Checkmate Read online

  “You’re nervous,” he said to Elena.

  “Wouldn’t you be?” Elena puffed and paced. Twenty-seven, she was tall and slender, with auburn hair held in a loose ponytail. “What I’ve been doing for your country is about information. I give information and they take it. They’ve never sent anyone here. Why would they send anyone here?”

  Elena Androtov was a biologist with PRIA, or the Pripyat Research Industrial Association, which managed the thirty-kiliometer exclusion zone around the now-infamous Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant. Worried that the Ukrainian and Russian governments weren’t fully sharing what they knew about the ongoing effects of the Chernobyl disaster with the world, Elena had walked into a U.S. consulate while on vacation in Bulgaria and offered to be a window on what she and her colleages were really learning inside the Exclusion Zone.

  Ideology, Fisher thought. It was one of the four MICE. The reasons why people offer or agree to spy for a foreign agency usually fall into one of four categories: Money, Ideology, Compromise, or Ego. Elena had never asked for money or recognition, nor was she under duress. While the CIA was grateful for her information, none of it was earth-shattering. Her handler had repeatedly reminded her she could quit at any time, no questions asked.

  Fisher understood her apprehension at his sudden apperance. For the last six years her handlers had simply accepted her data with a simple “Thanks, make contact when you have more.” And now, inexplicably, she was being asked to play tour guide to some mysterious secret agent.

  “How long have you worked here?” he asked. He knew the answer, but talking helped.

  “Six years. I came right after university. I wanted to help.”

  “Have you?”

  “You tell me. How many people do you think died because of Chernobyl?”

  “The official count was thirty-one.”

  Elena snorted. “Thirty-one! Twice that number of firefighters died within five minutes of reaching the scene, charred to a crisp by gamma radiation. Poof! Gone!”

  “How many, then?”

  “Over the last twenty years, just counting Ukraine and Belarus, I’d say two hundred thousand. So I ask you: How can I be helping when the whole world still believes thirty-one?”

  “Why don’t you get out?”

  “I’ve got another year on my contract,” she replied, then seemed to relax slightly. She took a drag on her cigarette. “Then maybe I’ll leave. Leave Ukraine.” She looked up at him. “Maybe I’ll come to America.”

  It was more a question than statement.

  Fisher said, “Maybe I can help you with that. But for now, you need to get me inside the Exclusion Zone. Get me in, and I’ll do the rest.”

  “Oh, really? The Exclusion Zone. Okay, James Bond, what do you know of the Exclusion Zone?” Not waiting for an answer, Elena pointed up the road. “Just over that hill is the checkpoint. Chernobyl is another thirty kilometers beyond that! Thirty kilometers! That’s . . . that’s . . .”

  “Eighteen miles,” Fisher said.

  “Eighteen miles. Another fifteen kilometers past that is Ghost Town.”

  “You mean Pripyat?” Before the disaster, Pripyat had been an idyllic city of fifty thousand where most of the Chernobyl workers and their families had lived. For the last two decades it had been deserted.

  “Yes, Pripyat. That’s what the disaster did. That’s how bad it was—is. I’ll take you there. You can feel the ghosts. They walk the streets.” Elena laughed and muttered to herself, “Thirty-one people. Hah!”

  “You’re pretty passionate about this. Were you always?”

  “Oh, no. Just like everyone else, I’d believed the official reports. Why would our government lie about something like that? They’re here to protect us. I was naive. I came here and my eyes were opened. Yours will be, too—if you want to see, that is.”

  “I do.”

  “Good.” She checked her watch. “Get back in. We need to go.”

  31

  ELENA drove for another few minutes, then, as Fisher had asked, pulled over again. “The checkpoint is one kilometer,” she said. “You remember where you’re going?”

  Fisher grabbed his rucksack from the backseat and got out. “I remember. I’ll meet you there in fifteen minutes.”

  “Fifteen minutes.”

  He shut the door, patted the car’s roof, and she drove away. Her headlights disappeared into the mist. He shouldered the rucksack and walked down the embankment into the marsh. He pulled out the OPSAT, double-checked his map, then settled his trident goggles into place, switched to NV, and started jogging.

