The lights of the helicopter were curious, a red, a white and a light that flashed and made the machine look like some unearthly thing, some vision from a vodka-drenched nightmare. When it became obvious that the machine was going to land here, Sergi Pavlenko straightened his uniform tunic and resettled his hat on his head at the correct angle. He eased the strap that held his rifle into the correct position and stood erect with his heels together, as a proper soldier should.
Now the helicopter’s landing light came on, a spotlight that shone downward and slightly ahead. Pavlenko started. He had never before seen a helicopter flying at night and the landing light was unexpected.
As the light moved toward him, the thought suddenly occurred to him that he might be in the place where the descending machine was going to alight. Galvanized, he scurried back toward the guardhouse at the entrance to the power plant.
Safe in his refuge, he looked across the enclosure at the guard kiosk at the main gate, where he could just see his friend Leonid under the light pointing with one hand and covering his mouth with the other. Leonid would laugh and tease him; he must have looked like a frightened rabbit running from the helicopter.
And now it was there in front of him, roaring like an enraged bear and stirring up a hurricane as it settled onto the grass.
The engines died immediately. The pilot obviously had no fuel to waste.
Five men climbed out. One of them, wearing a dark suit and dark tie, came toward him. Sergi straightened to attention.
“Where is the manager?”
“I don’t know. No one said you were coming.”
“I’m accustomed to being met by the manager of the facility.”
“The telephone from the outside is out of order. It has not worked all night.”
“Well, tell the manager I am here.”
Sergi was at a loss for words. Who was here? Should he ask for identification? The panic must have shown on his face, for the man’s expression softened and he growled, “Just get him out here.”
There was a telephone in his guardshack, a little wooden building that looked as if it had been added as an afterthought right by the concrete wall of the reactor building. It was a rotary dial instrument. Sergi wiped his hands on his trousers before he picked up the handset and checked the list of telephone numbers taped to the wall. The list was so dirty as to be almost unreadable. Control room, number 32. That was the only place in the complex where there would be people this time of night.
The first time Sergi dialed nothing happened. No ringing in the earpiece. The equipment was old and the electrical switches were worn out, like every other telephone system in the former Soviet empire. Still, the only telephone on Sergi’s collective farm had belonged to the manager, an important person, and Sergi had never used it. Having a telephone waiting for him to pick up to call someone — just within the facility, this instrument could not be used to call elsewhere — made Sergi proud. To complain about the quirks of the instrument was an impulse that had never crossed his mind.
Now he used his thumb on the hook to break the circuit, then lifted it and listened for the dial tone. There it was. He carefully dialed the number again. This time he heard the ringing. As he waited he turned and looked at the helicopter and the big red star on the fuselage. One of the passengers was over at the kiosk at the main gate talking to Leonid: Sergi could see them standing together under the light.
A man’s voice answered the telephone.
“This is the main door guard,” Sergi Pavlenko said loudly into the mouthpiece. “A helicopter has arrived. An important person wishes to see the manager.”
“The manager is home in bed. I’m the watch officer.”
“Yes, yes. He is waiting here to talk to someone in authority. It is a big helicopter with many rotor blades.” This fact impressed Sergi; it should impress the man inside too.
Apparently it did. “I’ll be right out,” the voice told him.
Sergi Pavlenko hung up the telephone and turned to report to the man from the helicopter. As he did so the man used a silenced pistol to shoot him once in the head, killing him instantly.
The five men worked fast. The main door had a lock that worked only from the inside. When the watch officer opened it they herded Leonid from the main gate, the watch officer and everyone in the building into an empty office and gunned them down with silenced submachine guns. They didn’t bother to pick up the empty brass cartridge cases strewn about.
They blocked the front door open with a piece of wood and carried in bags from the helicopter.
The reactor was operating at 50 percent power. The man who had shot Sergi examined the control panel carefully, then led the way through the lead-lined door that led to the reactor space.
A nuclear reactor is, when explained to schoolchildren, a very simple piece of machinery — a large tea kettle is the common analogy. True, the first reactor, Enrico Fermi’s pile under the University of Chicago’s football stadium, was indeed simple. But there was nothing simple about the Serdobsk reactor, a liquid-metal-cooled fast breeder. The core was made up of five tons of metallic oxides of uranium-235, plutonium-239, and uranium-238, the breeding material that would be converted into plutonium during the course of the reaction. This material was fashioned into twelve thousand long pins, each less than six millimeters in diameter and arranged with extraordinary precision inside a small core, a hexagonal container only three feet across each face.
The core sat in a cylindrical stainless-steel pot filled with molten, liquid sodium that was cycled through the core by three pumps. Unavoidably the sodium flowing through the core absorbed some neutrons and was converted into sodium-24, a highly radioactive gamma ray emitter, so the radioactive sodium was run through an exchanger where it gave up some of its heat to the secondary cooling system, also liquid sodium. The unpressurized stainless-steel vat that contained the core and the primary and secondary cooling systems was forty feet high and forty feet in diameter. Between the surface of the liquid sodium and the top of the vat was a cloud of argon, an inert gas. Lead shielding surrounded the entire vat. Surrounding the lead was a concrete vault with walls about three feet thick.
Pipes brought the secondary sodium out of the vat near the top and took it to a second heat exchanger, where it was used to boil water for steam to turn turbines, then returned it to the vat. The pipe holes in the vat and the lead and concrete shields were all above the level of the liquid sodium.
The nuclear reaction itself was controlled by dozens of graphite rods that absorbed radiation. These rods were withdrawn from the core to start the reaction and pushed into it to kill it.
The men from the helicopter began with the rods. Standing on top of the concrete vault, they planted a series of small explosive charges designed to shatter the rod mechanisms before they had a chance to slide down into the core. This job took about half an hour.
Still on top of the concrete biological shield, they used tape measures and chalk while the man in charge consulted a sheet of paper in his hand. When the chalk marks were precisely where he wanted them, he personally began placing six shaped charges that would vent their explosive force down into the vat. While he was at it several of the men climbed up the ladder and wandered out into the hallway for a smoke.
One of them came running back. “Colonel, the helicopter is starting!”
“What?”
“Listen.”
Yes, he could faintly hear the whine as the engines spooled up. He stumbled and almost fell running for the ladder. He hurried up and raced along the catwalk toward the control room. He arrived outside just in time to see the helicopter transition into forward flight and move away into the darkness.