FOLLOWINGhis 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-tickin 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
HElaid 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.
Up until now, there’d been a small part of Fisher’s mind that found this too surreal to believe. But here, within arm’s reach, was the piece of proof that made it real.
A section of the debris wall was missing, scooped out, he assumed, by the two discarded grain shovels at his feet.
SLOWLY,carefully, he backed out of the container and into the tunnel. From the leg pocket of his coveralls he pulled a cylindrical sample tube roughly the size of a coffee mug. This was the last piece of gear Elena had given him. Made of lightweight titanium, the double-walled tube was lead-lined and topped with a finely threaded lid.