Chapter Sixteen

  No matter if this plane is used for cargo, with only a few portholes, and in order to fit as many people as possible, it has removed various cabin equipment including seats, letting us squeeze together like canned goods, sticking to each other's cold skin.

  An American pilot looked at us from the partition of the cockpit and turned his head back to scold the ground crew below: "Is this what you call cargo? Damn it! You have me transport people in such weather!"

  The engine was warming up, and the rumble in the cargo hold was especially loud. We couldn't hear the ground crew's explanation at all. I looked around at the tense faces surrounding me - Ah Yi's face, Hao Shouyi's face, He Lao's face... even Miao Long now had a tense face. Our skin was almost sticking together, and in this unfamiliar environment, none of us spoke a word.

  The pilot, busy with pre-takeoff checks, suddenly remembered something and furiously complained to those below the plane: "Where's my escort? Am I flying a Japanese transport plane? The fighter planes in the sky are all Japanese devils! Where's the Flying Tigers?"

  I'm sweating, although it's cold I'm still sweating. At a very close distance, A Di stared at me straightly, "What did he say?"

  I deceived him, "He said it would arrive in the blink of an eye."

  The pilot slammed his cockpit and cursed loudly: "The landing gear wasn't fixed properly! Worse than the landing gear is China's fog! Worse than the fog is America's landing gear!"

  A Yi stared at me, no matter what he knew it wasn't an expression of happiness.

  I no longer looked at him, I turned to face Hao Shouyi's pale face, at this time the preheated engine started roaring, and as it roared Kang Ya began vomiting, he vomited so hard that the sky and earth were overturned. La Nuo and Dou Bing frantically pounded on him.

  Kang Ya cried out while vomiting: "I don't want to fly anymore! Mom, I want to get off!"

  "I said: 'You haven't even taken off yet, what are you yelling about! You have to taxi before you can take off!'"

  Kang Ya lifted her head from the vomit bag, "Huh?"

  When he found himself still on the ground, his vomiting miraculously stopped immediately. He and Not Spicy squeezed to the porthole that was only slightly larger than a human head, looking at the ground moving outside the window as C46 turned on the runway.

  "It's just like riding in a car."

  "Not so spicy to say: 'Can't fly? Americans are nothing special either.'"

  And at this time, the pilot threw down his last sentence towards the ground. When he said it, he also knew that no one heard him, "They are not frozen meat!"

  Then the plane accelerated and slid on the simple runway, vibrating and roaring. My shallow theoretical knowledge was not enough to deal with such reality. Kang Ya and Bu La were thrown to the ground, scratching each other, and people on board rolled around in a heap.

  Deputy Squadron Commander Kang Ya scolded the pilot: "Can you drive or not?"

  Neither the driver nor the co-driver paid attention to him, our world suddenly tilted, and Kang Ya crashed over and hit my temple with his forehead. The few of us hugged each other in the cabin, rolling and crawling around.

  A humble beacon flickers in the fog, this plane carries us, breaking through the fog and taking off.

  We took off, and supposedly at the airport where we would land, we would receive weapons, clothes, a complete set of equipment, everything. The vomit bags that were issued to each person were hardly used, although it was the only detail that our superiors had thought of for us, but vomiting was actually the least of our worries on the way.

  The cloud layer on the Yunnan Plateau was so low that C46 had just climbed out of the fog when it entered the clouds again.

  In the majestic cloud layer, it is like a paper fold, overturned in the air wave, and those strange clouds look like solids, like vast flowing mountains.

  We were tossed around the cabin like cargo. Every person who grabbed onto a fixed point became a human handhold, with several people clinging to him, and barf bags flew actively around us, but who still cared about them?

  The cabin was still tilted and the entire plane shook as it climbed.

  The pilot in the cockpit yelled wildly, and civilization also had to degenerate into barbarism in such a harsh environment. He scolded his plane: "Climb! Climb! Otherwise I'll be done for! Damn it, climb!"

  The jolts at takeoff were vertical, which was normal, but the violent ascent in turbulent air made them horizontal, and this old plane shook so hard it seemed about to come apart - not figuratively, literally. A cargo tie-down ring that Maelstrom had been clinging to came loose with a clang, and he cursed loudly as he and several people clinging to him crashed down on top of us.

  The earsplitting screech of the engines almost drowned out our own screams as the plane finally burst out of the turbulence and climbed above the clouds. It suddenly leveled off, and the sunlight from above the clouds stabbed painfully into our eyes through the portholes. We quieted down from our mutual clawing and tearing at each other, and a solitary cloud pillar rose almost vertically from the layer below, giving the illusion that it was supporting the sky, with the sun shining behind it.

  The co-pilot was kissing his dashboard, "Tonight I'll take you to my bed! Damn old prostitute!"

  The driver burst out laughing, "It's not your turn yet, I'm going to fly this old prostitute to the moon!"

  We celebrated in a Chinese way, shivering and huddled together, staring blankly at the clouds outside the porthole. I don't like being touched, although there was no choice but to be squeezed together, yet still, one by one, the hands that grasped my skin left their imprints.

