Xu Lei - Search for the Buried Bomber

We’d all begun to feel a bit nervous. Old Tang gave me one of his Iron Eagles. “It’s nothing,” he said. “Everything bad that could happen already has. There’s not going be anything else. They just walked too far away, that’s all.” Iron Eagle is an old cigarette brand, the first to begin production in the early days of liberation. I took a long look at the pack. Man, I thought to myself, even in these times there are still people who can get their hands on these. I took a puff. The flavor was impure, but invigorating. I turned again to look off into the warehouse. Now even the sound of the deputy squad leader’s voice was gone.

We still didn’t know how big the warehouse was. Thinking back on it now, a simple recitation of its size in square feet would never do justice to its complexity or its odd shape. The ceiling was quite high, with stacks of goods on suspended multilevel walkways and iron tracks for hauling supplies. The floor was covered with towering piles of materials. The devils must have thoroughly researched the form and structure of a dam, then utilized this space to the greatest extent possible.

Ten minutes passed without any communication from the deputy squad leader. Old Tang made us keep waiting. “He’s carrying a gun,” he said. “If something really happened, he would have fired a warning shot.”

I felt rather anxious. Not wanting my mood to affect anyone else, I got up and walked over to look at the corpse. Pei Qing was sitting off to one side of it. He stared, dazed, at the ice block, as if looking to see how much it had melted. I handed him a cigarette, but he refused. I could feel the questions bubbling up inside me. Making sure that none of the corpsmen were paying us any attention, I asked him what was going on. He ignored me. He gave me no more than a quick glance before turning back to the ice. I tried several times to give him a friendly nudge, but he just slapped my hand away.

There was nothing I could do. I walked back over to Wang Sichuan, but he was asleep, or at least pretending to be. Though I pushed him, he didn’t budge. I was at my wit’s end. The old saying is true: The eunuchs are anxious while the emperor is carefree. Attempting to calm my nerves, I told myself that Old Tang was an experienced soldier with a good understanding of the deputy squad leader and the rest of the men he’d sent. If he said there was no problem, then there wasn’t any problem. Anyway, we hadn’t heard the sound of gunfire. Perhaps they’d made some huge discovery and couldn’t come back immediately. That was possible. I wandered back to the fire and lay down. Looking up at the disorder of wires and ropes hanging from the ceiling, I considered our situation. The shadows of the cables trembled ceaselessly in the firelight. In a moment I had fallen asleep. I slept for six hours. When I awoke the deputy squad leader still hadn’t returned. Old Tang was now gone as well. The only people left were Pei Qing, Ma Zaihai, Wang Sichuan, and a few corpsmen I didn’t know. Only Ma Zaihai and the corpsmen were awake.

Where was everyone? I asked Ma Zaihai. He said Old Tang had eventually decided to take a group of men and go after the deputy squad leader. Two hours had passed since then, and there had been no sound of movement. Ma Zaihai also wanted to see what the matter was. He’d just been considering what to do.

Is this warehouse swallowing people or what? I thought to myself. My heart began to thump. After shaking Wang Sichuan awake, I told him and Ma Zaihai to collect their things. There was something we had to do. Wang Sichuan was still dazed when he awoke, but he quickly understood what was happening. Puffing on a cigarette, he said he feared things had already gone to hell. Old Tang was always so capable. If there’d been some delay, he definitely would have sent someone back. It’s certain that something has gone wrong, he said.

“That’s all obvious,” I replied. “The real question is, what do we do now?”

Wang Sichuan scratched his head. “Why not go look for them?” he said. “Or we could just sit here and wait, but that’s a pretty passive way of doing things.”

I didn’t hesitate for an instant. Pei Qing was sleeping some distance away, and there were three corpsmen left in camp. Ma Zaihai was clever and could handle himself, so I told him to follow us. The three of us switched on our flashlights and headed deeper into the warehouse.

I never would have expected the warehouse to be so big. I’d thought that behind the darkness were walls, but I soon came to appreciate the size of the base of the dam and the huge number of things it contained. Holding the iron ice breaker, Wang Sichuan knocked it against the supply piles we passed in hopes the sound would draw the others’ attention. Soon we could no longer see the firelight behind us. The temperature dropped precipitously. Ice crystals had formed across the floor, making it perilously slick. We could see signs on the ground that others had come through here. Then, after turning several corners, we gasped. In front of us was a great concrete wall, some indecipherable slogan painted across it. We’d reached the end.

Whatever message the slogan was trying to convey was lost on me—probably it was “Safety in Production” or something along those lines. I couldn’t believe the warehouse had actually come to an end. It wasn’t as big as I’d imagined. More importantly, if the warehouse really did end right here, then where had Old Cat and the rest of them disappeared to? There was nowhere else to go. It wouldn’t take ten hours to search something like this. The concrete wall was quite long. We walked along it till we hit another wall. Still there was nothing to find, nor were there traces of any activity. The others seemed to have disappeared.

Ma Zaihai began to worry, but as usual Wang Sichuan refused to give up. He walked back along the wall, saying, “Impossible. These people are alive. They haven’t conjured themselves away or vanished into thin air.”

I was sure that something fishy was going on. Then I spied the tarp-covered piles of goods. Could there be another exit hidden beneath one of these? I wondered. I walked back the way we’d come, looking for any materials that appeared to have been disturbed. Sure enough, a net fixed atop a length of supplies had been pulled apart and the rivets holding down the sheets of tarpaulin underneath loosened. We began turning over the tarps one after another, when suddenly Ma Zaihai cried out. Built into the concrete floor beneath one of them was an iron double door, similar to the one we’d seen back in the cave, though much smaller. This door was not welded down. On it was printed some strange symbol, the color already faded.

Wang Sichuan wanted to open it up, but Ma Zaihai blocked his way. “Engineer Wang, Engineer Wu,” he said, “I should go first. That symbol means high voltage. The whole level is probably filled with power cables. I’d guess the wires for the entire place run through it.” He had us back up and wrapped his hands in the tarp. The door was almost two feet thick. After lifting one of the doors halfway, he nearly collapsed. The two of us hurriedly helped him push the door until it rested on the concrete floor. Opening half the double door made an opening wide enough for us to enter. We jumped down to the platform below and shined our flashlights inside. The ground was covered in power cables, each with the circumference of a rice bowl. The temperature was extremely low, the cables all encased in a thick shell of ice. A ladder led down. We could see someone had already knocked the ice from its sides.