Midnight in Chernobyl

by Adam Higginbotham

  On his right, he could see the village of Chistogalovka, where more people were tilling their gardens. The wind was now blowing southwest, carrying a thin trail of white smoke—or steam, perhaps—from the direction of the plant and the railway station, toward the village.

  Chistogalovka wasn’t a part of the survey flight plan, but Volodin decided to take some readings anyway. What if the smoke was radioactive? This stuff could be falling right on people’s heads. As he passed the railway station, he pulled the control yoke over. The helicopter banked right.

  Large beads of liquid began to form on the canopy. At first, Volodin thought it was rain. But then he noticed that it wasn’t breaking over the glass like water: instead, it was strange, heavy, and viscous. It flowed slowly like jelly and then evaporated, leaving a salty-looking residue. And the sky remained clear. He bent over the control panel, and looked up: directly above him, the same whitish smoke was blowing overhead, thin in some places, dense in others. Almost like a cloud.

  “Captain, it’s maxed out!” the flight engineer shouted.

  “What’s maxed out?”

  “The DP-3. The needle’s stuck.”

  “Then switch to a higher range,” Volodin said, and turned to check the dial himself. But the radiometer was already calibrated to its most extreme setting. The needle was glued to the far end of the range, at 500 roentgen per hour. And Volodin knew that the device took its readings from a receiver in the back of his seat. It seemed impossible: the level of radiation inside the cockpit had risen beyond the worst expected in a nuclear war. Whatever it was, he had to get them away from the cloud immediately.

  Volodin threw the yoke forward. The nose of the helicopter dipped down and to the left. The treetops flashed beneath them, a smear of green. He pushed the machine to its maximum speed, away from the railway station and toward Pripyat. Then the cockpit door flew open, framing the terrified civil defense major, his own radiometer in his hand.

  “What have you done?” the officer screamed against the howl of the engines. “You’ve killed us all!”

  * * *

  Natalia Yuvchenko had spent all morning trying to discover what had happened to her husband, Alexander. First, she had gone downstairs to the public phone and called the hospital, but they wouldn’t tell her anything. Then she heard that the KGB was there, and no one was being allowed in. But she couldn’t stay at home, knowing nothing. And Alexander wasn’t the only one who hadn’t returned from work as expected. Her close friend Masha came up from her apartment downstairs to say that her husband, who worked in Unit Three, hadn’t come home either.

  So Natalia left her son, Kirill, in the care of a neighbor, and together the two women went from door to door, apartment to apartment, building to building, down the street and across the courtyards—running up one echoing concrete staircase and then another, ringing doorbells, searching for someone from the plant who could tell them what had happened. She tried to send a telegram to her parents, but the post office was closed. Masha picked up the phone to call her mother and father in Odessa. But the line had been cut off.

  Eventually Masha’s husband came home, apparently unhurt but confirming news of an accident. He explained that he had helped get Alexander to the hospital before dawn that morning. Then another neighbor said that he had seen him in the hospital. He was all in one piece, and the neighbor knew where Natalia could find him: on the second or third floor, at the back. She might not be able to get inside, but she could certainly call up to him through the window.

  It was already late in the afternoon when Natalia found her way to Hospital Number 126. Alexander appeared in the window, bare chested, wearing pajama bottoms. He leaned out and asked his wife if she had left the windows of the apartment open the night before.

  Natalia was relieved. He looked normal and unhurt, although his arm and shoulder were bright red, as if from an angry sunburn. And, more troublingly, the hair at his temples appeared to have turned completely white.

  “Of course!” she replied. “It was so hot and stuffy.”

  Behind her husband, Natalia could see other people moving around inside the hospital ward: more patients, perhaps. She couldn’t really tell. None of them came near the windows. She was terrified someone would notice her there, and she’d be taken away.

  “Natasha,” Alexander said, “close all the windows. Throw away all the food that has been out. And wash everything in the apartment.”

