Xu Lei - Search for the Buried Bomber

I knew that I couldn’t waste this opportunity. Stepping hard against the wall, I tried to climb. After I’d scrambled for a moment, my heart sank. There was nothing for my feet to grip. The moment they hit the wall, they slid right back down. Goddamn it, I swore, suddenly desperate. With a roar I leaped as high as I could. I made it halfway out of the pit, my arms clinging to the icy ground. Then a black shadow flashed before my eyes. A boot flew into my chin, and I was knocked all the way back down.

This fall was much heavier than the last, and my vision went black from the pain. I dropped my flashlight as I fell, but before doing so I managed to catch a split-second glimpse of my adversary’s clothing. What kind of outfit is that? I wondered. I felt my heart clench up. It was a Japanese military uniform. A Japanese soldier? Could the person trying to bury me alive really be a Japanese soldier? This place had only been abandoned for twenty years. If there was enough food, the remaining Japanese soldiers could probably have survived, but nothing about the cave had suggested that anyone was still living here.

A pile of icy mush dropped from above, half burying me. He’d changed his strategy. Now he was dropping whole heaps of the stuff, hoping to bury me alive before he’d even knocked me out. The ice chunks from before had already frozen around me. Not good. He wasn’t going to be able to knock me out, he knew that, but I also didn’t have a chance in hell of climbing out amid all this chaos.

Perhaps it was the ice, perhaps the imminent danger, but my mind suddenly cleared. I realized that to continue like this was a very bad idea, and if I didn’t get out of here soon I would be done for. I had to turn things around, and fast, or the outcome would not be pleasant. But what was there for me to do? Play dead? By now my flashlight was buried beneath the fallen ice. Using all my strength, I pulled my feet from the hole they were sunk in, then reached into the mush and groped blindly about. My hands found not my flashlight but some unknown, strange-feeling object. I grabbed on to it. My heart skipped a beat. My God, I thought.

I could no longer pay attention to my adversary above. Protecting my head with my left hand, I began to brush away the chunks of ice beneath my feet. I had a feeling I knew what this thing was, and if I was right, then we were in big trouble. The thing had felt conical—almost like an iron bell—and terrifically cold, the same temperature as the ice around it. No one else would have found anything strange about it, but I’m a special case. When I was still in school, I did fieldwork in Jiamusi. My field team once discovered this very sort of object frozen within a glacial cave. We’d been scared to death. Our whole team had nearly tried to climb back to the surface with their bare hands. I managed to fish out my flashlight. Using it as a kind of shovel, I continued to dig. Soon enough I’d reached the bottom of the pit. A pitch-black cone appeared before my eyes. I had long since realized what it was, but still I gasped as my suspicion was confirmed. It was a warhead.

Because only the tip of it protruded from the hard ice below, I couldn’t judge the caliber, but it sure wasn’t a howitzer shell. It was much too big. It had to be some large-bore shell used in heavy artillery. I suddenly understood why the previous team had dug out only a portion of it. I wouldn’t have messed with the goddamn thing either. The cover to the shell’s detonator had already been knocked off. If a shovel had come down on it one more time, everyone would have been blown to kingdom come. I gulped. And if all these shadows were artillery shells, then how many were there? Based on the size of the place, five thousand for sure. But why had the Japanese frozen them?

A great chunk of ice fell on my head, interrupting my reverie. The person up top had never paused in his assault, and I could consider the matter no further, but my heart was filled with worry. I hurriedly covered the warhead back up, telling myself that I had to escape as soon as possible and tell Wang Sichuan and the rest what I’d found. Even though I didn’t know what kind of warhead this was, it served as clear evidence that the Japanese had made preparations to blow up the entire dam. This sort of gigantic, concrete-built, fortresslike dam would be extremely difficult to destroy. If you used ordinary, small-ordinance dynamite, it would barely damage the place. The Kuomintang had run into this very problem when they were preparing to blow up the Fengman Dam. To thoroughly destroy a dam, you need to place a great quantity of explosives beneath its base, just as they’d done here. We were waiting inside a giant powder keg. It was just a matter of time.

And given my current predicament, a worst-case scenario might not be so far off. I had no choice but to arch my body over the warhead and protect it from the falling ice. In the confusion, I could no longer even begin to think about freeing myself. A man could easily go mad in a situation like this. It was as if someone had you completely at their mercy, could hit you as much and as hard as they wanted, while you were unable to strike back. And yet despite it all, you couldn’t give in. More than ten minutes passed. I was already frozen stiff and nearly buried beneath the ice. Finally, believing I really would die here, I took a deep breath, grabbed a hunk of ice, and flung it upward, shouting, “You goddamn son of a bitch, there’s a bomb down here! You fucking throw one more thing and we’re both going to die!”

The chunk of ice that came hurtling down served as his reply. I dropped my head and dodged out of the way, about to swear again. Then everything suddenly went calm. There wasn’t a sound. Even the ice stopped sliding down the pit walls. I waited a moment, then cursed loudly at him once more. There was no response. At last I shined my flashlight upward. Nobody was there. Gone? Fear rose within me. Had he decided this was taking too long and gone to fetch a more lethal weapon? With some effort I managed to pull my legs out. The ground was covered in icy mush. With each step my whole body sank down, as if I were in a snowfield. I took two more steps before realizing how utterly exhausted I was. I could go no farther. Then two flashlight beams came shining down from above. I raised my head, but couldn’t make out who was behind the light. Then I heard Ma Zaihai’s voice yell out in surprise, “It’s Engineer Wu!”

I relaxed, but then yelled up, “Look out! There’s a Japanese soldier here!”

Ma Zaihai couldn’t make out what I was saying. I heard the voice of the deputy squad leader. He’d understood, but didn’t know what I meant. Ma Zaihai reached in and pulled me out. My whole body was stiff. “What’s going on?” he asked me. It was windy up top and so cold I couldn’t stop trembling. I quickly raised my flashlight and shined it all around. There was no trace of the man anywhere.

After coming to, the deputy squad leader had scolded Ma Zaihai. The reason that they, the engineering corpsmen, were with us prospectors was to ensure that we came to no harm. We were high-ranking state personnel, so when our group encountered danger, it should be the corpsmen who rushed to the front, otherwise they were no more than a burden. Now it was two prospectors who were scouting ahead, while the soldiers slept back in the nest? Who could bear to lose face like this? The deputy squad leader had forced Ma Zaihai to come along, and they’d set out to look for us.

I was moved by what he said, though such a standpoint was obviously too inflexible. Given the situation, though, I said nothing. I told them what had just happened, the pit, the warhead, the Japanese soldier. They agreed it was beyond belief. “If it really was the Japanese, then this situation has gotten much more complex,” said Ma Zaihai. “We’d better be careful. The War of Resistance has been over for many years. To still be killed by the Japanese would be ridiculous.”