by Peter Tonkin
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The Iceberg
[Richard Mariner 05]
Peter Tonkin
No copyright 2012 by MadMaxAU eBooks
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PROLOGUE
MELTDOWN
CHERNOBYL, 1986
‘On 3 and 4 May, the temperature reached its highest level yet: over 2,000° C… On 5 May [this caused] a second peak [of radioactive emissions] of over 8 MCi. On 6 May the emissions suddenly dropped... It may never be known what caused the sudden decline of emissions and temperature…’ Viktor Haynes and Marko Bojkun, The Chernobyl Disaster, London 1988, pp. 22-3.
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Chapter One
Major Bohdan Valentinov slid out of the sluice and into the bubbler pool beneath reactor Number Four, screaming at the top of his lungs. Only the pain in his throat made him aware of the fact; the roaring of the fire above him was so loud it drowned the sound he was making, even though the bellows of terror echoed in the mouthpiece and headpiece of his black rubber diving suit. The water he plunged down into appeared to be boiling fiercely and some atavistic part of his mind howled uncontrollably in expectation of an agonising death although his well-trained intelligence insisted he had nothing immediate to fear. Nothing much from the water, at any rate; relatively speaking. The liquid was, in spite of appearances, cold, and the feeling of it was quite welcome against his nerve-heated skin as it filtered through the wet suit he was wearing. This fact was noted only distantly, however, and then placed with the overwhelming sound in the back of his mind. The moment he found his footing and regained his nerve, Valentinov was in action.
The water came up to his barrel chest and the bubbles exploded fiercely in his armpits as he fought to stay erect and look around. Yevgeny Popov would be here with the first of the equipment soon and Valentinov had to have decided on the best place to put it by then. Time in here was going to be strictly limited, he knew. In the ten days - less one hour - since the first explosion, the core had only become hotter and more dangerous. The first firemen, Valentinov’s colleagues from the nearby town of Prypiat, had been in hospital for more than a week now and they weren’t expected to live. The radiation, impossible to sense, able only to be understood on the red gauges of the dosimeters, would begin to kill him, too, in a very short time indeed. ‘Imagine you are inside a microwave oven,’ General Gogol had told him half an hour ago at the final briefing. ‘Imagine that the power is turned up high and you are going to cook very quickly.’
It wasn’t quite like that, Valentinov knew, but the image was clear and highly effective. He flashed his torch around, still overcome by the cataract of thought and sensation raining down upon him, and was so disorientated that he actually shone it up into his face to check that it was working properly because the beam seemed so weak and dim.
Then it struck him: the beam seemed dim because the tomblike chamber was not in fact dark at all. It was glowing. The walls were glowing dully, but the roof was actually shining, like a huge red alien sun in one of the science fiction films Valentinov liked so much. The colour shaded from a dazzling near-white in the centre of the roof through vivid rings of ruby to heavy shadows, dark as dry blood, at the edges. It seemed to hang down, as though the white heart was already beginning to sag as the molten core above prepared to pour through unstoppably towards the centre of the earth. But a more careful look, squinting through streaming eyes, showed this to be an illusion caused by the light. The roof was flat and seemed sound enough for the time being. And as he realised this, so, in sharp contrast to the coolness of the water on his body, the heat upon his head and shoulders struck through the black rubber, and he realised that the arm which held the redundant torch out in front of him was beginning to steam.
Slowly, in slow motion, imagining himself to be like some lost astronaut in Solaris, Valentinov began to move around, immersing himself in the boiling but cool, and highly radioactive water whenever the weight of the super-heated radioactive air became too much. At least the air he was breathing was pure, he thought, and then found himself wondering whether the alpha and beta rays he knew were mingling with the long light rays all around him could penetrate his air tanks and get into his lungs that way.
