Chapter 10
At nine o'clock on this Saturday morning the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Station is no longer a part of the Ukrainian electrical grid. No energy flows out along the high-tension lines. Reactors 1, 2, and 3 have been tripped to zero output, and the terrible fires — the fires in the buildings, at least — have been declared out long since. It is only the hundreds of tons of graphite in the exposed core of Reactor No. 4 that continue to burn. So far only one edge of the graphite is ablaze, with a blue-white heat as painful to the eyes as looking at the sun itself, and the firemen can do nothing about it. Their hoses still play on the roofs of the nearby buildings, on the smoldering heaps of rubble, on the walls around the wreck of No. 4, but they have not been able to extinguish the graphite. It is simply too hot; the water flashes into instant steam. There is another problem with using the fire hoses. The water that does trickle away from the core and from each bit of radioactive matter, small or large, dissolves radioactive material as it flows; and then it carries that radioactivity with it wherever it happens to go.
On that morning Vassili Smin's father was sitting in a militia car ten meters outside the gate of the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Station, feverishly making notes. They had the windows rolled up tight in the car, and the militia colonel at the wheel was smoking a Bulgarian-tobacco cigarette, the kind that laborers bought for forty kopecks a pack. The car was filled with the heavy smoke. Smin didn't notice. He didn't even hear when, now and then, the militiaman picked up the microphone and issued commands on his radio, or when messages crackled in. Smin had pushed back the white hood of his garment because it made his face and neck itch — he was sweating, and the scar tissue could not sweat — and trying to get everything down while it was all fresh. It was a list of the things that had gone wrong because of deficiencies in training, equipment, and supplies. It was becoming quite a long list:
Smin paused, scratching the itchy scars just below his ear and gazing blankly out at the emergency vehicles that were standing around, engines running, while the few active firemen continued to play their cooling hoses on the endangered walls. None of the things he had written, he realized, attacked the real question: what in the name of God had gone wrong? He wondered if he would ever find out. The stories he had pieced together — that one by one the operators had systematically dismanded all the safety systems, just when the reactor was at its touchiest condition — were simply too fantastic. Smin refused to believe that anyone in the Chernobyl plant could have been that arrogantly stupid. It was almost easier to accept the possibility of that word that had not been much heard in the Soviet Union in recent decades:
But that, too, was impossible to believe! Yes, certainly, the CIA or the Chinks, they were quite capable of blowing up a power plant simply to inconvenience the Soviets. But there was no way such a thing could have been possible without the concurrence of everyone in the main control room — and to believe that was as preposterous as to believe in simple, crass, spectacularly gross stupidity.
And the cost of it! Not simply the ruble cost, though that was going to be heavy. Not even the cost to the Plan; it was the cost to human beings that weighed on Simyon Smin. So many casualties! Nearly one hundred of the worst already on their way to the airstrip in the town of Chernobyl, where a special plane was going to take them right up to Moscow for treatment. And two dead already! One man never found, but dead all right because he had been last seen in the reactor hall itself, minutes before the blast. The other dying early this morning in the Pripyat hospital, with burns over eighty percent of his body and terrible radiation damage as well. . and there would be more—
He bent to the pad on his knee and wrote quickly:
'Comrade Smin?'
'Eh?' He looked up at the militiaman, who was replacing the microphone on the dashboard again.
'I said the helicopter from Kiev will be landing one kilometer away, by the river, in five minutes. With the team from the Ministry of Nuclear Energy.'
'Oh, of course,' said Smin, looking at his watch — nine o'clock! They'd made good time. 'Would you mind driving me out to meet them?' And as the militia officer started to say of course, Smin said sharply, ''No, wait. Can you turn on that outside speaker of yours?' He was scowling out the window at the idle firemen in their white hoods and jumpsuits, clustered in knots as they watched their comrades playing water on the walls. 'You there!' Smin cried into the microphone, and heard his amplified voice bounced back to him. 'Get those men behind shelter! Have you forgotten everything you've just been taught about radiation?' As they turned to gaze at him, he snarled, 'Do you want your balls fried?'
It was satisfying to see them jump — but how long had they been standing in the open like that before he noticed them?
As the militia car pulled away from the plant gate, Smin caught a glimpse through the trees of the bright towers of the town of Pripyat, prettily colored in the morning sun. He should, he thought, have put his message to his wife and son more strongly, so that they would keep away until things became more normal—
If things ever would. But Smin, at least, had a pretty clear idea of what the radionuclides that had erupted from Reactor No. 4 were going to do to the buildings, streets, and soil of Pripyat, once the wind changed — were already doing, no doubt, to the little farm villages in Byelorussia, just across the border to the north.
Smin recognized the little park by the river. It was where people swam in the summer, and the plant's football team practiced on its greensward. Now the goal cages had been torn away and the people there were not playing football. Some were on stretchers, waiting for the airlift to the larger hospital in Chernobyl.
Smin was surprised to see Chief Engineer Varazin bustling toward him. The man was neatly dressed, even freshly shaved, though the lines on his face suggested he had not slept. 'Eh, Simyon,' Varazin sighed gloomily. 'What a night! Wouldn't you know, the minute the Director goes out of town!' Then he brightened. 'You'll be glad to know that I've made sure all our observer guests are safe, and I've made arrangements for the new ones from the Ministry.'
'Well, that's very good, anyway,' Smin said wonderingly.
'Exactly! Put the past behind us. Get on with the work ahead, right, Simyon? But I'd better be doing it than talking about it,' Varazin said, and trotted away, glancing up at the sky.
Smin shook his head. Was it possible the man thought that escorting the observers to Pripyat would do anything to ameliorate the miseries that lay ahead for him? Well, for both of them, to be sure, Smin thought resignedly; but there was no time to worry about that sort of thing now. He peered up into the sky. He could hear the helicopter approaching from the southeast, but it did not come directly to the pad. It veered away and slowly circled the Chernobyl plant. Sensible of them to take a good look at the ruin, Smin thought, and wished he could do the same.
'Deputy Director Smin?' It was one of the Ponomorenko brothers, the footballer they called Autumn.
Smin searched for his actual name and came up with it. 'Hello, Vladimir. No game today, after all.'
'No. Can you tell me, please, if you know anything of my cousin Vyacheslav? They say he is missing.'
'Was he on duty?' Smin thought for a moment. 'Yes, of course he was. On the night shift. Well, no, I haven't seen him. Probably he had the good sense to go home when the plant was evacuated.'
'He isn't at home, Deputy Director Smin. Thank you, I'll go on looking.' Ponomorenko hesitated. 'My brother is in the hospital over there,' he said, waving toward the distant towers of Pripyat. 'He got some radio thing.'
'He'll have the best of care,' Smin promised, trying to sound more certain than he was. 'We can't spare the
