Xu Lei - Search for the Buried Bomber

Wang Sichuan tapped me on the leg from below. He asked what was going on. I didn’t know. This private was too capricious, too undisciplined, but the more I thought about it, the more I felt bewitched into following him across. I climbed onto the steel path. The wind was much more powerful as I made my way along the wall. Even keeping upright was a struggle. I was still only halfway across when, forcing my head up, I watched Ma Zaihai prepare to step over the final gap. Suddenly a great gust of wind rushed forth, pressing me against the side of the dam. I closed my eyes and held on tight. When I opened them, Ma Zaihai was gone.

My heart skipped a beat. Had he fallen? In a flash I saw him. He was hanging on to a steel bar some twenty feet down the face of that convex structure. He must have lost his grip when the wind came blasting through. I signaled down to him, asking if he was hurt, but he had no free hand to respond with. Kicking against the wall, he tried with all his might to pull himself up, but he seemed to be injured. After climbing for only a moment, he could exert himself no more and hung back down.

Not wasting a moment, I climbed toward the antenna and yelled for him to hold on. As I reached the final gap, I realized why he’d fallen. From here, the distance to one of the steel spines was considerable. My fingertips only brushed the bar. I brought my arm back and adjusted my position. I needed to swing over. I cursed the Japs for their corner cutting. A distance like this, and still they wouldn’t place just one more bar?

Wang Sichuan was right behind me, his nerves as frayed as mine. Leaning back, I took a deep breath and swung out. In an instant the bar was in my right hand and my left was behind me, still hanging in midair. The rush of it covered my body in a cold sweat. Had there been another burst of wind just now, I would have been a goner. I lifted my feet up onto a nearby steel bar, stabilized myself, and climbed down. I leaned over and grabbed hold of Ma Zaihai. “You goddamn idiot,” I yelled at him, “what the hell were you thinking, climbing over here?”

Holding my hand, he used all his strength to pull himself back up. He turned to me, panting. “The antenna. The antenna is here.”

I looked at the steel bars all around us. As a matter of fact, they were different from the ones that had led us over here. Not only were they thinner, they were without a trace of rust. I was rather startled. This thing was so big and its steel forks so numerous, its reception strength had to be immense. But by no means was that why he’d climbed across.

I continued to scold him. “So it’s an antenna. That’s still no reason for you to take such a risk.”

He laughed at me and scratched his head. I assumed he was embarrassed, but he reached behind him and brought his rifle around. He pulled back the bolt and leveled it at me. “I’m sorry, Engineer Wu,” he said, “but I’m going to have to inconvenience you for a moment.”

We’d all been through boot camp. We’d all been told countless times before target practice never to point our guns at anyone else. How many stories had we heard of someone dying when a weapon accidentally went off ? Even an empty gun could eject a firing pin fast enough to kill a man. So I found looking into the black hole of the gun muzzle stupendously irritating. At once I brought my hand up, yelling, “What are you doing? Put the weapon down. You want it to go off and kill me?”

He didn’t seem concerned in the slightest. “It’s fine,” he said. “I unloaded all the bullets and the safety is on.” He handed it to me.

I grabbed the rifle and looked it over. The bullet magazine really was gone. I was amazed. When had he taken it out? Then I remembered that he’d taken all the bullets out before he knocked out the iron grate with the butt of the rifle. “You need my help for what?” I asked him. “What is it you really want to do? Did you stop caring about your life when you saw the antenna? This thing isn’t going to lead us out of here.”

He undid his Sam Browne belt and tied one end to the rifle strap. “Company Commander Tang said the whole reason they came down here was to find this antenna. If they took the same route we did, then they too would have come across it and would surely have climbed over to check it out. If they went a different way, I still want to take a quick look at it. Then, once we find them, we can all leave straightaway and won’t have to come back down here.

“And you should let me go,” he continued, “because I’m an engineering corpsman. Although you two are, of course, much more learned than I, there are nonetheless some details that only I will understand. Let me take a look at the antenna. I might be able to figure out where Company Commander Tang is right now.”

He said this so sincerely, so solemnly, that I couldn’t help but trust him. Wang Sichuan jumped over, landing just beside me. “What’s going on?” he asked. “Looking for trouble again, are you? What’s this place got to do with anything?”

By the time I explained it, Ma Zaihai had already tied the other end of the Sam Browne belt to the belt around his waist. Then, having me hold tight to his gun, he began to climb down toward the underside of the antenna’s bowl-like concrete base. The nearer he climbed to the bottom half of the bowl, the steeper it began to slope toward the wall. Footholds became increasingly few, until at last he could do no more than hang on with his arms as the lower half of his body dangled helplessly in midair. Fortunately Ma Zaihai was both strong and agile. There were only a few places where I had to steady the gun in my arms and help him swing across. Soon enough he’d disappeared from view. A few moments later, he yelled back. Then the sound of some object striking the antenna rang out. After several more such knocks, he called out to us to climb down after him. I pulled on the line. He seemed to have fixed the other end to something, so I wedged the gun into a section of the antenna and began climbing down the attached lengths of rifle strap and Sam Browne belt. Wang Sichuan followed closely behind.

After descending about thirty feet, I saw a damp hole in the rock, so water-washed it appeared covered in wax. I had no time to take a closer look, for just then, at the spot where the base of the round antenna met the wall of the dam, I noticed a square window, about three feet high and wide. Power cables ran down the concrete bowl and into this opening. It was around one of these cables that the Sam Browne belt was tied. Ma Zaihai was kneeling inside the small window. “Behind here is the telegraph room,” he said.

“I thought the telegraph room was in the cavern Old Tang found,” said Wang Sichuan.

“I saw the transmitter he brought back,” said Ma Zaihai. “It was too small, definitely not the transmitter of a primary telegraph room. And no way would the main transmitter and the antenna have been placed so far apart. If they were attacked, the cables might be cut, so the primary telegraph room would be near the antenna. Underground bunkers are designed with the main transmitter in the primary telegraph room. All others are merely small-scale transmitters built into temporary command posts. If the dam were overrun, right here would be the hardest place to cut off from the antenna.”

“You son of a gun, how come you didn’t say this before?” asked Wang Sichuan.

“To tell you the truth, when Company Commander Tang said we should find the antenna, I figured what he really wanted was to find this primary telegraph room. He’s much more experienced than I, so I didn’t think it my place to say anything.” Ma Zaihai scooted deeper into the tunnel, giving me space to climb in.