“They’re still off?”
“Yes.”
“Sergei!”
“Up another fifty! It’s out of control! The fucking rods won’t go in! Do something!”
During this exchange, the supervisor of the electricians looked to the ceiling and shook his head. Then he went behind the console and could be heard cursing.
Amid the cursing and confusion at the console, more and more lights came on. Technicians began retreating from the console as a group, resembling children being told to line up in a hallway. Eventually, they gathered beneath the recessed ceiling lights above a conference table in the center of the room. The conference table was often used for meetings and discussions. Their automatic movement to the conference table was an indication that problem solving was needed, and in a hurry. As they gathered beneath the bright overhead lights, many began shouting at one another. No one sat at the chairs around the table. The few who did not shout stood about waiting for orders. Several demanded a solution from Mihaly, and he broke from the group to survey the entire console. When he turned back to the others, the determined look on his face silenced them.
“Everyone get back to their stations!” shouted Mihaly.
While the men returned to the console, Mihaly grabbed one of the technicians by the arm, and headed for the door at the side of the room.
While running, Mihaly shouted, “We’ll have to open the lines manually! I’ll get the intake valve! You take care of the steam valve!
The rest of you stay at the console!”
When Mihaly and the other technician were gone, the remaining technicians glanced alternately to one another, then to the lights flashing on the console. The supervisor of electricians came out from behind the console, followed by two electricians.
“What’s going on?” demanded the supervisor of electricians.
“Why have the visitors gone away?”
“We were too busy to notice!” shouted one of the technicians.
“You tell us why they left! You probably fucked something up back there!”
The supervisor of electricians ran at the technician with his fist raised. “All we did was remove a couple of panels! We didn’t touch a damn thing!”
The accusing technician backed away. “How did I know? I thought you might have started working on the circuits!”
The supervisor of electricians glanced at the lights flashing on the console, then shook his fist in the accuser’s face. “You’d better not try to blame us for this!” He turned to the others. “None of you!”
The other technicians ignored the supervisor of electricians.
Instead they stood at the console, staring wide-eyed at the flashing lights at their stations the way children stare wide-eyed when trapped in an impossible situation. The lights from the console surrounding the technicians gave their off-white uniforms a pinkish hue. When an alarm bell began ringing, everyone froze, standing perfectly still and silent.
A few seconds later, there was an explosion that shook the control room. Dust fell from the ceiling, and the plastic shields from several overhead lights clattered to the floor.
“The core!” shouted someone.
“No! Idiot! A steam line!”
“Get out!”
“We can’t! We have to go in there!”
The control console was even brighter now. Hundreds of red lights were glowing in the room like a fire from hell.
After double-checking his gauges, one of the more knowledge-able technicians backed quickly from the console, slamming into the conference table and falling on his back. He wriggled on the table for a moment like an upturned turtle. A few smiled back at him, but stopped smiling when they saw the look on his face. When the technician got off the table, he shouted. “I’m reading more than a thousand rems in the turbine room! If we don’t get the fuck out of here, we’ll all be dead!”
Everyone in the control room remained frozen for another moment until first one, then another, then all of the men began running for the exit at the rear of the control room. None of them went to the door at the side of the room that lead to the turbine room and the reactors, the door through which Mihaly and another technician had disappeared shortly before the explosion.
In the turbine room of unit four, the sound of the turbine slowing down had reached a low pitch, almost a moan. Off to the side, there was another moan, the feeble moan of the technician who had run from the control room with Mihaly. The technician lay trapped beneath a massive section of steam line blown from the side of the turbine by the explosion.
Nearer the turbine, superheated steam from the reactor gushed upward, blowing out skylights, knocking down sections of catwalk.
The room became engulfed in a hot fog. Mihaly crawled on the floor to the man trapped beneath the steam line and began pulling on the man’s arms. Nearby electrical fires and sparks lit up the fog in alternate hues of orange and blue.
Across the cooling pond on the narrow strip of land separating the pond from the Pripyat River, waterfowl settled back down after being startled by the steam explosion. Back at the plant, ghostlike figures ran across the yard of the lighted complex. One of the ghostlike figures jumped onto the rear bumper of a utility truck speeding away. Shouts of panic could be heard across the pond as faint whimpers in the night.
Soon after the running figures disappeared beyond the bright lights of the main reactor complex, the core of unit four exploded.
From across the pond it appeared as if the roof of the building had been severed and lifted slowly and quietly by a cauldron of flame.
Then the sound and the shock wave hit, and all the creatures of the pond were startled from their sleep.
The roof broke into several pieces, turning end over end. Flames shot into the air, lifting fragments that glowed and arced in the sky like fireworks. Flames emerging from the shell of the building lit up the sky and made the thick, black smoke from unit four into a monster dancing in the gentle spring breeze.
It was 1:23 a.m. on Saturday, April 26, and something was very wrong at Chernobyl.
10
Juli sat up, threw back the blanket, and turned on the lamp, expecting to see Marina’s bed empty beside hers, expecting Marina to be in the bathroom or the kitchenette because it would account for the sound. But Marina was in bed, her hair fanned out on the pillow.
The clock on the lamp table showed it was after one in the morning.
“Marina. Are you asleep?”
Marina stirred, turned her face away from the light. “Hmm?”
“Marina?”
“Time to get up already?”
“No. It’s only 1:30.”
“Good. I need my beauty sleep.”
“You didn’t hear anything?”
Marina turned to Juli, shaded her eyes with her hand. “Was it the neighbors again?”
“It sounded like an explosion,” said Juli. “I was asleep, and it woke me.”
“Maybe the baby kicked.”
Juli held her stomach with both hands. “So soon?”
“I’m joking,” said Marina. “It’s probably Mihaly tossing stones at the window. Wants to know what was bothering you after work today… I mean yesterday. Go to sleep. It’s the middle of the night and I have to work at
