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.”
CHAPTER 49
Control Room
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.
“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.