Emmaline shrugged. 'Stark was the one who brought up that mysterious seventeen-page document, right?'
'But he didn't say much about it himself.'
'Maybe he wanted to see what Mishko would say. Maybe they think Mishko's involved in it. They're both pretty big wheels, you know. The KGB can't just haul Mishko in and interrogate him, so maybe Stark was trying to get a rise out of him.' She sighed. 'Whatever it was, I don't think you and I will ever find out the score.'
'Not even with
'There will never,' Emmaline told him seriously, 'be
Chapter 40
Meteorologists who wish to explain the circulation of the Earth's atmosphere sometimes employ an illustration called 'Caesar's Last Breath.' By an arithmetical coincidence, the average number of molecules of air in a human lung is quite close to the total number of 'lungful-equivalents' in the Earth's atmosphere. In the two thousand years since Julius Caesar died of his stab wounds in the Roman forum, there has been plenty of time for mixing, so the molecules of air he exhaled as he perished are now everywhere. Even in your lungs. On average, each time you take a breath, you take in one molecule that Caesar gasped out. This does you no harm. Caesar's last breath contained nothing that can hurt you; but the last huge 'breath' from the dying Chernobyl Reactor No.
the Antarctic penguins. We breathe in some of Chernobyl's last breath every day, and will go on doing so all our lives.
By eight o'clock in the morning of May 23 the new fire at the Chernobyl power plant had been puffing additional poisons into the air for half a dozen hours. Leonid Sheranchuk knew nothing about it. He was thirty kilometers away,'in the little apartment he and his wife had been given in the town of Chernobyl (only two rooms, and where was Boris to sleep? But what luck to get an apartment immediately anyway!) What Sheranchuk was doing was to discuss with his wife whether they wanted to ask Smin's widow if she intended to sell the plot of land where the Smin's dacha was certainly not now going to be built, and if so whether they should hire a car to go out into the countryside to look at it first.
Then there was the knock on the door and Vladimir Ponomorenko, last living man of the Four Seasons, was standing there, apologetic, worried, insistent.
Was Comrade Sheranchuk going out to the plant in this emergency? If so could he get a ride with him? What emergency? Oh, hadn't Sheranchuk heard? A fire, a big one, a bad one — started only God knew how, spontaneous combustion or something in Section 24 of the plant, now almost out of control because that was the section nearest the deadly core and flooded with radiation so the firemen couldn't get close to it to put it out. 'And, please, Comrade Sheranchuk! I have to get out there right away to help!'
And, of course, since Simyon Smin's plant was once again horribly, unexpectedly, in trouble, so did Comrade Sheranchuk.
They found a taxi willing to take them as far as the perimeter checkpoint. They wheedled their way onto an ambulance bringing out a pair of new casualties — firemen again, of course, one knocked senseless by a hose nozzle that got out of control, the other far worse off because his radiation suit had been ripped open when he was breaking through a wall to get at the fire. The medics handled him with caution as they transferred him to another car.
It was bad, all right. The driver filled them in as they bounced along the road to the plant, sometimes circling off the road to avoid a still-contaminated patch of paving.
Sheranchuk knew the layout of the place where the fire started. It was Section 24 of the reactor building, several stories above the imprisoned, dying core. It was a nasty place. Everything in that area had been baked hot and dry from the earlier fires; perhaps some charred rubble had worked itself up to ignition temperature. No one could be sure of that. No one had been there to see. That whole section was sealed off with steel doors welded in place, for it was drenched with radiation. 'So they broke through the walls,' the driver said, fighting his wheel as he jolted over a series of potholes, 'but the fire was higher up. I don't know what they're doing now — look, it's still going, because there's the smoke!'
Smoke there was, black billows of it staining the pretty blue morning sky. Sheranchuk leaned forward, squinting to see what was going on from half a kilometer away.
'What are those people doing on the roof?' he demanded. But the driver didn't know; they hadn't been there when he left. 'That's dangerous!' Sheranchuk muttered, peering at the upper stories of the plant.
The core was at least partly shielded by walls on all four sides and the bottom — the solid layer of concrete that replaced the water Sheranchuk had helped remove. But there was nothing over the top of the core but what the helicopters and cranes had dumped there, nothing near enough to stop the flood of radiation. Even in their grotesque rubber and lead suits, those people on the roof were taking chances with their lives.
Then he caught his breath. 'The diesel fuel,' he said. As the ambulance lurched toward the gateway to the plant he caught a better look at where the firemen were.
'What?' the driver demanded, and Ponomorenko looked at him curiously. Sheranchuk just shook his head. The place where the firemen were struggling with something on the roof was only a few meters away from the fuel stores for the standby diesel generators! And if those went up—
Sheranchuk didn't want to think about what would happen if the fire spread to the diesel oil.
The men on the roof were dangling long lines over the edge for some reason, and firemen on the ground were setting something up below. Sheranchuk and Ponomorenko were out of the ambulance and running toward the building, when a fire major thrust himself in their way. 'Do your mother, get out of here!' he snarled. 'You don't even have radiation suits!'
'But I'm Engineer Sheranchuk. The diesel stores — they should be drained, or you'll have another explosion!'
The fireman scowled. 'Sheranchuk? Yes, all right, I know who you are, but you'll have to go in the bunker. What's this about diesel stores?'
Sheranchuk explained hurriedly, dodging as firemen ran toward them with a limp hose, toward the lines dangling from the roof. 'I know where they are,' he said. 'Let me go up there! You'll need a truck to drain them into; the pipes should be all right—'
'Not you,' snapped the major. 'You've taken too many rads already. Don't worry, we'll find the tanks—'
'Comrade Major,' Ponomorenko said eagerly. 'I know where they are.'
The fire major glared at him, then shrugged. 'All right, off with you to get a suit, then you can show us. But you, Sheranchuk, it's into the bunker for you, and no arguments. It's your life, man!'
So while a hundred firemen and volunteers were fighting the blaze in one part of the plant, Leonid Sheranchuk was fuming in a smoke-filled, stinking underground room a hundred meters away. Once the room had been the barracks for the plant's firemen. Now it was the on-site operations headquarters.
He could not stay there. The thing was, he knew the plant. That whole building was a maze of traps. The corridors were blocked intentionally by steel doors, or simply by heaps of clean-up rubble. And all these firemen were new men, brought in to replace the decimated original crew. Did they know what they were doing? Would Ponomorenko be able to lead them to the diesel tanks? Would they know how to open the drainage valves? Would the pumps work? Had they been able to find a tank truck to drain the fuel into?
Sheranchuk hunted around and found a suit — not one of the good rubber-lead ones, just the compulsory garments everyone in the plant now had to wear, designed to protect against small radiation leaks only. It was at
