Checkmate

34

It took only fifteen minutes to reach the site Alexi had described. Before they got there, Fisher told her to pull over. He reached up and switched off the dome light, then opened the door. “I’ll meet you on the main road in two hours,” he said.

“Let me go with you. I can help you.”

“You can help me by going home and waiting. I just need to check a few things; I’ll move faster alone. Pop the trunk.”

She did so. Fisher walked back and retrieved the bag of gear Elena had put together for him — a pair of hooded biohazard coveralls, a respirator, goggles, boots, and a double set of gloves.

“You remember how to put it all on?” she asked.

“Yes.”

“And the duct tape? On the wrists and ankles and neck? Make sure you get a good seal.”

“I will.”

Fisher closed the door and Elena drove away. He waited until the Kadett’s taillights disappeared around the bend, then shouldered his duffel and walked into the woods.

Fisher didn’t think Alexi was confused. He believed every word of the old tanker’s story. Someone had bought their way into the Exclusion Zone and then bought access to one the bunkers, and you don’t buy that kind of access from a pair of privates in the Ukrainian Army, but from staff officers — like an area commander. Whether the man knew his soldiers were going to be murdered, Fisher didn’t know, but according to Elena the commander in question, a colonel, had retired two months earlier and moved to the resort city of Yalta, on the Black Sea.

Alexi claimed that upon hearing the story of the shooting, the colonel thanked him, promised there would be a full investigation, and then swore him to secrecy. Alexi didn’t quite believe him, so he told the colonel the soldiers and the other man had been taken away in the civilians’ truck.

“The civilian he didn’t care much about,” Elena had translated, “but he didn’t think the colonel would do right by the dead soldiers. They were comrades; they deserved a soldier’s burial.”

Fisher could only speculate as to why the colonel left Alexi alive, but he suspected Alexi’s renown in Chernobyl had something to do with it. If two young privates go missing, it’s desertion. If Alexi goes missing, it’s a mystery that locals want solved.

Following his memory of the map Elena had drawn him, Fisher weaved his way through the darkened woods until he came to a stream, which he followed east until it widened into an inlet choked with reeds and cattails. He was now on the eastern side of the plant’s cooling pond.

He pulled out his Geiger counter and passed it over the dirt and nearby foliage. The rapid tick-tick-tick in his earpiece made his skin crawl, but the numbers were within acceptable range. According to Grimsdottir, his exposure here would amount to three chest X-rays.

Over the tops of the cattails he could see the outline of the power plant. He was a quarter mile from the site of the worst nuclear disaster in history.

The morning after the explosion, rescue workers finally realized they were fighting a losing battle against the fires in the crater, which were being fed by not only by the molten slag of the remaining fuel rods but also by the highly flammable graphite that had sloughed off the casings of the rods. Helicopters were called in to dump neutron absorbants into the pit.

Over the next six days nearly two thousand sorties were flown through the radioactive plume gushing from the reactor. Five thousand tons — some ten million pounds — of lead, sand, clay, dolomite, sodium phosphate, and polymer liquids were dropped into the crater until finally, a week after the initial explosion, the fires died out. None of the pilots who flew over the pit survived the exposure.

Across the cooling pond, Fisher could see the bunker mounds. They were arranged in three-by-three squares, each square separated from its neighbor by a hundred yards. The mounds, which were nothing more than bus-sized shipping containers, had been covered by layers of earth and then topped off with a conrete lid. As with everything at Chernobyl, nature had reclaimed the bunkers, turning them into shrub-covered hillocks. If he hadn’t known what they were, Fisher might have mistaken the mounds for natural terrain features.

He made his way through the reeds until he reached the opposite shore. He was about to cross the road when he heard the growl of an engine. He crouched down.

A pair of headlights appeared on the road. The vehicle, moving slowly, paused at the first set of bunkers. A searchlight came on and panned over the mounds, then went out. The vehicle pulled ahead and repeated the process at the next grouping. As it drew closer, Fisher could see the vehicle was a GAZ-67, a WWII-era Soviet jeep. Two soldiers were sitting in the front seat.

The jeep drew even with Fisher’s hiding place, paused, scanned the mounds, then moved on. After a long ten mintes, the GAZ rounded the bend and disappeared from view. Every few seconds the searchlight would pop on, skim over over the next set of bunkers, then shut off.

Fisher dashed across the road, down the embankment, and through the tall grass to the clearing surrounding the bunkers. He pulled out his Geiger counter. The numbers showed a slight rise, but they were still within limits.

Alexi claimed the bunker the civilians had been interested in was Number 3, the farthest back from the road. He ran between the first two mounds, then veered right and stopped at the base of Number 3. He scanned again with the Geiger scan: still okay.

He followed the edge of the mound to the back, then flipped his goggles into place and switched to infrared. The image was stunning. The ground beneath his feet was a dark blue that slowly faded to a neon blue where the slope started. From there the change was abrupt, a line of orangish-yellow that began at the base of the mound and went to the top.

After twenty-plus years, the radioactive debris was still pushing heat through several feet of soil and a layer of concrete. Again Fisher felt the tingle of apprehension. Don’t think, Sam, he commanded himself. Do what you came to do and then get out.

He opened his rucksack and rummaged around until he found the collapsible entrenching tool, which he quickly assembled. He walked the length of the mound, pausing every foot or so to jam the shovel into the slope. After ten feet, the tip of the blade plunged through into open air. He twisted the shovel, pulling out clumps of soil until he’d cleared a small hole. He clicked on his flashlight and shined it inside.

There was tunnel in the sod. At the end of it Fisher could see a patch of rusted steel.