The chamber he was in, immediately below Number Three and the blazing core of Number Four itself, was the better part of one hundred and fifty metres long and more than seventy metres wide. It was full to a depth of nearly one and a half metres with fiercely bubbling water designed to purge heat and radioactivity from the gaseous emissions of the reactors. It was supplemented now by the residue of the millions of tons of water which had been poured on the fire during the last ten days, and no one really wanted to imagine what the result would be if the core dropped into it. Less than twenty metres above Valentinov’s head, more than a thousand tons of blazing graphite was combined with one hundred and fifty tons of uranium currently boiling at about 2,000 degrees centigrade. If that broke through the glowing concrete, it would be met by 15,750 cubic metres of cold water. The result would make Hiroshima look like a firework. And it was going to happen later tonight.
There was almost no doubt about it; all General Gogol could hope for was that the bubbler pools at least could be pumped dry before the core broke free so that the body of the building stood a chance of containing the explosion - the much smaller explosion -as the core met cold concrete instead of cold water. What they really needed to do, had there been time, was to fill the chamber with sand from the floor of the nearby drainage pool to supplement the five thousand tons of boron carbide, lead, clay, limestone, and sand from the floor of the Prypiat River which had already been dropped on the blazing core from the air in a feeble attempt to cap it after the water had boiled off or drained away. But the best they would be able to manage by the look of things was to pump this water out down the deep channels they had just finished cutting and into that sand-bottomed drainage pool. It would take a couple of days to move this amount of water and they probably didn’t have that long but, as General Gogol had observed, they now had the expertise, the equipment and the all-important drainage channels in place. It would have been a dereliction not to try.
A hand descended to beat against the back of Valentinov’s shoulder and the major jumped with shock. He swung round and jumped again, so close was Popov’s face plate. The captain was shouting and gesturing but all Valentinov could hear was the continuous thunder of the fire. Such a situation was not an uncommon one for fire fighters, so Popov and he immediately fell into an agreed system of signals which communicated as effectively as sign language between the deaf. Popov had brought the first great hose and wanted to know where to place its massive nozzle. A few metres down its length, squatting up in the opening of the sluice itself, was a light but powerful pump. This was set up and ready to go, but Popov wanted to know whether Valentinov wanted more than one hose per sluiceway. The major nodded and held up his fingers: at least two. He gestured: and another pair in that sluiceway there and another…
Popov nodded and began to move away. Valentinov thumped him on the shoulder and the young captain turned back. I’m going to look over that way, the major’s gesture said. Popov nodded again and began to cross towards the sluiceway’s tunnel opening. Valentinov watched him as he hoisted himself out and slid like a seal past the still engine of the pump mechanism. His eyes had adjusted to the light now and he could see almost as though he was outside in daylight. Once Popov emerged from the ruined reactor building, General Gogol would know that this part of the plan was working and he had agreed that the next part would be to dispatch a communications expert with a waterproof telephone on a long line so that Valentinov could make a report on what he could see. The long line
was needed because they had discovered very early in the emergency that radio communications became all but impossible this near to a nuclear explosion. Valentinov had been impressed with what he had seen of Gogol, but even had this not been the case he would still have wanted to make a full and detailed report.
He began to cross the chamber, unconsciously letting his body slide below the surface of the water as he came closer to the white-hot section of the roof. At last only the very top of his head remained exposed to the roasting heat, and even then he kept dipping it under the water in order to stop his scalp from burning - or, as he imagined it, to stop his brain from boiling. The effect of this was completely disorientating; the water was bubbling fiercely and the gases exploding through the liquid all around him made it impossible to see, in the same way that the overwhelming noise made it impossible to hear. It was unlikely he would have noticed the first change in the circumstances, even had he had been able to do so. As things were, he stood no chance at all.
