Fisher laughed.
“I’ll be home around noon. On the way I’ve got to check on something in the village—a rumor I heard once. It might interest you.”
“What’s that?”
“Let me check first. Go to sleep. If anyone knocks, don’t answer.”
FISHER tried to sleep, but his body wouldn’t fully cooperate, so he dozed on and off for a few hours, then got up and wandered around the house. Elena had a good book collection she kept inside an old china cabinet in the living room. The titles ranged from Tolstoy and Balzac to Stephen Hawking and Danielle Steel. He also found a milk crate full of old records, mostly from the Big Band era. He put a Mancini tribute on the turntable and sat down with an English language version of War and Peace and read until Elena came home.
She was carrying a sack of groceries.
“Borshch?” Fisher asked.
“Of course. I promised you.”
After the groceries were put away, they sat down and shared a lunch of cold cuts, cheese, and wine. “So,” Fisher said, “this rumor?”
“Yes, I checked. I wasn’t sure I’d remembered it right, but the rumor is about four months ago a pair of soldiers went missing in the middle of the night. They were never found. Everyone, including the local commander, assumed they’d deserted. The were last seen heading toward the bunkers you were asking about. I’ve got the name of the man who saw them last: Alexi. He’s ninety-five years old, but still sharp. An old warhorse.”
“He’ll talk to us?”
Elena smiled. “Alexi loves to talk. He was a tank commander during the Great Patriotic War. He claims to have killed eighteen Panzers at Kursk before he got captured. He spent the rest of the war in a labor camp in Poland. We’ll go tonight, after borshch. I see you found my book collection.”
“I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to—”
Elena waved her hand. “No, no, I meant to show it to you. Here, I’ll clean up. You go back and read. Maybe you’ll have better luck than I did.”
“I thought War and Peace was required reading for all Russians.”
“Very funny. I’ve tried to read it four times. It bores me to tears. Besides, I’m Ukrainian.”
33
SHORTLY after nightfall, with his belly full of borshch so good he felt cheated for having lived so long without it, Fisher and Elena left her bungalow.
Throughout the afternoon, a low-pressure front had moved in, bringing with it dark clouds and icy drizzle. The Kadett’s headlights cut twin swaths through the dark, illuminating ruts and potholes rimmed with ice. The heater, which worked only on the highest setting, made a sound that Elena described as a “carrot being shoved into a fan blade.”
The change in weather was a mixed blessing for Fisher. The clouds and lack of starlight would provide better cover, but the sleet and dropping temperatures would leave the fields and marshes coated in ice, which would crackle with every footfall.
He wasn’t sure what to make of the story of the missing soldiers. Desertion was common in the Ukrainian Army—especially, he imagined, among troops pulling Chernobyl duty. Many of the conscripts were young and poorly educated, and all they knew about Chernobyl was that it had happened long before their births or when they were too young to remember, and that it was a place of ghosts and poison and sickness. Still, the rumor was also a place to start.
They drove for twenty minutes, following the road south along the Pripyat River. Three miles from the power plant, she turned off the main road and crossed a rickety bridge to the east side of the river. Set back in a stand of birch trees was a cabin. In the headlights Fisher could see the structure’s walls were made of rough birch planks sealed with what looked like a mixture of mud and straw. The roof was piled high with sod.
The Kadett coasted to a stop and Elena doused the headlights.
“He lives here year-round?” Fisher asked.
She nodded. “For the last eighteen years. It’s actually very warm in the winter; warmer than my place, even. I visit him once a week, bring him some borshch.”
“Lucky man.”
“What, you thought you were the only man I made borshch for? Men.”
Fisher started to open the door, but Elena stopped him. “Let Alexi come out and see that it’s me first. He’s ornery with strangers and handy with a shotgun.”
“And a tank,” Fisher said.
“And that.”
