37 Hours

by J. F. Kirwan

  Radiation was going to be the least of her problems.

  Chapter Seventeen

  Nadia ran as fast as her reactions allowed. The Geiger counter, muffled in her pocket, clicked in a constant purr. Back in Kadinsky’s training camp – a lifetime ago – she’d been tested on a three-kilometre course through a ghost town, an abandoned village full of rubble. The task had been similar: find one of her colleagues; shoot everyone else dead. She was given blanks – paintball shells – but her opponents had rubber bullets, very painful, and they wouldn’t stop at the first hit, either. They kept firing until either she got up and found cover, or screamed surrender.

  She never did the latter, despite blacking out once from the pain when she’d been caught in the snipers’ cross hairs after having run down a blind alley. What it taught her was economy. Whenever a target appeared, she aimed first, finger on the trigger, and only then decided friend or foe, in a split second. It let her right brain do what it was good at first, and then let the slightly slower but more rational left brain decide the target’s fate.

  Meanwhile she ran like a cross-country runner, eyes and head torch focused four metres ahead. The brain could process that fast, no need to look down. Her peripheral vision would pick out anomalies or anything that moved – as the human visual system had done for millions of years in order for its host to hunt and survive. She kept her mind empty, suppressing her cocktail of rage and guilt over the deaths of Katya and Bransk.

  A clank up ahead. A machine gun being breeched. Someone taking up position. Just around the corner. Maybe one, probably two. An easy kill. Just wait for her to come whizzing round the bend and blam!

  Nadia scanned the right-hand bend. Concrete falling apart, rusty pipes – some intact, several broken – and a wiring cupboard halfway up the wall, its metallic housing sturdy. She levelled the sub-machine gun in her left arm and pulled out Bransk’s Stechkin with her right, which had a fresh magazine. She ran as far as she could to the left, then opened fire with the machine gun, aiming at the cabinet. A spray of sparks and crazy whines told her it was doing what she’d wanted – the bullets were ricocheting around the corner.

  She didn’t slow down, and kept firing until the last second when she ran full steam around the bend, saw the two targets trying to take cover from the hot lead hailstorm, slammed into the bend and shot them both in the head as she rebounded off the wall. The sub-machine gun was empty. She dropped it, switched the Stechkin to her left hand, unshouldered the rifle and levelled it in her right arm.

  She leapt over the corpses and didn’t look back.

  The purring began to blur into a constant drum roll. Silver crystalline, web-like forms hung here and there on the walls, as if a radioactive spider had left them. Chernobylite. Unique in the world. Pretty. Deadly. She ran faster. She knew where she was headed.

  Back in 1986 the core had melted first through the reactor vessel, then through several floors, and ended up in a pile of slag that looked like solidified lava. It was called the elephant’s foot, because somebody thought that was what it resembled. Still highly radioactive. This was the place Bransk had talked about when he’d said she would have seconds. Thirty at most.

  How far were they ahead of her, Salamander and her father? Several minutes, initially. But she was running while Salamander would have to cajole her father, bound and hooded, maybe shot for all she knew. What was her priority, given the choice? Kill Salamander, let her father die, or save her father and let Salamander escape? What she should do was clear. Kill Salamander. And if you didn’t do ‘should’, it usually turned into ‘should have’ afterwards. But she’d just lost her sister.

  Her father mattered more.

  Light up ahead. Her fingers hugged both triggers. She heard shouting, something striking flesh, an outburst of anger – her father – and many swear words, a few she didn’t know, pretty creative. Good for you.

  She turned the corner and the Geiger began a constant whine. She fired at Salamander who was bolting down another tunnel, and then she skidded to a stop. Handcuffed to a pipe was her father, bleeding from a gash in his forehead and a gunshot wound in his side. Next to him was… It took a moment to really register it. The elephant’s foot, a mound of cracked grey slag that looked inert, but the Geiger counter went delirious. Her mind started counting automatically.

  She started at five, for good measure.

  Her father looked at her. Those grey eyes like hers, a killer’s eyes, now dying eyes.

  Ten.

