The Iceberg - [Richard Mariner 05] Read online

  What he could be sure of, however, was that nobody on the site of the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Station would see daylight tomorrow unless he came up with a miracle now. But he knew he could not act absolutely on his own - or on his own authority. Trailing the phone wire after him like the tail of a dejected dog, he walked into the makeshift hut he was using as a headquarters. The bank of communications instruments it contained looked nothing like a leftover from the Great War. He eyed the young communications officer who had leapt to attention as soon as he had entered and who now stood like a statue beside the humming equipment. ‘Get me Moscow,’ he said at last. ‘I have to speak to the General Secretary.’

  He saw the shock and hesitation in the young man’s eyes. Who phoned Comrade Gorbachev at one o’clock in the morning, even under these circumstances? And why?

  ‘And hurry up,’ snapped the general. ‘Time may be limited.’

  ~ * ~

  The junior communications officer’s name was Ivan Baranov and he spent the next fifteen minutes standing outside the communications hut, dying for a cigarette and trying not to look at the utterly sinister, quietly snarling, dully glowing ruin which towered overpoweringly a mere thirty metres away. Once connection had been made with the office of the General Secretary, Ivan had been summarily dismissed by the glowering general with a curt order against any mental speculation whatsoever. It did not occur to him that the general had no right to tell him what he could or could not think, and he obeyed.

  Ivan had been stationed on the outskirts of Kiev since last autumn, under the command of Colonel Ryzhkov. It wasn’t a long time, but it had been long enough to get to know a few people down here and get a girl friend. Her name was Larisa. She was a student with a slim body, hair like corn and freckles on the bridge of her nose. She had the ability to be deadly serious one second and utterly frivolous the next and Ivan quite enjoyed never knowing where he was with her. The first time they had made love - an occasion treasured in his memory - he had been convinced she was about to throw him out of her tiny apartment right up until the moment she had unbuttoned her blouse and revealed the fact that she had freckles in other places than her nose.

  She was an active Komsomol member and had spent much of the last week, he knew, helping to dredge up the tons of sand from the bed of the River Prypiat, which the heroic pilots of General Antoshchkin’s command had dropped onto the core from their helicopters as they passed mere metres above the billowing flames. Ivan knew the pilots would be lucky to survive and he hoped that none of the lethal radioactivity had seeped down to the river and infected Larisa and her friends. He ached to be able to slip out through the lines of civil guards surrounding the immediate area and go to see her in the worker’s flat in Prypiat she was currently staying in. But things had tightened up a lot since General Gogol had arrived. Colonel Ryzhkov had been transformed into a martinet, there was a curfew and the risks of breaking it had escalated drastically during the last few days since the tanks had showed up. Quite what a squadron of state of the art battle tanks was doing supplementing a civil defence exercise, even in an emergency such as this, no one could make out. Someone had asked die colonel and received a pretty dusty answer. No one had dared ask the general, of course. But there they were, and there were their crews, obviously hand-picked to a man and looking extremely dangerous; and there was the fact that the tanks were clearly fully armed. Speculation was rife but very, very quiet. That was true of the soldiers in Ivan’s unit at any rate. Ivan had mixed with more of the civilians than the other soldiers because he had worked so closely with the general and the general worked with them - up until now - but even Ivan had a limited view of how the nuclear power workers, the atomic experts and all the others were reacting to the presence of the tanks. Also speculatively, he assumed.

  A footstep crunched on the hard ground behind him and he slammed to attention automatically. A tall man hurried past without giving him even a glance. The door into the hut opened and closed. A bar of yellow light fell across Ivan’s face. As it did so, it revealed the profile of the stranger. Ivan Baranov frowned. He had never seen the strange man before and he thought he had seen everyone here, even the tank crews. Automatically, Ivan moved a little closer to the flimsy wall of the hut, but his keen ears could pick up little more than a low hum of urgent conversation. He took a step nearer, only to leap back as the door opened again.

  ‘Wait,’ said the general’s voice, quite clearly. ‘I can phone him from here, it will be quicker. In fact I can phone them both.’

  The door closed.

  Ivan stood at attention, just in case.

  Colonel Ryzhkov appeared within moments and hurried into the hut only to reappear almost at once. ‘What’s going on, sir?’ Ivan ventured.

  ‘We’re clearing the area. You wait here.’

  ‘Yes, sir. What...’

  Colonel Ryzhkov was gone. Very soon, Ivan heard the bustle of large numbers of people moving none too happily away. Then there was silence. He remained at attention, rigid, as though the iron control he was exercising over his body could extend to his terrified mind. He could feel sweat trickling down his neck although it was by no means warm out here. He had never felt so alone and exposed. He knew with absolute certainty that, with the exception of the general and the stranger - and presumably of the two fire fighters and his best friend Mykola Drach who were still over there at the mouth of the sluice - he was all alone in the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Station.

