But on one bus there were people from nearer the plant who knew about the accident. This bus overflowed with speculation.
They said Soviet army troops controlled traffic farther to the north.
A woman doctor on the bus, when asked what might be happening, said, “The children will get iodine prophylaxis, and then everything will be fine as long as the children are protected against any radiation. If there is radiation.”
One man on the bus from nearer the plant said the radiation would go north into the Belarussian Republic because of the southerly winds. Another man claimed parents trying to send children away would eventually besiege the railway stations. This same man insisted he saw a long line of buses heading north before he was picked up. A homeless woman wearing rags became hysterical, saying Gorbachev was a devil with a birthmark. A teenaged boy said he was a Young Pioneer and was certain the Pioneers would become involved in any rescue effort.
Lazlo recalled his last visit to Pripyat, when Mihaly wondered if Cousin Zukor could be a spy. If any one of the rumors he heard in a single hour was true, anything could be true.
The day continued with more cars at the checkpoint, more people wanting to go north, but also other cars. Green and white militia Zhigulis, two men in a black Volga watching, a Chaika with yellow fog lights parked up the hill, and a newer Zil, the kind used by high officials.
Do not spread rumors, Chkalov had said. Do not panic. The one thing he wanted to do was jump in his Zhiguli and drive north.
But he knew, from years of experience in the militia, it was too late.
As rumors spread, so do people. He was certain Mihaly and Nina and the girls were by now away from Pripyat. He only hoped they would be here in Kiev before the day was out.
14
“Everyone is leaving,” said Nikolai.
“Not everyone,” said Pavel. “There are still people on the streets.
What about the crowd at the Catholic church?”
“It closed years ago. They use it only for marriage ceremonies and meetings.”
“So, the people are meeting there trying to get information.”
“Or praying because it is their only escape.”
“Why pray when there are buses lined up to take them away?”
“They’re praying they don’t get a drunken bus driver,” said Nikolai. “But seriously, the best thing to do about radioactivity is to get far away. Exactly what we should be doing.”
Pavel and Nikolai sat in the car assigned them by Captain Putna.
Not a Volga like other KGB agents, but a two-year-old Moskvich with an engine clicking like a windup clock as it sat idling off the road across from Juli Popovics’ apartment.
“How long do we stay here?” asked Nikolai. “We know she’s in there because we saw her at the window. We should simply question her, write up a report, and get the hell out of here.”
Anger showed on Pavel’s face as he rocked the steering wheel back and forth with his finger. “If we write up a report on Juli Popovics, we’ll have no further orders to follow. It would mean reporting back to Captain Putna, who might tell us to start questioning every fuckhead citizen in town! Don’t you remember what he said about Major Komarov?”
“I don’t know what you’re getting at,” said Nikolai.
“If Juli Popovics leaves the area, which I’m sure she will, we’ll be obliged to follow. To put it more plainly for your pea-sized brain, we’ll be able to get out of here without deserting our post, and we’ll be fulfilling our duty. The investigation of this so-called accident.”
“But what if she doesn’t run away?” asked Nikolai.
“She will. Every few minutes either Juli Popovics or her roommate leans close to the window and looks up the road. Someone is coming to pick them up.”
“Maybe they’re looking at the helicopters.”
“They’re watching the road,” said Pavel. “It has nothing to do with helicopters.”
Nikolai leaned forward, looked up through the windshield.
“There goes another.”
While Pavel and Nikolai sat at the side of the road across from Juli Popovics’ apartment building, an occasional car or truck sped past, heading west on the road from Chernobyl to Pripyat. The cars and trucks were packed with people and did not slow down.
“We always seem to be cooped up together in cramped quarters,” said Pavel. “I guess it’s best we keep the windows closed.”
“We’d be safer in a Volga,” said Nikolai. “This thing leaks like a sieve. Did you see the last car fly past? Everyone was wearing handkerchiefs over their noses and mouths like bandits.”
“I saw,” said Pavel, looking at his wristwatch.