  HE and Elena would face two checkpoints. The first one, placed at the outer edge of the thirty-kilometer Exclusion Zone, was manned by guards drawn from the Ukrainian Army; every soldier was required to spend six weeks guarding the zone.

  No car was allowed to enter the Zone, lest it be contaminated. Outsiders were required to park their clean vehicles in the checkpoint parking lot, then walk through, where they were logged in and assigned a “dirty” vehicle from the motor pool.

  The Inner Ring, eleven kilometers from Reactor Number Four, was guarded by a second checkpoint, where visitors were again required to trade cars—dirty for even dirtier—and change clothes. Civilian clothes, which would be decontaminated, sealed in plastic bags, then returned to the first checkpoint to await the wearer’s return, were exchanged for dark blue coveralls, plastic boots, gloves, and white surgical masks.

  According to PRIA, the use of the zone cars was not hazardous to humans, but their introduction to the world outside the zone might have “unforeseen ecological consequences.”

  TEN minutes after setting out, Fisher came to a line of scrub pines and stopped. A gust of wind whistled through the trees, causing the branches to creak. He pulled his collar up against the chill.

  Whether by chance or by choice Fisher didn’t know, but at least at this entrance, the tree line represented the outer ring. Irrational as it was, he wondered if things would look and feel different inside the zone. Was the grass rougher, more brittle? Were the leaves on the trees withered, trapped in in some endless radioactive autumn? Did the water smell different? He knew better, but such was the nature of radiation—an invisible rain of poison that left nothing untouched. Including the imagination.

  He forced his mind back on track.

  A half mile to his west was the first checkpoint. He slowed his breathing and listened. In the marshes sound traveled well, and after a few seconds he heard the distant chunk of a car door slamming, then voices speaking in Ukrainian. Another visitor coming or going, Fisher thought. Probably the latter. By now, Elena would already be through the checkpoint and waiting at the motor pool.

  He stood up and started picking his way through the pines.

  After a few hundred yards, the trees began to thin and he could see gray light filtering through the branches. He reached the edge and stopped. Ahead lay a gravel parking lot filled with dozens of cars and trucks. A single sodium-vapor light sitting atop a pole in the middle of the lot was the only illumination. As Elena had predicted, the ever-flirtatious checkpoint guards had assigned her her favorite car: a bright red 1964 Opel Kadett. Fisher could see her silhouetted in the driver’s seat.

  From habit, he waited and watched for another ten minutes. He wasn’t necessarily concerned about her trustworthiness, but she’d been spying for the CIA for six years—a lot of time in which suspicions can be raised and investigations started.

  Staying within the tree line, he circled the parking lot until satisfied no one else was about. He walked to Elena’s Opel and got in. She put the car in gear, backed out of the lot, and started driving.

  “What took you so long?” she asked. “Is everything okay?”

  “Everything’s fine. I’m just not as fast on my feet as I used to be. Getting old.”

  “Old? Rubbish. You look fine to me,” she said, concentrating on the windshield.

  “Thanks.”

  “You’re welcome.” She tappe
d her finger on the steering wheel. “Are you married?”

  “No. You?”

  “No.”

  They drove in silence for five minutes, then Elena said, “Have you ever had borshch? Real Ukrainian borshch?”

  “I don’t think I have.”

  “I make wonderful borshch.”

  “I’m not even sure what’s in it.”

  “You start with pork stock, add beans, beets, lemons, vegetables, sorrel leaves, vinegar, strained rhubarb juice, garlic. . . . It’s delicious. I’ll make it for you.”

  “Where do the vegetables come from?”

  She smiled. “You mean do I grow them in the zone? No, they’re from from the outside. Kiev.”

  “Okay.”

  “It’s only a few hours befor sunrise. Do you want to go to the inner zone? I assume you’d rather do your skulking at night.”