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Captain Yevgeny Popov slid out of the outside end of the sluice and into the deep gully running like a dry river bed straight down to the distant glimmer of the shallow, sand-bottomed drainage pool. The air was cuttingly cold out here and he had no desire to linger. He ran up the roughly shaped clay steps and paused for an instant at ground level. Behind him the ruin of the reactor building reared darkly, capped with fire like a restless volcano. Before him lay thirty metres or so of debris-littered desert, beyond which he could see the figures of his colleagues, the experts from Moscow and the military. Out there somewhere was General Gogol awaiting a signal. He waved his torch slowly in the agreed signal and was relieved when the answer came so promptly. He turned, grabbed the next pump and heaved it up. The warmth of the sluice tunnel was almost a relief. Until he remembered where it was leading. He was one of the growing number of Ukrainians who were replacing the creed of communism with the burgeoning faith of Russian Orthodoxy and so he started to pray.
In the inner mouth, Popov set the second pump on the rough concrete floor beside the first and paused, looking across the seething subterranean lake to see if he could work out where the major was. He put all thoughts of hell firmly out of his mind, for the idea that he was damned was even more unnerving than the reality of the radiation. It was impossible to make out the black shape of the fire fighter’s rubber-clad body or the long cylinders of his air tanks, and there was no way of working out which of the millions of bubbles came from his commanding officer’s lungs. It struck the young captain quite suddenly that the light in this place was playing all sorts of tricks on him in any case, changing colours - there were no blues, violets, indigos or greens - and twisting distances. After a few moments of increasingly nervous inspection, however, Popov made out a determined movement in the centre of the chamber, almost exactly beneath the white heart of the glowing roof. The next section of the plan required Valentinov to be back here to greet the communications expert Lieutenant Mykola Drach, but it looked to Popov as though the major was going to be on the far side of the chamber. Popov decided that it would be best for him to remain here himself. He knew what to do next, and a moment or two’s wait now would allow him to send Drach to Valentinov directly and save time in the long run. So he stayed where he was and squinted into the chamber as he waited.
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Valentinov was in another world, exactly like a character from the works of his beloved Stanislav Lem. He would never know whether the euphoria which overtook him then was a result of the near perfect conditions for brainwashing, or reaction to the stress and simple terror of the situation, or actual damage to the cells of his brain caused by the radioactive environment. He was floating quite contentedly and increasingly less actively through a dream world where the spectres of his loved ones were beginning to appear ever more powerfully. His wife and daughters were swimming like naiads beside him and he was distantly concerned about their lack of protective clothing until he realised they were all actually on holiday at the beach in Berdyansk anyway. And his parents were there too, although his mother had died many years ago. And there was Grandfather Anatoli waving to him; this did not seem strange in spite of the fact that he had only seen photographs of Anatoli who had died at Stalingrad in 1942. Valentinov looked across to his wife who was performing the strong breaststroke he loved so much to see. ‘Look, Katya,’ he said, unaware of the rubber mouthpiece slurring his cheerful words, ‘there’s Grandfather Anatoli. He’s a hero of Stalingrad; I’ve always wanted to meet him…’
And everything stopped, as though the whole of reality had been switched off like an electric light.
~ * ~
Popov saw. Not everything, but enough.
The core was just beginning to break through. It did not come, as expected, all at once. At first it came in tiny drops, spoonfuls, thimblefuls, falling like the blazing hail that Moses summoned down. The lethal drizzle was difficult to see, for the refraction caused by the heat made each smoking fall look as if it was taking place behind layers of twisted glass; the water was bubbling, so that each tiny explosion of impact was hidden like a tree in a forest.
Until half a thimbleful of pure uranium, at 2,000 degrees C, hit Major Bohdan Valentinov square on the top of his head. It was hardly bigger than a raindrop, but where even the largest raindrop would have shattered against the rubber and run off the thick black curls of the major’s hair, the uranium burned its way through the impediment with the celerity of a laser beam. Immediately beneath the dome of bone, which it penetrated in a nanosecond, lay the major’s brain, and brain tissue is largely composed of water.
