Xu Lei - Search for the Buried Bomber

“We’ve already located a telegraph room,” I said, “and verified that telegrams were sent from the transmitter there, so what’s the point of finding this place?”

“While I can’t guarantee it,” he said, “ordinarily the main telegraph room is also the general headquarters. There’s probably going to be something important back here.”

By now I had already squeezed myself into the small window. Actually, the window wasn’t as small as it looked, it’s just that there were so many power cables. They stretched chaotically down the long and narrow space, taking up most of the room. Twisted together and each as thick as a wrist, they resembled the tentacles of some monstrous beast. From outside Wang Sichuan shouted for us to be careful not to get shocked.

After crawling about twenty feet, we reached the tunnel’s end. The power cables ran through a hole cut into the wall, which had then been tightly resealed. “This is the external maintenance passage,” said Ma Zaihai. “The internal maintenance passage is beyond. That they sealed off the tunnel suggests that something is wrong with the air outside.”

“This isn’t engineering class,” I groaned. “Doesn’t the wall just mean we’re stuck out here?”

Ma Zaihai didn’t reply. Grabbing his water canteen, he began striking it against the wall. A moment later a crack had opened up. “So that maintenance is convenient, this sort of separation wall is generally made of lime,” he said. “It might look sturdy, but you could break it open with your fingernails. At most, there will be a layer of iron netting inside, but we can just cut through it.” As he said this he struck the wall once more and a wide gap opened up. “No netting even,” he said. “I guess there are not any mice in this fortification.”

We spent the next ten-plus minutes making the hole big enough to fit through, then we continued on. Following the same pattern as before, we broke through two more isolation walls. Between them was an air-dispersal ventilation shaft, used to prevent the buildup of poisonous gas. It was just like the one we’d seen in the caisson and thus far too narrow for a person to enter. At last we reached the end of the cables. Each connected to an electrical box, emerging from the other end as thin wires that ran through the panels below us and down into the room underneath. Ma Zaihai pointed at one of the panels. Grabbing hold of the cables threading into it, he wedged his legs against the wall across from him and pulled with all his might until the panel burst open.

The space below was pitch-black. Sweeping my flashlight about, I saw we were in the ceiling of some room. Chairs surrounded several tables stacked with papers. Ma Zaihai jumped down and scanned the room with his flashlight but found nothing of note. Wang Sichuan and I jumped down as well and looked around. This room was different from any we had seen so far. The space was square and about the size of a basketball court. Equipment was arranged all around us. I saw a row of great iron boxes, each of them taller than a person and covered in a multicolored array of indicator lights and electrical switches. Huge and heavy, they’d been placed one after another along the room’s four walls. Numerous rust spots had formed across their outer sheeting, but compared to the other machinery we’d seen, much of it so rusted as to be dropping whole flakes of the stuff, the damage here was minor. These iron boxes had clearly gone through some rust-prevention process. A great sheet of iron hung from one of the walls. Upon this were engraved lines of every color, forming a sectional map of the entire dam, albeit a simple one. Numerous indicator lights were fixed along the lines. The iron box that stood beneath it was covered with far more buttons than any of the others. It was some kind of console. Four long writing desks were lined up in the center of the room. Telephones and numerous piles of documents were neatly arranged atop them. Everything was covered in a thick layer of dust. The reason this room felt so different was all the precision instruments. Up till now we’d seen only huge machinery and crude concrete structures. We’d been in refrigerated storage, a warehouse, and an electrical canal. Here, at last, was a place fit for technical personnel.

“What’s all this used for?” I asked Ma Zaihai. One by one he explained the purpose of each piece. Everything was in Japanese, so he couldn’t be exactly sure what controlled what, but he knew their general uses. He said the large iron boxlike instruments must control the dam’s equipment. There were mechanisms for inspecting and regulating the dam’s pressure and water level, electrical circuits that operated the large sluice gates, and controls for all the generators. The sectional blueprint had to be a map of the pipelines running through the dam’s interior. The lighted diodes indicated whether the pipelines were currently open or shut. This, he said, was definitely the dam’s control room—or at the very least, one of the dam’s control rooms.

We didn’t see the transmitter we’d been anticipating, nor did we see any door that might lead to one. The room appeared to be sealed off. Shining his flashlight upward, Ma Zaihai observed the progression of the electrical wires. He tracked them along the ceiling, down the wall, and onto the floor. At last he pointed at four iron plates. They were locked with bolts thick as doorknobs. Undoing the locks, he pulled the iron plates open. A trapdoor. A ladder hung down into the darkness. There was another room below.

“A hidden trapdoor,” said Ma Zaihai. “Even if this place was captured, it would still be a long time before this control room was found. Japanese military structures were all built this way.”

At first glance there seemed nothing worrisome about the room below. Still I remembered with concern other times, other rooms. I steeled myself and was about to descend when Wang Sichuan grabbed hold of me.

“Wait a second,” he said. “I just thought of something.”

“What is it?” I asked.

He pointed at the dam’s sectional map. “There are two extralarge indicator lights sticking up on both sides of the dam. Don’t you think they represent the caissons?”

Ma Zaihai looked where he was pointing. The two lights were bigger than all the others, their colors different. He took a breath and nodded. “Yeah, I think they are.”

“Then doesn’t that mean their operational controls should be right here?”

I gave a start. I knew what he was thinking. Wang Sichuan walked over to the control box and shined his flashlight along the densely packed buttons. Beneath each button was a label, written in Japanese, but he wasn’t trying to read the buttons. He leaned in closer, then beckoned me over. Dust had been rubbed from a few of the buttons. The machine had been used only recently.

“Interesting,” said Wang Sichuan. “Perhaps there really is a Japanese soldier here.”

Who’d started up those caissons after we entered and dropped us to the bottom of the dam? I didn’t believe it was some “left behind” Japanese soldier. The whole way in, we hadn’t seen a single sign of life. And this place was covered in dust. Clearly this room didn’t see a lot of activity. I looked at the floor. There’d probably been footprints here, but now that we’d walked all around the room, they were no longer distinguishable.

“So then who was it?” Wang Sichuan asked. “The spy must have been here before us. Could it be the final woman from the first team, the one we haven’t found yet?”

“For now we can only assume it was her,” I said. “I really can’t think of any other possibility.”

“No,” said Ma Zaihai, “it had to be someone who knew the layout of the dam. To get in here from the outside, we had to smash through the isolation walls. The only other way in would be through the trapdoor. It’s pretty unlikely that someone here for their first time would just happen upon a place this concealed by luck. He or she had to already know the layout of the dam.”