When Juli hung up the phone, Marina came to her, and they hugged.
Meanwhile, several residents with apartments facing the street held curtains apart and watched as a tanker truck came from the center of town, rinsing the street. The water draining into the sewers was dark with a metallic luster.
11
Although it was Saturday and Nikolai knew he and Pavel were not due back in their stuffy PK room at the Pripyat post office until Monday, here was Pavel at his door. Pavel wore jeans, his hair was messed up, he needed a shave, and he kept glancing up and down the hallway.
“What do you want?” asked Nikolai.
“Let me in. I don’t want to speak out here.”
Once the door was closed, Nikolai pulled his robe more tightly about his waist and went to the bedroom adjoining the small living area. “I have a business matter to discuss with an associate,” he said into the bedroom before closing the door.
Nikolai and Pavel sat at the small table in the kitchenette.
Nikolai nodded to the bedroom. “Without company, it would be a lonely weekend.”
“I keep forgetting you are not blessed with a wife.”
“Sarcasm?” asked Nikolai.
“Perhaps,” said Pavel. “But more importantly, Captain Putna called early this morning. We’re getting a new assignment.”
“Not at the post office?”
“There’s been an explosion at the Chernobyl plant, and Captain Putna has put the PK on special duty.”
“What kind of duty? What happened at the plant? Is it sabotage?”
Pavel glanced to the bedroom door, which remained closed. He leaned forward over the table and spoke softly. “I’m surprised you didn’t hear it. One of the reactors exploded. Early this morning there was a crimson glow in the sky. Now there’s smoke spreading north. Captain Putna says it’s not an ordinary fire. Radiation may have been released, but we’re not supposed to talk about it. Some technicians working at the plant have been seen fleeing the area.
On the way here, I saw people out on their balconies. Even though they’ve been told to remain indoors, they get a great view from the upper floors.”
“Who told them to remain indoors?” asked Nikolai. “No one told me.”
“You and your friend have remained indoors, haven’t you?”
“What’s an accident at the plant got to do with us? What about those ministries? Medium Machine Building or Energy and Elec-trification. Aren’t they in charge?”
Pavel took a notebook from his inside jacket pocket, opened it to a page, and put it on the table. He spoke softly, glancing occasionally to the closed bedroom door. “Captain Putna says he’s not sure if it involves sabotage, but we need to investigate the possibility.”
“Is it the Gypsy Moth theory we heard about?” asked Nikolai.
“What Gypsy Moth theory?”
“Don’t you remember? We were watching for mention of the code name in correspondence. We put it in our report to Captain Putna.”
“Pure speculation,” said Pavel. He pointed to the open page of his notebook. “Here are the facts. We’ve been given a list of Chernobyl employees and their addresses. Some have been ordered to the plant to assist emergency personnel but have refused to go.
Some were under observation before this happened.”
Nikolai took Pavel’s notebook, studied the list. “A familiar name or two. Especially Juli Popovics and Mihaly Horvath, the lovebirds.
I thought Juli Popovics was pregnant and went to visit her aunt in Visenka.”
“If you remember our last report, she’s to go there next month,” said Pavel.
“Does Captain Putna think a pregnant woman is involved in sabotage?”
“I don’t know what Captain Putna thinks,” said Pavel. “I know only of this list of people we’ve been ordered to report on. Captain Putna said Major Komarov is angrier than shit and wants to know the cause of the explosion. Komarov is heading up the investigation himself.”
“This radiation,” said Nikolai, “do you think it’s dangerous?”
“They’re hosing down streets on the south side of town.” Pavel stood and pulled the chain on the overhead light, but the light did not come on. “The electricity is out at my place, too.”
“I hadn’t noticed. We didn’t need lights.” Nikolai smiled, then became serious. “What about your wife?”
Pavel walked to the window, looked up at the mix of smoke and clouds in the overcast sky. “I put her on the early bus to Kiev.”
“Were there others on the bus?” asked Nikolai.
“The bus was full,” said Pavel.
From inside a helicopter flying at a thousand meters, the fire looked like a kerosene smudge pot used to mark road construction. But as the helicopter flew closer, vibrating violently because of the heavy load of sand swinging below, the fire grew in size.
The helicopter pilot steered south, staying out of the cloud of bluish smoke. He dropped to five hundred meters and saw the spray from several fire hoses below. At one hundred meters, individual firemen were visible. Masks with cylindrical snouts covered the firemen’s faces. In their masks and coats and hats, the firemen looked like multicolored beetles.
“It’s a graphite fire!” shouted the pilot.
“Graphite’s supposed to stop the neutrons!” screamed the co-pilot. “Drop the load and go!”
Inside the low-level counting laboratory, two technicians in off-white caps who had just climbed the stairs from the basement watched the helicopter drop its load of sand and disappear beyond the trees to the west. The man and woman stayed inside the double doors of the building. On the road out front, an ambulance headed for the fire.
From where they stood, the man and woman could not see the fire, but they saw the thick smoke rising to the north.
“The graphite is burning,” said the woman. “What should we do?”
“The explosion must have cracked the concrete shell,” said the man. “We have no choice but to stay inside.”
“We’ve been here for hours with no word,” said the woman, heading for a rack on the wall near the door. She took several dosimeters from the rack and began looking into them, aiming one after another at the dull light coming through the glass doors. “They’re all at two hundred already. I thought the building was sealed.”
The man behind her walked slowly backward away from the doors.
“If we’ve already picked up two hundred millirems up here…”
The woman turned. “Where are you going?”
“Back to the basement. If there’s still water, I’m going to shower.
Then I’m staying down there until this is over. Are you coming?”
The woman dropped the dosimeters to the tile floor and followed the man, removing her off-white cap and throwing it aside as she ran.
Outside the building, farther along the road to Pripyat, a crowd had gathered at the crossroads beyond the main gate. Several vehicles were parked about, some militia and fire vehicles and a few private cars. The crowd consisted mostly of uniformed firemen, militiamen, and plant guards. But there was also a group of civilians who had been stopped at the crossroads, several men and women and even a few children. Many stared at the column of smoke in the distance.
An argument began between civilians and militiamen. A few men among the civilians began pushing and shoving, causing some women to scream. One young woman, slender, wearing a jacket over a cotton dress, held a little girl in one arm while holding the hand of another girl some years older. When a fireman wearing a filter mask approached and swept the slender probe of a Geiger counter in front of the woman and the two little girls, the woman backed away, and the little girls stared wide-eyed.
An ambulance sped to the gate from the plant. Instead of driving through, it skidded to a stop, the rear doors flew open, and at least a dozen firemen with blackened coats piled out. All of the firemen wore filter masks.
The fireman with the Geiger counter waved the probe frantically over the returned firemen and shouted obscenities through his filter mask. A bus drove up, and militiamen, firemen, and guards herded the civilians onto the bus like cattle. One fireman asked the woman with the two little girls the name of the youngest.