  ‘Go, Nadia. Kill him. You can do it.’

  He was right. And so wrong.

  She aimed the rifle, fired, the bullet chipping the chain before whizzing around the room. She fired again. He fell forward, free.

  Fifteen.

  She caught him, but he was heavy. She needed to drag him. She stumbled, dropped the Stechkin, and he gripped her arm for support, and then too late she realised what he was doing.

  Twenty.

  ‘So proud of you,’ he said, and then broke her grip on him, shoved her away. He aimed the Stechkin up beneath his chin, looked at her one last time, closed his eyes, and fired.

  She reached for him but he fell backwards onto the slag.

  Twenty-five.

  She stared. Not moving. Not thinking. Not feeling.

  Twenty-nine.

  She sprinted down the same tunnel Salamander had taken. Almost choking, her breathing control lost completely, hardly able to see. Fifty metres later, the Geiger had calmed down to a slow stutter. She tripped over something stuck in the ground beneath a puddle. She whacked into the floor and slid to a halt, bashing her shoulder against a piece of broken pipe. Just another rubber bullet.

  She was about to get up when she saw the tripwire two metres ahead. She walked up to it, checked around, saw a small device, presumably C4, stepped over the wire, and walked slower. Daylight up ahead. The sound of rotors. She ran again. It was taking off. He was getting away. She burst out into the open and saw the chopper already airborne, pitching forward, about to swoop away. A face was at the window. She took aim as he looked at her, smiled his grim fucking smile, held up another trigger affair, and pressed it. A remote switch for the C4.

  The explosion back in the tunnel lifted her off the ground, and she flew through air black with smoke and radioactive dust. She hit the ground rolling, staggered a few paces out of the smoke, fell to her knees, tried to aim at the receding chopper, and realised she was on fire. She got off three rounds, knowing they would never find their target. Suddenly there was a loud hiss and white foam everywhere, the sound of shouting, boots appearing in front of her as she fell face first onto the ground, her rifle snatched away from her, her wrists whipped behind her back and bound together.

  She didn’t care. All she could see was her father, right before his last kill. His eyes, full of so much he wanted to say, and no time to say it. She wished the explosion had taken her; she really did.

  Then they could be a family again.

  ***

  The decontamination procedure was long and painful. She welcomed it. The cold needle sprays. The endless scrubbing till her skin bled in places. The nurses and doctors – all suited up in full protection gear – tried to console her, told her it would soon be over. They didn’t understand. Bring it on. She was in a world of hurt. The only thing keeping her focused was the pain. Four rounds of decontam, checking her rad level, more decontam, more meds, more exams, a body scan, and then an isolation room in the wing of a military hospital somewhere outside Kiev. They locked her in. She was still hot. She didn’t care. Her mind focused on one thing, and one thing only.

  Kill Salamander.

  Inevitably, she did the one thing she didn’t want to do, the one thing she’d promised herself not to do. She thought of them. She imagined her father and Katya, in front of her, hugging her. She broke down and wept and screamed and tore the room apart and slammed her fist into the wall, and ended up shivering on the cold linoleum f
loor in the foetal position, wishing she’d never been born, because after all this, what had been the fucking point?

  ***

  She awoke somewhere else. On a leather sofa. Clothed. Warm. Someone’s office. A portrait of an unsmiling general – clearly an arrogant, harsh man – on the dark brown wall, opposite an ornate wooden desk. A reminder, maybe. A single laptop on the desk, closed. No phone. Behind the desk a calendar showing a woodland scene, and today’s date circled, the preceding days neatly crossed out. Three days. Three days since…

  The door was open, the sound of computer keys tapping beyond the wall. An assistant. Nadia glanced at her own left-hand knuckles, a light bandage wrapped around them. Why had she punched the wall with her left fist? So she could still shoot. She got up and wandered over to the desk. Aside from the laptop – an Apple Mac as it happened, not exactly standard military issue in Russia – there were two things on the leather-topped surface. One was a radiation monitor. Hers. It was face down. She turned it over.