It so happened that Popov was actually looking at Valentinov when this happened. He saw the flash of brightness leave its twisting smoke trail hanging in the air as though it had always been there. He saw the water erupt and realised - though it took him a little while to do so - that the major had simply exploded, as though he had somehow swallowed a live grenade. Shock hit Popov, shock and a terrible recognition of how many tiny trails of smoke were hanging in the air. And what the tiny trails of smoke signified.
He turned to run away and crashed into the solid body of Lieutenant Drach with such force that they both fell backwards, sprawling down the tunnel of the sluice. Drach reacted violently -from his point of view he had just been attacked by an apparent madman. Popov’s simple terror was enough to overcome the lieutenant’s clumsy resistance however, and he managed to bundle the pair of them back along the sluice until they fell out into the chilly air. Then, long before the confused communications expert could even begin to work out what was going on, Popov had the handset and was screaming down it at the top of his lungs, ‘We’re too late, the core is coming through. It’s coming through, I say!’
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Chapter Two
General Valerii Gogol looked down at the handset and then up at the ruined reactor building as Lieutenant Fireman Popov’s words continued to spill out into the still night air. It was fortunate no one was close enough to overhear. ‘It’s coming through, I say! Not all at once, a little at a time, as though it’s raining uranium. Major Valentinov’s dead. He just seemed to explode. I saw it. I think some uranium must have hit him. It’s so hot it just…’ There was the sound of retching.
The boy must have a weak stomach. Or perhaps he was fond of his commanding officer. The fire service was not like the army, after all; regard could replace regulations as long as the job got done. But then, Popov had been subjected to such a massive dose of radiation in that terrible, water-filled chamber that nausea was only to be—
The general pulled up the speculation abruptly, his mind veering away from contemplating the unthinkable.
They had meltdown; the core was coming through.
‘That’s it, the rest of you,’ he called, hoping his voice sounded firm and decisive. ‘Take a break. Get some hot tea. I won’t want you back here for a while.’ They looked at him blankly and he frowned in irritation. Power workers, fire fighters, advisers,
experts, they were all under military command now. He didn’t want them hesitating over obedience to his orders. ‘Go!’ he snapped, and they went. He could get them back within moments if he needed them, but at the moment he wanted time alone to think. Advice, discussion, plans of action, all that could come later - if they had time. Now he needed time to think. Alone.
He put the handset back to his ear, squinting to see across the stark, floodlit wasteland which lay between his position and the building. How cold the Bakelite of the instrument was! He shivered, abruptly remembering his father’s stories of the Eastern Front in the war against Hitler. The telephone with its long wire, however, was more like something his grandfather would have used in the Great War of 1914-17, before getting caught up in the Glorious Revolution. Gogol smiled grimly, realising that his mind was running away from reality again. How numb his lips felt. ‘Popov! Can you hear me?’
‘Yes, General.’
‘How long? Can you estimate how long we’ve got?’
‘No. I’m sorry. I don’t think there’s any way to tell. Hours. Seconds. I’ve no idea at all.’
No, thought the general grimly. No one will have any real idea now. That’s why he didn’t need the director of the power station or any of the structural engineers here at the moment. He knew the plans as well as they did - almost as well, at any rate - and everything else was guesswork. No one had ever been in this situation before in the history of the world. No one could advise him how best to proceed when faced with the meltdown of a nuclear core. It could be coming through joints between the concrete slabs of the reactor vault floor or it could be melting through the hearts of the slabs themselves. The original explosion must have sent force downwards as well as upwards and it had had power enough to hurl a thousand-ton concrete-filled steel lid up into the air like a kopek flipped for a bet. The second explosion, when cold, damp air had hit 1,700 tons of graphite and 1,661 uranium fuel rods weighing more than 200 tons, all at nearly 700 degrees C, had been even bigger still. The uranium coming through into the bubbler chamber could be seeping through hairline cracks in the blast-damaged concrete reactor floor. If that was so, it might be some time before the cracks became wide enough to let out the whole core. It was all guesswork. Popov was right. They might have hours or they might have seconds. It was impossible to be sure.