“Here comes another tanker truck washing down the street,” said Nikolai. “What the hell are they spraying? It doesn’t look like water.”
When the truck came out of a side street and turned the corner away from them, white foam trailed behind. Immediately following the tanker was a dump truck. The dump truck stopped, and a man wearing a face mask and covered from head to toe in a jump-suit got out, carrying a shovel. The man ran to the side of the road, lifted what looked like a black rock with the shovel, heaved the rock into the back of the dump truck, and ran back to the cab. The two trucks continued on their way, away from Nikolai and Pavel, who sat staring ahead.
“What the hell was that?” asked Pavel.
“I think it might have something to do with the shitty smell in the air,” said Nikolai. “I’ve read a little bit about our reactors. They use graphite around the core. The explosion was at night when no one would have seen a piece of graphite flying through the air. This could be worse than we’ve been told.”
“But Captain Putna said …”
“What does Captain Putna know about reactors and radiation?”
Farther up the street, the dump truck stopped again, the man covered from head to toe running as he lobbed another black rock into the back of the truck.
“It’s Vasily!” screamed Marina from the window.
Everything happened quickly. Marina shouting orders, Vasily and his mother and sister undressing and bathing, Juli putting out fresh clothing.
“We wore scarves over our mouths!” shouted Vasily. “You should have seen the crowd at hospital! The airport road was blocked, nobody allowed in except ambulances and buses driven by militiamen.”
“Why didn’t you come back yesterday?” asked Marina.
“No gas,” said Vasily. “But we have a full tank now. I drained it from a truck. Buses are lined up on Lenin Street, but we shouldn’t wait. Army troops on the main road carrying Kalashnikovs are stopping people and delaying the buses. The main roads are clogged with convoys of army trucks, and I saw a bus near the power plant in a ditch. I took a shortcut here, and no one is being stopped on back roads to the west.”
Vasily continued while Marina had him strip and wiped him down with a wet towel. “Yesterday, before I got gas, a man said soldiers went floor to floor in apartment buildings on the other side of the bridge. They told people to leave but didn’t say where to go. Today I saw a farmer herding livestock down the road. Everywhere people are looking out their windows, waiting to be told what to do.”
“We can’t wait,” said Juli.
Vasily, stuffed into a pair of Marina’s stretch slacks and a baggy sweatshirt, was first out the door. He carried a box of canned goods Juli packed as a precaution. He wore one of Marina’s colorful print scarves over his nose and mouth, and over his head and shoulders were sheets and blankets from the bed to cover the car seats.
Vasily’s mother and sister, both shivering from the cold bath, carried extra clothing from the closet in case their clothes became contaminated. Juli and Marina moistened the last of the towels to use for sealing the vents of the car.
Juli wrote a note saying they were leaving, heading southwest and eventually to Kiev. Although the note was not addressed to him, she prayed Mihaly would, on his way out of Pripyat, come to the apa
rtment and read it. Even better, she prayed he and Nina and his little girls had already escaped. She left the note on the floor inside the door and once again looked through the lens of the dosimeter. Eighty millirems. Although there was no exact cutoff, she knew they would soon surpass a year’s worth of normal exposure if they did not get out of Pripyat. When they ran to the car, another helicopter passed overhead, chopping the air into miniature explosions.
Not far from the building, four men wearing winter coats and ski masks blocked the road, wanting Vasily to stop. Vasily revved the engine, threatening to run them down. Marina screamed when one man was nicked by the car and thrown into a ditch. But the man was soon up shaking his fist with the others.
Vasily drove very fast away from Pripyat. The road west was bumpy and they all hung on. With the windows closed, it was hot in the car. Juli glanced out the rear window and saw several other cars heading west. Beyond the cars she saw the tops of apartment buildings—hers, Mihaly’s, and everyone else’s—disappearing behind them. South of the buildings, smoke from Chernobyl’s unit four rose into the bright spring sky. When the road dove into a wooded area, Pripyat disappeared. In the front seat, Marina held onto Vasily’s arm. In the back seat, Juli and Vasily’s mother and sister looked to one another with tears in their eyes. The road became narrower, the woods closed in, and the spring day grew dark.