  Did it hurt when she saw it? Not really. All grey. Three distinct black dots. Three. One each for Katya, Bransk, and her father. How long did she have? It didn’t matter. She’d find and kill Salamander. He’d probably take her with him. But that would be okay, because when they both arrived in hell, her father would be waiting. Not bound and shot this time. He’d punish Salamander until the end of time.

  She tossed it in a wastepaper basket. It made a resounding clink, and the tapping of keys paused. A pretty young assistant appeared, tawny hair coiled on top of her head. She took one look at Nadia and disappeared again, her high heels clacking along a corridor. Gone to find the owner of the office.

  Nadia turned to the other object: a silver frame, also face down. She picked it up and saw a smiling, seductive woman in a bathing suit, in the arms of a man in his trunks on a beach somewhere. Probably this photo was normally kept in a drawer, taken out when the door was shut. The colonel and his aide. Footsteps approached: strong, authoritative, making a statement a little too hard. The colonel appeared at the doorway, looked her in the eye, then saw what she was holding in her hand. His new assistant was behind him. Nadia dropped the frame in the wastepaper bin, too. His lips tightened but he said nothing, waving his assistant back to her desk, but not before her lips curled upwards.

  He closed the door, walked towards Nadia, waving her back to the sofa. She moved back but did not sit.

  ‘Your father?’ she said, nodding behind her.

  ‘Yes,’ he replied. ‘He was a great –’

  ‘Get rid of it. He’s holding you back; nearly got you killed. You could be better than he ever was.’

  The colonel stared at her, didn’t look at the painting, then sat down behind his desk and took off his hat.

  ‘She likes you,’ Nadia said, nodding to the other side of the wall where his assistant sat.

  He ran his fingers through his thick blond hair, frowning. ‘Are you always like this?’

  She shrugged. ‘Where’s Sergei?’

  He drummed his fingers on the desk, then opened up his laptop. ‘He’ll be here later.’

  Good. She’d need help to take down Salamander. ‘We need to talk to MI –’

  He hammered his hand down on the desk. ‘SHUT UP!’ he shouted, half-rising from the chair. He sat back down and ploughed his fingers – both hands this time – through his hair again, then laid them flat, palms down on the desk, as if trying to pacify them.

  She drew her finger and thumb across her lips, as if closing her mouth with a zip.

  He looked at her, face taut. ‘Can we at least pretend I’m in charge here?’

  She gave the faintest of smiles in response.

  ‘I have been busy, actually.’ He got up, began pacing. ‘My superiors have been briefed, and they,’ he said, wagging a finger at her, ‘they have informed the President, Mr Putin himself.’ He staggered a little, as if dizzy from his own actions reaching all the way to the top. ‘Who, at this very moment is talking with the British Prime Minister.’ He faced his father’s portrait, then spun around. ‘MI6 are aware.’

  He walked back to his desk, sat down, tapped a few keys, the brightness of the screen illuminating his face in the dull, musty light of this crypt he called an office. He leant back, composed himself. ‘I am flying there tonight. London. The ambassador himself…’ He stopped.

  She knew why. No plan. He was out of his depth. Moving into the Kremlin limelight was risky. And besides, the warhead was on its way to London. That was the real reason he was going and not one of the generals. They weren’t stupid. Neither was he.

  Silence filled the room, his eyes fixed on the screen. She had a hunch what he was looking at. Another photo of his aide.

  She walked forward and tapped the edge of his desk twice. He looked up. She pointed to her mouth. He waved dismissively. ‘Just talk for God’s sake!’

  ‘Salamander,’ she said. ‘It was him. Not her.’

  He studied her face, then the screen, then closed it again.

  ‘Sergei and I are coming with you to London.’ She held up her hand before he could open his mouth. ‘I have a plan. You need one.’

  He drummed his fingers again. ‘Do I want to know what this plan is?’

  ‘All they need to hear is that there is a plan. You have a crack team. Who can work with MI6. In this type of crisis, that’s as good as it gets.’

  He surveyed his bare desk, then looked up towards the portrait. She moved into his line of sight, blocking his father from him.

