“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.
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.”