  He couldn’t say much else. The KGB was there, interrogating everybody. But the couple agreed to meet the same way the following day. By now, other women had managed to smuggle vodka, cigarettes, and folk remedies to their husbands, some even passing them up through the hospital windows, tying bags to the end of a rope. Alexander said there were a few things he’d like Natalia to bring him: a towel, a toothbrush, toothpaste—and something to read. These requests were the normal things anyone might want to have in the hospital. It seemed the panic was over. Natalia felt quite sure that now, as soon as whatever had gone wrong at the plant was resolved, everything would be okay. She went home and did everything just as her husband had said.

  * * *

  At 4:00 p.m., the members of the OPAS medical team began to triage the patients. Alexander Esaulov, deputy mayor of Pripyat, stood by as the doctor in charge produced a worn notebook and began reading a list of symptoms down the phone to someone at the Institute of Biophysics in Moscow.

  “Many are in grave condition,” he said in a hollow voice. “The burns are bad. Some have severe vomiting, and a large number of burns on the extremities. The patients’ condition is exacerbated by thermal burns. They should be urgently evacuated to Moscow.” But when he explained that there were as many as twenty-five people in need of an emergency airlift, there were protests on the line. The specialist’s voice turned harsh.

  “Well, then organize it,” he said.

  Still more patients were arriving all the time, displaying the symptoms of radiation sickness. After some debate, the director of the hospital made the decision to distribute to everyone in Pripyat stable iodine—a prophylactic against iodine 131, the radioisotope that represents a particular threat to children. But there weren’t enough iodine pills in the dispensary, and it was imperative that the crisis remain secret. So Esaulov used his Party contacts in the neighboring districts of Chernobyl and Polesia to quietly appeal for help. By nightfall, a total of twenty-three thousand doses of potassium iodide had arrived, and preparations were under way to deliver them door-to-door to apartments across the city.

  At 8:00 p.m., Second Secretary Malomuzh summoned Esaulov back to the White House. The deputy mayor found the building surrounded by parked vehicles of all kinds: Volgas, Moskvitches, militsia patrol and escort cars, military jeeps, and the new black sedans of senior Party officials. Inside, on the third floor, a group of colonels and generals in uniform waited outside the office where the government commission was meeting. Malomuzh instructed Esaulov to transfer the most seriously injured patients from the Pripyat hospital to Borispol Airport outside Kiev. From there, a military jet provided by General Ivanov, the civil defense chief, would fly them to Moscow.

  From the office window, Esaulov could see a large crowd leaving an evening screening at the Prometheus Cinema and mothers strolling with their children toward the cafe on the pier. The sound of tinkling glasses drifted up from a wedding celebration in the restaurant below. He heard shouts of “Kiss!” and then, in slow chorus, “One! Tw-oooo! Thre-eeeee!”

  * * *

  By nightfall on Saturday, the telephone lines and the hardwired radio speaker boxes in every apartment in Pripyat had fallen silent. The boxes—radio-tochki, or “radio points”—hung on the walls of homes throughout the Soviet Union, piping in propaganda just like gas and electricity, over three channels: all-Union, republic, and city. Broadcasts began every morning at six with the Soviet anthem and the cheerless greeting Govorit Moskva—“Moscow speaking.” Many people left the radio on constantly—at one time, switching
it off was regarded with suspicion—a susurrating trickle of Party enlightenment in every kitchen. When the boxes were silenced and the phones went dead, even those in Pripyat who had spent the afternoon soaking up the sunshine began to realize something unusual was happening.

  And then officials from local housing bureaus, or zheks, came around, telling people to mop their stairwells, and young women from the Komsomol began knocking on doors, handing out stable iodine tablets. Word spread that all the remaining reactors at the plant had been shut down. There were rumors of a citywide evacuation. Some people even packed their bags and went down into the street, expecting to be taken away at any minute. But no official word came.

  Alexander Korol had spent much of the morning sitting in Leonid Toptunov’s apartment, waiting for his old friend to come home and explain what had happened inside Unit Four. He’d heard that there had been a maximum design-basis accident at the plant. But he refused to believe it. Eventually Toptunov’s girlfriend, the nurse, arrived and explained that everybody from the midnight shift was in Hospital Number 126. Some of them were being flown to a special clinic in Moscow that evening.