The cabin’s door opened and a lantern appeared on the porch. In its glow Fisher could see a gaunt face and bushy salt-and-pepper beard. Elena rolled down her window and called something in Ukrainian. Alexi grumbled something back and waved for them to come in.
“He promised not to shoot you,” Elena said. “I told him you brought borshch.”
FISHER hadn’t brought borsch, but Elena had, and they sat in silence while Alexi ate all of it, then licked the bowl clean. The interior of the cabin wasn’t what Fisher expected. Except for the mud-filled gaps between the planks, the walls were painted a butter yellow. Off the kitchen there were two bedrooms and a living room with a large open-hearth fireplace.
As were most WWII Soviet tankers, Alexi was short and sinewy—the kind of muscle that comes from hard labor. His hands were so calloused they looked like leather.
Alexi set the bowl aside and grabbed a bottle of vodka from the shelf and poured three shots. They all drank. Alexi and Elena talked for a few minutes before she turned to Fisher.
“He’ll talk to you. I told him you weren’t with the government—he doesn’t like the government—and that you’re writing a book about Chernobyl since the accident.”
“Have him tell us the story of that night—the night the soldiers disappeared.”
Elena translated Fisher’s words, then listened as Alexi began talking. She translated.
“He says it was past midnight and he was fishing in the cooling pond beside the plant. He saw an Army truck appear on the road on the other side of the pond and then circle around to the ‘mounds’—the bunker area—but before it got there, the headlights went out and the engine went quiet. A few minutes later another truck appeared, this one from the opposite direction, and parked facing the Army truck.
“The men who got out of the second truck weren’t in uniform, so he got curious. He snuck through the reeds until he could see better. There were the two soldiers from the Army truck and four civilian men from the second truck. They talked for a few minutes; then the four civilians disappeared behind the truck and then reappeared wearing ‘cosmonaut gear.’”
“A biohazard suit,” Fisher said.
“Yes, I think so.”
Alexi kept talking.
“Two of the men were each carrying a big shiny footlocker. They all walked behind one of the mounds. The soldiers stayed behind, leaning against their truck, smoking.
“About twenty minutes passed, and then the four men reappeared from behind the mound carrying the boxes, two of them to each box. They loaded the boxes into the back of the second truck, then stripped off their suits and joined the soldiers at their truck.
“They talked for a few minutes, and then one of the civilians opened the door to the truck, took out a suitcase, and walked back. He handed the briefcase to one of the soldiers. And that’s when . . . That’s when it happened.”
“What?” Fisher asked.
She held up her hand to silence him, then leaned closer to Alexi and put her hand on his forearm. They spoke for a while, then she leaned back and frowned. She turned to Fisher.
“He says after the civilian handed over the briefcase, his three partners drew pistols and started shooting. The first soldier went down, but the second was faster. As he fell, he got off two rounds from his rifle, killing one of the civilians. Then the leader—the one with the briefcase—walked over and shot each soldier a final time time in the head, then reloaded and emptied his pistol into the dead civilian’s face. The three of them dragged the bodies behind the mounds, then climbed into the truck and drove away.
“He says he buried the two soldiers and the civilian in the woods beyond the bunkers.”
“Did you know about this?” Fisher asked.
“All I knew was the rumor: that Alexi had seen the men the night they disappeared.”
“Did he tell anyone about this?”
Elena asked him, then said, “He thinks he did, but he’s not sure. He may be confused.”
“Tell me.”
“He says he told the area commander.”
34
IT took only fifteen minutes to reach the site Alexi had described. Before they got there, Fisher told her to pull over. He reached up and switched off the dome light, then opened the door. “I’ll meet you on the main road in two hours,” he said.
“Let me go with you. I can help you.”
“You can help me by going home and waiting. I just need to check a few things; I’ll move faster alone. Pop the trunk.”
She did so. Fisher walked back and retrieved the bag of gear Elena had put together for him—a pair of hooded biohazard coveralls, a respirator, goggles, boots, and a double set of gloves.
