Xu Lei - Search for the Buried Bomber

How vast was the abyss? I had believed it would be comparable to something I’d seen or heard about, but as I watched the searchlights shine across it, I realized the word va st was entirely inadequate to describe its size. Military searchlight beams generally reach forty-five hundred to six thousand feet, meaning they can illuminate objects from over a kilometer away. This searchlight illuminated nothing, extending out into the abyss until at last the far end of it was swallowed up by the darkness. It was as if the beam had been aimed into the night sky. A moment later I understood. My jaw dropped open. The deputy squad leader saw my shocked expression. After hearing my explanation, his eyes went wide. Cold sweat trickled down my back. At once I understood why the devils had endured such hardships to transport a bomber down into this cave. They’d planned to fly it into the abyss.

The whole thing was beyond strange—not just the scene that lay before me, but also what the devils had done. It was all so creepy. It gave me a profound understanding of the deeply irregular way the Japanese behaved. I’m afraid that only a people as paranoid as them could have carried out such an aff air. A gigantic Shinzan bomber took off from an underground river thirty-six hundred feet underground, flew into a black abyss, and then disappeared. Over the many years that have passed since then, this image has stayed with me, like a nightmare that never goes away. I’m unable to shake it from my mind.

I imagined the Japanese prospectors reaching this point. Certainly there were no natural wonders like this on an island nation like Japan. How must they have felt? Probably just as I did now. As they looked out at that boundless darkness, were they seized by an intense desire to explore it, to see what was hidden within?

I continued to watch the point where the searchlight vanished. For a long time I was spellbound. At last a cold wind broke me from my trance, and I began to shake all over. I pulled myself together at once, muttering that this was no time to get excited. Romanticizing requires an environment both safe and secure. This place was neither.

The searchlight beam began to move again. It has to be Wang Sichuan, I thought to myself. Helping each other along, the deputy squad leader and I made our way toward the light. In a place like this, finding another person was no small thing. We wanted to meet up with him as soon as possible and come up with a way out of here. Our assignment was finished. Although I feared the military would attempt to replicate whatever the Japanese had done, right now it had nothing to do with us.

The searchlight was surely located within the facility’s machine room, a place filled with the valves and mechanisms used to regulate the water level. We just didn’t know where the entrance was. The deputy squad leader yelled out, “Engineer Wang,” several times, but he knew his voice would never reach. As soon as the words left his mouth, they were swept up by the wind and carried away. Once we were right above the searchlight, we could see the beam was shooting from somewhere within the body of the dam, but there seemed no way in from up here. There was only a vertical iron ladder, like the one we’d just climbed, leaning against the outside of the dam, but it was honestly too terrifying. As brave as Wang Sichuan was, even he wouldn’t have dared to descend from here into the black abyss. After walking a while more, we came upon a ruined part of the dam. A large section had caved in. Within the breach was a set of emergency stairs. Making our way down, we came upon an iron door on the side of the dam. We went inside.

The room was pitch-black, but given how dark it was outside, this was nothing I wasn’t used to. Sure enough, it soon became clear that the dam really had been designed for only short-term use. The concrete walls were covered with spreading cracks and exposed steel bars. The machine room might have been better termed a “machine facility.” It was divided into a number of stories. The concrete floor was pockmarked with holes, looking similar to those in the half-torn-down buildings you see today. There were a number of wooden boxes near the entrance, covered by a dry oilcloth. Dust filled the air as we pulled it off. Through the holes in the floor we could make out a faint light, many stories down. It had to be the tail end of the searchlight. The primary machine room was probably at the very bottom. I could feel some vague sense of the gigantic apparatus down there. The wind had died down, but from outside the sound of water was still frighteningly loud. We called for quite some time, but there was no response. He couldn’t hear us and we couldn’t find a way down.

“What now?” I asked the deputy squad leader.

Each of the dam’s floors was much taller than average building stories. Jumping was out of the question. The deputy squad leader dropped a piece of concrete through a hole in the floor, but we could neither see where it landed nor hear the sound it made. There was still no response from below.

“It seems we can’t get down from here,” he said. “We’ll have to find another way.”

I cursed to myself and shined the flashlight around the room. The light was almost out. This flashlight’s lifespan was already way above average. It should have gone out much earlier, back when we were first exploring the sinkhole. There was no point placing any outsize hopes on it working much longer. I turned to the deputy squad leader. “First we have to find a new light source,” I said. “Otherwise, when our flashlight goes out, we’ll be stuck.”

We looked around. There were more than a few things we could burn, and who knew what was inside those wooden boxes stacked in the corner? The deputy squad leader forced one open. Inside were mostly power cables and welding rods, as well as a bag of alreadyhardened cement. These had probably been used to maintain the dam. Cement mortar has to be reapplied to the base and body of a dam every year, otherwise it will gradually push outward, becoming incredibly dangerous.

After we’d taken four or five boxes apart in quick succession, the most useful things we found were a steel helmet and a cotton overcoat. The coat was exceedingly damp, almost as if I’d found it in a coffin dug up from the ground. The helmet, however, was still in fairly good shape and blocked some of the wind. We also discovered a box of water canteens. Having long since lost my own, I took one of these as well. At the time this little plundering spree didn’t feel particularly notable, but in hindsight I get nervous just thinking about it. The canteen was key. It’s the reason I’m here reminiscing and not still in that dam beneath the earth, slowly rotting away.

The room itself was not large. After making a lap, we’d turned over just about everything in it. We could barely breathe from the dust and decay. We broke off several wooden sticks and wrapped them in oilcloth in preparation for when our flashlight went completely dead. As we were getting ready, there came a sudden droning wail from outside. The instant I heard it, I knew it was the siren. As we were so much closer this time, the noise was deafening. I’d already mentally prepared myself for this. Were the sluice gates closing? I wondered. What was going on? Could there be some automatic maintenance system installed in the dam? Luckily, we didn’t have to worry about the water rising while we remained stuck on the wing of the wrecked bomber.