“Marko,” she said.
A trunk rattled. The muffled voice sounded again. It came from an old Soviet car lodged beneath a hollowed-out Datsun. Nadia took the crowbar and checked the pit for water. She remembered her lesson from Hayder, the scavenger she’d met last year. Strontium and cesium settled in moisture. Her boots were going to get contaminated. They were probably already hot. But her hands. Her flesh. She could not let her hands touch water. Otherwise she’d absorb more radiation in a second than was healthy in one year.
She shined the light into the pit, saw the ground was dry, and climbed through the hollowed-out Datsun. She yanked the trunk open with the crowbar.
Marko lay curled inside.
“You all right?” she said.
His voice sounded raspy. “Sure. Like a day at the spa. Get me out of here.”
Nadia pulled him out of the trunk. Marko groaned as he straightened.
“How long were you in there?” she said.
He checked his watch. “About two. No. Closer to three hours.”
Nadia crawled out of the pit. Marko barely squeezed through the Datsun. He looked unsteady as he hoisted himself onto the edges of the frame. A woman or a child could negotiate the graveyard easier than a grown man, she thought. She reached out with her hand. He took it. She yanked. He stepped out of the pit onto solid ground.
A muted rifle shot cracked the air.
They ducked.
Metal clanged against metal. A bullet ricocheted among the cars in the pit.
They looked around.
“Which direction?” Nadia said.
“Can’t tell. Sound suppressor.”
“You see anyone?”
“Not yet.”
They swiveled around, backs to each other.
Nadia spied a glint on the horizon. A man was taking aim with his rifle.
“There he is,” Nadia said. “Go.”
They ran.
A second gunshot rang out.
Nadia clenched her teeth as she ran, waited for the onset of pain. It didn’t come. She glanced at Marko. He was catching up quickly. The bullet had missed him, too.
They sprinted onto an asphalt road. Grass, weeds, and small shrubs sprouted from its cracks. The path took them out of the hunter’s line of sight. The forest shielded them. They continued running hard for twenty yards. Then they jogged side by side.
“Why did they go to all this trouble?” Marko said.
“Good question,” Nadia said.
“Why did they kidnap me and lock me in the trunk of a car in a vehicle graveyard. Why Chornobyl?”
“Why give me a pill and have me wake up here?”
“Why is a man with a rifle shooting at us?” Marko breathed heavily. “Almost feels like a game.”
The phrase struck a chord. Nadia remembered Obon’s description of the origins of the Zaroff Seven. “Yeah. The most dangerous game.”
“What do you mean?”
Nadia told him about the Zaroff Seven and the meaning of the name.
“And the Cossack in this story hunted a man?”
“Correct.”
“So you think these guys are hunting us?”
“Maybe.”
“Why? You mean for sport?”
“Who knows? They think Bobby killed Valentin’s son. It could be about revenge and sport. They knew I wanted answers about Valentin and his son, and their connection to Bobby. The man said if I took the pill I’d wake up and get the answers. It’s as though they are giving us the answers now.”
“How’s that?”
“I’m not sure. But if we stay alive, we might find out.”
They stopped at a curve in the road.
“Which way?” Marko said.
Nadia glanced at the irradiated trees on the right. Remembered her previous travels along the road, the layout of the village.
“This is the road to Pripyat.”
“Pripyat?”
“The city that was built to house the workers at the power plant. A couple of miles away from Chornobyl Village. It’s a ghost town. I was there. There’s a cultural center, a theater, a hotel. A Ferris wheel that was never used. It’s dark and totally desolate. It leads to the opposite end of the Zone of Exclusion, furthest away from the formal entrance. It’s perfect for us.”
“Escape and evasion,” Marko said. “Rule number one. Stay away from the hay barn.”
Nadia recalled the rules of survival. “Right. The hunter could have set us up any way he wanted. Why point us this way?”
“Because he wants us to make a run for the hay barn.”
“Why?”
“Because he’s got a buddy there waiting for us.”
“Then we better go the opposite way.”
Marko shot her a glance. “You want to run toward the hunter?”
“We’re going to loop around behind him.”
Forest surrounded the road on both sides. Nadia veered left into the woods. Marko followed. Darkness fell upon them. They slowed to a march.
“Twenty minutes for our pupils to adjust,” Marko said.
“We don’t have twenty minutes. I’ll shine the light every ten seconds so we can see straight. How many guys did you see?”
“One old guy. Looked like a Russian aristocrat. The ex-military guy who saved our bags in Lviv. And the driver. Basketball player with the eighteen karat mouth. They called the old guy General.”
“Those two picked me up in Kyiv.”
“They must have put me in the trunk first.”
“Okay. We know the score. There’s three of them.”
Nadia knew that the forest sprouted in groves in and around Chornobyl. She was certain they were somewhere between the power plant and Pripyat. Soon the grove would end and the reactors would appear on the left. The only question was how far away they’d be.
The second rule of escape and evasion was speed. They needed to put as much distance between themselves and their hunter as quickly as possible. They took long strides, but every two minutes they veered off course to divert the hunter from their tracks. They left behind a complex and circuitous path. This was the third rule. Camouflage one’s tracks.
Rule number four concerned scent.
“We have to worry about dogs?” Marko said. “Hunters use dogs.”
“No,” Nadia said. “A hunter loves his dogs. Think of the moisture, how much radiation they’d pick up. They’d be dead in a month.”
Wolves howled in the distance. Something large rustled to the right. Based on Nadia’s experience last year, it might have been a boar, one of the poachers’ favorite targets. More than one had ended up in a Kyiv restaurant over the years. There were also a variety of wild cats and previously extinct species. Man’s absence had prompted the Zone to become one of the largest wild preserves in the former Soviet Union.
Nadia kept waiting for a light to flash behind her. The hunter would surely be following. But it never happened.
They emerged unscathed at the edge of a field. Two smokestacks towered above six nuclear reactors half a mile away.
Sweat covered their faces. Nadia felt invigorated. The pace was comparable to her jogging speed. Her lungs filled and contracted. Marko appeared to be laboring.
“Let’s run to that boulder and take a break,” she said.
They stayed low and ducked behind the far side of a three-foot tall rock.
“We need to get past the power plants to a path the scavengers use,” she said. “But to get to it, we have to cross the cooling pond.”
“As in radioactive cooling pond?”
“Yes. It hasn’t been decommissioned.”
“How the heck are we going to do that?”
“Rowboat. They keep them on both sides of the pond.”
“But what if the boat tips over?”
Nadia glared at him. “Next question?”
“After we get across, then what?”
“We keep going to the black village first. It’s close. A kilometer away.”