  Fisher had the documentation and cover story to explain his presence if apprehended, but he preferred to avoid all contact with the authorities. He’d allotted himself three days inside the Exclusion Zone. More than simply a safety concern, he needed to do the job and get out. With a U.S. Navy battle group on its way to the Gulf of Oman, events would begin moving quickly. Iran would send elements of its own Navy to meet the battle group. Tensions would mount; shots would be fired.

  “How do you know I’m a skulker?” he asked her.

  She glanced sideways at him. “You have the eyes of a skulker. Kind, though—kind eyes.”

  “To answer your question: Yes, night would be best.”

  “Good. We’ll go now. You really should see Pripyat. I can show you things you won’t see in pictures.”

  Sightseeing wasn’t part of his mission, but he had the time—and the curiosity. “Drive on.”

  IT was only fifteen kilometers, or seven miles, but along the way they passed east of the village of Chernobyl on the banks of the Pripyat River, which at the time of the accident fed the plant’s cooling pond.

  Elena arced around Chernobyl to the east, passing through dozens of villages, all abandoned save for a few hundred die-hard farmers who’d returned despite the government’s warnings. Elena translated the Cyrillic signs as they drove: Yampol, Malyy Cherevach, Zapol’ye—one by one they appeared and disappeared in the Opel’s headlights, wooden farmhouses and sheds and barns, many of them crumbling, overgrown with foliage and moss, fences so coiled in vines and underbrush they leaned at wild angles to the ground, structures so primitive Fisher had little trouble imagining himself transported back a hundred years.

  “This is surreal,” Fisher said.

  “This is nothing. Just wait.”

  AS they drew closer to the city, farmhouses and barns gave way to smaller buildings, made mostly of gray concrete and faded brown brick. The signs were all in Cyrillic, but there was something universal about the structures: a gas station, a grocery store; a bank. . . . Soon the scrub pines and marshland gave way to vacant lots and paved intersections.

  They approached Pripyat from the west, so Fisher’s first glimpse of the city’s skyline was backlit by the first hints of sunlight on the horizon. Great rectangular blocks of buildings, tall and narrow, short and squat, rose from the terrain. In twilight they were dark and dimensionless, as though painted on the skyline by a movie set designer.

  As they entered the city limits and the horizon brightened, details began to stand out.

  Pripyat was in many ways a typical Soviet-era city. The structures, from apartment high-rises to four-story schools and office buildings, were built in gray cinder block. Everything had an almost Lego-like atmosphere, as though geometric blocks were simply dropped into the empty spaces between the streets and then given designations: Apartment Block 17; People’s Bank Number 84; General Office Complex 21. The only bits of color Fisher saw were faded murals painted on the sides of buildings, traditional Revolution-era scenes of Lenin or of iron-jawed, blond-haired men standing knee deep in golden fields of wheat, one hand clutching a sickle, the other shielding eyes that stared at some distant horizon.

  What struck Fisher the most was the utter stillness of the place. If the outlying farms seemed trapped in the 1800s, Pripyat seemed frozen on that fateful day in April of 1986. Cars sat parked in the middle of intersections, their doors still open as though the occupants had simply gotten out and run away. Suitcases and footlockers and wheelbarrows piled high with clothes, pots and pans, and framed pictures lay strewn on the sidewalks.

  Just like in Slipstone, Fisher reminded himself.

  They passed an elementary school. The playground, once a clearing surrounded by trees, had been reclaimed by weeds and bushes. A jungle gym rose from the undergrowth, its steel frame choked with vines; a raised play-house in the shape of an elephant with a slide for a trunk was a nothing more than a rusted hulk. The school’s doors stood yawning—shoved open, Fisher imagined, by fleeing children and teachers. As the school disappeared in the car’s side window, Fisher glimpsed a child’s doll sitting perfectly upright on the rim of a sandbox.

  This, he decided, is what nuclear Armageddon would look like.

  “Is it all like this?” he asked.

  “Yes. And it will be for the next three hundred years. It’ll take that long for the contamination levels to fade. I come here sometimes, just to remind myself it’s real. But never at night. I never come at night.”

  “I don’t blame you.”

