Whining again, but in a panicky tone this time, he complained, "How can I go down these steps? It is too much not-bright, comrade."
Wu tapped his pistol butt. "Go on down. You'll find out."
Chattering his protests, Dugan went down into the dark. The steps wound around and around. When he was out of hearing of Wu, he moved more swiftly. Wu could not fire through that maze of steel. Whatever these people had down here, it was not a shooting-persons room, such as the Chinese Communists were reported to operate elsewhere in China.
A new smell reached out and touched his nostrils. Dugan stopped. It was an odor which had no place in this kind of building. It reminded him of industry, of power — power, that was it! The ozone of electrical machinery. The smell of a ship's wireless room. More confidently he hurried on down the steps. Two more turns, and he saw a doorway outlined in razor-sharp thin beams of light, top and bottom, where the door did not quite fit; and this light was blue-tinted.
Boldly he rapped on the door. It opened.
The pale quiet bland face of the "American" greeted him. Behind the American there was a maze of communications machinery, most of it Japanese. A fan sucked air out of the room into a ventilating shaft. There was another person behind the captain, but Dugan could not see him clearly.
"Proceed inward," said the American in a toneless Chinese voice.
Dugan obeyed, babbling in Russian, "Yefreitor Josif Nikodimovich Andreanov, Comrade General, seeking Red Army officers to whom to report—"
The other man rose — a giant of a Russian — and said, in easy Russian, "I am Starchii Sarzhant Byelov, comrade. What clothes are you wearing?"
"Stolen American clothes, comrade. I have escaped from the Fascist Americans in Mukden." As he spoke, Dugan sized up the big old Russian. Technical sergeant? Too bad. Perhaps he shouldn't have introduced himself as a private first class. The sarzhant would expect a yefreitor to know too damned many things about the Red Army. But Dugan-Andreanov had assumed the character of a souse and a liar. He could, quite consistently, demote himself at the first convenient opportunity.