We left the room and followed the other trail, toward the iron double doors. It was as I’d expected. After pushing them open, we were greeted by a long, pitch-black hallway. I shined my flashlight down it. Some footprints ran down the corridor, others into the room behind us. There had to be an exit ahead. We took off without a second thought, following the footprints into the darkness. Before long the corridor branched in three directions. The footprints ran down each one. Unable to determine which was the right path, we had no choice but to investigate them one by one. Our first selection ended in a power distribution room. Switches filled every inch of it.
“Why not try and flip a few?” said Wang Sichuan.
“Absolutely not,” I said. “If they turn off some important mechanism, the compression engines in the icehouse for example, then the devil only knows what the consequences will be.”
We returned to the fork and took the second corridor. We were soon standing before an iron door, triple-proofed, just like the others, and terribly thick. In a battle, every space in here would become a very-difficult-to-capture bunker. The big guy pushed the door open. Inside was a great hall. We swept our flashlight beams across the room.
I’m taking such pains to relate our search for the right path because it really was so critical. Later, while giving a summary of the incident, we felt some residual “fear after the fact.” Had we not checked all the corridors, had we found the exit on the first try, then the true, hidden face of this sprawling underground bunker would have remained forever concealed. So often one’s choice can change so much.
Past the door we saw a strange room. It looked so familiar, as if I’d seen it only recently. We walked inside. On the wall directly across from us hung a square curtain, fifteen feet in both length and width. Numerous low seats filled the room, and at its rear rested some strange apparatus. I walked straight over to the front of the machine. It was a miniature film projector. I hadn’t known film projectors this small existed until I watched the Zero Film back on the surface. Could this be the underground base’s movie theater? Was this where their superiors strengthened the soldiers’ brainwashing and savagery? Looking back at it now, it was probably where the Japanese soldiers came to relax and have fun. In those days, though, our concept of the Japanese didn’t allow for them taking part in recreational activities.
I was extremely curious about the little projector. Taking a closer look, I discovered it had been wiped clean of dust. Whoever was here before us must have been interested in it as well. I checked it all over. Sprouting from the back was a very familiar-looking shape. It was a circle with a spool in the middle, like you could hang something off it. This was uncanny. This feeling of familiarity was different from the sense of having seen this room before. It was a kind of anxiety, as if there were two electrically charged pieces in my mind about to touch and they were sending sparks back and forth. I needed to remember where I’d seen the thing. It was terribly crucial. I could feel it.
I called Wang Sichuan over and he motioned to Ma Zaihai. The three of us put our heads together. It came to Ma Zaihai at once. “The iron case! The shell-like iron case the female corpse was carrying. Maybe it attaches onto the projector.”
No way, I thought. The iron case had looked like a snail shell. That case could be attached onto some component of the projector? Suddenly I realized what was wrong. The case wasn’t a part of the projector. No, by God, but within that iron case was none other than a roll of film!
CHAPTER 50
The Film Canister
The three of us looked at one another, unsure what to make of our discovery. I sat down and forced myself to think things over. Now that we understood what the iron case was, a number of clues began to fit together. We knew how it all started: the only reason the Japanese established this base and transported the bomber down here was the void. How they’d discovered the place, we didn’t know. Perhaps while prospecting for oil or coal deposits they’d simply happened upon it. The original motive was unimportant. For in any case, upon finding the abyss, they’d obviously become consumed with the desire to know what was hidden in the outer-space-like darkness beneath this mountain.
They then used the Shinzan bomber to explore the abyss. Naturally, they would never have relied on the naked eye for the results of this survey, so aerial recording equipment must have been affixed to the Shinzan. For some reason the base was suddenly abandoned after the plane took off. Lacking guided navigation, the Shinzan crashed into the underground river. Buffer bags stuffed with Chinese corpses had been sunk along the watery runway, so the plane was not completely destroyed. While others might have sustained injuries, there was only a single fatality—the twisted corpse of the pilot we discovered in the wreckage.
We had discovered the film canister on the body of a corpse encased in ice, so were those frozen corpses the missing members of the flight team? They survived the crash and grabbed the film, but then why had they frozen to death in the icehouse? Had they discovered something that made them, instead of leaving, go to the lowest level of the dam and pile warheads all around the radar device? And then there’d been an accident and they’d gotten stuck there? The arrangement of the radar and the warheads really did look like Wang Sichuan had said, like a lure and a trap, but why do all this? Was it because of something they’d seen in the abyss? Or rather, had they believed that, because of the Shinzan, something was actually being drawn back from the abyss?
The next part was simple: After the members of the flight team had been dead and frozen for twenty or so years, the first prospecting team discovered this void. We didn’t know what happened to the first team. Supposing their ruin had been the work of an enemy agent, this person must have come from Japan, known everything that was down here, and that the Chinese had discovered this place. This person then infiltrated the first team, killed some of its members, and sabotaged the mission.
Based on the marks we’d found, the spy was searching for something, most likely the film canister. The spy was unaware that the canister had actually been frozen beneath the ice, so, when we arrived a month later, “he” still hadn’t found it. To buy himself some time, he’d dropped us down to the icehouse, hoping we’d freeze to death. What he didn’t realize was that someone from the first team had survived long enough to use the automatic transmitter, causing Old Tang and the rest to discover a structural plan of the base and thereby locate the icehouse. Later this person tried to bury me alive and locked us in the electrical canal.
“If this really is the case,” said Wang Sichuan, “then whatever the spy’s really after, he’s pretty damn clever. He’s had us in the palm of his hand this whole time. But since the person missing from the first prospecting team is a woman, why did you think your attacker was a man?”
I bit my lower lip in thought. “There are two possibilities,” I said. “The first is that I was mistaken. The second is that the woman from the first team was actually a man in disguise. The Japanese aren’t that big, so it isn’t impossible. Actually there’s one more. He could have been mixed in with our team when we came in.” I remembered the two notes I’d been given.