  The lieutenant’s nerve broke. He reached into his uniform pocket and pulled out a cigarette. The bitter black tobacco was just beginning to singe the long cardboard tube of the mouthpiece when the first distant scream made the soldier’s hair stir. It was a long, drawn-out haunting scream of tortured agony, distant but powerful enough to pierce the dull, thunderous rumble of the fire. Ivan had done his stint in Afghanistan and he knew a lot of reasons for sounds like that and he hated them all. The scream came again, bringing to his mind all too vividly the picture of a mujehaddin fighter being crushed to death beneath the tracks of a tank.

  A tank! That was it! They were bringing up a tank and the screaming was the sound its tracks were making on the concrete. His relief that the sound was not issuing from a human throat was so overwhelming that he forgot to wonder why General Gogol had ordered up a tank.

  Ivan had hurled away the cardboard stub and was standing at attention once again when the tank pulled up beside him. He had always considered tanks clumsy vehicles, but as he watched this one coming up to park beside the communications hut, it was as though he was watching the sleekest Zil limousine being guided to the door of the General Secretary’s dacha. There was no more screaming from its tracks and the rumble of its engine mingled with the noise of the fire so that it seemed to move silently. So precisely did the driver guide the massive vehicle that the lieutenant didn’t even feel the need to move out of the way.

  As soon as the tank stopped, its cover was lifted up and back to reveal the head and shoulders of its commander. Ivan gazed up, entranced, as the slim figure pulled itself out of the port and scrambled lithely down. Only then did Ivan realise that the tank commander was a woman. She gave him a glance and a curt nod in passing, then the silence returned.

  The silence underpinned by that sinister, continuous thunder-rumble, as though an earthquake was erupting nearby. Now that he had leisure to stand and think about it, Ivan realised that the ground was, in fact, trembling. Had it been doing that for the last ten days and he’d simply never noticed? Or was the whole thing building up to some kind of climax?

  No, he didn’t want to think about that.

  The door to the hut slammed open and General Gogol came out, with the stranger and the tank commander immediately behind him. The general stopped dead when he saw Ivan. ‘What! Are you still here?’

  ‘Yes, General. The Colonel said—’

  ‘Never mind. Make yourself useful. Tell the people in the reactor building to get over here at once.’ He handed Ivan the old-fa
shioned handset and waved him vaguely towards the hut. Ivan obeyed and got out of the way of the three busy officers. Oddly enough, even on so short an acquaintance, Ivan had no doubt that the stranger held military rank.

  ‘Mykola! Can you hear me? It’s Ivan! The general says you and the fire fighters must come back now. At once. Mykola?’

  ‘I hear you, Ivan. Thank God. We’re on our way.’

  Ivan felt himself nodding, as though Mykola could see him. He was surprised to hear his friend referring to God. Things must be pretty bad over there. Then he thought that ‘over there’ was only thirty yards distant.

  The three officers were poring over a large piece of paper which was spread over the front of the tank. At first glance, it looked as though they were consulting a map or battle plan, but the white paper was in fact an architect’s drawing of the building. Ivan was still gripped by mild surprise that such a thing existed. He was one of those many who were extremely cynical about the manner in which even nuclear power stations were constructed.

  The tank commander had a clear, decisive voice. ‘The angle is perfect,’ she was saying. ‘My gunner should be able to pierce the chamber. Under the circumstances, any fallout from the shell will go unnoticed. So we just have to worry about how much of the building is actually destroyed.’

  ‘Yes, indeed,’ answered Gogol. ‘There is a risk but it’s well worth taking.’ He paused. ‘Any risk is worth taking. We have no option now. If we can drain it, we stand a chance of keeping some kind of control. If it goes into the bubbler pool as things stand, there’s no way to calculate what the damage will be.’

  ‘Not that we’ll be in any position to care,’ the commander observed drily.

  ‘Let’s move,’ said the stranger, and there was no doubting the fact that he was in command. ‘You say you can do it. We know it must be done. We know there is no alternative and no time. That’s all there is to it. No matter what the risks may be, we can’t make things any worse. So let’s do it.’

  The commander scrambled up into her tank like a cat going up a tree and the others turned away. Ivan went cold. Mykola and the fire fighters were still over there! He swung round, his mouth open to remind his seniors, but as he did so, he saw two figures scurrying across the debris-littered wasteland towards them. He stepped forward towards his friend, crossing the line into the forbidden area without thought. ‘Mykola, are you all right?’

  Drach fell into his best friend’s arms and let Lieutenant Popov fall. Popov sprawled onto the ground and Ivan looked around for help. The stranger and the general stepped forward side by side and lifted the fainting fireman between them. No sooner had they done so than the turret of the tank whined into mechanical motion.