Although he stayed back from the car carrying Juli Popovics, Pavel sped up when he saw the men standing in the road. The men parted as they passed, but one managed to smash a rear side window with a brick.
“Everyone’s gone crazy!” shouted Nikolai.
“They’d better keep their shitbox going,” said Pavel. “Look at the smoky exhaust.”
“What kind of car is it?”
“An old Zaporozhets painted about fifty times. But they didn’t get a window smashed.”
“I wish we had guns,” said Nikolai.
“We’re lucky Captain Putna assigned us a car.”
“You and I recruited to follow Juli Popovics makes me think,”
said Nikolai. “What if there is something to the Gypsy Moth connection and the Horvath brothers?”
“Conspiracy and sabotage,” said Pavel. “You’re beginning to think like Major Komarov.”
“I’m not kidding,” said Nikolai. “I wonder how things are at the post office.”
“Do you wish you were back there?” asked Pavel.
Nikolai tied his handkerchief over his mouth and nose. “The PK wasn’t such a bad life.”
As Pavel drove, Nikolai helped out by tying Pavel’s handkerchief. Then the two PK agents raised their coat collars against the wind from the broken back window and followed the Zaporozhets into the countryside.
Late Sunday afternoon, two convoys of army trucks and buses converged on the area around the Chernobyl plant. One convoy concentrated on villages and the town of Chernobyl south of the plant.
The second convoy led a group of buses to reinforce those already sent to Pripyat, the population center nearest the plant. On the way to Pripyat, several buses detoured to Kopachi, the closest village to the plant. The people of Kopachi were in a state of panic, and when the buses left, each with an armed soldier onboard, dogs belonging to people from the village chased the buses speeding away.
After pausing at Kopachi, the rest of the convoy headed to Pripyat on back roads in order to avoid driving too close to the plant.
The Sunday evening sun was low in the sky. It would be the second sunset since the Chernobyl Power Station explosion.
Several kilometers from the entrance to the plant, lights powered by a generator illuminated tents being set up in a ditch along the back road by soldiers assigned to assist firefighters and rescue personnel. When the convoy passed the makeshift emergency headquarters, wind from the vehicles shook the tents, almost knocking them down as they were being set up.
Colonel Gennady Zamyatin of the army’s Ukrainian border force was a veteran of the Great Patriotic War long past traditional retirement. He held on to the center post of the headquarters tent as the convoy roared past. Radio equipment had already been brought into the tent. The radio dials were lit up, and a member of the technical unit was wiring the equipment to a makeshift antenna on the raised bank alongside the ditch. Colonel Zamyatin smiled as the convoy passed. The sound reminded him of the Great War, and despite what he knew about the tragedy at the Chernobyl plant, he felt happy for the first time in years.
A truck from the rear of the convoy veered off the roadway and came to a skidding stop at the side of the road near Colonel Zamyatin’s tent. Soviet Army Captain Ivan Pisarenko jumped from the truck and ran down the embankment to the headquarters tent. Inside the tent Colonel Zamyatin and Captain Pisarenko quickly introduced themselves, grasping hands and staring into one another’s eyes. Both knew the seriousness of the Chernobyl explosion. Both had been briefed by superiors who counted on them to take charge.
Although Zamyatin showed his age, he was a sturdy, red-cheeked man with bright eyes and an upturned nose. Captain Pisarenko was taller, more muscular, and much younger.
“My convoy will be in Pripyat tonight,” said Pisarenko. “I’ve got ten trucks, fifty men, and seventy-three buses from Kiev. Do you have any news?”