  It was past 9:00 p.m. when Korol found his way to the hospital, clutching a towel, toothpaste, and Toptunov’s toothbrush. When he got there, two red Ikarus buses were drawn up at the front steps. One was being loaded with injured firemen and his friends from the night shift on Unit Four. They were all still wearing their hospital pajamas, and many appeared perfectly healthy. Korol climbed aboard and found Toptunov: Leonid looked just as he always did. But his friend could see that the seats and walls of the bus had been covered with sheets of plastic, and when Toptunov spoke, he seemed bewildered and disoriented.

  Korol asked him what had happened. “I don’t know,” the young operator said. “The rods came halfway, and then stopped.”

  Korol asked no more questions. He knew that few other people in Pripyat would have any idea that the men were being taken from the city, or where they were going. He began moving through the bus with a pen and paper, scribbling down the names and addresses of his friends’ relatives—so at least he could tell them that their loved ones were being transported to Moscow. As he did so, two more men were brought aboard the bus, on stretchers.

  One of them looked up. “Hi, Korol!” he said brightly.

  But Korol had no idea who the stricken specialist was. His face had turned a bright red and was so swollen that he was completely unrecognizable. And when Korol saw the man on the second stretcher, his body seared by 30 percent burns, he realized that, whatever had happened with the control rods, this was no minor accident. By then, his time was up: his friends were leaving. Korol climbed down from the bus and watched as it pulled away from Hospital Number 126.

  That night, Korol and other senior engineers from the plant gathered in groups in one another’s homes, drinking beer and discussing what might have caused the accident. There were many theories, but no answers. They turned on the TV hoping for some news, but there was no mention of the plant or an accident.

  In their big corner apartment at the end of Lenina Prospekt, Valentina Brukhanov had waited in vain all day for news of her husband, whom she had last seen leaving silently before dawn. It was long after midnight when the station director returned home, bringing a permit that would allow their pregnant daughter and son-in-law to take the family car, slip through the militsia cordon, and escape the city. He stopped for only a few minutes. He said he had to get back to the plant. “You know the captain is always the last one off the ship. From now on,” he told Valentina, “you’ll be responsible for the family.”

  When Veniamin Prianichnikov at last got through to his boss at the station by phone, he had been told that they were conducting an exercise, and he should mind his own business. That night, Prianichnikov shut his wife and daughter inside the apartment. He instructed them to pack their suitcases and be ready to leave town on the first train the next morning. The family was just preparing for bed when they heard strange sounds coming from the direction of the station. From their sixth-floor balcony, they watched as yellow and green flames flared a hundred meters into the sky above the torn ruins of Reactor Number Four.

  In the small hours of Sunday morning, General Ivanov’s plane lifted off from the tarmac at Borispol Airport, carrying twenty-six men suffering the initial symptoms of acute radiation syndrome. They included Leonid Toptunov; his shift foreman, Alexander Akimov; Deputy Chief Engineer Dyatlov; Alexander Yuvchenko; and the firefighters who had fought the blazes on the roof of the reactor hall. Most had no idea where they were being taken, or why. They worried about the fate of their families—and about what had happened at the plant. The flight to Moscow took less than two hours. Those who were still conscious vomited all the way.

  As the new day began in the militsia station in Pripyat, where the Department of Internal Affairs had established an emergency headquarters, the duty officer recorded a series of notes in the official log. At 7:07 a.m., he wrote: “People are resting. At 8:00 a.m., the staff office will start working. The situation is normal. The radiation level is rising.”

  9

  * * *

  Sunday, April 27, Pripyat

  The first of the big transport helicopters came in soon after dawn, dropping low over the rooftops surrounding the town square. The concrete facades of the White House and the apartment buildings on Kurchatov Street rang with engine noise from its twin turbines, the air whirled with dust, and rotor wash tore the petals from the flower beds. Major General Nikolai Antoshkin, the baby-faced forty-three-year-old chief of staff of the Soviet Air Defense Forces Seventeenth Airborne Army, stood below, signaling to the pilot with his uniform cap until the machine came to rest in the street outside the Hotel Polesia.

