“The tours come in the day. Tourists come. Always the same questions. Why do you live here? Aren’t you afraid of the radioactivity? Stupid.” She shrugged, holding up her jar for a refill.
“You’re not afraid?” Scorpion asked, pouring her another drink.
“Pah,” she sneered, and tossed back the horilka. “The same tourist people who ask me, you think they’ll live forever? What difference?” She wiped her mouth with the back of her hand. “When God wants to crush us, we’re done,” she said, crossing herself. “An old Jew once told me-you know before the war, there were many Jews in Chernobyl-he told me a saying: ‘Men make a plan-and God laughs.’ I like this saying. I like it very much,” she said, taking the money and sticking it in her pocket. “What do you want to know, miy drooh?”
“I’m looking for a man. Big man, long blond hair.” Scorpion gestured hair falling over his eyes. “His name is Dimitri Shelayev. He is maybe using a different name. He came here in the past four or five days. Have you seen him?”
Her eyes narrowed.
“I see nichoho. ” Nothing. “No one,” she added, and looked away. She stood and got a knife, spit on it, then came over to the table and started skinning the squirrel in front of him. “What makes you think I know?”
“Dennis. The tour guide,” Scorpion said. “He says you know everything, everyone in the zona.”
“I know nothing, nichoho,” not looking at him.
“I know he’s in the zona. Gde on? ” Scorpion asked. Where is he?
She didn’t answer. When she finished skinning the squirrel, she wiped her hands on her dress and speared the squirrel on an iron spit, head and all. She went over to the fire and lifted the lid on the pot. The smell of kasha groats filled the hut.
“You’ve seen him, this Dimitri, haven’t you?” Scorpion said. “What did he tell you? That people were coming to kill him?”
She stopped what she was doing and took a crude wooden crucifix on a string, the kind that might be found in any flea market in Ukraine, from around her neck. She slapped it into his palm and closed his hand around it.
“You are a ubiitsa,” killer. “I see it in your eyes,” she said. “Why?”
“Not by choice.”
“I see that too,” she said, looking up into his eyes. “What do you want with this man?”
“I want him to tell the truth.”
“Only that?”
Scorpion nodded.
“Worse and worse. Sometimes the truth is more dangerous than an army,” she said, putting the spit over the fire to roast the squirrel. She turned the spit. The hut filled with smoke and the smell of roasting meat.
“True,” he said.
“This man,” she said. “He is not called Dimitri. He says his name is Yevhen. Most of the samosely- the squatters-who live in the zona of Exclusion are old, like me. We come to live our last days in a place we know. Here there is no rent, no taxes. Only death. But this Yevhen is new. He lives in a cabin near Zimovishche. It’s three kilometers from here, east of Pripyat.”
“Spasiba,” thanks, Scorpion said, getting up. He handed the crucifix back to her. He started to close his jacket and put the bottle of Nemiroff back into his pack.
“You want to stay and eat?” she asked. “Kasha and belku. It’s good.”
“Nyet, spasiba,” he said, getting ready. As he stooped to go out the door, she called after him.
“This Yevhen. He has eyes like yours. Maybe you kill him,” she said. “Maybe he kill you.”
Chapter Thirty-Three
Zimovishche
Chernobylska Exclusion Zone
The farmhouse was in the woods at the edge of an abandoned village. Scorpion had taken a road that led from the river into what must have once been farmland and was now an empty landscape covered with snow. The tree line was beyond the fields. Shelayev had chosen well, he thought. The woods could not be approached from the road except across the open snow. It would give Shelayev plenty of warning if anyone tried to approach.
He stopped the car in the middle of the road, got out and studied the open field from behind the car through his night vision goggles. He could see light coming from somewhere in the trees, the only sign of life in the night. The snow in the field had footprints going from the road to the woods, but was otherwise empty. Crossing the field was not only a giveaway, it was possible the field was mined or booby-trapped. Shelayev had already shown he knew how to make a bomb and set a trap.
Scorpion looked to the right, at the abandoned houses of the village. He could approach the woods from that side, he decided. The houses would give him some cover and possibly had lower radiation levels.
There was an irrigation ditch beside the road, with a glimmer of ice at the bottom. He slid into the ditch and made his way toward the edge of the village. While in the ditch, he was hidden from anyone looking out from the woods. He nearly stumbled over something in the bottom of the ditch. It smelled appalling. As he climbed around it, he saw it was the remains of a wild horse.
When he got near the village, he peeked out over the top of the ditch. An abandoned house, shrubs and bare trees growing on its roof, shielded him from the woods. He scrambled out of the ditch, went around the back of the house and into the woods.
He stepped slowly, using his night vision goggles to scan for trip wires before he took each step. Then he heard something and froze. The cry of a night bird and a sudden flutter of wings. Damn, he thought. If Shelayev was waiting, that would have sounded the alarm. He froze behind a tree, took a deep breath and peered around the trunk. With his night goggles, he could see the house about two hundred meters ahead. It was overgrown with vegetation and snow on the roof, like all the other houses in the zone. As he stepped out from behind the tree, a bullet tore a chip of wood from the trunk a few inches from his head. He dove to the ground behind a fallen log.
He hadn’t heard the shot, just a faint chunking sound, so Shelayev had used a sound suppressor. If he was Spetsnaz-trained and using a rifle at two hundred meters, Scorpion reflected, he shouldn’t have missed. Odds were, Shelayev was using a pistol. The question was, what to do about it? He couldn’t stay behind the log. He looked around. There was a tree with a thick trunk about ten meters away. He found a pinecone and tossed it at a bush in the opposite direction, then made a dash to the tree as a bullet ricocheted off a tree behind him.
“Dmitri Shelayev, ne strelyaite!” Scorpion called out in Russian. Don’t shoot! “Alyona’s safe. I just want to talk.”
Two bullets thunked one after the other into the tree trunk he was standing behind.
He’s good, Scorpion thought as he scrambled on all fours, dodging through the trees on a diagonal toward the cabin. He still couldn’t tell where Shelayev was firing from, except that it was from somewhere near the house. Through his goggles, he spotted movement from near the house into the shadows of the trees. He crouched beside a bare tree that had grown at a strange angle, realizing he needed a diversion.
Scorpion placed the Geiger counter in the crook of a branch on the angled tree and got ready to move. He turned on the beeper and fired the Glock toward where he’d last seen movement, then ran to a large tree close to the house, the beeper sounding behind him. He could hear shots coming from a stand of trees about forty meters from the angled tree. Holding his breath, he strained to listen. It was very faint, but he heard it. The sound of someone moving through the branches, toward the angled tree. The sounds stopped. Time to move, Scorpion thought.
He ran toward the house and around to the side, crouching low. He was below a small windowsill, and risked raising his head to peer into the house. The light he had seen was from a candle on a table. The house was furnished. It had the feel of someone living there, but he could see no movement. Ducking back down, he moved slowly on all fours to the corner of the house, where he waited and listened. He could hear the Geiger counter beeping faintly. It still seemed to be coming from where he had left it.
Something was wrong, he sensed. Shelayev should have reached the Geiger counter by now. He could hear nothing coming from the direction where Shelayev had been. Deciding it would be safer on the side of the house
