Xu Lei - Search for the Buried Bomber

Darkness was all around me. Resounding over the river from some dark and distant part of the cave came the wail of the siren, like the voice of some evil spirit. The air had begun to vibrate, as if with a kind of extreme restlessness. I had no idea what was about to happen. The deputy squad leader had been startled awake as well. He climbed up and asked me what was going on. I listened to the sound of the alarm. The noise, I suddenly realized, was speeding up, becoming more and more urgent. All at once an extreme foreboding burst forth in my mind.

The siren resounded through the vast cave, the noise continuing to intensify, but we could see nothing within that darkness. A great unease filled us, the kind that makes one want to flee at once, but there was nowhere to run. All we could do was stand anxiously atop the plane and await the arrival of whatever danger the siren was warning us about.

After sounding for roughly five minutes, the alarm abruptly went silent. Before we could react, there was a tremendous roar, as if some piece of machinery had been twisted apart. From the darkness downriver, the sound of water became audible once more. I looked uneasily in the direction of the machine sound, knowing neither what it was nor where it had occurred. The wreckage of the plane underfoot began to tremble slightly. I looked down. The force of the current had picked up and the water level had unexpectedly fallen. A dam! It suddenly became clear to me. The siren and crash were a dam’s sluice gates opening. Had the Japanese actually dammed the underground river? At first, this was hard to believe, but if a bomber could “crash” deep beneath the earth, then to build a dam down here seemed comparatively reasonable. The deputy squad leader and I looked at one another, then back down at the river. We were both at a loss.

The water level fell rapidly. After half an hour it was already below the gunnysacks. Together with the rest of the fuselage, countless corpse bags were now revealed. It was a terrifying thing to see. In the darkness it was easy to feel that the water level hadn’t dropped, but rather the corpses had floated to the surface. They extended in an unbroken expanse across the cave. Looking at them, I felt my breath catch in my throat.

A previously submerged road of planks and wire mesh appeared amid the gunnysacks. It was still underwater, but the water was no more than thigh high. We didn’t know whether the decrease in water level was manually operated or some automatic mechanism, but we saw an opportunity to escape. We climbed down from the plane at once and clambered along the gunnysacks until we reached the plank road. Although seriously decayed, it was nonetheless able to hold our weight. Quickening our pace, we hurried onward.

The water level had soon dropped beneath the plank road, and we no longer needed to wade along. Once we’d run for about three hundred feet, the roar of the water became much louder. We could feel the dam nearby. We couldn’t see the plane anymore, though. A pair of giant iron rails then appeared along the river bottom, more than ten times as wide as ordinary train tracks. As I looked at them and at where the plane had been, I could tell they’d been the latter’s transport. Huge electrical transformers, the kind used in large-scale hydraulic power generation, appeared on either side of the tracks. Some of them seemed to be in operation, the crash of their components blending with the sound of the rapids. They were indistinguishable if one failed to listen closely. There was also a crane, a searchlight, and a collapsed sentry tower. As the water level swiftly diminished, all sorts of heavily corroded structures were revealed. Never would I have expected so much hidden beneath the waves. Why had all of it been built in the middle of the river? Then, up ahead, we finally caught sight of the dam.

In fact, calling it a dam would be somewhat misleading. Only one long section of concrete with rubble remained, towering overhead and laced with cracks. Still, on an underground river it would be impossible to build too tall of a structure, and this “dam” had probably been developed for only temporary use. At the foot of the dam we saw a massive iron loudspeaker, though who knew if this had actually produced the siren? At the end of the plank road was a rickety-looking iron ladder that led to the top of the dam.

I craned my neck and looked. At the most, it was only one hundred feet tall, but seeing the still-damp waterline along the dam, I felt a lingering sense of fear. The deputy squad leader motioned to me to ask whether we should climb up. I was anxious to see what lay beyond, so I nodded. The two of us began to climb, one in front, one behind, cautiously making our way up the dam. Fortunately, the ladder proved quite sturdy, but as soon as we reached the top a violent wind began to blow, nearly knocking me off the dam. I quickly squatted down to keep my balance. I’d already heard the roar of a waterfall as we scaled the ladder. Up here the noise reached its peak, but there was more than just a waterfall. After finding my footing, I saw that after the dam stretched a deep abyss. It was into this that the underground river ceaselessly surged and fell. Incredibly, there was no sound of the falls striking bottom. I had no way of knowing how deep the abyss really went. More than that, the opening of the abyss—a vast and empty expanse—yawned as wide as it was deep. There was nothing for my flashlight to illuminate here, just some kind of giant subterranean void.

An oppressive sense of emptiness came over me, something that hadn’t occurred while on the river. Then as a cold, powerful wind came sweeping out of the darkness, we had to move away from the edge. “Why does it seem like there’s nothing out there?” the deputy squad leader asked me. “It’s like outer space. What is this place?”

I searched the geological lexicon, but my brain could find no term suitable. I could think of only one way in which a place like this could have been created: after the limestone cave system had reached its final stage, an enormous portion of it had collapsed, forming this cavity. It was a marvelous geological spectacle. That I should actually see such a rare phenomenon in my lifetime made me feel, quite abruptly, as if I were about to cry. I continued to stare at it in astonishment when a loud boom suddenly rang out and several beams of light appeared from the side of the dam facing into the abyss. In a moment, all but two were extinguished. They then began to pivot side by side, seemingly from a fixed point, the beams sweeping through the darkness. A searchlight had been switched on. Someone was inside the dam!

The deputy squad leader immediately became alert. “Could there still be Japanese soldiers here?” he asked in a low voice.

Impossible, I thought to myself. “No,” I said, beginning to smile. “It’s probably Wang Sichuan!” I wanted to yell aloud to let him know we were here.

Before I could utter a sound, dread enveloped me. My body went stiff. As I watched the searchlights probe that endless dark, I was unable to move a single step. I’ve always felt there are marked differences between the sensations of fright and dread. Fright originates from sudden occurrences. Though whatever causes the fright might not, in and of itself, be scary at all, it manages to become so by either suddenly appearing or disappearing. Dread is different. Dread results only after reflection and requires some time to ferment in the mind. For example, this dread I felt watching that unending dark, it manifested only after I’d begun to imagine what might be out there. In itself there was nothing scary about the dark. If you asked me what I saw down in that abyss, I could say only dread. For in fact, I saw nothing at all.