“You remember how to put it all on?” she asked.
“Yes.”
“And the duct tape? On the wrists and ankles and neck? Make sure you get a good seal.”
“I will.”
Fisher closed the door and Elena drove away. He waited until the Kadett’s taillights disappeared around the bend, then shouldered his duffel and walked into the woods.
FISHER didn’t think Alexi was confused. He believed every word of the old tanker’s story. Someone had bought their way into the Exclusion Zone and then bought access to one the bunkers, and you don’t buy that kind of access from a pair of privates in the Ukrainian Army, but from staff officers—like an area commander. Whether the man knew his soldiers were going to be murdered, Fisher didn’t know, but according to Elena the commander in question, a colonel, had retired two months earlier and moved to the resort city of Yalta, on the Black Sea.
Alexi claimed that upon hearing the story of the shooting, the colonel thanked him, promised there would be a full investigation, and then swore him to secrecy. Alexi didn’t quite believe him, so he told the colonel the soldiers and the other man had been taken away in the civilians’ truck.
“The civilian he didn’t care much about,” Elena had translated, “but he didn’t think the colonel would do right by the dead soldiers. They were comrades; they deserved a soldier’s burial.”
Fisher could only speculate as to why the colonel left Alexi alive, but he suspected Alexi’s renown in Chernobyl had something to do with it. If two young privates go missing, it’s desertion. If Alexi goes missing, it’s a mystery that locals want solved.
FOLLOWING his memory of the map Elena had drawn him, Fisher weaved his way through the darkened woods until he came to a stream, which he followed east until it widened into an inlet choked with reeds and cattails. He was now on the eastern side of the plant’s cooling pond.
He pulled out his Geiger counter and passed it over the dirt and nearby foliage. The rapid tick-tick-tick in his earpiece made his skin crawl, but the numbers were within acceptable range. According to Grimsdottir, his exposure here would amount to three chest X-rays.
Over the tops of the cattails he could see the outline of the power plant. He was a quarter mile from the site of the worst nuclear disaster in history.
The morning after the explosion, rescue workers finally realized they were fighting a losing battle against the fires in the crater, which were being fed by not only by the molten slag of the remaining fuel rods but also by the highly flammable graphite that had sloughed off the casings of the rods. Helicopters were called in to dump neutron absorbants into the pit.
Over the next six days nearly two thousand sorties were flown through the radioactive plume gushing from the reactor. Five thousand tons—some ten million pounds—of lead, sand, clay, dolomite, sodium phosphate, and polymer liquids were dropped into the crater until finally, a week after the initial explosion, the fires died out. None of the pilots who flew over the pit survived the exposure.
Across the cooling pond, Fisher could see the bunker mounds. They were arranged in three-by-three squares, each square separated from its neighbor by a hundred yards. The mounds, which were nothing more than bus-sized shipping containers, had been covered by layers of earth and then topped off with a conrete lid. As with everything at Chernobyl, nature had reclaimed the bunkers, turning them into shrub-covered hillocks. If he hadn’t known what they were, Fisher might have mistaken the mounds for natural terrain features.
He made his way through the reeds until he reached the opposite shore. He was about to cross the road when he heard the growl of an engine. He crouched down.
A pair of headlights appeared on the road. The vehicle, moving slowly, paused at the first set of bunkers. A searchlight came on and panned over the mounds, then went out. The vehicle pulled ahead and repeated the process at the next grouping. As it drew closer, Fisher could see the vehicle was a GAZ-67, a WWII-era Soviet jeep. Two soldiers were sitting in the front seat.
The jeep drew even with Fisher’s hiding place, paused, scanned the mounds, then moved on. After a long ten mintes, the GAZ rounded the bend and disappeared from view. Every few seconds the searchlight would pop on, skim over over the next set of bunkers, then shut off.
Fisher dashed across the road, down the embankment, and through the tall grass to the clearing surrounding the bunkers. He pulled out his Geiger counter. The numbers showed a slight rise, but they were still within limits.
