They shifted into the back of the vehicle, which waited ahead of the cargo truck to lead it along a secondary route to the Latvia/ Belarus border. Once they started moving at a snail's pace, the luxurious interior of the car started filling with cool air to alleviate the midday heat, accompanied by soft classical music.
“I hope you don't mind Mozart,” Kemper said purely out of propriety.
“Not at all,” Sam accepted the formality. “Although I am more of an ABBA man myself.”
Once again Kemper was highly amused at Sam's entertaining indifference. “Really? You play!”
“I do not,” Sam insisted. “There is something irresistible to Swedish retro pop with one’s impending death on the menu, you know.”
“If you say so,” Kemper shrugged. He got the hint, but he was not in a hurry to entertain Sam Cleave’s curiosity on the subject at hand. He knew full well that the journalist was shocked by the inadvertent reaction his body exhibited when he attacked. Another fact he kept from Sam was the information pertinent to Kalihasa and the fate that awaited him.
While traveling through the remainder of Latvia, the two men hardly spoke. Kemper had his laptop computer open, mapping strategic locations for unknown purposes Sam could not spy from his seat. But he knew it had to be nefarious — and it had to involve his part in the insidious agenda of the sinister commander. For his own part, Sam refrained from prying about the pressing matters on his mind, electing to spend the time relaxing. After all, he was almost certain he would not get the chance to do it again anytime soon.
After crossing the border into Belarus, things changed. Kemper offered Sam a drink for the first time since they had left Riga, having tested the endurance of body and will of the investigative journalist who was so highly regarded in the United Kingdom. Sam accepted readily, receiving a sealed can of Coca-Cola. Kemper took one as well, putting Sam at ease about being duped into drinking a laced beverage.
“Prost!” Sam said before emptying a quarter of the can in one big gulp, relishing the bubbly burn of the drink. Of course, Kemper drank his steadily, retaining his refined composure at all times. “Klaus,” Sam unexpectedly addressed his captor. Now that his thirst was quenched, he had summoned his courage. “The numbers trick if you please.”
Kemper knew he owed Sam an explanation. After all, the Scottish journalist was not going to survive past the next day anyway, and he was rather tolerable. A pity that he was going to meet his end by suicide.
Chapter 28
On their way to Pripyat, Nina drove several hours after she had filled the Volvo's tank in Wloclawek. With Detlef’s credit card she had purchased Purdue a first aid kit to treat the flesh wound on his arm. Searching the unfamiliar town for a pharmacy had been a detour, but a necessary one.
Even though Sam's captors had directed her and Purdue to the Sarcophagus in Chernobyl — the tomb of the ill-fated Reactor 4 — she recalled the radio message from Milla. It mentioned Pripyat 1955, a term that simply would not relent since she jotted it down. Somehow it stood out among the other phrases, almost as if it glowed with promise. It had to be resolved and so Nina had spent the last few hours trying to discover the meaning of it.
She did not know of anything of significance related to 1955 about the ghost town that was in the Exclusion Zone that had been evacuated after the reactor disaster. In fact, she doubted that Pripyat had ever been involved in anything important before its infamous evacuation in 1986. The words kept the historian's mind busy until she looked at the watch to determine how long she had been driving for and realized that 1955 could refer to time, not a date.
At first, she thought it might be a reach, but it was all she had. For her to make it to Pripyat by 8 pm there would hardly be enough time for a good sleep, a very dangerous prospect given the fatigue she was already experiencing.
It was dreadful and lonely on the dark road through Belarus while Purdue was snoring through his Antidol-induced sleep in the passenger seat next to her. What kept her going was her hope that she could still save Sam if she did not falter now. The small digital clock on the dashboard of Kiril’s old car announced the time in eerie green.
02:14
Her body ached, and she was exhausted, but she popped a fag in her mouth, lit it, and took a few deep breaths to fill her lungs with slow death. It was one of her most favorite sensations. Rolling down the window was a good idea. The furious whip of the cold night air revitalized her somewhat, although she wished she had a flask of strong caffeine to keep her wired.
From the surrounding land hidden beyond darkness on both sides of the lonely road, she could smell the soil. On the pale concrete meandering towards the border between Poland and the Ukraine, the car hummed a melancholic dirge with its worn rubber tires.
“God, this is like Purgatory,” she complained as she flicked her spent butt out into the beckoning oblivion outside. “I hope your radio works, Kiril.”
With a click, the knob turned at the command of Nina's twisting grip and a frail light proclaimed that there was life in the radio. “Hell yeah!” she smiled, keeping her weary eyes on the road as her hand turned the other dial for a suitable station to listen to. There was an FM station that came through on the car's only speaker, one fitted in her car door. But Nina was not picky tonight. She direly needed company, any company, to soothe her rapidly growing moroseness.
With Purdue out cold most of the time, she had to make the decisions. They would head for the Chelm, a city 25km shy of the Ukraine border and get some sleep at a lodge. As long as they reached the border by 2 pm, Nina was confident they would be in Pripyat by the designated time. Her only concern was how to get into the ghost town with guarded check points everywhere in the Exclusion Zone surrounding Chernobyl, but little did she know that Milla had friends even in the harshest camps of the forgotten.
After a few hours’ sleep at a quaint family-owned motel in Chelm, a fresh Nina and a wide awake Purdue had taken on the road across the border from Poland, Ukraine-bound. It was just past 1 pm when they reached Kovel, an approximate 5-hour drive away from their destination.
“Look, I am aware that I was under the weather for just about the entire trip, but are you sure we should not just proceed to this Sarcophagus rather than to chase our tails in Pripyat?” Purdue asked Nina.
“I understand your concern, but I have a thick hunch that that message was important. Don’t ask me to explain it or make sense of it,” she replied, “but we have to see why Milla mentioned it.”
Purdue looked stunned. “You do realize that Milla’s broadcasts come straight from the Order, right?” He could not believe that Nina would choose to play right into the hands of the enemy. As much as he trusted her, he could not fathom her logic on this endeavor.
She looked at him sharply. “I told you that I cannot explain it. Just…” she hesitated, doubting her own hunch, “…trust me. If we run into trouble, I will be the first to admit I fucked up, but something about the timing of that broadcast feels different.”
“Women’s intuition, right?” he scoffed. “May as well have let Detlef shoot me in the head back in Gdynia.”
“Jesus, Purdue, can you be a bit more supportive?” she glowered. “Do not forget how we got into this in the first place. Sam and I had to, once again, come to your aid when you got into a scrap with these bastards for the umpteenth time!”
“I had nothing to do with this, my darling!” he sneered at her. “I was ambushed by that bitch and her hackers while I was minding my own business, trying to vacation in Copenhagen, for God’s sake!”