“Essential equipment up here, let me tell you,” Byrnes said, patting the hovercraft’s shiny fiberglass hull.
“Essential, huh?” Zubov said. He was skeptical, but looked at the machine with envy.
“Oh sure. We need some way to get across the ice when it begins to break up.
Something practical in addition to the helos, Zodiacs, the Snocats, snowmobiles, snowshoes, and our own two feet.” Byrnes flashed Zubov a grin.
“Ah, what the hell. There was room for it in the budget and it is sooo cool to drive.”
As two overworked boatswains with a host of professional complaints in common, Zubov and Byrnes took a natural liking to each other. Whatever was broken or lost, whatever the erratically ingenious mind of a scientist could imagine or request, it was the job of the boatswain to provide. However, where Zubov liked to take an active hand in the work he assisted, it was enough for Byrnes to have a steady job and reliable income from the Nolan Group, something he had never had as a commercial fisherman.
Finished for the moment, Zubov followed Byrnes forward for a cup of coffee.
“I can’t believe you turned down a WOCE cruise to Palau just to help Garner,” Byrnes said, shivering slightly as he pulled off his parka. His smaller and much leaner physique made it more difficult for him to shake off the cold.
“Palau? I’d give my left nut to go there.”
“I’d rather work with Brock than catch a tan,” Zubov said, though he would probably never admit it to Garner himself. For all his overly elegant sampling plans and uncompromising perfectionism, Garner was hardly the typical career academic. It was more than his background in the Navy or the unending struggle for funding that made him different.
Garner had common sense, a necessary but surprisingly rare commodity at sea. What Garner considered important to note in the broad scheme of things usually was. He had a natural leadership quality and Zubov was drawn to follow it.
Byrnes chuckled.
“You and him must have some kind of history for you to follow him to both poles in the same week.”
“I hadn’t thought of it like that, but I guess we do,” Zubov considered.
“Brock’s a good egg, as eggheads go. He needs me, and I know that his needs are legitimate, unlike a lot of uses of my time. And when Carol needs me, I know the shit has really hit the fan, so I come along for the ride. It’s like that Spanish proverb ‘it’s good to have friends, even in hell.”
“Is that what you think this is going to be? Hell?”
“Radiation is always hell,” Zubov said. “My father was a nuclear engineer. He was the first in our family to go to college and that was enough to alienate him from his friends and neighbors. Until then, we had been farmers, working the land. No one understood the allure of higher education, much less the need for it. My dad didn’t agree. He had a single-minded purpose to improve himself, to improve the welfare of his family.”
“But you didn’t follow in his footsteps?” Byrnes asked.
“I tried,” Zubov said. “As a kid I read books on Bikini Atoll and the Manhattan Project and Hiroshima. I actually had pictures of mushroom clouds tacked up in my room. At night my father would tell me about this detonation or that one, how many kilotons it was, where the blast was or what the test hoped to prove. I think that the only time I could get him to talk to me really talk to me was when I was asking him about bombs. Later on I took college courses and I read my father’s notes and his engineering books. I don’t think I had any real interest in the science of it all, but I wanted to understand what my father did for a living. I wanted to see what could make him go so far against the grain, to put up with being thought of as such an oddball.” He shrugged.
“Once I figured out my dad, there was no need to go to school.”
“Me too,” Byrnes said. “But my options were simpler. My old man was a longshoreman in Baltimore. He told me I could work the ships or I could move out of his house. Eventually I got my ABH degree Anywhere But Here.”
“My dad said if I ever moved out, I might as well move as far away as I could and be the best I could be at whatever I chose to do,” Zubov said. “The States seemed pretty far to an eighteen-year-old.”
“Immigrant?”
“Actually, I greased the wheels by calling myself an orphan and a refugee and ended up living with friends of the family. The first job I got was on a trawler in the North Atlantic. When I was finally naturalized, the first thing I did was apply to NOAA. I guess you could say the sea bit me and I bit back.
“If I learned anything about my father’s work, it was a respect for nuclear elements,” Zubov continued. “That’s why I said ‘hell.” He used to call radiation the Middle East of environmental problems all the discussion, all the government programs, all the best intentions in the world won’t fix the problem if the hatred is allowed to boil over. It kills, and it keeps killing for longer than any of us can ever know because that is all it has ever known.”
Byrnes blinked, not certain how seriously to take the Ukrainian’s strangely passionate anecdote.
“You sound a little bitter,” he said.
“Have you ever heard of Pripyat?” Zubov suddenly asked.
“What?” Byrnes asked. Zubov repeated the word.
“No. What is it?”
“Pripyat is my hometown,” Zubov said. “Population about fifty thousand, north of Kiev on the Pripyat River. Factory workers, mostly, and farmers. They picked rocks from the fields to grow potatoes, they raised livestock to put food on the dinner table.
“Work the soil and the soil will work for you,” they said.”
“There’s something to be said for the simple life, all right,” Byrnes agreed.
“Cling to your roots and you’ll never get blown around by the wind.”
“Funny you should say it like that,” Zubov said. “As a boy, I remember the wind in Pripyat always coming from the north. Always. It was cold because it came down from Finland and the Barents Sea, bringing the feel of winter with it no matter what the month.” He paused, struggling slightly at the prospect of continuing.
“But in the spring of 1986, the wind changed direction. My relatives wrote me letters saying it was suddenly coming from the south. The crops were confused, they said. The cows were confused. The farmers were confused because they didn’t know what this new wind would bring these were very superstitious people. In 1986, no one knew what the change in wind would bring, but few of them thought it would be good. They complained, but they didn’t know why at the time.”
“So what was it?” asked Byrnes.
“You don’t know?” Zubov asked, as if it should be common knowledge.
Resolution smoldered in his eyes. Despite Byrnes’s obvious interest, Zubov struggled for a moment before he could continue.
“To the south of Pripyat, about ten miles and upwind only in 1986, are the four reactors of the Chernobyl nuclear power plant. On the morning of April twenty-sixth, some arrogant bastard decided to see if he could run Reactor Number Four without any cooling water. Minutes later, the reactor turned into a nuclear volcano and my parents, my brothers, and six hundred thousand others got a close-up look at hell.”
5
With a violent crack, the floe split almost in half, a huge chasm spreading quickly across its equator like horizontal lightning. The sudden fracture caught a team of technicians from the Phoenix off guard; they had to scramble back from the sudden precipice and scoop their field gear away from the edge. Even so, their Snocat and two boxes of field samples were caught above the rift and toppled into the ocean below. The Snocat plunged immediately into the depths, while the sample cases reeled on the churning surface for a moment before rolling over and following the heavy machine to the bottom.