  Dispatched from the central command post of the Kiev military district the previous night, General Antoshkin had reached Pripyat by car after midnight on Saturday, accompanied by an air force chemical warfare expert. He had only the vaguest idea of what was happening at the power plant, and had no instructions, staff, or equipment—not even the two-way radios needed to communicate directly with his pilots. As soon as he arrived in Pripyat, he went to the White House to report to Boris Scherbina. The chairman of the government commission was brief: “We need helicopters,” he said.

  Using a telephone in one of the offices now annexed by generals and admirals of the army, nuclear navy, and civil defense, Antoshkin roused his deputy in Kiev from bed to scramble the heavy helicopter regiments. Flying by night, in rain and low clouds, and menaced by thunderstorms, the first machines came into the nearby military air base in Chernigov from across Ukraine and Belarus. Antoshkin used the emergency powers granted to the government commission to summon test pilots from the helicopter training school at Torzhok, north of Moscow, and had more fliers transferred from bases a thousand kilometers away, on the border of Kazakhstan.

  By sunrise on Sunday, the general was in command of a disaster-response aviation task force of eighty helicopters, awaiting orders at four different airfields around the plant, with still more being redirected toward Chernobyl from airfields across the Soviet Union. He had also been awake for more than twenty-four hours.

  * * *

  Inside the hotel, the din of the arriving aircraft shook Boris Scherbina, Academician Legasov, and the other commission members from their beds. They had remained in session deep into the night, attempting to disentangle the tightening knot of problems surrounding the wreckage of Unit Four: the threat of a new chain reaction in the reactor; the fire, and the need to smother the invisible plume of radionuclides streaming into the atmosphere; but also the questions of whether to begin evacuating the city and how to solve the mystery of what had caused the accident in the first place.

  Legasov estimated that the reactor had contained 2,500 tonnes of graphite blocks, which had caught fire and already reached a temperature of more than 1,000 degrees centigrade. The intense heat could soon melt both the zirconium cladding of the fuel cassette
s remaining in the core and the uranium dioxide pellets they contained, adding yet more radioactive particles to the cloud escaping from the shattered core. Legasov determined that the graphite would burn at a rate of around one tonne an hour. Even accounting for the material that had been thrown from the core by the explosion, if his calculations were correct and what remained burned unchecked, the blaze could roar on for more than two months—releasing a column of radionuclides into the air that would spread contamination across the USSR and circle the globe for years to come.

  But the problem was one of unprecedented complexity. Ordinary firefighting techniques were useless. The graphite and nuclear fuel were burning at such high temperatures that neither water nor foam could possibly quench them: so hot that water would not only evaporate instantly into steam, further distributing radioactive aerosols in a cloud of toxic vapor, but also could separate into its constituent elements, oxygen and hydrogen, creating the possibility of a further explosion. And besides, the colossal fields of gamma radiation surrounding the reactor made it impossible to approach by land or water for prolonged periods.

  Legasov and the other increasingly exhausted nuclear specialists debated for hours, throwing out every idea they could think of, scavenging information from books and manuals, and via phone and teletype from Moscow. Firefighting chiefs from the Ministry of the Interior and experts from the Energy Ministry sought help from their counterparts in the capital. One physicist, unable to find the answer to a simple question in the technical materials held at the power station, phoned his wife and asked her to look it up at home. In his office at the Kurchatov Institute, the eighty-three-year-old director himself, Anatoly Aleksandrov—chairman of the Soviet Academy of Sciences, holder of the patent on the RBMK reactor, and Legasov’s mentor—sat beside a scrambler telephone, offering advice to the scientists in Pripyat on how to regain control of Reactor Number Four. Legasov suggested covering it with the iron shot stockpiled at the plant’s construction site for making radiation-resistant “heavy” concrete; Scherbina wanted to sail fireboats up the Pripyat and shoot water into the reactor hall with high-pressure hoses. But the iron shot sat in a warehouse that lay directly in the path of the fallout drifting from Unit Four and was already too contaminated to approach; pouring more water into the reactor would be dangerous and pointless.