“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.”
He was right. And after making it here, she realized immediately that the apparatus beneath the sectional map was the control box. She wiped the dust and read the labels until she found the switch controlling the caissons. She knew what she was looking for and so left the other machines untouched. “Regardless of who it is specifically,” I said, “there’s definitely something strange going on. Maybe it really is a Japanese spy. It was probably this person who murdered the young soldier in the warehouse. The ruination of the first team and their ultimate failure to complete the mission was also likely the work of this agent.”
The two of them nodded.
“We don’t know where this woman is,” said Wang Sichuan, “but maybe she’s still nearby. We might be about to run into her.”
“Should we head back and grab the rifle so we can defend ourselves?” I asked.
“We still don’t know for certain that we can get out through the lower room,” said Ma Zaihai. “If we can’t, then we’ll have to come back the way we came. If we take down the gun, it’ll be very difficult to climb out of here.”
“Then we’d better be extra careful,” said Wang Sichuan.
Ma Zaihai was the first down the ladder. After he reached the bottom and confirmed no one was there, the two of us climbed down. This room was nearly twice the size of the one above it. Six transmitters were arrayed along the wall nearest the dam’s exterior. Stacks of telegrams were strewn messily atop them. Ironwork desks piled with dust-covered documents took up the rest of the space. This has to be the dam’s command center, I thought. A huge blueprint of the underground base hung on one wall, identical to the one Old Tang had found but much larger. Wang Sichuan spied a microphone sitting atop one of the long tables against the wall. “This has to be where they read the emperor’s letter of surrender before they withdrew,” he said. He tried to convince Ma Zaihai to switch on the mike, but after he’d fussed with it for some time, the power light remained off. It appeared completely ruined.
I told them to stop walking around. I scanned the room with my flashlight. Sure enough, there were two sets of footprints heading in two directions: one to an ironwork double door, the other to a dark green wooden door. The ironwork doors were clearly blastproof, probably with some corridor beyond. What was behind the wooden one? A bathroom? We walked over and opened the green door. It was an office.
Dust filled the room. The furnishings and decor were very simple, though traces from where decorations had hung could be seen on the walls. Japanese swords, most likely. A dust-covered military uniform of some unknown rank hung in the corner. All over the room was evidence of dust disturbed. We followed a trail of handprints but found only a large stack of documents. We didn’t speak Japanese, nor were we historians, so the papers were useless, but apparently somebody was very interested in something they thought was in this room, though they didn’t seem to know exactly where it was.