The door closed.
Ivan stood at attention, just in case.
Colonel Ryzhkov appeared within moments and hurried into the hut only to reappear almost at once. ‘What’s going on, sir?’ Ivan ventured.
‘We’re clearing the area. You wait here.’
‘Yes, sir. What…’
Colonel Ryzhkov was gone. Very soon, Ivan heard the bustle of large numbers of people moving none too happily away. Then there was silence. He remained at attention, rigid, as though the iron control he was exercising over his body could extend to his terrified mind. He could feel sweat trickling down his neck although it was by no means warm out here. He had never felt so alone and exposed. He knew with absolute certainty that, with the exception of the general and the stranger — and presumably of the two fire fighters and his best friend Mykola Drach who were still over there at the mouth of the sluice — he was all alone in the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Station.
The lieutenant’s nerve broke. He reached into his uniform pocket and pulled out a cigarette. The bitter black tobacco was just beginning to singe the long cardboard tube of the mouthpiece when the first distant scream made the soldier’s hair stir. It was a long, drawn-out haunting scream of tortured agony, distant but powerful enough to pierce the dull, thunderous rumble of the fire. Ivan had done his stint in Afghanistan and he knew a lot of reasons for sounds like that and he hated them all. The scream came again, bringing to his mind all too vividly the picture of a mujehaddin fighter being crushed to death beneath the tracks of a tank.
A tank! That was it! They were bringing up a tank and the screaming was the sound its tracks were making on the concrete. His relief that the sound was not issuing from a human throat was so overwhelming that he forgot to wonder why General Gogol had ordered up a tank.
Ivan had hurled away the cardboard stub and was standing at attention once again when the tank pulled up beside him. He had always considered tanks clumsy vehicles, but as he watched this one coming up to park beside the communications hut, it was as though he was watching the sleekest Zil limousine being guided to the door of the General Secretary’s dacha. There was no more screaming from its tracks and the rumble of its engine mingled with the noise of the fire so that it seemed to move silently. So precisely did the driver guide the massive vehicle that the lieutenant didn’t even feel the need to move out of the way.
As soon as the tank stopped, its cover was lifted up and back to reveal the head and shoulders of its commander. Ivan gazed up, entranced, as the slim figure pulled itself out of the port and scrambled lithely down. Only then did Ivan realise that the tank commander was a woman. She gave him a glance and a curt nod in passing, then the silence returned.
The silence underpinned by that sinister, continuous thunder-rumble, as though an earthquake was erupting nearby. Now that he had leisure to stand and think about it, Ivan realised that the ground was, in fact, trembling. Had it been doing that for the last ten days and he’d simply never noticed? Or was the whole thing building up to some kind of climax?
No, he didn’t want to think about that.
The door to the hut slammed open and General Gogol came out, with the stranger and the tank commander immediately behind him. The general stopped dead when he saw Ivan. ‘What! Are you still here?’
‘Yes, General. The Colonel said—’
‘Never mind. Make yourself useful. Tell the people in the reactor building to get over here at once.’ He handed Ivan the old-fashioned handset and waved him vaguely towards the hut. Ivan obeyed and got out of the way of the three busy officers. Oddly enough, even on so short an acquaintance, Ivan had no doubt that the stranger held military rank.
‘Mykola! Can you hear me? It’s Ivan! The general says you and the fire fighters must come back now. At once. Mykola?’
‘I hear you, Ivan. Thank God. We’re on our way.’
Ivan felt himself nodding, as though Mykola could see him. He was surprised to hear his friend referring to God. Things must be pretty bad over there. Then he thought that ‘over there’ was only thirty yards distant.
The three officers were poring over a large piece of paper which was spread over the front of the tank. At first glance, it looked as though they were consulting a map or battle plan, but the white paper was in fact an architect’s drawing of the building. Ivan was still gripped by mild surprise that such a thing existed. He was one of those many who were extremely cynical about the manner in which even nuclear power stations were constructed.
The tank commander had a clear, decisive voice. ‘The angle is perfect,’ she was saying. ‘My gunner should be able to pierce the chamber. Under the circumstances, any fallout from the shell will go unnoticed. So we just have to worry about how much of the building is actually destroyed.’
‘Yes, indeed,’ answered Gogol. ‘There is a risk but it’s well worth taking.’ He paused. ‘Any risk is worth taking. We have no option now. If we can drain it, we stand a chance of keeping some kind of control. If it goes into the bubbler pool as things stand, there’s no way to calculate what the damage will be.’
‘Not that we’ll be in any position to care,’ the commander observed drily.
‘Let’s move,’ said the stranger, and there was no doubting the fact that he was in command. ‘You say you can do it. We know it must be done. We know there is no alternative and no time. That’s all there is to it. No matter what the risks may be, we can’t make things any worse. So let’s do it.’
The commander scrambled up into her tank like a cat going up a tree and the others turned away. Ivan went cold. Mykola and the fire fighters were still over there! He swung round, his mouth open to remind his seniors, but as he did so, he saw two figures scurrying across the debris-littered wasteland towards them. He stepped forward towards his friend, crossing the line into the forbidden area without thought. ‘Mykola, are you all right?’
Drach fell into his best friend’s arms and let Lieutenant Popov fall. Popov sprawled onto the ground and Ivan looked around for help. The stranger and the general stepped forward side by side and lifted the fainting fireman between them. No sooner had they done so than the turret of the tank whined into mechanical motion.
‘Get behind the hut!’ yelled the stranger, and the five of them hurried off. It was a short, stumbling run to get their chilled and shaking bodies behind the flimsy structure. Ivan made it without too much trouble because Mykola could at least run. The senior officers had more trouble because Popov had not regained consciousness, and his dead weight was obviously unwieldy. As soon as they were behind the building they all crouched down, their backs to the clapboard wall, and General Gogol yelled, ‘Shut your eyes! Now!’
They had scarcely made it before the flat report of the tank’s gun told them that the commander had fired her shell as ordered.
There was a flash like summer lightning, which dazzled even those who had clenched their eyes shut. Immediately the thunder of the fire intensified, became overwhelming, grew as loud out here as it had seemed to the firemen inside the bubbler chamber. Popov stirred and whimpered. The stranger clutched him sympathetically. Ivan moved, as if to get up and go to look at what was happening, but Mykola held him back. Nobody could hold back General Gogol from going to see what the result of his desperate plan was. He extricated himself from the tangle of limbs and staggered to his left, having wisdom enough at least to come out behind the tank itself.
What Valerii Gogol saw was this. The side wall of the reactor building had been pierced by the tank’s shell. A perfectly round hole had been created in the concrete wall, and out of this came a tongue of intense, dazzling blue fire as though a moon rocket was blasting off sideways through the building. Even as he watched, feeling the backs of his eyeballs being destroyed by what they saw, the tongue of blue intensified into white, and a huge arc of white liquid sprang out as though the reactor building had been stabbed to the heart and was going to bleed to death.