Xu Lei - Search for the Buried Bomber

Hoping to see what was happening with the river, we walked back outside. Suddenly, the deputy squad leader’s brow wrinkled. “Engineer Wu,” he said to me, “listen closely. This siren is different from the one we just heard.” I listened, but could detect nothing new about it. “The sound is much longer,” he said. “Now it can reach much farther away. This one sounds like the early-warning siren for an air raid.”

An air raid? There are air raids here too?

Ibelieved what the deputy squad leader said. After all, this was something the army drilled nearly every day. As I spent most of my time in the field, I knew little about air-raid sirens. Although there had been mandatory evacuation drills—once or twice a year—back when I was in school, we all knew it was just practice. We followed the teacher and it was a fun diversion. No one was paying attention to the frequency of the siren.

There was not going to be an air raid here. That was beyond doubt. I was much more inclined to believe the alarm had some other function—warning, for example, that prisoners had escaped. The deputy squad leader told me that the early-warning air-raid siren would ring for thirty-six seconds, then stop for twenty-four seconds. It was an advanced alert for when an air raid was still only a possibility. As the planes approached, the siren would speed up, ringing for six seconds, stopping for six seconds.

Hearing the alarm from within the machine facility was enough to make us tremble. We climbed back on top of the dam. Walking into the wind, we made our way back to the point above the searchlight beam. It had changed direction and was now strafing the gigantic open space overhead. In theory, the roof of the abyss could not possibly be more than thirty-six hundred feet up. Indeed, the faint bulge of cliff rock could be seen at the uppermost end of the searchlight, but the area of illumination was too small and I was unable to make out their actual shapes.

There was no sign of any air raid—as if the frantic siren was all a joke. And though the searchlight swept back and forth above the void, there was nothing to see but rocks. After a while, its operator seemed to realize he was wasting his time. We watched as the beam again went level, then tilted down and began to illuminate the lower reaches of the abyss. We couldn’t even hear the falling water hit bottom. How could this searchlight possibly illuminate anything that far down? I wondered. But when I crawled to the side of the dam and looked over, though the far end of the searchlight was rather dim, it was nonetheless able to illuminate the very bottom. The abyss was not that deep at all. Then I took a closer look: it was not the bottom being illuminated, but rather a huge sheet of mist that was floating slowly upward. It was as if the beam was shining upon a cluster of clouds in the sky. Although it might sweep back and forth, it could not penetrate their outer layer—like when we were young and we believed a lid must have been placed over the world. The mist was far from still. You could tell, albeit only vaguely, that it was slowly, almost rhythmically roiling and floating ever higher. This strange sight, matched with the immense and extraordinary background, only increased our agitation. Just what exactly was producing this mist? And what sort of geological formation was underneath?

I’m ashamed to admit it, but despite hearing the chaotically ringing siren and watching what was happening, I somehow didn’t connect the two. I just continued to stare, my mind filled with excitement and wonder. Little by little the mist rose ever nearer, the searchlight beam becoming shorter and shorter, until the earlywarning alarm suddenly stopped and abruptly changed to a much more urgent air-raid siren. Startled, I finally realized what was going on—the alarm was warning us about the mist! And it was now only six hundred feet below the dam. I remembered the corpse with the blackened gums in the sinkhole. My toes curled in fear. I could have slapped myself. How had I not realized this earlier? The mist carried some deadly poison!

We had to get out of there at once. I grabbed the deputy squad leader, wanting to flee back the way we had come—at least to the wrecked plane, but the farther from here the better. He was even thicker than I—he didn’t realize at all the danger the mist posed—but when I explained it, his face turned white with fear. Still, he wouldn’t leave. He grabbed hold of me. “Not yet!” he said. “Wang Sichuan is still down there. We’d just be letting him die. We have to go save him. Otherwise we’d never be able to live with ourselves later.”

I felt both ashamed and worried, but it was too late to search for a way down. I looked again. I still couldn’t see any sign the searchlight operator knew what was going on. The searchlight continued to focus on the mist below, swaying ever so slightly. What was he looking for? Then we both saw it—the iron ladder leading down into the abyss. It was only a few feet from us. We looked at one another. The deputy squad leader stretched his foot down onto the first rung. “Get out of here!” he said. “I’ll go inform—” Before he could finish, the rung broke beneath him. His feet pedaled air, he dropped downward, and then he was falling.

There was something supremely valiant about the way the deputy squad leader spoke that final sentence, like some hero in one of those old War of Liberation movies. Unfortunately, I was roused too late. All at once he dropped away. A split second later, I instinctively shot my arm out to grab him, but his fall had been too sudden. He dropped directly onto the nearly vertical wall of the dam and slid downward. I froze, terrified, then, in a flash, I lost my balance and very nearly tumbled down beside him. Fortunately, the dam was sloped, if only just barely. After hitting the wall, he slid no more than eight or nine feet before he managed to grab on to a section of the iron ladder’s concrete base. This alone stopped him from immediately falling to his death, but his momentum was too great. He was barely able to grip the concrete, and his hands began to slip.

I yelled to him not to panic, I was coming to get him. I got down on my stomach and leaned over the side, but my arms weren’t long enough to cover even half the distance. I leaned out farther, until half my body was over the edge, then farther still, but even when I was about to slide down, there still remained a huge gap between us. The deputy squad leader was a soldier, his strength and reflexes far superior to those of the average man. Seeing me stretch out my hand, he kicked off the wall with his feet, using this split second of momentum to leap upward, just high enough to grab hold of my hand. I took a deep breath and tried as hard as I could to pull him up, but I had misjudged both my strength and my position. I was extended too far over the side. His weight yanked me free from my perch and together we began to slide over the edge. Panicking, I swung my free arm desperately, but the way I was stretched out, even if I’d managed to grab something, I would never have been able to hold on to it. My surprise lasted for only a moment, then the deputy squad leader pulled me down. In that instant I saw his eyes register some complex emotion, but my mind was completely blank. Everything had happened much too fast.