Xu Lei - Search for the Buried Bomber

What should we do now? Wang Sichuan asked me. All I could say was that Old Cat had a point. We were injured. There was no denying it. In a way he had been doing us a favor. All five of us squatted down. Even the deputy squad leader looked crestfallen. A soldier doesn’t fear death, only that he might be unable to join the battle. There was nothing to do but look for a few cigarettes to console them with. As I reached into my pocket, I was given a start. I withdrew my hand. There was another note.

The note was superficially identical to the one I had been given on the rocky shoal, both torn from our worker’s insurance documents. Paper back then was thick, yellowed, and rough, not at all like today’s high-quality stock. Opening it, I saw, once again, only a few small characters: “Enter the sinkhole.”

The three characters were written in an exceedingly sloppy manner, so sloppily that it took me a while to figure out what they said. They’d been jotted down in a terrific rush. I could feel my heart thump heavily in my chest. Enter the sinkhole? I turned and looked to where it yawned amid the circle of iron railings. It wasn’t far away. All of the power cables hung from its mouth like the tentacles of an octopus, winding together in thick bundles. Between these river water ran down into its black depths. Enter this sinkhole? I was confused and reached inside my pocket once more, but besides my cigarettes, I found nothing else. Who could have slipped it in there? When I discovered the first note, warning me to “Beware of Pei Qing,” I had disregarded it, assuming it was some trick played by Chen Luohu. Now, having received a second one, I was forced to take it seriously.

Wang Sichuan and the rest were all squatting nearby. They saw the mix of emotions that played across my face. They all crowded around to take a look. Knowing I wouldn’t be able to resolve the matter myself, I handed it over. Maybe one of them could figure out just what the hell was going on.

Wang Sichuan gulped and said it had to be a clue, but damned if he knew who it was from or why they’d given it to us like this. Could our team be harboring an enemy spy? We all agreed that was a possibility. Otherwise there would be no need to convey information so surreptitiously. Wang Sichuan then jumped to his feet, saying, “Comrades, the chance to win honor has arrived! It looks as if there’s something fishy going on in that sinkhole and the enemy spy cannot be allowed to find out about it. Thus it was we who were covertly appointed to investigate. This shows the confidence our comrades have in us. Come on then, there’s no time to waste—let’s begin at once!”

I stopped him. “Something’s not right. We need to make some kind of plan first. We don’t even know who placed the note in my pocket. Let’s first go down to the mouth of the sinkhole and take a look. Even if we really are going to explore it, we still shouldn’t make that decision hastily.” Wang Sichuan nodded, adding that, in fact, this was just what he had intended all along. So we turned on our flashlights and made our way over to the sinkhole.

The engineering corpsmen who’d just surveyed this area had left their anchors and locks. With these we made our way smoothly down the wall to where the sinkhole opened. To be honest, I hadn’t looked at the sinkhole too closely until now. When we first arrived, I’d noticed straightaway how slippery the rock was around the entrance and so hadn’t dared get any closer. The mouth was big enough to drive a jeep through, though the tangle of electrical wires took up almost half the space. The remaining gap was pitchblack, and out of it blew an intermittent cold wind.

Thanks to the soundness of my exam-based education, I could already tell what it would be like inside just by looking at it. Indeed, sinkhole was a rather apt description of the thing. Despite being located deep underground, it was fundamentally identical to sinkholes on the surface, having been formed by erosion as water flowed down a vertical crack in the rock. I didn’t know how deep it went, but once the surface water had penetrated to a certain depth, the sinkhole would either begin to slope down along the rock strata—descending gradually into the earth like a set of stairs—or form a tilted joint, becoming winding and complex. This sinkhole was a kind of cave within a cave. The water most likely exited through some hair-thin crack at the end to become groundwater, but it was also possible that beneath our feet there was another cave system or that somewhere down below was an even deeper tributary of the underground river.

Seeing the sinkhole up close, we hesitated. Geological prospectors always retain some thought of safety, and we knew that this type of cave would be dangerous to explore. The water level was also high, and the spray it kicked up as it rushed into the hole greatly reduced our field of vision.

What now? I asked Wang Sichuan. The situation inside the hole was anyone’s guess from out here, he said. He would descend first and check it out. The deputy squad leader immediately interjected that he should go instead, but Wang Sichuan stopped him. “That son of a bitch Pei Qing and I are different,” he said. “I’m a geological prospector, and climbing into caves is my specialty. It’s up to me to explore it first. Don’t argue about this.”

At this my temper flared. “Don’t pull this hero shit now,” I said to Wang Sichuan. “That note was stuffed into my pocket. It’s up to me to handle it.”

I’ve always found these kinds of arguments infuriating, but this was how everyone acted in all of the revolutionary movies, and that’s where we learned how to behave. What could you do? In the end, it was decided that I would be the first to descend. Wang Sichuan was too big. Even with three corpsmen holding the rope, we were afraid they still wouldn’t be able to pull him up.

We had originally been carrying equipment for this sort of thing, but we’d dropped it while fleeing the rising water. Luckily the people who’d been here before us left their belongings behind. We put all the gear in order, and I strapped on a headlamp. This was my least favorite piece of equipment. Wearing it makes one’s forehead burning hot, and this affects my thinking. Looking into the deep cave, I felt a twinge of regret. Being the trailblazer has never been my forte. But there was nothing to do now except grit my teeth and take the plunge.

I hooked myself in and climbed over the iron railing. Stepping onto the tangle of power cables, I slid into the cave. With the torrent of water splashing all around me, I could see nothing but the thick black cables. The cave wall behind them was completely obscured. The uppermost portion of the sinkhole was narrow and cramped with power cables. After descending a short distance, I began to hear a creaking sound. Scanning below with my headlamp, I could just make out a dark form somewhere far below my feet. It appeared to be a platform with some kind of machine. The men up above continued to lower me down. I turned my head to escape the water’s spray, but I was soon drenched and freezing. After another twenty or so feet, my headlamp illuminated an iron sign, rusted to ruin, hung amid the power cables: St ation-0384-Line 8 . More Japanese was written on the back, but I couldn’t understand what it said. The sound of rushing water filled my ears. I finally descended deep enough to get a clear look at the machine. You could see the traces of where the engineering corpsmen had peeled the calcium carbonate from its exterior. The generator had been erected on a platform of iron bars laid across the hole like a protective filter. Looking through the gaps I could see the utter blackness below. Another iron sign had been placed on the platform: “No Entry.”