  Next they passed a six-story apartment building, another gray cube lined with balconies that ran the length of the structure. With only a few exceptions, each balcony door on the sixth floor stood open. It took Fisher a moment to understand why. These apartments faced southeast—toward the power plant. The upper floor would have offered an unobstructed view of the reactor’s explosion and subsequent fire. He imagined women in housecoats and children in pajamas standing at the railing watching the spectacle, not yet realizing what had happened. Not knowing an invisible cloud of cesium was already falling on them. Below, many of the balconies a faded number had been painted in red or orange.

  “What are those?” Fisher asked.

  “It wasn’t until the next morning, after many of the children had left for school, that the evacuation order was given. People were told to mark their balconies with the number of their evacuation bus so if loved ones returned home, they would know.”

  “My God,” Fisher murmured.

  “Have you seen enough?”

  Fisher nodded, still staring out the window.

  32

  THEY drove south for ten minutes before Fisher saw the first sign they were approaching Chernobyl itself. In the distance an obelisk rose from the marshlands. It was the plant’s smokestack, Elena explained. As they drew closer, Fisher could see the stack was painted in faded red and white horizontal bands. Beside it stood a crane that he guessed was being used for nearly constant rebuilding of the Sarcophagus, which had over the years begun to crack and crumble.

  Twelve kilometers from the plant, Elena veered off the paved road and onto a gravel track that wound through a copse of stunted pine trees. After a few hundred yards, she turned into a driveway. She pulled to a stop before a ranch-style bungalow painted a washed-out yellow. Like the farmhouses Fisher had seen in the outlying villages, the bungalow was encased in a labyrinth of vines that snaked up the walls, along the eaves, and around the front porch’s post, like snakes frozen in mid-slither.

  “PRIA’s headquarters is just inside the inner zone,” Elena said, getting out. “Moscow built it about a year after the disaster. Of course, we all spend as little time there as possible.”

  “Who does this place belong to?”

  “Me, now. Back then, a local party boss from Kiev. When the plant was first build, Moscow ordered bigwigs to take dachas here, to prove the reactor was safe. Officially, all the PRIA scientists are supposed to live in a block of renovated apartments south of Pripyat.”

  “I saw them.” Fisher grabbed his rucksack from the backseat. “Not very cozy.”

 
“Yes, lovely, aren’t they? This place is better. The outside isn’t much, but the roof doesn’t leak and the insulation is good. Plus, it wasn’t in the plume.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “The plume of radioactive dust. Most of it was blown west and then north, toward Belorus. We’re on the east side of the plant. Come on in.” She started walking. She realized Fisher wasn’t following, and turned back and smiled. “Relax. You see that?” She pointed to what looked like a weather vane jutting from the roof. “It’s a dosimeter; I check it twice a day. Trust me, this is one of the cleanest places in Chernobyl.”

  “Guess it pays to be a biologist,” Fisher said, and started walking toward the porch.

  “I’m very careful. I would like to have children some day.”

  SHE directed Fisher to the spare bedroom, where he dropped his rucksack, and then he joined her in the kitchen. She was crouched before the open door of a woodstove, shoving sticks into a growing flame. She shut the door and stood up. “Sit. Tea will be ready in a few minutes.”

  She got a loaf of black bread and a tin of blackberry jam from the cupboard and laid them on the table. She chose an apple from the windowsill, washed it, then sliced it into a bowl.

  “The water comes from a new artesian well,” she said before he had a chance to ask. “I test that every day, too.”

  Fisher said, “Sorry. This takes some getting used to.”

  “Don’t apologize. I was the same way when I first came here. I didn’t want to touch anything. I even found myself holding my breath without realizing it. It’s a natural reaction.”

  They ate breakfast and then Fisher helped her clean up. “I’ve got to go into work for a few hours,” she said, wiping her hands on a towel. “I’m running an experiment on a three-headed cattail.”

  Fisher squinted at her, wondering if she were pulling his leg.

  “I’m serious,” she said. “Almost all the cattails around the reactor’s cooling pond are mutated. Believe me, those are some of the tamer changes we’ve seen. You should see some of the carp they pull out of the pond.” She sucked her lips and crossed her eyes. “Ugly, like that.”