Only you must be quick."
"I will, Senior Lieutenant Osipev."
"And then you get the rest of the day off. Well," the
lieutenant sighed, "you have my permission to volunteer, so get on with you then, Konov. The armored car is waiting to take the cleanup squad to the plant."
Konov wasn't the only volunteer. There were fifty others standing uneasily about in the top floor of the plant, just under the roof. It was the first time most of them had been inside the actual buildings of the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Station itself, and they were wary about touching anything, even about being there at all. When they were all gathered, the sergeant looked them over dispassionately. "We don't have any use for loafers," he told them. "You've got to move quick, do your job, jump back inside, and that's it. Otherwise you'll be as dead as the lad that's still inside there. And we don't have suits to fit freaks. If you're over a hundred kilos or under sixty-five, drop out now."
Six or seven of the soldiers fell out, most of them scowling— though some of them, Konov thought, were frowning more with relief than disappointment. The promise of a whole day off had sounded attractive, especially after a week of shoveling rubble, but up here it all began to sound a lot more serious.
The training was as simple as the requirements. When they had made their way to the last stairway to the roof— walking briskly all the time, sometimes running as the sergeant warned them past points of high radioactivity — a major looked them over, shook his head, and turned them over to a different sergeant. "Line up!" the noncom commanded. "Count off by fours! All right, you first four! Find a suit that fits you, put it on, make sure it's tightly closed or you'll never do your mothers again."
The suits were clammy, like rubber diving suits, and heavy with the lead they contained. "Don't fart in your suits, lads, think of the next man who'll wear it," the sergeant cautioned the first group. "Now the boots — lace 'em up all the way! The helmets. . The respirators — sure, a hundred other soldiers have been sucking the same masks, but just think of it as kissing your girl!" And then, before he had time to think, it was the turn of Konov's four.
Up the stairs to the roof on the double—"Go!" the major shouted — burst out the door, grab a lump of graphite the size of a woman's ass (hot, too! Thank God for the lead-lined gloves) — heave it over the side of the roof — another — another— another — and all the time the major yelling off the seconds, forty, fifty, sixty—
When Konov's four were inside again the major grinned. "Sixty-one seconds for the last man. You've done well. Now, off with you, and the brave ones can come back tomorrow and do it again."
And actually Konov thought he might. His dosimeter said that he'd picked up less than half a roentgen, and it was certainly more interesting than shoveling the dirt the bulldozers had missed.
It was also more useful. When the armored car had taken Konov's group back to the abandoned collective farm that was their headquarters, Konov wheedled a cup of tea from the cook sergeant and wondered what to do with this day off he did not particularly want.
To throw lumps of hot radioactive graphite off the roof of the plant so the bulldozers could scoop them up and cart them safely away — that was useful. Exciting, even, for those lumps had once been part of the very core that had exploded and caused the whole disaster. Frightening, a little, too, but it was as the lieutenant had said: if you were quick and followed orders, you would be all right — unless, of course, you stumbled and fell, or unless you left a seam open in your rubber-lead suit, or unless something else went wrong.
But nothing had gone wrong, and the day, really, had just begun. Struck by a thought, Konov counted on his fingers and realized that it was a Saturday. That was the Soviet soldier's day of freedom — when you weren't called out for a surprise inspection, or a twenty-kilometer forced march, which you were once or twice every month, anyway. It was the day when the soldier could sleep, or play football on the parade ground, or even go into town and see what the local girls were up to — but what could you do with a day off here, anyway? You couldn't even leave the old cow barn that was their barracks without putting on the radiation garments, and who could play football in a breathing mask? Even if there had been anyone else to get up a game with!
Konov knocked on the door of his lieutenant's quarters.
"Private Konov reporting for duty, Senior Lieutenant Osipev," he said, standing at attention.
The lieutenant looked startled. "Didn't you understand me? You have the rest of the day off."
"Yes, Senior Lieutenant Osipev. I wish to return to duty."
"What, are you suddenly addicted to shoveling dirt? Most of the men are raising dikes today."
"As the lieutenant wishes," Konov said agreeably.
Osipev peered at him curiously for a moment, then shrugged. "Oh, well," he said, "There's a truck going to Pripyat with more oil for the sprayers. You can go there, but be quick about it. The truck's ready to leave."
"Thank you, Senior Lieutenant Osipev," Konov said. As he marched away, he could feel the lieutenant's wondering eyes on his back.
Actually, that was the detail Konov liked best, to go in among the high-rises of the ghost town of Pripyat. That was a task of trust and importance. The vanished inhabitants couldn't protect their belongings from looters or weather or radiation; it was Konov's duty, and Konov's pleasure, to do it for them.
Today's job was a little different. The orders were to take a spray tank into Pripyat, to oil down all the patches of exposed earth that the trucks might have missed. He didn't go alone; there was a buddy system enforced, so they could watch each other — after all, the temptation to pick up some abandoned treasure might be too much for even a soldier to resist.
His partner was Miklas the Armenian, short, dark, angry at the world and especially at the Army that had taken two years of his agreeable young life — the second worst soldier in the detachment until Konov had vacated the bottom spot for him. But as soon as they were by themselves, they flipped a three-kopeck coin to see who would carry the radiation counter— Miklas got it — and then, to get the job done with faster, walked in opposite directions.
It was hard work. Konov was sweating at once inside his coverall and hood, but he was meticulous. He sought out and poked his long-handled spray into every corner of the garden plots (dead tomato vines and grape) and floral plantings (wilted stalks with buds that would never blossom through their thick coating of oil).
Looked at in one way, what Konov was doing was destruction. Where he saw green life, he killed it with his spray. Where a missed corner of black earth showed through the greasy film, he covered it at once with deadly oil. He didn't look at it in that way. He was wielding the surgeon's knife, he reasoned. He killed here to prevent a worse death somewhere else, and so he was painstaking at poking his spray behind dead shrubs, under wooden steps, into every corner that might have been overlooked.
It took him an hour or more to finish the grounds around a single building, and there were half a hundred high-rise apartments in Pripyat, not to count the parks and school yards and open squares and offices and stores. No matter. Not one centimeter was going to get by Sergei Konov. Nor did he neglect his collateral duties. All the time he was spraying he was alert for the sounds or sights of unauthorized others in the town.
There were, of course, some who had a right to be there, for he and his partner were not alone. Two other teams were spraying in other areas, and there were the big orange trucks that rumbled through now and then to water down the roadways one more time. But when he turned a corner of a building and saw a smaller truck standing there with its motor running and its back flaps up and no one in sight, he had one sudden thought: Looters.