At least, Smin thought grimly, his wife and younger son were out of it. He had passed them through the checkpoint himself, in their own car, not twenty minutes before the order had come to let no more vehicles through.
But nearly fifty thousand other people were still in the town of Pripyat.
When someone thrust a plate of bread and Army soup in front of him, Smin realized that it was well past noon and he had eaten nothing since he arrived at the control point, well before daybreak. He wished he could put his head down, just for a minute, close his eyes—
But it would not be a minute. The aching weariness in every bone, the sullen throbbing that was beginning between his temples — no ten-minute nap would heal those. So Smin did not put his head down. Instead, he got up from his meal he had picked at and walked out the door, because he had heard the sound of a helicopter approaching.
Could it be the Air Force, arriving so quickly? It wasn't. It was a little two-man craft, like that of the major general of militia, and the man getting out of it was the Director of the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Station, T. M. Zaglodin. He spoke deferentially to Istvili, the man from the Ministry, before he turned to Smin. "Well, Simyon Mikhai-lovitch," he said angrily. "I am called away on business for a few days, and a fine mess you make!"
What the Director had to say meant nothing to Smin. In any decision-making sense, he no longer mattered. He had not been present when the first decisions had to be taken, and now that the men from Moscow were on the scene, nothing he, or Smin, decided would be final without ratification by them. Smin ignored him. "Comrade Istvili," he said, "I request a decision on the question of the urgent evacuation of all unnecessary personnel from Pripyat."
Istvili raised his hand. "The buses are already on the way," he said, but he didn't seem interested in the subject. He was peering curiously at Smin's face. He said soberly, "Comrade Deputy Director, I think you will have to leave these matters to us now."
— Smin scowled, and the sudden, sharp crack of pain at the corner of his mouth informed him what Istvili meant better than any words. He touched the spot. When he brought his finger away he was not surprised to find it damp with the fluid from a broken blister.
Istvili had already turned away to order an ambulance for Deputy Director Smin. "Ambulance?" Smin protested. "There is work that I must do here! Why do I need an ambulance for a blister?"
"Not for the blister," Istvili said gently. "For what caused it. What you will do now is what the doctors will tell you to do, in Hospital Number Six. You're relieved of your duties, Deputy Director Smin." He turned to Zaglodin, his face hardening. Then he paused, looked back at Smin and added, "Good luck."
Chapter 15
Although the Soviet Army soldier Sergei Konov was born in Tashkent, he is both Russian and Muscovite by ancestry and upbringing. He does not remember anything about Tashkent. He doesn't even remember coming to Moscow with his parents when he was two years old. He remembers very well leaving it when he was ordered up for his military service in June of 1984, when he was twenty, because he did not at all want to go. Konov has not been a good soldier. He did not want to be a soldier at all, since he didn't like any of the possibilities that suggested. You could be sent to Afghanistan and die there, you could go to Poland and have the Solidarity girls shun you; you could, at the very best, have to spend all your time doing dull and arduous things for a couple of years, with no chance to put on the beautiful Wrangler jeans and join friends in the Blue Bird nightclub off Pushkin Street, or listen to Beatles and Abba tapes in someone's flat until daylight.
But what Konov wanted had not mattered. There was no way to get out of it, though he had tried. The entire jar of American coffee powder he had forced himself to brew and drink just before his examination by the military doctor had certainly made his heart pound, but the doctor had not been impressed. All he had said was,
"Less coffee, please, Konov; you will serve your country better if you sleep at night."
Konov has a reputation in his unit as a sloppy soldier. He has deserved it. He doesn't get along very well with most of his comrades, few of whom are Slavs like himself (and none, of course, Byelorussians, since the Byelorussian Republic is where his 461st Guards Rifle Division is based.) He avoids all the details he can — pretty successfully now that he is a fourth class soldier, with his discharge not far away and thus in a position to make the juniors do his work for him.
He has one ambition, and that is to avoid being sent to a punishment battalion before his time is up. Since Konov was in the summer 1984 intake, his term of service will expire exactly two years later, on June 12, 1986. He knows that date well. He has been looking forward to his demobilization date for exactly 684 days so far, and as he bumps along in the Army truck to his new assignment, he calculates that that date is (he looks at his watch) now just 66,240 minutes away.
Konov didn't know that Chernobyl was the name of the place they were going to on that Sunday afternoon in April, the one day in the week that should have been their precious own. Konov didn't know anything at all about where they were going or what they were supposed to do. Neither did any of the other twenty-odd soldiers in his truck, bouncing along a country road at a hundred and thirty kilometers an hour, until they stopped at a crossroads and were ordered out of the trucks.
They straggled down from the truck to relieve themselves, lined up along the edge of a field of winter wheat, exchanging with the soldiers from the other trucks the same guesses and denials they had been exchanging with their truckmates for the past two hours. No one had any facts. None of the units was even complete. The 461st Guards Rifle Division had been put on alert at two o'clock that afternoon and the units that were in camp ordered to be on board the trucks with full gear at fifteen minutes before three. "It can't be the Americans attacking," said one, "because we'd be going east, not south."
And another said, "Americans your asshole. It's the fucking Ukrainians. They've found another Cossack bandit to lead them, so they're trying a revolt." And another still was certain it was the Chinese, sneaking over the border from Iran — or the Afghans, bored with shooting down Soviet troops in their own country and now invading — or the Martians; and it wasn't until the sergeant came trotting up to shout at them that they got any information at all. Then it wasn't immediately helpful.
"Assholes," he yelled. "You should all piss on the east side of the road — the west is where you're sleeping tonight!"
"Sleeping here, Sergeant?" called one. "You mean we're going to be staying in this place? What are we here for?"
And the sergeant waved a hand to the distant pillar of smoke on the southern horizon. "You see that? That is what we're here for, and you'll all be damned lucky if you ever live to see anything else."
It was just his way of talking, Konov's comrades reassured one another.
But an hour later, when they were in the town of Pripyat, Konov was no longer so sure. Some of the militiamen guarding the approaches had called to the soldiers, and the words they used were scary. Atomic explosion. Out of control. Worst of all, People are dying here! And no one seemed to think that was an exaggeration. And then they were all issued light little aluminum things that looked like fountain pens. The men turned them over curiously, and when they were told that these objects were called dosimeters and their purpose was to measure how much dangerous radiation each of them might receive, the mood of the soldiers became quite thoughtful.