  The clouds on the Yunnan border create an illusion that one can walk on them, they form their own world.

  Kang Ya licked her lips and said, "It looks like it can be eaten."

  The bean pancake had a reverent look on its face, "My dad said that gods live in this place."

  The dragon grasped the handle and said, "There's still a dragon living in it, a cat is sleeping on the clouds, several tens of thousands of miles long, and even if it sleeps for several tens of thousands of years. It swallows you from this handle and pulls you out when you're already in Northeast China. Our Heilongjiang River is just such a bald-tailed dragon transformed."

  Hao Shouyi gave him a sideways glance, "You're scared yourself, but you have to scare others to death?"

  The exposed mystery dragon haha laughed, now we all calm down, so we all start caring for others.

  The co-pilot threw all the canvas that was piled up in the cockpit and didn't know what to do with it over to us, "Chinese soldiers, we really don't want to risk our lives delivering frozen meat. But you have to leave them behind after landing."

  The English I learned in school is now spoken with great difficulty, but thanks to my father's strictness, I remember it well. I said to him in English: "Thank you very much. How long will we be flying?"

  The American's eyes lit up with delight, "English? Great. We just climb and then descend, and then we can have the terrible British afternoon tea." He leaned back in his pilot's seat, gesturing the climbing and descending with his hands, and scrunched up his face like a bitter melon to show his attitude towards British tea. I wanted to return his humor with a joke, but Not Spicy happily interrupted me while looking out of the porthole.

  His non-spicy expression was radiant, "They even followed up with numbness."

  I saw from his position an airplane darting out of the tail of C46, agile and ferocious, it had been hiding behind the clouds, when the cumbersome transport plane climbed away from the deadly cumulus clouds, it suddenly appeared.

  "I shouted loudly in English: 'Fighter planes! Japan!'"

  Our two drivers have already practiced their reactions in such bad conditions like fighter pilots, they heard me shout and saw the direction I was pointing. The nose of the plane suddenly dived down, they tried to dive back into the clouds without any buffering process. That agile Zero fighter flew over, starting to fire when it swooped past from under the tail.

  The cramped cargo hold suddenly opened with several portholes, I saw a man violently shudder and then collapse on the snake's buttocks. The 12.7mm machine gun killed several people in our cargo hold with one burst, but because they were standing too crowded, they didn't even fall down.

  C-46 resumed its violent shaking, it was crazy to want to escape into the clouds. The airflow rushed in from the bullet holes, I looked at him desperately clinging to the newly shot-out bullet holes to keep stable, the bandage on his severed finger had come loose and was fluttering around the cabin like a defeated flag. No one shouted because the strong airflow made it impossible to shout out loud.

  Before we dived into the clouds, Zero made a second attack. This time I saw my co-pilot who was chatting with me just now struggling and bouncing on his seat like a wooden puppet, blood splashing all over half of the cockpit. His colleagues didn't care about him at all, doing their best to push down the nose of the plane.

  We were engulfed in clouds, I watched as the Zero soared upwards and broke through the clouds, it didn't intend to do a futile search of the vast ocean. All I could see was the endless white outside the cockpit, we descended at an almost plummeting speed.

  The Japanese planes have gone, anyway today we are still such defenseless targets.

  As I fell through the clouds, I wondered if the person who put us on the plane would help me mail my will. Later, when I saw the ground, I thought, although I can speak English, this is my first time abroad.

  From the clouds to the fog, there was almost no change, but in the fog, there was a ground, and the jungle came immediately, in a shock that threw us all over the place, the pilot completed a suicidal landing, the glass of the driver's window shattered in front of him, that old brother fell back and didn't move again, it seemed to me that he was badly injured, no need for him anymore, now this plane has become an inert body, how many people can survive below is up to God.

  The plane careened through violent turbulence, each jolt threatening to shatter our teeth. I clung desperately to a fixed point, listening to the sound of landing gear snapping off and metal skin being torn open like paper.

  It finally came to a stop, and the cargo hold was silent. I raised my head and pulled on one of my colleagues beside me, but he didn't respond at all - I looked up to see that the cargo hold had been torn apart by branches from the jungle, and he had been squeezed to death by a tree branch that had pierced the hold.

  Then I remembered what was the most frightening thing in my theoretical knowledge after a plane crash. I got up dizzily and crawled to the ground, "It's going to catch fire! Jump down! Get off the plane!"

  Kang Ya shouted back at me in a daze: "You'll get yourself killed!"

  "Do you think you're still in heaven?" I looked around for an exit.

  He glanced at the branches on his head and suddenly started shouting violently, "Jumping plane! On fire! On fire!"

  The plane was overloaded with over 50 people at the time, and now there are only about 30 people left. I'm really glad to see that our foraging group of people were crowded together and avoided the severely damaged rear cabin, they basically got away with just bruises and scratches. The door couldn't be opened early, but the cargo compartment was torn open with a bigger gap than the door, we jumped out from the gap.

