Andrew Kaplan - Scorpion Winter

“Who says I care?” Shaefer said. Then with a different tone: “Mucho has changed, bro. You still dealing with our Asian amigos?”

Akhnetzov must’ve forwarded his earlier suspicions about Li Qiang and the Guoanbu to Rabinowich, Scorpion realized. The CIA was a couple of critical steps behind.

“It was a surkh fish. You five by five?” he said, using the Urdu word for red that he knew Shaefer would know from their time in Pakistan, meaning the Chinese were a false trail, a “red herring,” and asking if Shaefer copied.

“Romeo that,” Shaefer said, meaning he got it. “So who killed JR? Do you know?” asking who was really behind the assassination of Cherkesov.

“Yes.”

“I’m all ears,” Shaefer said. Scorpion pictured him sitting up ramrod straight in bed, fingers hitting his keyboard to connect to Langley.

“It was an inside job.”

“Inside as in inside Freedom?” The name in English of the Svoboda party.

“You’re getting warmer.”

“Can you prove it? Maybe get us off the hook?” Shaefer asked, and Scorpion could hear the tension in his voice. Washington must be going ballistic over the crisis.

“I need forty-eight hours.”

“Man, don’t you watch TV? We don’t have forty-eight hours,” Shaefer said.

“Find it,” Scorpion said, and hung up. They’d hung him out to dry, and now he was telling them he knew who the real assassin was and there was a chance he could stop the war if they could delay forty-eight hours. They could try, he thought grimly. If there was one thing Washington knew how to do, it was delay.

Leaving the park, he drove north on the P2 highway from Kyiv. Along the way, he got rid of the cell phone and SIM he had used to call Shaefer, tossing them separately in empty fields miles apart. Shaefer had sounded desperate. That could mean only one thing. Washington had decided to call Russia’s bluff.

The day broke cold and gray. By the time he reached the small town of Sukachi, some eighty kilometers north of Kyiv, the road was a beat-up two-lane and traffic had disappeared. The landscape was like the Arctic, an endless expanse of white, the road bordered by rusty fences and dead grasses sticking out of the snow.

He stopped for breakfast at a roadside trailer that doubled as the town’s only restaurant. Breakfast was hrechany, a chicken soup thick with buckwheat, plus tea and black bread. The woman behind the counter told him she had been born in Pripyat, but her family had moved down to Sukachi when she was a teenager because of the radiation. On an impulse, Scorpion bought a bottle of Nemiroff horilka to take with him.

He reached the Exclusion Zone border at Dytyatky. Ukrainian militsiyu soldiers manned a checkpoint that stretched across the main street of the town. He stepped inside the checkpoint building and showed them his passport and InterInform Chernobyl tour receipt and brochure. They had him sign a release in Ukrainian and English stating that he knew that by entering the Chernobylska Exclusion Zone he might be endangering his health. The soldier behind the counter told him it was another thirty kilometers from Dytyatky to the nuclear power plant. There would be a second checkpoint at the town of Chernobyl, ten kilometers out from the reactor. He would have to leave his vehicle there and join the tour. When he returned to Dytyatky, he would be tested for radiation.

Scorpion drove beyond Dytyatky toward Chernobyl. The landscape was empty; only an occasional abandoned farmhouse and snow. He wondered if the snow was radioactive and decided it was. He had the car radio tuned to news in Russian but could only understand a fraction of what he heard.

He was supposed to get a dosimeter to wear when he got to Chernobyl and wished he had it now. A leaflet from InterInform had stated that normal background radiation around the world averaged twelve to fourteen microroentgens. Inside the Exclusion Zone around Chernobyl, the background radiation had decayed over the years to an average of twenty, exposure equivalent to a transatlantic flight. But this was only an average; actual radiation varied greatly from one place to another. The real danger was in hot spots in various locations.

He turned on his cell phone’s iPlayer app to get the news from the BBC. The tinny voice of a British announcer came on.

“The crisis in the Ukraine has grown more serious following Russia’s veto in the Security Council of a U.S.-led resolution for a withdrawal of all military units to a distance of twenty kilometers from both sides of the Russian-Ukraine frontier. The Pentagon announced today that the American military has been ordered to a DEFCON-1 level, the highest level indicating war is imminent.

“In London, the prime minister told Parliament that Britain stands with the United States and NATO in this dangerous hour. Within the NATO alliance, member nations are still debating their response. Both France and Germany continue to express reservations about a military response to Russia’s actions, citing their concern that Ukraine is not an official member of NATO, but only a participant in the NATO Membership Action Plan, and that since the breakup of the Soviet Union, the status of ethnic Russians and the Russian-speaking minorities in former satellite nations such as Ukraine have been issues of contention. The Italian representative, Mr. Vincenzo Cassiani, told the BBC that we may be seeing the end of the NATO alliance.

“In the meantime in the Ukraine, it has been reported that one of the leading candidates for president in the election that sparked the crisis, Mr. Viktor Kozhanovskiy, has approached his opponent, Mr. Lavro Davydenko, with a suggestion that they meet to try to hammer out a joint statement regarding the steps Ukraine is prepared to take to deal with the crisis. Mr. Davydenko was selected as a replacement candidate by the Svoboda party leadership following the assassination of that party’s candidate, Yuriy Cherkesov. So far, there has been no response from Mr. Davydenko’s representatives.”

Iryna, Scorpion thought, unable to keep an image of her naked in bed, her breast barely touching his arm, out of his mind. She was trying to buy him time.

A shape darted in front of the Volkswagen and he slammed on his brakes, just missing it. The car fishtailed and swerved, coming to a stop in a snow pile on the side of the road. He saw a wild boar crash into the underbrush. The boar disappeared in the woods. Radioactive boars, he thought. What’s next?

The four-wheel drive got him out of the snow and moving again to the second military checkpoint at the town of Chernobyl. Many of the streets were overgrown with trees and foliage. It was a small town, easy to find your way around. The Tourist Office was a two-story building just beyond a strange-looking steel monument.

“T he test begin normal,” Denys-Call me Dennis-said, sitting on a table next to a slide projector showing images from the 1986 disaster. “Steam to turbines is shut down and turbines is begin to slow down. At 1:23:40 Operations Engineer Leonid Toptunov is starting ‘SCRAM’; test emergency shutdown of reactor number 4. Power level is stable at two hundred megawatts. Too low. Also, main computer, SKALA, is shut off. Why they go forward with low power and no computer is not clear. What happens now is big controversy, big mystery. We cannot ask either Akimov or Toptunov, because soon both men and everyone in room is being dead from radiation. Toptunov push EPS-5 button; cause insertion of all control rods into core, even manual control rods. Why he do this? Is only for ultimate emergency. We will never know for sure.

“In one second comes giant power surge, more than 530 megawatts. What cause surge? Some say is design of control rods; displace coolant. Less coolant is allowing more fission, thus more power. Another big question: Does power surge come after Toptunov press button or does Toptunov panic at spike in power? Who can say?” Dennis shrugged.