The general pulled up the speculation abruptly, his mind veering away from contemplating the unthinkable.
They had meltdown; the core was coming through.
‘That’s it, the rest of you,’ he called, hoping his voice sounded firm and decisive. ‘Take a break. Get some hot tea. I won’t want you back here for a while.’ They looked at him blankly and he frowned in irritation. Power workers, fire fighters, advisers, experts, they were all under military command now. He didn’t want them hesitating over obedience to his orders. ‘Go!’ he snapped, and they went. He could get them back within moments if he needed them, but at the moment he wanted time alone to think. Advice, discussion, plans of action, all that could come later — if they had time. Now he needed time to think. Alone.
He put the handset back to his ear, squinting to see across the stark, floodlit wasteland which lay between his position and the building. How cold the Bakelite of the instrument was! He shivered, abruptly remembering his father’s stories of the Eastern Front in the war against Hitler. The telephone with its long wire, however, was more like something his grandfather would have used in the Great War of 1914-17, before getting caught up in the Glorious Revolution. Gogol smiled grimly, realising that his mind was running away from reality again. How numb his lips felt. ‘Popov! Can you hear me?’
‘Yes, General.’
‘How long? Can you estimate how long we’ve got?’
‘No. I’m sorry. I don’t think there’s any way to tell. Hours. Seconds. I’ve no idea at all.’
No, thought the general grimly. No one will have any real idea now. That’s why he didn’t need the director of the power station or any of the structural engineers here at the moment. He knew the plans as well as they did — almost as well, at any rate — and everything else was guesswork. No one had ever been in this situation before in the history of the world. No one could advise him how best to proceed when faced with the meltdown of a nuclear core. It could be coming through joints between the concrete slabs of the reactor vault floor or it could be melting through the hearts of the slabs themselves. The original explosion must have sent force downwards as well as upwards and it had had power enough to hurl a thousand-ton concrete-filled steel lid up into the air like a kopek flipped for a bet. The second explosion, when cold, damp air had hit 1,700 tons of graphite and 1,661 uranium fuel rods weighing more than 200 tons, all at nearly 700 degrees C, had been even bigger still. The uranium coming through into the bubbler chamber could be seeping through hairline cracks in the blast-damaged concrete reactor floor. If that was so, it might be some time before the cracks became wide enough to let out the whole core. It was all guesswork. Popov was right. They might have hours or they might have seconds. It was impossible to be sure.
What he could be sure of, however, was that nobody on the site of the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Station would see daylight tomorrow unless he came up with a miracle now. But he knew he could not act absolutely on his own — or on his own authority. Trailing the phone wire after him like the tail of a dejected dog, he walked into the makeshift hut he was using as a headquarters. The bank of communications instruments it contained looked nothing like a leftover from the Great War. He eyed the young communications officer who had leapt to attention as soon as he had entered and who now stood like a statue beside the humming equipment. ‘Get me Moscow,’ he said at last. ‘I have to speak to the General Secretary.’
He saw the shock and hesitation in the young man’s eyes. Who phoned Comrade Gorbachev at one o’clock in the morning, even under these circumstances? And why?
‘And hurry up,’ snapped the general. ‘Time may be limited.’
The junior communications officer’s name was Ivan Baranov and he spent the next fifteen minutes standing outside the communications hut, dying for a cigarette and trying not to look at the utterly sinister, quietly snarling, dully glowing ruin which towered overpoweringly a mere thirty metres away. Once connection had been made with the office of the General Secretary, Ivan had been summarily dismissed by the glowering general with a curt order against any mental speculation whatsoever. It did not occur to him that the general had no right to tell him what he could or could not think, and he obeyed.
Ivan had been stationed on the outskirts of Kiev since last autumn, under the command of Colonel Ryzhkov. It wasn’t a long time, but it had been long enough to get to know a few people down here and get a girl friend. Her name was Larisa. She was a student with a slim body, hair like corn and freckles on the bridge of her nose. She had the ability to be deadly serious one second and utterly frivolous the next and Ivan quite enjoyed never knowing where he was with her. The first time they had made love — an occasion treasured in his memory — he had been convinced she was about to throw him out of her tiny apartment right up until the moment she had unbuttoned her blouse and revealed the fact that she had freckles in other places than her nose.
She was an active Komsomol member and had spent much of the last week, he knew, helping to dredge up the tons of sand from the bed of the River Prypiat, which the heroic pilots of General Antoshchkin’s command had dropped onto the core from their helicopters as they passed mere metres above the billowing flames. Ivan knew the pilots would be lucky to survive and he hoped that none of the lethal radioactivity had seeped down to the river and infected Larisa and her friends. He ached to be able to slip out through the lines of civil guards surrounding the immediate area and go to see her in the worker’s flat in Prypiat she was currently staying in. But things had tightened up a lot since General Gogol had arrived. Colonel Ryzhkov had been transformed into a martinet, there was a curfew and the risks of breaking it had escalated drastically during the last few days since the tanks had showed up. Quite what a squadron of state of the art battle tanks was doing supplementing a civil defence exercise, even in an emergency such as this, no one could make out. Someone had asked die colonel and received a pretty dusty answer. No one had dared ask the general, of course. But there they were, and there were their crews, obviously hand-picked to a man and looking extremely dangerous; and there was the fact that the tanks were clearly fully armed. Speculation was rife but very, very quiet. That was true of the soldiers in Ivan’s unit at any rate. Ivan had mixed with more of the civilians than the other soldiers because he had worked so closely with the general and the general worked with them — up until now — but even Ivan had a limited view of how the nuclear power workers, the atomic experts and all the others were reacting to the presence of the tanks. Also speculatively, he assumed.
A footstep crunched on the hard ground behind him and he slammed to attention automatically. A tall man hurried past without giving him even a glance. The door into the hut opened and closed. A bar of yellow light fell across Ivan’s face. As it did so, it revealed the profile of the stranger. Ivan Baranov frowned. He had never seen the strange man before and he thought he had seen everyone here, even the tank crews. Automatically, Ivan moved a little closer to the flimsy wall of the hut, but his keen ears could pick up little more than a low hum of urgent conversation. He took a step nearer, only to leap back as the door opened again.
‘Wait,’ said the general’s voice, quite clearly. ‘I can phone him from here, it will be quicker. In fact I can phone them both.’