Chernobyl Murders (20 page)

Lazlo would follow his orders. But Chkalov knew more than he was saying, and had acted the way he’d seen Chkalov act when officers were in trouble. When he stopped at his apartment to pick up his pistol on the way to headquarters, Lazlo found a wineglass from the night before set upright on the table. He was certain the glass had been on its side when he and Tamara had left for breakfast. He remembered Tamara wiping at a droplet of wine from the overturned glass with her finger. Someone had been in the apartment since he and Tamara left this morning. At the roadblock, after picking up his officers, there were other things adding to Lazlo’s concern.

First, the number of cars coming from the Chernobyl area was on the rise, and occupants spoke of radiation and asked about the location of Kiev’s hospitals. Second, a black Volga was parked off to the side near the roadblock, the two occupants obviously KGB.

Normally this would not bother Lazlo, but with his apartment being broken into and with Chkalov saying less than he knew, Lazlo knew the KGB might be there to watch who came from the north to escape the radiation, or they might be there to watch him.

It was after noon on a Sunday, and Kievians out for their drives in the country were angry. While Lazlo watched his men arguing with drivers, he remembered the question he had saved for the wine cellar last summer. The question he had not wanted Nina or the children or the other relatives to hear.

What’s wrong at Chernobyl?

Several buses came through the checkpoint as the afternoon wore on. Rather than being from the towns of Pripyat or Chernobyl, the buses had picked up people in outlying areas south of the plant. Some said they were out for a Sunday walk when the bus came by. Others said they were on their way to spend a Sunday in Kiev anyway and welcomed the free ride.

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.

“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 apartment 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.