  ‘Get behind the hut!’ yelled the stranger, and the five of them hurried off. It was a short, stumbling run to get their chilled and shaking bodies behind the flimsy structure. Ivan made it without too much trouble because Mykola could at least run. The senior officers had more trouble because Popov had not regained consciousness, and his dead weight was obviously unwieldy. As soon as they were behind the building they all crouched down, their backs to the clapboard wall, and General Gogol yelled, ‘Shut your eyes! Now!’

  They had scarcely made it before the flat report of the tank’s gun told them that the commander had fired her shell as ordered.

  There was a flash like summer lightning, which dazzled even those who had clenched their eyes shut. Immediately the thunder of the fire intensified, became overwhelming, grew as loud out here as it had seemed to the firemen inside the bubbler chamber. Popov stirred and whimpered. The stranger clutched him sympathetically. Ivan moved, as if to get up and go to look at what was happening, but Mykola held him back. Nobody could hold back General Gogol from going to see what the result of his desperate plan was. He extricated himself from the tangle of limbs and staggered to his left, having wisdom enough at least to come out behind the tank itself.

  What Valerii Gogol saw was this. The side wall of the reactor building had been pierced by the tank’s shell. A perfectly round hole had been created in the concrete wall, and out of this came a tongue of intense, dazzling blue fire as though a moon rocket was blasting off sideways through the building. Even as he watched, feeling the backs of his eyeballs being destroyed by what they saw, the tongue of blue intensified into white, and a huge arc of white liquid sprang out as though the reactor building had been stabbed to the heart and was going to bleed to death.

  The white arc of liquid fell like a molten Niagara into the wide trench they had dug for the water from the bubbler pool and began to thunder down towards the sand-bottomed drainage lake. With the bright curve of it imprinted on the backs of his streaming eyeballs, Gogol staggered back to crouch behind the flimsy structure of the communications hut once again. The thunder of the burning core began to diminish, only to be replaced by a different, hissing thunder, further away.

  After a length of time he was never able to measure, Gogol blinked some of the brightness out of his eyes and opened them, to perceive a world clouded in white as though a billion spiders had been busily spinning webs over everything. The sight was enough to start Gogol choking as though the webs were smothering him; it was only when the coughing really began to shake him that the general realised that the spiders’ webs were real. They were mist. No, not mist. Steam. Water vapour at the very least. And he knew where it had come from.

  He staggered to the tank and beat against the side of it until the commander thrust her head up out of her trap door. ‘Take me down to the drainage pond,’ he yelled. The commander’s head disappeared, and the tank’s motor fired up.

  Like Ivan Baranov and the majority of professional Russian soldiers of his generation, Gogol had seen active service in Afghanistan. He had served in strategy and intelligence, but he still knew how to ride a tank. He climbed onto the back of this one and rode it down to the outwash of the channel whose mouth lay under the sluice of the bubbler pool beneath the core of reactor Number Four. The banks of the pond were swathed in thick, foul-smelling fog which had a nasty way of reflecting the tank’s battery of headlights. Gogol was no fool; he knew it was almost certain death to breathe the radiation-laden water vapour, but truth to tell, he didn’t really care. He had to know whether or not the plan had worked. That was the most important thing, certainly more important than the life of one general officer.

  He climbed down as soon as the tank stopped and staggered forward to the bank of the drainage pool. He used his hands to beat aside the clouds of steam which still billowed around him as though he was in the hot room of a Turkish bath. The edge of the water came as something of a surprise. He had expected vegetation - rushes, sedge. There was nothing. One moment he was on land, the next he was surrounded by water. No sooner had he registered the fact than his feet slipped out from beneath him and he found himself sitting down up to his waist in warm liquid. The water vapour thinned sufficiently for him to see that the water was unnaturally clear. In the light from the tank, he was able to make out the occasional water-borne detail: perch, exploded and half poached, hanging upside down as though they had been savaged by miniature sharks; a duck, with all its feathers gone, caught in the act of taking off and boiled.

  Dazed and dying, the general slopped himself over onto all fours and looked straight down. No; more than looked. Stared.

  On all fours like a dog, General Gogol gazed straight down through the limpid water of the drainage pond which had been cleared, almost distilled, by the process of boiling. The headlights from the tank glimmered off the still surface of the water and he found himself looking down through two feet of liquid onto a fathomless sheet of black ice. There was no mistake. The bed of the drainage pool was clear and crystalline, apparently frozen down to the depths of the earth. He could almost see his reflection in the dark heart of it.

  His palms and knees seemed to catch fire abruptly and his face had the oddest sensation, as though he was staring down into a furnace, and he realised that the str
ange obsidian crystal beneath the shallow water was not ice after all.

  It was glass.

  ~ * ~

  CONVERGENCE