“Not a word to your editor about this one,” Jake told him. “But you ain’t the only guy with problems. The Russians just had another nuclear power plant meltdown.”
“Holy…! Like Chernobyl?”
“Maybe worse.”
“Where? Around here?”
“Someplace called Serdobsk, about three hundred miles southeast of here. Now go in there and shut the door and let us work.”
After the door closed Toad turned on the radio. Classical music came out.
“Judith Farrell?” Jake asked.
“I’d bet the ranch, CAG.”
Jake Grafton went to the window and stood looking out. He rubbed the back of his neck, then moved his shoulders up and down. Finally he stretched.
When he turned around he told Toad, “The Israelis sure get their money’s worth out of that woman.”
“Uh-huh.”
Toad was looking at the map spread upon the floor. The wind was going to spread that radioactivity over hundreds of square miles. He was looking now at the villages in the fallout zone. He couldn’t even pronounce the Russian names upon the chart. A great many people from a culture he didn’t know were about to die, and it sickened him.
“Do you believe in God?” he asked Jake Grafton.
“Only on Sundays,” the admiral replied.
“There’s a military base here in this footprint, sir. Petrovsk. Here, take a look. Wasn’t that the base we visited a couple days ago?”
Jake Grafton looked. “Yes. Petrovsk. Missiles with nuclear warheads.”
“They’ll have to evacuate that base, if they haven’t already.”
Evacuate. That meant airplanes, fuel. And what percentage of the base personnel could be carried on the planes?
“Wonder if Moscow will even tell those people that a lethal cloud of radioactivity is coming their way?”
“If only five or ten percent of them could possibly escape, would you tell them?” Jake Grafton mused, his voice so low that Toad almost missed the comment. “What would you tell them?”
A little later he muttered, “A lot of that radioactivity is going to go into the Volga.”
He looked again at the predicted radioactivity levels. The numbers were two or three times worse than Chernobyl. How did people manage to make such horrible messes on this tiny, fragile planet? His finger moved on the map, down the Volga past Saratov and Engels, past Kamyshin, all the way to Volgograd, formerly Stalingrad. The water supplies of those cities would be grossly contaminated. The land. The food supply. Jake Grafton picked up the estimate of the various isotope levels and their half-lives and stared at it, trying to take it in.
And on down the Volga to the Caspian Sea. How much radioactivity could that closed inland ocean tolerate before it became a dead sea?
This was worse than a disaster — it was a nightmare. When the Russian people finally learned the truth, what would be their reaction?
The telephone rang and Toad picked it up. After saying “Yessir,” several times, he replaced the receiver and told Jake, “The ambassador wants you to go with him to the Kremlin. In a couple hours our president will announce that the United States will assist Russia any way it can.”
Jake Grafton took a deep breath and let it out slowly. “So when is the Yeltsin government going public on this?”
“The ambassador’s aide didn’t say. Soon, apparently.”
Yeltsin had no choice. Gorbachev had waited for days to tell the world of Chernobyl and had been excoriated for it. But Gorbachev had been a Communist and Yeltsin swore he no longer was. “Umm,” Jake Grafton said.
“Maybe you’d better wear your uniform, sir,” Toad said gently. “It looks like it’s going to be one of those days.”
“Jack Yocke has just been had by a pro. She conned him good and he’s so anxious for a story — any story — that he swallowed it without even tasting it.”
Toad Tarkington nodded. “I’ll buy that.”
“She may try again.”
“Naw. She’s not that stupid. Too big a risk.”
“When the stakes get this large any risk is justified. Any risk! We’ve got to get to her before Jack Yocke does.”
Captain Herbert “Tom” Collins was the naval attaché. As the senior naval officer he supervised a staff of just three other officers: one a marine lieutenant colonel, one a navy commander, and the other the politically impure lieutenant, Spiro Dalworth. A surface warfare officer with a destroyer command behind him, Collins had acquired a degree in Russian from the U.S. Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, California, while he was still a lieutenant. Tonight Jake recalled with a jolt that Collins’ first assignment after the Naval Academy had been to nuclear power school. After graduating, he then spent his first tour tending a reactor aboard a nuclear-powered frigate.
These days Collins tried to keep track of what was happening in the former Soviet Navy as the ships, planes and sailors were divided between the newly independent republics. The job was impossible. In the past the naval officers had subsisted on a mere trickle of information, mainly what the Soviets wanted them to see and hear — now they were drowning in it. The Russians were showing them everything, telling everything, talking openly about weapons capability, maintenance problems with ships, engines, radars, planes, problems with personnel, training, recruitment, supply, food…everything. If there were any secrets left in the new Commonwealth, Collins had yet to bump into one of them.
Two nights ago he told Jake Grafton, “Today the Russian Navy would lose a fight with the Italians. Honest to God, since the collapse they can’t get food or fuel to steam with. They can’t feed the sailors; they can’t maintain the ships; they got ’em tied up rusting at the pier. A couple more years of this and most of those ships will be beyond salvage.”
Tonight in the courtyard Tom Collins turned up the volume on his portable radio, which was tuned to a Russian station playing American jazz. They were standing in the shadow of the new embassy complex, empty and condemned because it was hopelessly infested with bugs — the electronic kind.
“Isn’t one of your chiefs a communications specialist?” Jake asked.
“One of my two, sir. Senior Chief Holley.” Collins was eyeing Jake’s uniform and the ribbons displayed there. The admiral had just returned from the Kremlin with the ambassador.
“I need to borrow him for a while. Holley and Dalworth.”
“We’re drowning in my shop, Admiral. I’ve got them working twenty hours a day.” Collins and the other military people were using every contact they had to try to discover what the Russian military knew about the extent of the damage from the Serdobsk meltdown. Jake had spent the day helping, trying to analyze information received in dribbles from all quarters.
“I understand. This is important.”
“Aye aye, sir.”
Jake Grafton felt like a jerk. He merely needed two people he could trust — anyone really — and Collins had an important job to do. Still, if he could get to Judith Farrell…
“So what are the Russians saying?” Jake asked.
“Same old story. It’s all Yeltsin’s fault.”
“Is it?”
“Well, there’s no money to maintain reactors and they’re all in terrible shape. An American inspector from the Nuclear Regulatory Commission would have a heart attack if he saw one of those plants, but they’ve been like that for years. This country is too poor to properly build or maintain or operate nuclear power plants. They just don’t have the technical expertise or the trained people.” Collins’ shoulders sagged. “They’re like monkeys with a computer.”
“Nobody over at the Kremlin will even hazard a guess about why that thing melted.”