He began to cross the chamber, unconsciously letting his body slide below the surface of the water as he came closer to the white-hot section of the roof. At last only the very top of his head remained exposed to the roasting heat, and even then he kept dipping it under the water in order to stop his scalp from burning — or, as he imagined it, to stop his brain from boiling. The effect of this was completely disorientating; the water was bubbling fiercely and the gases exploding through the liquid all around him made it impossible to see, in the same way that the overwhelming noise made it impossible to hear. It was unlikely he would have noticed the first change in the circumstances, even had he had been able to do so. As things were, he stood no chance at all.
Captain Yevgeny Popov slid out of the outside end of the sluice and into the deep gully running like a dry river bed straight down to the distant glimmer of the shallow, sand-bottomed drainage pool. The air was cuttingly cold out here and he had no desire to linger. He ran up the roughly shaped clay steps and paused for an instant at ground level. Behind him the ruin of the reactor building reared darkly, capped with fire like a restless volcano. Before him lay thirty metres or so of debris-littered desert, beyond which he could see the figures of his colleagues, the experts from Moscow and the military. Out there somewhere was General Gogol awaiting a signal. He waved his torch slowly in the agreed signal and was relieved when the answer came so promptly. He turned, grabbed the next pump and heaved it up. The warmth of the sluice tunnel was almost a relief. Until he remembered where it was leading. He was one of the growing number of Ukrainians who were replacing the creed of communism with the burgeoning faith of Russian Orthodoxy and so he started to pray.
In the inner mouth, Popov set the second pump on the rough concrete floor beside the first and paused, looking across the seething subterranean lake to see if he could work out where the major was. He put all thoughts of hell firmly out of his mind, for the idea that he was damned was even more unnerving than the reality of the radiation. It was impossible to make out the black shape of the fire fighter’s rubber-clad body or the long cylinders of his air tanks, and there was no way of working out which of the millions of bubbles came from his commanding officer’s lungs. It struck the young captain quite suddenly that the light in this place was playing all sorts of tricks on him in any case, changing colours — there were no blues, violets, indigos or greens — and twisting distances. After a few moments of increasingly nervous inspection, however, Popov made out a determined movement in the centre of the chamber, almost exactly beneath the white heart of the glowing roof. The next section of the plan required Valentinov to be back here to greet the communications expert Lieutenant Mykola Drach, but it looked to Popov as though the major was going to be on the far side of the chamber. Popov decided that it would be best for him to remain here himself. He knew what to do next, and a moment or two’s wait now would allow him to send Drach to Valentinov directly and save time in the long run. So he stayed where he was and squinted into the chamber as he waited.
Valentinov was in another world, exactly like a character from the works of his beloved Stanislav Lem. He would never know whether the euphoria which overtook him then was a result of the near perfect conditions for brainwashing, or reaction to the stress and simple terror of the situation, or actual damage to the cells of his brain caused by the radioactive environment. He was floating quite contentedly and increasingly less actively through a dream world where the spectres of his loved ones were beginning to appear ever more powerfully. His wife and daughters were swimming like naiads beside him and he was distantly concerned about their lack of protective clothing until he realised they were all actually on holiday at the beach in Berdyansk anyway. And his parents were there too, although his mother had died many years ago. And there was Grandfather Anatoli waving to him; this did not seem strange in spite of the fact that he had only seen photographs of Anatoli who had died at Stalingrad in 1942. Valentinov looked across to his wife who was performing the strong breaststroke he loved so much to see. ‘Look, Katya,’ he said, unaware of the rubber mouthpiece slurring his cheerful words, ‘there’s Grandfather Anatoli. He’s a hero of Stalingrad; I’ve always wanted to meet him…’
And everything stopped, as though the whole of reality had been switched off like an electric light.
Popov saw. Not everything, but enough.
The core was just beginning to break through. It did not come, as expected, all at once. At first it came in tiny drops, spoonfuls, thimblefuls, falling like the blazing hail that Moses summoned down. The lethal drizzle was difficult to see, for the refraction caused by the heat made each smoking fall look as if it was taking place behind layers of twisted glass; the water was bubbling, so that each tiny explosion of impact was hidden like a tree in a forest.
Until half a thimbleful of pure uranium, at 2,000 degrees C, hit Major Bohdan Valentinov square on the top of his head. It was hardly bigger than a raindrop, but where even the largest raindrop would have shattered against the rubber and run off the thick black curls of the major’s hair, the uranium burned its way through the impediment with the celerity of a laser beam. Immediately beneath the dome of bone, which it penetrated in a nanosecond, lay the major’s brain, and brain tissue is largely composed of water.
It so happened that Popov was actually looking at Valentinov when this happened. He saw the flash of brightness leave its twisting smoke trail hanging in the air as though it had always been there. He saw the water erupt and realised — though it took him a little while to do so — that the major had simply exploded, as though he had somehow swallowed a live grenade. Shock hit Popov, shock and a terrible recognition of how many tiny trails of smoke were hanging in the air. And what the tiny trails of smoke signified.
He turned to run away and crashed into the solid body of Lieutenant Drach with such force that they both fell backwards, sprawling down the tunnel of the sluice. Drach reacted violently — from his point of view he had just been attacked by an apparent madman. Popov’s simple terror was enough to overcome the lieutenant’s clumsy resistance however, and he managed to bundle the pair of them back along the sluice until they fell out into the chilly air. Then, long before the confused communications expert could even begin to work out what was going on, Popov had the handset and was screaming down it at the top of his lungs, ‘We’re too late, the core is coming through. It’s coming through, I say!’
Chapter Two
General Valerii Gogol looked down at the handset and then up at the ruined reactor building as Lieutenant Fireman Popov’s words continued to spill out into the still night air. It was fortunate no one was close enough to overhear. ‘It’s coming through, I say! Not all at once, a little at a time, as though it’s raining uranium. Major Valentinov’s dead. He just seemed to explode. I saw it. I think some uranium must have hit him. It’s so hot it just…’ There was the sound of retching.
The boy must have a weak stomach. Or perhaps he was fond of his commanding officer. The fire service was not like the army, after all; regard could replace regulations as long as the job got done. But then, Popov had been subjected to such a massive dose of radiation in that terrible, water-filled chamber that nausea was only to be—