Xu Lei - Search for the Buried Bomber

Then, as quickly as the thought occurred to me, I realized how unlikely it was. Why would the Japanese have bothered to haul their weapons so deep into the forest? Concealing them like this didn’t seem worth the effort. How much time would it take to transport chemical weapons to such a remote place? Moreover, using an underground river as a storehouse was patently unsafe. No matter what, a dry cave would have been found for such an operation. The deputy squad leader agreed this probably wasn’t the case. According to him, the netting beneath the platform was a measure to prevent workers from escaping. He pointed out that the “No Entry” sign suggested that an as yet unexplored area lay below. If it were gas bombs down there, the sign would have said something different.

Everyone let fly with a hundred different opinions at once. There was another problem as well, Wang Sichuan pointed out. How had this person managed to die on the underside of the platform? He couldn’t have been swept down there by the water. He would have landed atop the iron platform, not under it. There was only one possibility: In his final moments, he’d attempted to head back the way he’d come, but the strength of the poison had blurred his senses. He’d tangled himself up past any point of extrication, and there, at last, he died.

It now seemed as if not only had the earlier team descended into the sinkhole, but something terrible had happened to them down there. Had the person who slipped me the note already known about this?

After we’d covered the corpse with a sleeping bag, Wang Sichuan said we had no choice but to go down there and investigate. We were on to something, he said. And if these were the people that Old Cat was here to rescue, then he had already gone the wrong way. Having been given a clue, we couldn’t just ignore it. We placed country above all else in those years, and, given that people’s lives were at stake, none of us felt the slightest hesitation about completing the job in Old Cat’s stead.

“There’s probably poison gas down there,” said Wang Sichuan. “We have to be extremely careful. Since we don’t have any gas or protective masks, we’d better prepare some wet towels.”

In the end, we all tore off pieces of cloth to use as masks. Thinking back on it now, it sounds so naive, believing that these would actually protect us, but back then, that’s what they’d taught us in Attack Preparation class: hide under your desks if there’s nuclear war, and a wet towel is a replacement for gas masks. Anyway, we geological prospectors weren’t used to using gas masks. Any caverns that produce poison gas are also generally combustible. What use would a mask be? You’d be blown to smithereens long before the gas had time to get to you.

We passed one by one through the breach in the iron platform. The deputy squad leader led the way down to the staircase-shaped slope that lay below. We continued down for a very long way. The sides of the cave had been washed so slick that the moment you stopped paying attention you’d fall. Making our way with great care, we soon arrived at a narrow tunnel with eroded limestone walls. Running water covered the floor. Although this tributary was still expanding, it was still too small to be called anything but a subterranean brook. The water rose no higher than our ankles, and the space was so narrow we had to stoop to proceed.

As expected, there were few signs of Japanese presence down here. After we’d been walking for some ten minutes, covering our noses with cloth all the while, one of the young soldiers suddenly paused and said something was wrong. We all stopped and looked at him. What is it? we asked. He didn’t respond, but used his flashlight to illuminate his boots. Then, somewhat anxiously, he rolled up the bottom of his pants. His legs were covered in a black, uneven mass of soft, writhing flesh. We looked closer: leeches, and already filled to bursting with his blood.

My mind buzzed as I shined my flashlight around the water. At first I could see nothing, but when I squatted closer, my hair stood on end. The water was all leeches, their color similar to the cave bottom. They crowded around our feet. Inch by inch, they crawled over to us, hoping to burrow into the cracks in our boots. Goose bumps rose all over my body. Without second thought we began frantically pulling them off of us, Wang Sichuan using so much force that he flung one directly onto my neck. I cursed violently and told him to get it off me. The deputy squad leader then raised his pant legs. We gasped. Black leeches bulging with blood covered every inch of his legs. We checked our own. They were no different. “How the hell are there so many of them here?” asked Wang Sichuan.

“It’s the water temperature,” said one of the young soldiers. “It’s much warmer than the main river.”

Leeches may be disgusting, but they’re not fatal. Still, watching them squirm all around us made me deeply uncomfortable, for after latching on to you, they become very difficult to remove. While in the South, I once heard that leeches will sometimes burrow into a man’s reproductive organ without him feeling it. This scared the hell out of me. I immediately began to brush off the area around my groin. Wang Sichuan asked me what I was doing. When I told him the story, his face turned pale with fear. “Should I not just take it out and wipe it off?” heasked.

“Try to be a little more civilized,” I said, but then the deputy squad leader announced that we had to keep going. There were too many leeches for us to wait here any longer.

We ran like the wind, none of us paying any attention to what was beneath the water. Then, after sprinting about a hundred feet—who osh—th e deputy squad leader suddenly disappeared from out in front. Neither Wang Sichuan nor I had time to react, and in a moment there was nothing but air beneath our feet as well. I cried out, but it was too late. The cave had suddenly sloped downward, right out from under our feet.

Everything went dark. We tumbled together down the slope, somersaulting over and over each other until we were wrapped together. Within seconds my knees, head, butt, and every other body part had been smashed so many times I wanted to vomit. My flashlight was knocked loose. With his great strength, Wang Sichuan tried desperately to grab hold of something to stop our descent, but the drop was far too sheer. A chaos of light pulsed before my eyes. For an instant my body ceased its tumbling, but I had no time to realize the change before air was once more beneath me. The rock was gone, and I was in free fall.

It’s over, I thought to myself. Am I really about to die? Is there some jagged cliff below me? Before I could finish imagining this miserable plight, there was a loud boom and my body went cold—the shock went through me as soon as my butt hit the surface, then all at once I felt the force of it—I had plunged deep into a pool of water. The current picked me up in a flash and washed me onward. Wang Sichuan was still holding me in a firm bear hug and wouldn’t let go. I gathered my strength and kicked him off, then swam for the surface. With effort, I finally made it to the top. It was pitch-black, and the water seemed to be continuously spinning me around. From the speed I was moving and the sounds that filled my ears, I could tell I’d fallen into the raging rapids of some second underground river. Judging by the roar of the water and the speed of the river—each of them far in excess of the channel we had initially traveled down—this seemed to be the true underground river!