“Gunshots?” Johnny said. “Who was shooting?”
“The hunters.”
“What hunters?”
“The hunters that were there to hunt men.”
“What men?”
“Criminals. If a man is in trouble with the police, the Zone is a good place to hide out. No one lives there, except for the squatters. There’s no law. Just the animals. What could be a better place to hide?”
“Who were these hunters?”
Bobby shrugged. “I don’t know. Coach told me later they were powerful men. Men who could do whatever they wanted.”
“And had they done this before?”
“There were rumors but we never believed them. When they spotted me and Eva from a distance they assumed we were scavengers. Scavenging and poaching in the Zone is illegal. A scavenger is a criminal. That made us no better than the other criminals they were hunting. So they shot at us with their rifles.”
“And what happened?”
“They missed. We got away. We ran from the village to Pripyat. It was dark there and we knew the way out of the exclusion zone. We didn’t come in via the main road, though. We came in through the forest. When we saw the car parked behind the cultural center—there are no cars in Pripyat—we knew.”
“There was another hunter waiting for you.”
Bobby nodded. “We turned back, cut into the forest and hiked two kilometers back toward the power plant. There are only two places along the perimeter for a scavenger to escape. One path starts at Pripyat. The other one starts on the other side of Chornobyl, half a kilometer before the main entrance to the power plant. That’s how we got in. That’s how we needed to get out.”
“You and Eva.”
“When we doubled back, we snuck inside the power plant so we didn’t have to cross the cooling pond. There’s an opening in the fence. A person can sneak through. That way you walk along the cooling pond on the inner bank. By the reactors. You don’t have to cross it. But when we looped around toward the far side of the plant, another hunter was there waiting for us with a rifle. She was the lookout for the cooling pond. We caught her by surprise by coming along the inner perimeter.”
“She?”
“One of the hunters was a woman. She pointed her rifle at us and told us to put our hands in the air. She looked confused. She said, ‘You’re not criminals. You’re children. What are you doing here?’ When we didn’t answer, she told me to show her what I had in my knapsack.”
“What did you have in your knapsack?”
“Gear shafts from a tractor. They look like darts made out of iron. When she saw them she got angry. She said, ‘Who put you up to this? You poor things. They’re not going to care. Because you’re scavengers. Don’t you see? My husband and the others. They’re not going to care that you’re children.’ And then she said, ‘Go. Run.’ But it was too late. Eva had pulled a knife out of her back pocket and was charging her, trying to catch her by surprise. It was reckless and stupid but that was Eva’s way. Eva was fast. Very fast. It all happened so quickly. There was no time to think. The woman did what any person would have done if someone with a knife charged them.”
“She squeezed the trigger,” Johnny said.
Bobby nodded.
“And?”
“Nothing happened.”
“It was a squib.” Johnny heard the relief in his own voice.
“When the rifle didn’t fire, all three of us were surprised. None of us understood what had happened. Especially not her. So before she got her senses back, I ran up and shoved her as hard as I could. She wasn’t expecting it. She went flying backward. The rifle fired into the sky as she fell backward—”
“Delayed discharge,” Johnny said. “Not a squib. Hang-fire.”
“As she fell backward headfirst into the cooling pond.”
CHAPTER 54
NADIA AND MARKO stood against a wall in the kitchen. The same picture Nadia had seen last year hung behind them. It was a picture of a boy in skates holding a hockey stick on a frozen pond. It was the same picture her uncle had sent her mother. It was the first snapshot of her cousin, Adam, she had ever seen.
The babushka stood between the oven and a portable cabinet. To her left, the rawboned man from Lviv held his assault rifle pointed at Marko and Nadia. The man they called the General sat in a narrow chair, rifle by his side.
He pulled a radio transmitter out of his pocket. “The game is over. I repeat. The game is over. Report to base camp. We’ll be there shortly.”
Three men answered sequentially in the affirmative.
Nadia and Marko exchanged glances. They’d thought there were three men. But there were five. The two in the house, the one they’d encountered on the street, and two more. They had both scavenger trails staked out, Nadia thought.
“Once you’ve hunted the human,” the General said, “nothing compares. If you tell a person that, they’ll say of course, the target has a chance. The truth is all prey has a chance to survive. If hunting were easy, there would be no sport in it. Men wouldn’t hunt. What’s different with a human is the tactics change. The hunt becomes cerebral on both sides. And that elevates the stakes of the game. And its rewards. For instance, today I hunted you successfully without hunting you at all. I knew what you were going to do. I knew where you were going to go. Can you imagine how gratifying that is?”
“How did you know where I was going?” Nadia said.
“I was in charge of clean-up and security at the power plant in 1986 after the explosion. After Ukraine proclaimed independence, they put me on a retainer as a consultant. There are very few people left alive who lived through that first month and can provide an eyewitness account to everything that happened. In my capacity as security consultant, I see every application for special entry into the Zone. Last year a man named Kirilo Andre received entry on the basis of national security from the deputy minister of internal affairs. There was a mention of an American woman, and a criminal thief named Damian Tesla in the report. Kirilo Andre has since disappeared. But I was able to locate his driver. He told me they went to see a house in a black village where an American woman was rumored to have been. From there it wasn’t hard to find the house. The house with bicycles. And weapons.”
He walked over to the square wooden table beside the stove. Picked up a cleaver from a block of knives. “Sharp weapons,” the General said. He reached behind the table and pulled out an old rifle. “And dull ones.”
Nadia suppressed her dejection. That was the rifle she’d wanted. It had belonged to her uncle. The babushka had used it to kill the two deranged hunters who’d been sent by the Soviet government to Chornobyl after the explosion. Radioactive dust had landed in pets’ fur and the government had decided to exterminate them. This particular pair of hunters had derived too much joy from their mission. The babushka heard of their abuses, invited them for a drink, and shot them dead. Then she buried them in her root cellar.
Nadia stared at the General. “He said I’d get answers about Ivan Valentin if I took the pill,” she said, nodding toward the rawboned man from Lviv. “He said I’d get the answers in your theater.”
“And you did. We just gave you all the answers. You just don’t realize it yet.”
“I don’t understand.”
“What usually happens in a theater?”
“Someone puts on a show.”
“Exactly. Actors re-enact a familiar scene.”
“You hunted my brother and me. That was a re-enactment? Of what?”
The General smiled.
Nadia pictured Bobby helping another boy out of the trunk of a car, just as she had helped Marko. The General had recreated the circumstances under which Bobby had met Valentin, or his son. That meant the General had hunted Bobby.