Nina could not believe her ears. Purdue was beside himself, acting like a high-strung stranger she had never met before. Granted, he had been pulled into the Amber Room affair by the doing of agents beyond his control, but he had never exploded like this before. With an aversion for tense silences, Nina turned on the radio and kept the volume low to serve as a third, more cheerful presence in the car. She did not say anything after that, leaving Purdue to fume while she was trying to make sense of her own ludicrous decision.
They had just passed the small city of Sarny when the music on the radio began to fade and swell in turn. Purdue ignored the sudden change, staring out the window at the unremarkable scenery. Normally such interference irritated Nina, but she dared not switch off the radio and plummet into Purdue's silent treatment. As it persisted, it grew steadily louder until it got impossible to ignore. The familiar tune last heard on the Gdynia shortwave broadcast floated forth from the battered speaker by her side, identifying the emerging broadcast.
“Milla?” Nina muttered, half afraid and half excited.
Even Purdue's stone face became animated as he listened to the slowly waning melody in astonished apprehension. They exchanged suspicious glances as the static scratches violated the airwaves. Nina checked the frequency. “It is not in its usual frequency,” she declared.
“How do you mean?” he asked, sounding much more like his old self. “Is this not the place you usually tuned it to?” he asked, pointing to the needle sitting well away from where Detlef used to set it to tune into the numbers station. Nina shook her head, intriguing Purdue even more.
“Why would they be on a diff…?” she wanted to ask, but the explanation came to her as Purdue answered, “Because they are hiding.”
“Aye, that’s what I’m thinking. But why?” she wondered.
“Listen,” he rasped excitedly, perking up to hear.
The female voice sounded insistent, but even. “Widower.”
“That’s Detlef!” Nina told Purdue. “They are transmitting to Detlef.”
After a brief pause, the fuzzy voice continued, “Woodpecker, eight-thirty.” A loud click popped on the speaker, and only white noise and static was left in place of the concluded transmission. Dumbstruck, Nina and Purdue considered what had just happened by apparent happenstance while the radio waves hissed into the current broadcast of a local station.
“What the hell is Woodpecker? I assume eight-thirty is the time they wish us to be there,” Purdue speculated.
“Aye, the message to go to Pripyat was for seven fifty-five, so they have moved location and adjusted the time frame to reach it. It is not much later than before, so I take it Woodpecker is close to Pripyat,” Nina ventured to guess.
“God, I wish I had a phone! Do you have your phone?” he asked.
“I might — if it is still in my laptop bag you snuck it out of Kiril’s house,” she replied, glancing back to the zipped-up case on the backseat. Purdue reached back and rummaged through the front pocket of the bag, digging between her notebook, pens, and shades.
“Got it!” he smiled. “Now I hope it is charged.”
“It should be,” she said, peeking over to see. “That should do for the next two hours at least. Go ahead. Find our Woodpecker, old boy.”
“On it,” he replied, browsing the Internet for something with a nickname of the sort in the vicinity. They were rapidly approaching Pripyat as the late afternoon sun lit up the pale brown and gray of the flat landscape, making eerie black giants of sentinel pylons.
“It feels so foreboding,” Nina remarked as her eyes recorded the scenery. “Look, Purdue, this is the graveyard of Soviet science. You can almost feel the lost brilliance in the atmosphere.”
“That would be the radiation talking, Nina,” he jested, evoking a giggle from the historian who was happy to have the old Purdue back. “I got it.”
“Where do we go?” she asked.
“South of Pripyat, towards Chernobyl,” he directed casually. Nina gave him the raised eyebrow, showing her reluctance to visit such a devastating and hazardous patch of Ukrainian soil. But in the end, she knew they had to go. After all, they were already there — contaminated by the remnants of the radioactive material left there after 1986. Purdue checked the map on her phone. “Carry on straight from Pripyat. The so-called ‘Russian Woodpecker’ is located in the surrounding forest,” he reported, leaning forward in his seat to look upward. “Night is coming soon, love. It is going to be a cold one too.”
“What is the Russian Woodpecker? Will I be looking for a large bird plugging holes in the local roads or something?” she chuckled.
“It is actually a relic of the Cold War. The nickname comes from… you're going to appreciate this… a mysterious radio interference that plagued broadcasts all over Europe in the 80's,” he shared.
“More radio phantoms,” she remarked, shaking her head. “It makes me wonder if we are not being programmed daily by hidden frequencies fraught with ideologies and propaganda, you know? Without a clue that our opinions might be formed by subliminal messages…”
“There!” he exclaimed suddenly. “The secret military base where the Soviet military broadcasted from about 30 years ago. It was called Duga-3, a state-of-the-art radar signal they used to detect potential ballistic missile attacks.”
Vividly visible from Pripyat’s region stood a terrible vision, captivating and grotesque. Looming silently over the tree tops of the irradiated forests ablaze with the touch of the setting sun, the assembly of identical steel towers lined the deserted military base. “You might have a point, Nina. Look at the sheer size of it. Transmitters here could easily manipulate the airwaves to alter thought patterns,” he hypothesized in awe of the creepy wall of steel grids.
Nina looked at the digital clock. “It’s almost time.”
Chapter 29
Throughout the Red Forest predominantly pine trees populated the area, born from the very soil that covered the graves of the former forest. Contaminated by the Chernobyl disaster, the previous vegetation had been bulldozed and buried. The ginger red pine skeletons beneath the thick layer of earth had given birth to a new generation planted by authorities. The Volvo's only headlight, the high beam on the right, haunted the grave rustling tree trunks of the Red Forest as Nina drove toward the dilapidated steel gates at the entrance of the forlorn compound. Painted green and mounted with Soviet stars, the two gates fell askew, barely held up by the collapsing wooden perimeter fence.
“Good God, this is depressing!” Nina remarked, leaning on the steering wheel to get a good look at the hardly visible surroundings.
“Where are we supposed to go, I wonder,” Purdue said, looking for signs of life. The only signs of life, though, came in the form of surprisingly abounding wildlife such as the deer and beavers Purdue had seen on the way to the entrance.
“Let’s just go in and wait. I give them 30 minutes tops, then we get the hell out of this death trap,” Nina asserted. The car advanced very slowly, creeping along the decrepit walls where the fading Soviet era propaganda peeled from the crumbling masonry. Only the scrunching of the tires sounded in the lifeless night at the Duga-3 military base.
“Nina,” Purdue said softly.
“Yeah?” she replied, fascinated by an abandoned Willys Jeep.
“Nina!” he said louder with eyes frozen ahead. She slammed on the brakes.
“Holy shit!” she shrieked as the grill of the car stopped inches short of a tall, thin Balkan beauty dressed in boots and a white dress. “What is she doing in the middle of the road?” The woman's light blue eyes pierced through the beam of the car's light into Nina's dark stare. With a subtle wave of her hand, she beckoned them, turning to show them the way.