Peter Tonkin
The Iceberg
PROLOGUE
MELTDOWN
CHERNOBYL, 1986
‘On 3 and 4 May, the temperature reached its highest level yet: over 2,000 °C… On 5 May [this caused] a second peak [of radioactive emissions] of over 8 MCi. On 6 May the emissions suddenly dropped… It may never be known what caused the sudden decline of emissions and temperature…’
Chapter One
Major Bohdan Valentinov slid out of the sluice and into the bubbler pool beneath reactor Number Four, screaming at the top of his lungs. Only the pain in his throat made him aware of the fact; the roaring of the fire above him was so loud it drowned the sound he was making, even though the bellows of terror echoed in the mouthpiece and headpiece of his black rubber diving suit. The water he plunged down into appeared to be boiling fiercely and some atavistic part of his mind howled uncontrollably in expectation of an agonising death although his well-trained intelligence insisted he had nothing immediate to fear. Nothing much from the water, at any rate; relatively speaking. The liquid was, in spite of appearances, cold, and the feeling of it was quite welcome against his nerve-heated skin as it filtered through the wet suit he was wearing. This fact was noted only distantly, however, and then placed with the overwhelming sound in the back of his mind. The moment he found his footing and regained his nerve, Valentinov was in action.
The water came up to his barrel chest and the bubbles exploded fiercely in his armpits as he fought to stay erect and look around. Yevgeny Popov would be here with the first of the equipment soon and Valentinov had to have decided on the best place to put it by then. Time in here was going to be strictly limited, he knew. In the ten days — less one hour — since the first explosion, the core had only become hotter and more dangerous. The first firemen, Valentinov’s colleagues from the nearby town of Prypiat, had been in hospital for more than a week now and they weren’t expected to live. The radiation, impossible to sense, able only to be understood on the red gauges of the dosimeters, would begin to kill him, too, in a very short time indeed. ‘Imagine you are inside a microwave oven,’ General Gogol had told him half an hour ago at the final briefing. ‘Imagine that the power is turned up high and you are going to cook very quickly.’
It wasn’t quite like that, Valentinov knew, but the image was clear and highly effective. He flashed his torch around, still overcome by the cataract of thought and sensation raining down upon him, and was so disorientated that he actually shone it up into his face to check that it was working properly because the beam seemed so weak and dim.
Then it struck him: the beam seemed dim because the tomblike chamber was not in fact dark at all. It was glowing. The walls were glowing dully, but the roof was actually shining, like a huge red alien sun in one of the science fiction films Valentinov liked so much. The colour shaded from a dazzling near-white in the centre of the roof through vivid rings of ruby to heavy shadows, dark as dry blood, at the edges. It seemed to hang down, as though the white heart was already beginning to sag as the molten core above prepared to pour through unstoppably towards the centre of the earth. But a more careful look, squinting through streaming eyes, showed this to be an illusion caused by the light. The roof was flat and seemed sound enough for the time being. And as he realised this, so, in sharp contrast to the coolness of the water on his body, the heat upon his head and shoulders struck through the black rubber, and he realised that the arm which held the redundant torch out in front of him was beginning to steam.
Slowly, in slow motion, imagining himself to be like some lost astronaut in Solaris, Valentinov began to move around, immersing himself in the boiling but cool, and highly radioactive water whenever the weight of the super-heated radioactive air became too much. At least the air he was breathing was pure, he thought, and then found himself wondering whether the alpha and beta rays he knew were mingling with the long light rays all around him could penetrate his air tanks and get into his lungs that way.
The chamber he was in, immediately below Number Three and the blazing core of Number Four itself, was the better part of one hundred and fifty metres long and more than seventy metres wide. It was full to a depth of nearly one and a half metres with fiercely bubbling water designed to purge heat and radioactivity from the gaseous emissions of the reactors. It was supplemented now by the residue of the millions of tons of water which had been poured on the fire during the last ten days, and no one really wanted to imagine what the result would be if the core dropped into it. Less than twenty metres above Valentinov’s head, more than a thousand tons of blazing graphite was combined with one hundred and fifty tons of uranium currently boiling at about 2,000 degrees centigrade. If that broke through the glowing concrete, it would be met by 15,750 cubic metres of cold water. The result would make Hiroshima look like a firework. And it was going to happen later tonight.
There was almost no doubt about it; all General Gogol could hope for was that the bubbler pools at least could be pumped dry before the core broke free so that the body of the building stood a chance of containing the explosion — the much smaller explosion — as the core met cold concrete instead of cold water. What they really needed to do, had there been time, was to fill the chamber with sand from the floor of the nearby drainage pool to supplement the five thousand tons of boron carbide, lead, clay, limestone, and sand from the floor of the Prypiat River which had already been dropped on the blazing core from the air in a feeble attempt to cap it after the water had boiled off or drained away. But the best they would be able to manage by the look of things was to pump this water out down the deep channels they had just finished cutting and into that sand-bottomed drainage pool. It would take a couple of days to move this amount of water and they probably didn’t have that long but, as General Gogol had observed, they now had the expertise, the equipment and the all-important drainage channels in place. It would have been a dereliction not to try.
A hand descended to beat against the back of Valentinov’s shoulder and the major jumped with shock. He swung round and jumped again, so close was Popov’s face plate. The captain was shouting and gesturing but all Valentinov could hear was the continuous thunder of the fire. Such a situation was not an uncommon one for fire fighters, so Popov and he immediately fell into an agreed system of signals which communicated as effectively as sign language between the deaf. Popov had brought the first great hose and wanted to know where to place its massive nozzle. A few metres down its length, squatting up in the opening of the sluice itself, was a light but powerful pump. This was set up and ready to go, but Popov wanted to know whether Valentinov wanted more than one hose per sluiceway. The major nodded and held up his fingers: at least two. He gestured: and another pair in that sluiceway there and another…
Popov nodded and began to move away. Valentinov thumped him on the shoulder and the young captain turned back. I’m going to look over that way, the major’s gesture said. Popov nodded again and began to cross towards the sluiceway’s tunnel opening. Valentinov watched him as he hoisted himself out and slid like a seal past the still engine of the pump mechanism. His eyes had adjusted to the light now and he could see almost as though he was outside in daylight. Once Popov emerged from the ruined reactor building, General Gogol would know that this part of the plan was working and he had agreed that the next part would be to dispatch a communications expert with a waterproof telephone on a long line so that Valentinov could make a report on what he could see. The long line was needed because they had discovered very early in the emergency that radio communications became all but impossible this near to a nuclear explosion. Valentinov had been impressed with what he had seen of Gogol, but even had this not been the case he would still have wanted to make a full and detailed report.