“Pripyat is close to the plant, and radiation is bad there,” said Zamyatin. “They’ve been rinsing streets and even some of the buildings because of radioactive dust from the explosion. I’ve been told they had to chase people away who walked to the plant. The first buses took many away along with injured firefighters. Have your men cover their faces as much as possible. Try not to breathe in smoke from the fire or dust in the air.”
“What’s happening at the power plant?”
“The core exploded, setting the graphite on fire, so it’s best to avoid the area as much as possible. That’s why we’re setting up here.
Water on the fire is ineffective. Many of the early firefighters and workers from the plant were exposed to extreme radiation. I saw men vomiting blood. The serious cases were flown out, headed to the radiation hospital in Moscow. Yesterday helicopters dropped tons of sand on the core. Although somewhat diminished, the fire continues. Today they dropped boric acid and lead along with sand on it. With people living so close to the plant, it’s a terrible situation.
It reminds me of the Great War when the Nazis rounded up Jews and Gypsies. I don’t know what’s going to happen to all these people.”
“Moscow is ordering collectives to make room,” said Captain Pisarenko. “They’re also recruiting the komsomols to help. For now, the health ministry gave me boxes of iodine pills to be handed out as people board the buses. We’ll tell residents they’ll be gone a few days at most. One of my men suggested we have parents tell their children they are going on holiday, or to the circus. Anything to move them along. And only one suitcase per person.”
Colonel Zamyatin shook his head sadly. “I was preparing for my retirement on a farm near here when they called me. I sent my wife to Kiev as soon as I heard what had happened. Nothing of this scale lasts only a few days.”
“I agree,” said Pisarenko. “The people of the village of Kopachi know how serious this is. We got them out of their houses at gunpoint.
Some of them were puking as they boarded the buses.” Pisarenko paused, wiped his forehead with his sleeve. “When the buses turned around to head south, neighborhood dogs chased them.”
Both were silent a moment.
Captain Pisarenko shook Colonel Zamyatin’s hand. “I hope we meet again.”
One of the radios on a table squealed to life as the technician adjusted the knobs. A loud voice boomed out question after question.
“Who the hell is that?” asked Pisarenko.
“Who else?” said Zamyatin. “The KGB. It’s their office in Kiev interfering with the emergency frequencies, wanting to know every fucking detail while they sit on their asses!”
“I’ll go now, Colonel.”
“Good luck, Ca
ptain.”
Captain Pisarenko ran up the embankment to his truck, ordering the driver to go before he landed in the seat. The truck sped off after the rest of the convoy and caught up as the line of trucks and buses drove past signs welcoming visitors to Pripyat. Although the sun had set and it was rapidly growing dark, the messages could still be seen. Among the messages were, “The Ideas of Lenin Are Im-mortal” and “The Proletariat Will Triumph.”
Back at the roadside emergency headquarters, another convoy of trucks and buses roared past, heading north, their headlights flashing on the sides of the tents.
The traffic heading southwest increased. To stay on the main route, Vasily simply followed the lights of the car ahead. Likewise, the car behind stayed close, and Juli used this light to look into her dosimeter.
Vasily’s fifteen-year-old sister was named Lena. While Vasily’s mother slept at the other end of the back seat, Lena, who sat between her mother and Juli, asked questions as they drove through the night.
“What does it say now?” asked Lena.
“About a hundred,” said Juli.
“I learned in school radiation is more dangerous for younger people.”
“Don’t worry, Lena. They’ll have doctors in Kiev to check everyone. People get a hundred millirems in a year from natural radiation. My dosimeter goes all the way up to three hundred, and we turn it in every day.”
“Aren’t you worried for your baby? A baby shouldn’t get any.”
“Juli’s been taking precautions,” said Marina from the front seat.
“Like what?” asked Lena.
“Quit being so depressing,” said Vasily. “We’re out of there, and we can do nothing about what’s already happened.”
“I was simply asking, Vas. Anyway, you pay attention to driving.”
“I will,” said Vasily. “But when we get where we’re going, I might have to pop you.”
Lazlo Horvath Thriller - 01 - Chernobyl Murders Page 16