  He pressed something under his desk, and waited. There was a knock and the assistant entered. Nadia noticed how the young girl looked at the colonel, a spring in her high heels as she entered, lip gloss added since she’d last seen her. Not that he seemed to notice.

  ‘Miss Laksheva will be joining me on the plane.’ He glanced at Nadia. ‘Economy. Next to the commander. See to it.’ He said no more, and the assistant disappeared, eyeing Nadia before she did so.

  Don’t worry girl, he’s all yours.

  ‘The doctor will see you before you leave.’ He bent his head towards the wastepaper bin, where her dosimeter lay. ‘It won’t be good news,’ he said, for the first time his voice devoid of its usual bluster and self-importance.

  ‘Anything else?’ she asked.

  He tapped a forefinger on the desktop. ‘The sub. A team of saturation divers is about to enter it.’

  ‘Pretty dangerous, even for saturation divers.’

  He shrugged, and she understood. They’d either volunteered or had been volunteered. Another one-way dive. ‘I hope they find something worthwhile,’ she said.

  ‘We’ll see.’ He opened his laptop and began typing. She watched him. Damaged goods. And yet her and Sergei’s success lay to an extent in his hands.

  She left his office and closed the door behind her, and approached the pretty young receptionist. ‘I’m to see the doctor, apparently.’

  The assistant pointed without looking at Nadia. ‘Lift to floor seven, then turn left, second door on the right.’ She raised her head, looked Nadia up and down, then chewed her lip. ‘Are you and he…? Are you –’

  ‘Not in a million lifetimes.’ Nadia glanced at the door to his office, then back to the assistant, and knew what Katya would say. Maybe it wasn’t such a bad idea; it could get the colonel back on form. ‘Naslajdaysa momentum,’ she said to the assistant, and walked to the lift.

  As Nadia waited, she glanced back down the hallway to the colonel’s office. As the lift doors opened, she saw the assistant knocking on the colonel’s door.

  Carpe diem.

  ***

  The doctor bellowed ‘Enter,’ and Nadia walked into a perfunctory light brown wallpapered office with an upholstered examination bench, a strong flexible standing lamp, a mosaic of backlit pearl squares for studying X-rays, and a no-nonsense iron desk. The bespectacled greybeard asked her name and only then lifted his head from his papers. ‘Ah,’ he said, his voi
ce shifting from impatient surgeon to concerned grandfather.

  Not good.

  ‘Sit, please.’

  She didn’t, and he let it go, standing up himself. He walked around his desk and perched on one corner. As if ready to catch her if she fainted.

  She’d rehearsed this, boiled it down to the only clinical questions that mattered.

  ‘How long – symptom-free, and with symptoms?’ She cleared her throat. ‘No bullshit. Brutal works best for me.’

  He regarded her over the upper rim of his glasses. ‘Symptom-free? Some nausea and vomiting for sure. Your dose was 200 rem. Exactly. Right on the border between sickness with some chromosome damage, and fatal in about thirty per cent of cases. It rather depends if you ingested anything we haven’t been able to detect. All those bullets, radioactive dust in the air… It could have gotten into your lungs.’

  She thought about all that running, all that hard breathing. Most of her bullets had found flesh. Then she remembered her ricochet shooting spree.

  Shit.

  ‘If the latter, days, maybe a month. But you could be one of the seventy per cent, if you’re lucky.’

  She was never lucky. Not once. Maybe Lady Luck was storing it for her when she really needed it. Yeah, right.

  ‘What symptoms should I watch for?’ She kept her voice level.

  ‘Your symptoms are already quietening down. They will stop for a time. Perhaps for good. But if they start again…’ He folded his arms. ‘Once you vomit blood, even a drop, then you have about six weeks, the last two of those will be in hospital, trust me.’

  She did, though she had no intention of a lingering death on morphine. Her father had shown her the way.

  On the outside she remained calm, though taut. Inside was a different story. Inside…the war had already begun… Despite herself, the question passed her lips.

  ‘No radical treatments, experimental drugs, camel-urine magic cures?’

  He smiled. ‘I see you’ve done some homework. No. You can always consult others, but if I were you I would put your affairs in order, and go on holiday.’