the balcony. It had no glass. Stepping out on the balcony, he peered around the edge of the wall at the corner apartment balcony. It was close enough to jump over, and he could use the balcony wall to help balance himself.
He just started to put his foot on the balcony ledge when he heard a sound behind him. He looked over his shoulder and saw Dennis starting to walk toward the corner apartment. He must’ve gotten bored waiting or he had seen or heard something, Scorpion thought.
“Dennis, don’t!” he shouted, thinking, You stupid son of a bitch as he climbed back into the room. He ran back through the room toward the hallway, catching a glimpse of Dennis as he passed the open doorway.
The explosion flung Scorpion off his feet, hurling pieces of the wall at him.
Chapter Thirty-Two
Krasnoe
Chernobylska Exclusion Zone
The forest was silent except for the sound of the wind. Scorpion shook his head. His ears still rang from the explosion. He had left the Volkswagen on what passed for a road and had come through the woods on foot, stopping at every step to check for trip wires and other booby traps. It was his fault Dennis was dead, he thought. He should’ve kept him out of it. But he couldn’t just leave him, not knowing what Dennis might have done or who he might’ve talked to.
He had found Dennis’s body blown a dozen feet from where the explosion went off. Using his flashlight, he found the trip wire Dennis had set off when he walked into the apartment. From the size of the explosion, it had been hooked to just an ounce or two of C-4, Scorpion calculated. Strictly antipersonnel. The light they saw from the roof of the tall apartment house was lying on the floor. It was an LED that had been on a battered old table until the explosion knocked it over, still connected with a copper wire to a double-A battery. A simple lure, like those used to catch fish at night, and right out of the Spetsnaz manual, he thought.
Except for the light and the booby trap, there was no sign of Shelayev. Scorpion looked around the apartment, checking for more booby traps or surveillance. Shelayev had left the booby trap for whoever came after him. Sending a message: don’t come any further.
He went back to Dennis’s body and fished around in the pants pockets until he came up with the keys to the Lada. He took back the five thousand hryvnia he had given him. Whoever found Dennis would just take it. Damn you, he silently cursed the dead body. Why didn’t you just stand there like I told you?
One thing was clear. Iryna had been right. Shelayev was somewhere in the Exclusion Zone, or he wouldn’t be trying to chase pursuers away. When he did find Shelayev, he thought grimly, he would be ringed with defenses out of the Spetsnaz playbook.
Scorpion stepped out onto the balcony. Shelayev wasn’t in Pripyat. But he had known that when someone came looking, sooner or later, they’d have to check the city, so he set a trap. Scorpion looked out over the city hidden in the darkness. There were no lights anywhere and only one or two stars in the sky, the rest hidden by cloud cover. He saw no movement except for the wind. If anyone heard the explosion, there was no sign of it. He went back to the body, picked up Dennis’s Geiger counter. Heaving his pack over one shoulder, he went back down the stairs and out the back of the building.
Walking down the middle of an empty avenue toward the Palace of Culture, Scorpion heard a sound behind him and whirled into shooting position. At first he saw nothing, and then spotted an odd-looking long-eared owl perched on top of a child’s swing near an apartment building. He let the gun hang down at his side and went on. Being alone in this city at night was like a postapocalyptic movie; Mad Max without even the crazies, he thought. When he reached the Palace of Culture parking lot, he got into the Lada and drove through the city, the shadowy silhouette of the reactor building and the smokestacks and cranes looming above the trees.
He drove back to Chernobyl, his headlights carving a tunnel of light in the darkness. There were only bare trees and the snowy road. He turned on his cell phone to try to get the news, but this deep into the Exclusion Zone, there was no reception. The phone was useless, which meant there was no WiFi either. No way to know what was happening with the crisis.
When he got to Chernobyl, he’d have to bribe the militsiyu at the checkpoint, he thought. But driving up to the checkpoint, he saw it was closed. Evidently no one ever came this way at night. Why should they? It was a dead world.
He parked the Lada not far from the Tourist Office and left the keys in the ignition, taking Dennis’s map of the Exclusion Zone from the glove compartment. Since he’d been wearing gloves all along, he didn’t need to wipe the Lada down for prints. He went back to the Volkswagen, got in, and turned on the car’s inside light to check Dennis’s map. Krasnoe was almost exactly due north of the nuclear reactor.
He drove back toward the reactor site. It took a while in the dark, but he found the unmarked road to Krasnoe. Meanwhile, having turned on Dennis’s Geiger counter beeper, he listened to it beep. The radiation level was serious, and he knew if he wasn’t careful, there was a good chance he’d come out of this with cancer.
The road north from the reactor site led through a wooded area, spindly limbs covered with snow. A single pair of tire ruts and the four-wheel drive kept him moving through the snow. It took a half hour to cover half a dozen kilometers. When he saw a house with no lights covered with vegetation like a house in a fairy tale and trees growing through the roof, he knew it had to be Krasnoe. Stopping in the middle of the road, he got out and checked the Geiger counter. It read: 1.824. It would have to do, he thought, grabbing his gear and the Glock.
He walked into the deserted village. There was an onion-domed wooden church next to what might have once been a village square, now taken over by the woods. The houses were like wooden islands in the forest, every one of them abandoned, covered with moss and trees. He tried to stay in the clear, not touching the trees if possible, turning off the Geiger counter’s clicking sound. Icicles and dead branches hung down from the trees like stalactites. There were no sounds, not even birds.
He walked through the town looking for a hut with a light on the outskirts that might belong to Pani Mazhalska, tramping for what seemed hours through the foliage, though it was only minutes by his watch. Seeing a light glimmering through the trees, he stopped.
When Scorpion got closer he saw that the light was coming from a low hut, almost a shed, hidden in the trees. The window was shuttered, the light leaking from an opening where the shutters didn’t fit together. He peered through the opening into the hut, saw a candle on a table and a pot cooking on a burning log in the fireplace. He didn’t see anyone. The door to the hut was so low he had to stoop to knock.
“Pani Mazhalska, dobry vecher,” he called out in Russian. Good evening. There was no answer. He knocked again, harder. “Pani Mazhalska?”
Still no answer. He opened the door and went in, ducking his head to clear the top of the door. The walls were covered with animal skins, vegetation, and a shelf full of bottles with dark colored liquids. There was a wooden bench near the fire. Scorpion checked it with the Geiger counter: 1.271. He sat and waited. About ten minutes later the door opened and a tiny old woman with a round peasant face came in. She was carrying a bundle of wood and a dead squirrel. When she saw Scorpion, she screamed and dropped the wood and the squirrel. She reached into her sack and pulled out a straw doll that she held before her.
“Ne byyete mene!” she cried out. Don’t hurt me!
“Ya droohoo.” I’m a friend. “I won’t hurt you,” Scorpion said.
“Ne trogaite moyu belku,” don’t touch-he couldn’t catch the rest-she said, putting the dead squirrel on the table. Scorpion guessed belku meant squirrel.
He took the bottle of Nemiroff out of his pack and asked if she wanted some.
“Khto vy? Shcho vy khochete?” she asked, going to a cupboard. Who are you? What do you want? She took out a mismatched pair of jars that served as glasses and put them on the table. Scorpion poured them both good shots.
“Ya droohoo. Budmo,” he toasted, and drank. She watched him, her eyes narrow, then sat down and drained her jar.
‘What do you want?” she asked again, in Russian.
“Informatsiya,” he said. “I can pay,” and he put a few hundred hryvnia on the table.
