Xu Lei - Search for the Buried Bomber

What a mess, I thought. Old Tang waved his hand, quieting everyone down. He said the deputy squad leader and I were both injured, and he and the others were all exhausted from the journey here. For the time being, we should stop thinking about this and get some rest. He would arrange for some of his men to make a quick search of the area. When our energy had returned, we could discuss our next move.

It was true. I was exhausted. After Old Tang said this, we all calmed down. We split up and at once the atmosphere relaxed. They had already boiled some water and cooked the condensed vegetable paste. Now a few corpsmen ladled out a bowl for me. Seeing that I was cold, Old Tang gave me some of the chili sauce he’d brought along. One bite and my whole body began to sweat. But I remained tired as ever. As I ate my eyelids drooped down and I nearly fell asleep.

I was once told that ancient warriors could sleep even while on horseback. In all my years of toiling for different prospecting teams across China, riding not only horses but every other domesticated animal besides dogs, never once had I been able to sleep on the back of some animal. Now I believed the stories. My sleepiness was so extreme that nothing else mattered. I just wanted all the world to go away. If someone wanted to kill me, then let it happen. I wanted only to sleep.

But I could not. Looking back toward the bonfire, I noticed that Old Cat and some others had unrolled a number of blueprints and were poring over their contents. These were the structural drawings they’d found near the telegraph room. I was sure of it. I climbed to my feet, walked over, and asked Old Cat if I could take a look as well. Old Tang told me I’d better rest, but I said I was fine and that I wanted to see what was really going on down here. Old Cat passed me one of the drawings. The thing was rather timeworn. It felt soft and limp in my hand. I spread it out on the ground. Wang Sichuan also came over. At a glance I could tell he was full of energy. Those goddamn nomads really are much stronger than us rice eaters, I thought. I forced myself to focus on the blueprint before me. It was the entire underground river system. In an instant I had found the markings for both the dam and the enormous River 0. The meticulousness with which the Japanese had designed these blueprints was astonishing. Both the large and small tributaries were rendered with incomparable clarity. The opening through which we entered the cave was distinctly marked. There seemed to be three more such entrances, all of them leading to other tributaries. The underground river system was truly immense. We gradually pressed closer, forming a tight circle around the map.

The underground river had seven tributaries in total. Numbers 3, 4, 5, and 6 all diverged from River 2, the river we began on. All four of these tributaries off River 2 eventually seeped out through cracks in the rock. This was why none had formed into a mature river, nor did any ultimately empty into a subterranean reservoir. The communications center at the end of River 6 was the only military installation at the end of any of these four tributaries. Were this river system compared to a large tree, River 2 would be the trunk and Rivers 3, 4, 5 and 6 would all be branches. Two other tributaries also formed a stand-alone system. After merging in the upper reaches of the cave, River 1 and River 7 became River 0, which flowed into the dam. Surprisingly, the area between the eight rivers was far from solid. Each of the rivers was connected to the others by a great mass of still-forming limestone tunnels, all of them distinctly depicted by the Japanese. By traversing these complex, mazelike caverns, they would have been able to smoothly shuttle from one river to the next. There were also a number of markings designating provisional generators like the small one we discovered on the sinkhole platform, as well as several symbols that we found unrecognizable. A question occurred to me as I looked at the drawing. I asked Old Cat what they were planning to do now. Why had they decided to keep going till they got all the way down here? Was it to rescue that final woman?

Old Cat shook his head and pointed at a section of the blueprint. “For this,” he said.

I looked where he was pointing. It was a spot just to the side of the dam. At first I thought he meant the Shinzan, but then I realized he was indicating the great void beyond. I didn’t understand. When I had looked upon that boundless darkness with my own eyes, my blood froze and my body shook, but on this drawing it was merely a blank expanse. Why was Old Cat interested in all that emptiness?

But Old Cat said nothing, just continued to smoke his cigarette. Old Tang then jumped in. He pointed to a long line of alternating long and short dashes. He motioned for quiet and in a low voice said, “First look at this line, then I’ll explain it to you.” I nodded and he continued: “The symbols used by the Japanese are different from ours, but we can guess what they mean. There are different kinds of lines all over the blueprint. Look. Solid lines represent electrical cables. They’re everywhere, like vines, all of them emerging from power stations. Now look at these dotted lines. They all end at telephone marks, so they must be telephone lines. But on the whole blueprint there’s only one line of long and short dashes. What is it supposed to represent?” He moved his hand along the dashes. “Look at the ends of the line. Do you see where this is?”

I followed his finger and looked. It was the telegraph room at the end of River 6. “Aha!” said Wang Sichuan beside me. “The telegraph room. In which case this line—”

“That’s right. This is the line that connects the telegraph room to its transmitting antenna. We were wrong. The antenna wasn’t on the surface. It was right here.” He pointed at the outer edge of the dam. Here the dashed line stopped and became an asterisk.

My hair stood on end. Goddamn! The transmission antenna was on the side of the dam, pointing out toward the void. The 1942-standard cipher they’d received didn’t originate on the surface. It came from the abyss itself. Twenty years ago, the Japanese had not only flown in, they’d sent a message back out!

Old Tang’s voice was very calm as he spoke, but hearing him we all felt unspeakable terror. “Twenty years ago,”

he said, “a Japanese Shinzan bomber took off from a river thirty-six hundred feet below the earth’s surface. It soared over an underground dam and glided into the immense void just beyond, disappearing into the limitless darkness. None of us knows what the Shinzan encountered out there, or what the pilots saw.”

By itself this was crazy. Now we’d discovered a mysterious transmission had somehow come out of the darkness? Then I recalled the huge number of airdrop-ready supplies. It was obvious. This entire base had been set up to airdrop people into that abyss. Arriving some twenty years earlier, the Japanese must have asked themselves the moment they looked into the void: What is this place, what’s inside, and how do we get down there? It was evident that not only had they solved this final question, they’d also sent back a message from within.

After discovering this place, the Japanese proceeded to build a vast infrastructure, then successfully used a long-range bomber to airdrop people and supplies into the abyss. And the crashed Shinzan was certainly not the first plane flown into the abyss. The small night fighter whose wreckage we discovered earlier had surely been used in some sort of trial run. Even though, in the end, the bomber crashed, the entire course of events could still be described as “magnificently insane.”