Alexi claimed the bunker the civilians had been interested in was Number 3, the farthest back from the road. He ran between the first two mounds, then veered right and stopped at the base of Number 3. He scanned again with the Geiger scan: still okay.
He followed the edge of the mound to the back, then flipped his goggles into place and switched to infrared. The image was stunning. The ground beneath his feet was a dark blue that slowly faded to a neon blue where the slope started. From there the change was abrupt, a line of orangish-yellow that began at the base of the mound and went to the top.
After twenty-plus years, the radioactive debris was still pushing heat through several feet of soil and a layer of concrete. Again Fisher felt the tingle of apprehension. Don’t think, Sam, he commanded himself. Do what you came to do and then get out.
He opened his rucksack and rummaged around until he found the collapsible entrenching tool, which he quickly assembled. He walked the length of the mound, pausing every foot or so to jam the shovel into the slope. After ten feet, the tip of the blade plunged through into open air. He twisted the shovel, pulling out clumps of soil until he’d cleared a small hole. He clicked on his flashlight and shined it inside.
There was tunnel in the sod. At the end of it Fisher could see a patch of rusted steel.
35
HE laid the shovel aside and scanned the tunnel with the Geiger. The numbers had spiked up significantly. He grabbed his duffel and backed away, then chose an open spot in the earth and dug a hole two feet wide and two feet deep.
Next he donned the biohazard gear, starting with the coveralls and ending with the respirator and goggles. He took his time, making sure the fit was right and that all the zippers and flaps were closed, then sealed all the seams with the duct tape as Elena had instructed. Despite the protective gear, she had been adamant about his time inside the container: “No more than four minutes. Don’t touch anything you don’t have to touch. Don’t bump or brush up against anything. Walk slowly—very slowly, like you’re moving through water.”
Fisher clicked on his headlamp and returned to the mound. He began widening the tunnel. The task was easy. Whoever had been here before him had done all the hard work. The mouth of the tunnel had simply been overlaid with a lattice of birch branches, then recovered with chunks of sod carefully cut from the face of the mound.
After five minutes work, the full tunnel was exposed. Four feet
tall and two feet wide, it led directly to the container’s rusted door, which was secured by a crossbar. A soil-encrusted padlock, its shackle cut in two, lay at the foot of the door.
He paused to catch his breath. The coveralls, gloves, and boots were all chemically treated to retard radioisotope absorption, but they also trapped body heat. He could feel sweat running down the back of his neck and his sides. Inside the respirator mask, his breath hissed. His goggles were perpetually fogged but, nervous about touching anything with his potentially tainted gloves, he left them alone.
This was just a glimpse into what rescuers had endured after the explosion, Fisher realized. Short of manpower and time, hundreds of soldiers and civilians spent days inside protective suits working at the lip of the crater with shovels and buckets and in some cases their hands to push radioactive debris back into the pit.
He set aside the shovel, then ducked down. Following the beam of his headlamp, he stepped into the tunnel. Pebbles and dirt rained down on him. Roots hung from the overhead like skeletal fingers. He reached the container door and stopped. Deep breath.
He gripped the crossbar and lifted. Half expecting to hear the shrief of rusted metal, he was surprised how soundlessly the latch moved. Curious, he peered at the mechanism; it glistened with oil. He felt his heart rate increase. This is where it had all started. Months ago, four men had crept down this same tunnel, oiled this same latch, then gone inside, stolen the radioactive debris that had ended up aboard the Trego, and had poisoned an entire city.
He swung the door open. Its passage dislodged a small avalanche of dirt. He waited, frozen in place, until it passed, then opened the door the rest of the way and shined his flashlight inside. He was immediately confronted by what looked like a chest-high wall of gray-black ash and scrap metal—which in fact it was, the only difference being this was so radioactive that even now, after two decades, direct exposure would kill you within minutes.