  As we fell from the wreckage of C46 into the bushes, we saw the efforts made by that American. He had wanted to make an emergency landing on the open ground, but in the thick fog it was impossible to distinguish the terrain, so at the last moment he chose to use branches and vines to stop the impact, the plane was stopped at the edge of the thicket, with a small section of the broken cockpit exposed at the edge of the thicket and the open ground. We stumbled out of the bushes, dazed and confused, and stared in shock at the wreckage of C46 that had taken us to heaven and back to hell.

  It didn't explode, but we heard the sound of an explosion. We instinctively dodged and then found out that the explosion wasn't from the plane wreckage, but from the fog behind us - it was gunfire and artillery, and a kind of, say, the sound of an ammunition dump being set on fire.

  We stared blankly at the fog behind us, just as we had stared blankly at the fog in front of us, until we heard the engine of an American Willys Jeep. We took a few steps forward and saw a jeep emerge from the fog, driving slowly and steadily towards us, with two equally unhurried British soldiers sitting on it.

  Mr. Ah thought politeness was more suitable for such a diplomatic occasion, so he slightly bowed in a Chinese way and said, "Gentlemen."

  But both of them were armed, and suddenly there was a Lee-Enfield rifle and a Sten gun pointed at us.

  "We are friends." I said in English, and I was actually a bit red-faced when I said it, because no matter what, there shouldn't be an army with only underpants, "Chinese Army".

  The gun was put down and the car continued driving forward.

  I chased after them and asked: "We've made an emergency landing! Where are we?"

  The car drove past us for a while before stopping, and the British people on it looked at us with an indifferent attitude, that kind of indifference was so familiar, not only without concern, but also without curiosity - usually we also treat each other with that attitude.

  The Briton said expressionlessly: "Asia ah, could this damned jungle be Europe?"

  I couldn't laugh, and judging from the serious expressions of those few people, they didn't think it was a joke either. Jokes are to be made with people of equal status, so they don't make jokes with us - fortunately, their driver thought our gap wasn't big enough that we couldn't communicate at all.

  "He said: 'You have landed in the wrong place.'"

  I really wanted to laugh, that kind of laughter but the expression is like a crying face. "I agree. But we are forced down, we were shot down by the Japanese."

  "The airport is eight kilometers in the direction of eleven thirty." He said angrily without hiding his anger, "You always get the place wrong."

  The interpreter beside me subconsciously looked at his watch, but apparently he could only see his wrist. I knocked his wrist down.

  "I said patiently: 'Respected sir, just one word is needed and you can let a group of lost people know their location.'"

  The respected gentleman drove the car and said coldly: "Look at your map."

  He was so confident that I had to take a look at my only pair of pants to make sure there wasn't a high-proportion military map hidden in them, and by the time I looked up, the car had driven away.

  "How did you figure out that I had the entire warehouse, including the map, on me? — Where in the hell are we?" I completely forgot about diplomatic etiquette.

  The car sped away, and whether you were polite or rude to them was irrelevant. They just threw back a lifeless response: "We're withdrawing."

  "What did they say?"

  I furiously waved my hand, "Say they're already dead! Don't ask about the trivialities of the living!" I picked up a branch and threw it into the vast fog that had swallowed the car, obviously not hitting anything. All I could do was listen to the distant explosion and maliciously imagine that the two undead men had been hit by stray bullets.

  Hao Shouyi, who was reminded by me, suddenly jumped up, "Not dead! Ah! He's not dead yet!"

  He hastily ran towards the wreckage of C46 again, and we followed him in a daze. When we realized what he was going to do, we rushed ahead of him.

  We pulled the dying American pilot out of the wreckage, alleviating his pain as much as possible because he had treated us equally before. Dr. Hao did everything in his power to rescue him, but unfortunately could only provide some manual first aid.

  The American's bleary eyes finally cleared for a moment, looked at us clustering around him, and then looked at the hazy sky.

  "Go fight, damn it." He said, then died. We were stunned.

  "What is he muttering about?"

  "Damn it, you guys, go fight." I said.

  The dragonfly asked me: "Who is he fighting with?"

  I asked Ah Yi: "Who was he fighting with in the camp?"

  He looked as if the whole thing had nothing to do with him, which was no wonder. It took him a long time to remember that he was in charge. He managed to bluff his way through officer training school and now put on an air of confidence. "Oh, I've got to find out where we are first. Where are we?"

  I stared at him for several seconds, making Ah Yi feel almost mysterious and unpredictable.

  "Don't force me to say hurtful things again. Hurting others doesn't benefit myself either." I said gritting my teeth.

  Then we fell silent. After a while, Kang Ya scratched his head, "Is there a shovel?"

  It's strange that Kang Ya wants that thing. "Clothes and guns are more important than a shovel, what do you want a shovel for?"

  Kang Ya glared, "Bury him!"

  We stared at him because this unselfish suggestion came from Kang Ya who always only cared about his own needs.