Chen Luohu continued to sulk and ignore the rest of us, but Wang Sichuan and I talked and laughed between ourselves, and all the corpsmen took a similar attitude. There’s a lot of turnover in military units: While it’s great if people get along, there’s no need to force it. After all, once the mission is over we all return to our respective homes, and who knows when we might meet again.
Our military rations consisted of condensed, dehydrated wheat flour and rice with accompanying packets of sugar and salt. Unwrapped, it was the size of one’s finger, but once cooked it would fill the pot. Wang Sichuan got up to go draw some water, but as soon as he reached the edge of the rock and beheld the field of black bags and twisted wire, he changed his mind. “I think I’ll just use the water I carried in,” he said. Someone located a kettle and put it to boil. Together we sat and ate our rice-and-flour paste out of a big basin. It was almost inedible and tasted like medicine, but we made do.
As I ate, I began to consider some of the problems we might face. What was I to do once I had drunk all of my water? The more I thought about it, the more vexed I became. At the back of my mind I kept thinking: Should I be on the brink of dying of thirst, would I be able to drink my own urine? Surely that would be no time to be picky.
We’d finished our meal, but Pei Qing and the soldier still hadn’t returned. We smoked and waited. The cigarettes I had at the time were an unruly combination of Harbin and Hengda brand tobacco. Either Wang Sichuan’s salary or his connections weren’t as good as mine, because he smoked Albanian brand cigarettes, which went for eighteen cents a pack. I could see that none of the soldiers were smoking anything good, just generic cigarettes, so I handed over a pack of Hengdas to the deputy squad leader and—no joke—he blushed all over from happiness. Even after smoking for a while, though, we still felt ill at ease. Not a word was spoken. We just gritted our teeth and kept puffing away.
Honestly, I could understand where Chen Luohu was coming from and, in several respects, he was braver than the rest of us. First of all, he had the courage to admit in front of everyone that he was afraid, and even if we weren’t as scared as he was, no way were we entirely free of fear. The worst was eating dinner in that place. I could see how each man tried to behave with an air of complete indifference, but I knew how uneasy they really were. The feeling that people were watching us from every direction never slackened. Our shoulders grew tense from fighting the constant urge to turn our heads and look.
Wang Sichuan suggested I tell some jokes to lighten the mood. I’d worked for a long time as part of a prospecting team that included a number of young soldiers. They’d often ask to hear jokes and stories and I’d composed more than a few of them. Wang Sichuan had heard a few while we were living together, so he knew I had a gift for storytelling. Still, being asked out of the blue made me feel a little embarrassed. I usually liked to build up to the story subtly, talking about work, chatting about one thing or another, drawing the listener in, and then bring out the jokes. And of course, I couldn’t tell scary stories here. I did have a good bit that I kept in reserve, though. It was about a prospector in Yunnan making a fool of himself with a young woman from an ethnic minority. The routine was truly hilarious, romantic as could be, and with punch line after punch line. I wasn’t sure how long it had been since these young soldiers had seen a woman, but hearing this story would absolutely divert their attention.
As I was pondering the best way to begin—Bang! Bang! Bang!—three shots suddenly rang out, booming like a series of thunderclaps. We all leaped in surprise. The deputy squad leader clearly knew what he was doing; at once he tossed away his cigarette, hoisted his rifle, and headed off in the direction of the noise, the rest of the soldiers following closely behind. We had none of their superior agility, and I quickly lagged some sixty feet back. Wang Sichuan was too large and too heavy, and before long he had slipped down the side of one of the boulders and caught his foot in a gunnysack. Unable to pull it out, he began to call for my help. I didn’t have time to worry about him. I yelled for Chen Luohu—farther back and nearly crawling flat on his stomach across the rocks—to give him a hand. Then I hurried onward.
CHAPTER 10
A Martyr’s Death
I ran through total darkness. All I could see were the shaking beams of the soldiers’ flashlights up ahead. I had to slow my pace and withdraw my own flashlight to shine the way. I continued on, leaping across the gaps from rock to rock. There was nothing easy about crossing these spaces. A man is not a kangaroo, and as I hurtled on, it seemed that each jump would be my last. Sometimes, if my feet weren’t fast enough, I would begin to slide down the side of a boulder. All I could do was try my best to keep up.
They were still firing their weapons in the distance. Soon I could see the course of their bullet tracers as they shot through the dark. I guessed they were still about eighteen hundred feet away. Pei Qing and the soldier hadn’t been walking for that long. My strength was gone by the time I’d made it half that far. I came to a stop. I was panting so hard I thought I might vomit, but after resting for a moment, I realized I could wait no longer. All around me was pitch-black, and up ahead the soldiers continued to fly across the boulders, moving farther and farther away. As I looked at the gunnysacks scattered all around me, with the limbs of desiccated corpses emerging at sickening angles, the blood ran cold in my veins. I gritted my teeth and carried on.
By the time I caught up with them, the gunfire had already ceased. I saw that it was Pei Qing who had been doing the shooting. The soldier who’d accompanied him was nowhere to be seen. The deputy squad leader’s complexion had turned deathly pale. Along with another soldier he began running back toward camp. “What is it?” I asked, but he ignored my question and ran straight past me into the darkness. I could do nothing but climb over to Pei Qing and ask what was going on. His face was ashen and he made no reply. The soldier at his side began to explain, but he could barely get the words out. He just pointed and stuttered. It took some time before I understood what he was saying. Someone had fallen. The deputy squad leader had rushed back to find a rope.
I could hear the roar of water nearby. Taking a few steps closer, I saw that we had made it to the end. The boulder field had come to a sudden stop. Here the river crossed a fault line and dropped a level straight down, forming a waterfall. It wasn’t that high, sixtysome feet at most. As I shined my flashlight along its base, I could see that the bottom was entirely covered in rocks. Then my beam lit upon the soldier. His body was caught between two rocks, his whole face red with wounds and blood. I couldn’t tell whether he was alive or dead.
My head began to buzz. All at once the situation had become very serious. I hurriedly asked Pei Qing what had happened. He said that after reaching this spot they had initially planned to go back, but when he saw the waterfall was not that high, and given that they had already come this far—no easy feat, in itself—he decided to climb down and have a look. The young soldier told Pei Qing that he had been ordered by the deputy squad leader to protect him. This was a dangerous situation, the young man had said, so he’d better check it out first. Handing his rifle to Pei Qing, he began to climb down. Before the soldier had even gone two steps, he suddenly slipped and fell to the bottom. Pei Qing had immediately called for help, but after yelling for some time and receiving no response, he began to fire the rifle.
I’d seen this before. Losing one’s footing and falling is the most common danger we prospectors faced. I wasted no time in telling the two soldiers waiting next to me to call out the fallen soldier’s name. If he was still conscious, we had to keep him from going to sleep. They yelled and yelled—they called him something like “Big Beard”—but the fallen soldier didn’t make even the slightest response. My heart sank. The situation looked grim.