“That wasn’t lightning that almost hit us,” he said.” It’s like someone shot at us.”
“With what?”
Noonan had the raft mostly inflated and was still pumping when the fog reached the tail of the plane. Earhart couldn’t see more than a couple of feet into it. The plane was beginning to settle deeper, water washing close to the doorway.
“Let’s go,” she said. “We can finish pumping once we’re away.” Then she remembered the photos and her journal. “Wait a second.”
She dashed back into the plane, ran to the cockpit, and grabbed the box containing the photos she had taken for the Navy and her journal. As she came back, she could barely see Noonan standing in the raft, holding on to the wing. She was just about to step through the door and into the raft when a long tentacle shot out the water and wrapped around Noonan, who gave a surprised yell. She froze in place.
“Help me!” He screamed as he was lifted into the air.
Another tentacle surfaced, searching along the bottom of the wing by feel. Then a half dozen more, like a forest of red, exploded out of the water. Earhart remained still, fear and self-preservation locking her in place inside the aircraft. She could see that there were what appeared to be mouths on the ends of the tentacles, about six inches wide, snapping open, revealing rows of razor-sharp teeth.
As she watched helplessly, one of those mouths struck Noonan in the chest and bore into him, blood spurting out around it. He screamed, his face rigid with pain, his back arching, trying to get away, but being held in place by the first tentacle wrapped around his body. Earhart staggered back in shock as the tip of the second tentacle came out of Noonan’s back, teeth covered in his blood, still snapping. Noonan slumped, lifeless.
One of the other tentacles turned toward her, and she finally moved, slamming the door shut. She heard tentacles slithering over the plane’s metal skin. Then she noted her feet were wet. There was about a foot of water inside, and the level was getting higher as the plane slowly sank.
She ran forward to the cockpit and looked out. The sea was churning with red arms. Looking back, there was no sign of Noonan or the raft, and the plane was completely inside the fog.
Suddenly, a wide flash of gold came out of the fog slicing neatly through the tentacles in its path. In a second they vanished beneath the surface. A light illuminated the fog, pushing it away — but it was coming from below the plane. Earhart gasped as a curved black wall came out of the water, surrounding the plane in all directions. For several moments, Earhart couldn’t comprehend what she was seeing; then she realized, as more of the wall came out of the water and it curved inward, that her plane was in the middle of an opening on the top of what must be a great sphere.
The opening began to iris shut, and something solid touched the plane below, causing Earhart to stagger. When the opening was completely closed, she was in total darkness.
Then a blue glow suffused the plane, and she passed out.
CHAPTER THREE
Power. That was what had drawn Andrej Shashenka to Chernobyl. The ability to run a nuclear reactor and control power in its basest form, at the atomic level. Reactor Four was Andrej’s domain, and he was currently in the process of overseeing its shutdown for periodic maintenance. His was one of four reactors that made up the Chernobyl complex, each capable of producing one thousand milliwatts of power. Currently, power production from Four was down to two hundred milliwatts, well within the range of the positive void coefficient required for safe operation.
It was 0100 in the morning, the fifty thousand people living in the town of the same name next to the reactor asleep in their beds, including Andrej’s wife and three children. He had vacation beginning tomorrow, and he was taking his family to meet his twin brothers, Pytor and Felix, who served in the army. It would be the first time the three of them would be getting together since their mother’s funeral. He was anxious to finish the shutdown so he could turn the reactor over to the maintenance people.
Shutdown was a difficult balancing act of reducing power but at the same time drawing enough power from the reactor to keep the cooling system running to prevent the core from overheating. While the reactor was normally self-sufficient, providing the power to run its own cooling system, Andrej was in the process of shifting to generator power.
At exactly 0123, right after the power switch was completed, Andrej noticed the slightest dip in power readings. He scanned the rest of his vast control panel, making sure all was running properly, when Leona Kiril, his senior assistant, gave a startled yell.
“What’s the matter?” Andrej went over to her position.
In her shock, all she could do was point at the video monitor that displayed the view of the reactor core. A black triangle, fifteen feet on each side and ten feet high, was floating directly over the core rods.
“What the hell is that?” Andrej had never seen the like.
Gold beams came out of each corner of the triangle, flashing down to the rods. Alarms began going as the power dropped abruptly. At the same time, the lights in the control room went out, and all instruments went dead.
“Emergency backup!” Andrej yelled. His crew was trained to operate in the dark, and he could hear switches being thrown and people moving, but nothing happened.
“All power is down,” someone yelled.
If primary and emergency generators were down, that left only one choice. Andrej threw the switch taking the reactor off-line from the generators and back to reactor power. “Power up as quickly as possible,” he ordered.
The lights came back on along with instruments as the machines drew power from the reactor, but what the gauges told Andrej froze his heart. Whatever the black triangle was, it was drawing power from the core faster than the core could produce it. Andrej knew they had scant seconds before things became critical in an inverse way. The reactor wouldn’t be able to provide enough energy to the cooling systems, which meant there would be a point at which the entire system would reverse very quickly. The core, getting hotter, would produce more and more power until it reached critical mass and exploded.
“Emergency shutdown!” Andrej screamed, knowing it was already too late. He slammed his fist down on the emergency reactor trip button.
“Power spike!” someone yelled.
Inside the reactor, power was doubling every second, faster and faster, until it was doubling every millisecond. Within four seconds, it reached critical.
The last thing Andrej saw was the black triangle on the video monitor. The gold beams still sucking from the core, and when the water in the core exploded into steam it destroyed the fuel elements, sending super hot, radioactive gas outward, blasting off the roof of the containment building and blowing through the walls into the control room, killing everyone instantly.
The white-hot graphite in the reactor caught fire, sending a radioactive cloud billowing into the air over a mile high.
The fire burned for days, pouring forty times the radioactivity released by the atomic bombs detonated at Hiroshima and Nagasaki into the atmosphere. Over five thousand tons of lead and stone were dropped by helicopters to both put out the fire and contain the radiation. In the process, many of the crews received fatal doses.
Besides the black triangle, there was another strange aspect to Reactor Four: the lead and stone seemed to hit an invisible, hemispheric wall covering the core and piled up around it. The same with the concrete that was poured next. Still, they dropped the concrete, covering the clear shield completely.
All of Europe was affected by the fallout, particularly in the north.