Xu Lei - Search for the Buried Bomber

Chen Luohu called for me to help. We lifted the deputy squad leader onto the writing desk. His face was covered in blood. The young soldier was panting and frantically checking him for wounds. I asked him where he’d found the deputy squad leader. He said that only a very short distance down the wall was a water chute, above which there was a concrete buffer strip to prevent people from falling. The deputy squad leader hadn’t been as lucky as I. He’d tumbled all the way down and smacked into the buffer strip. That area was reachable from this level of the generator facility, and the young soldier had immediately rushed down. The mist was almost at their feet. The deputy squad leader had lost consciousness, but kept a death grip on his flashlight. As soon as the soldier saw how close the mist was, he picked him up and ran like mad back the way he’d come. The mist nearly overtook him, leaving him no time to shut the outer door.

We all had experience giving emergency medical treatment. This kind of thing happened often in the field, and injuries from falls were particularly common. By now my hand was killing me and I could barely lift it, but I ignored the pain and helped undo the deputy squad leader’s clothing. He had a heartbeat and was still breathing, but out cold. His whole body had gone soft, and there was a huge gash on his head. It’s hard to tell how serious head wounds are. I’ve seen people fall from tall trees, hit their heads and bloody their faces, then wrap the wound and climb back up the next day. I’ve seen others fall dead after getting knocked on the head by a fist-sized rock while picking pecans. Miraculously, the deputy squad leader had otherwise suffered no major external injuries.

The young soldier’s face crumpled. Seeing the deputy squad leader like this, he began to sob. I told him not to worry and patted him on the back, although the pain in my hand was agonizing. Rolling up my sleeve, I could tell for certain that it was either not a break or only a minor one. My wrist was heavily swollen and hurt like hell. I’d probably sprained it, but there’s no good way to treat a sprained wrist. I just had to endure it.

We stopped his bleeding and let the deputy squad leader rest. I asked the young soldier how, after reaching this place, he’d found the triple-proofed chamber. With a blank look, he said it wasn’t he who’d found it. Yuan Xile had led them here. The current had swept their raft all the way down to this dam. They’d found a place to dock, and as soon as they climbed out, Yuan Xile took off running like a madwoman. The soldier and Chen Luohu ran as hard as they could after her, but she didn’t stop until she’d reached this chamber, where she immediately curled up in the corner and hadn’t moved since.

I was dumbstruck. The average person has learned to navigate buildings based on the layouts of those they’re most often in. These habits are useless when it comes to structures designed to serve some specific and unfamiliar function. It is for this reason that, when coming across ruined buildings while prospecting, we sometimes decide not to explore too deeply. Within a chemical plant, for example, you might start running somewhere, but not get a hundred steps before hitting a wall. Places you assumed to be walkways turn out totally different. Hydroelectric plants are especially unusual. The structural design of such facilities takes into account only the pressure they must bear and the machinery they will contain. That Yuan Xile could enter a place this complex and sprint all the way here without stopping could only mean one thing: she’d already spent a lot of time here. Remorse skewered me. She’d gone through so much to return to where she’d met up with us, and then what did we do? Goddamn it! We led her right back here. Had she not already lost her mind, I suspect she would have tried to strangle us.

The private told me the mist had already come up once. That time it had also been preceded by a discharge of floodwater, but the mist hadn’t risen nearly so high. Yuan Xile had practically gone mad when she heard the siren go off and went immediately to shut the door. As an engineering corpsman, the soldier knew quite a bit about poisonous gas and the measures taken against it. He’d quickly realized that the mist was toxic.

There had to be some kind of induction machine here to regulate the water level, he said. Once the river reached a certain height, the dam would automatically open the sluice gates. Either this facility had been in continuous operation for the past twentysome years, or it had recently been switched back on. When the discharged water crashed into the depths of the abyss, it disturbed the mist, allowing it to ride the crosswind up to the dam. (Later, after making it back out, we would agree that this was the only possible explanation.) As to what the mist was composed of, he had no idea.

I asked his name. Ma Zaihai, he said. He was a soldier from Yueqing, in Wenzhou, a three-year veteran of the engineering corps who’d never once taken a leave. “Then how are you still a private?” I asked. He said his family’s class wasn’t good. Every time a squad leader mentioned him for promotion, his file was ignored. His squad leaders had changed four times, yet he remained a private. The deputy squad leader was just like him, he said. He too had a bad family background, but having fought against India, he’d been risen one rank. The two of them had stayed within the squad this whole time while each of their leaders was promoted. If I felt bad for him, he said, I should help him out and talk to our superiors. No matter what, he was determined to become at least a deputy squad leader.

I laughed hollowly and made no response. Given the situation we’re in now, I thought, let’s think about making it out alive first—not that I’d be able to help him, anyway.

The mist persisted. Outside the airtight door, it was pitch-black, and after two hours there were still no signs of it beginning to disperse. From our hiding place in the iron chamber, we could only observe the situation through the small window in the door. We couldn’t see anything clearly. Fortunately, the sealed chamber was relatively quiet. We could hear the roar of the current, but the most distinct sounds were our own breathing and the groans as pressure bore down on the dam’s concrete structure.

None of us knew when the mist would retreat. At first we talked among ourselves, but then we quieted down and took to resting within the chamber. After lying comatose for an hour and a half, the deputy squad leader finally came to. He was groggy and listless but nonetheless awake, and there seemed to be nothing seriously wrong. Ma Zaihai was so happy he cried again, and I too felt a sense of relief.

Later, I began to worry we’d exhaust the room’s oxygen supply, but I discovered an old-fashioned ventilation system installed behind the baseboard. While visiting a captured Japanese submarine on display at a naval base in 1984, I would run into a similar system and realize this chamber’s ventilation system had probably been based on submarine models. This chamber seemed designed to withstand the mist. But I had no one to discuss these observations with. I could only silently ponder the events taking place.

Given Yuan Xile’s familiarity with the area, her prospecting team must have stayed within the dam for some time. Though I didn’t know what exactly had happened to them, it was clear that whatever they encountered, we were soon to face as well. Yuan Xile had lost her mind and a man had been poisoned to death. Whatever had happened here, it was nothing good. But where was everyone else? Was Yuan Xile’s extreme terror because the mist had already killed the rest of her team? And, again, what had the Japanese been up to? There was no thread to follow. My mind flashed to an image of the gigantic Shinzan bomber, then to the abyss and the mist rising out of it like some evil ghost. Thinking about this gave me a splitting headache. These were our only clues, but I couldn’t make heads or tails of them.