Andrew Kaplan - Scorpion Winter

“Time to go,” Scorpion said.

Pripyat,

Chernobylska Exclusion Zone

The danger point would be crossing the empty street and the area in front of the building in full view of Shelayev or whoever was in that apartment. Up till then they kept close, moving in the shadows of the buildings. Scorpion had Dennis shut off the Geiger counter beeper. It helped that they wore dark clothes and there were no streetlights of any kind. To be in this city at night was bizarre; a ghost world of ice and darkness, Scorpion thought, forcing his mind back to the target. He had to assume Shelayev was armed. Unless he caught him by surprise, the situation would go out of control as fast as Chernobyl had.

Scorpion studied the building. There was a drift of snow by the front entrance. He put his night vision goggles on and looked for footprints in the snow. There weren’t any. That either meant there was no one there, which wouldn’t explain the light, or that Shelayev had used another entrance. Scorpion looked up at the apartment on the top floor where they had seen the light. He could see no movement. Nothing. There was nothing for it, he thought. They had to cross the street.

Dennis looked up at the building.

“Maybe I go wait in avto,” he said, meaning the Lada.

“Maybe you leave me stranded here with no way to get back,” Scorpion said.

“I am not liking.”

“Neither do I. You want to give me back the five thousand?”

Dennis didn’t say anything. In his mind, Scorpion thought, he’d already spent that money. He nudged Dennis, motioning him to follow. They ran across the street, nearly slipping on the frozen snow.

Dennis followed him to the side of the building. Keeping close to its walls, they went around to the rear entrance. Through the night vision goggles, Scorpion spotted footprints in the snow by the rear entrance. He heard Dennis breathing as he came up behind him. The obvious choice was to go in the back entrance and up the stairs. But Shelayev was Spetsnaz, he thought. He would likely reason that if someone trained was coming after him, they would come in the back way. They had passed a steel fire escape on the side of the building. Scorpion decided to go in that way. He started back toward the fire escape, motioning Dennis to follow.

“Why we going-” Dennis began.

Scorpion clamped his hand over Dennis’s mouth.

“Zatknis!” he hissed into Dennis’s ear. Shut up.

He looked up the ladder at the metal landings above but saw nothing, then tested his weight on the fire escape. Everything was radioactive and had been rotting for a long time but it seemed solid. He put his finger to his lips, then climbed step by step up the fire escape to the second floor. Dennis followed. Their footsteps grated hollowly on the metal stairs. Too loud, Scorpion thought. If he Shelayev was there, he’d know they were coming. They needed to get off the fire escape. A broken window on the landing was open, and Scorpion stepped through it into an empty apartment and onto a snowdrift. Dennis came in behind him. Scorpion motioned for him to follow.

They tiptoed through the apartment trying to avoid crunching on broken glass and went out to the hallway. Even there they could feel the icy wind. Adjusting his night vision goggles, Scorpion started carefully up the hallway stairs. When he reached the top floor, he paused and peered down the hallway, with its glints of broken glass from a faint glow of light coming from the corner apartment. It appeared empty. No cameras, no surveillance, no wires. He stepped into the hallway but stayed close to the wall, not walking down the middle of the corridor. He sensed Dennis behind him, breathing heavily.

Scorpion stopped at the half-open door of the apartment next to the corner apartment. Shelayev was Spetsnaz, he told himself again. He couldn’t go straight in. He turned to Dennis, put his finger to his lips and motioned for him to stay there. Dennis nodded that he understood. Scorpion pressed his ear against the wall but could hear nothing. If someone was in the corner apartment, he wasn’t moving around. He stepped through the half-open door into the next-door apartment, the Glock ready, walked into an empty room and checked the door to the balcony. It had no glass. Stepping out on the balcony, he peered around the edge of the wall at the corner apartment balcony. It was close enough to jump over, and he could use the balcony wall to help balance himself.

He just started to put his foot on the balcony ledge when he heard a sound behind him. He looked over his shoulder and saw Dennis starting to walk toward the corner apartment. He must’ve gotten bored waiting or he had seen or heard something, Scorpion thought.

“Dennis, don’t!” he shouted, thinking, You stupid son of a bitch as he climbed back into the room. He ran back through the room toward the hallway, catching a glimpse of Dennis as he passed the open doorway.

The explosion flung Scorpion off his feet, hurling pieces of the wall at him.

Krasnoe

Chernobylska Exclusion Zone

The forest was silent except for the sound of the wind. Scorpion shook his head. His ears still rang from the explosion. He had left the Volkswagen on what passed for a road and had come through the woods on foot, stopping at every step to check for trip wires and other booby traps. It was his fault Dennis was dead, he thought. He should’ve kept him out of it. But he couldn’t just leave him, not knowing what Dennis might have done or who he might’ve talked to.

He had found Dennis’s body blown a dozen feet from where the explosion went off. Using his flashlight, he found the trip wire Dennis had set off when he walked into the apartment. From the size of the explosion, it had been hooked to just an ounce or two of C-4, Scorpion calculated. Strictly antipersonnel. The light they saw from the roof of the tall apartment house was lying on the floor. It was an LED that had been on a battered old table until the explosion knocked it over, still connected with a copper wire to a double-A battery. A simple lure, like those used to catch fish at night, and right out of the Spetsnaz manual, he thought.

Except for the light and the booby trap, there was no sign of Shelayev. Scorpion looked around the apartment, checking for more booby traps or surveillance. Shelayev had left the booby trap for whoever came after him. Sending a message: don’t come any further.

He went back to Dennis’s body and fished around in the pants pockets until he came up with the keys to the Lada. He took back the five thousand hryvnia he had given him. Whoever found Dennis would just take it. Damn you, he silently cursed the dead body. Why didn’t you just stand there like I told you?

One thing was clear. Iryna had been right. Shelayev was somewhere in the Exclusion Zone, or he wouldn’t be trying to chase pursuers away. When he did find Shelayev, he thought grimly, he would be ringed with defenses out of the Spetsnaz playbook.

Scorpion stepped out onto the balcony. Shelayev wasn’t in Pripyat. But he had known that when someone came looking, sooner or later, they’d have to check the city, so he set a trap. Scorpion looked out over the city hidden in the darkness. There were no lights anywhere and only one or two stars in the sky, the rest hidden by cloud cover. He saw no movement except for the wind. If anyone heard the explosion, there was no sign of it. He went back to the body, picked up Dennis’s Geiger counter. Heaving his pack over one shoulder, he went back down the stairs and out the back of the building.

Walking down the middle of an empty avenue toward the Palace of Culture, Scorpion heard a sound behind him and whirled into shooting position. At first he saw nothing, and then spotted an odd-looking long-eared owl perched on top of a child’s swing near an apartment building. He let the gun hang down at his side and went on. Being alone in this city at night was like a postapocalyptic movie; Mad Max without even the crazies, he thought. When he reached the Palace of Culture parking lot, he got into the Lada and drove through the city, the shadowy silhouette of the reactor building and the smokestacks and cranes looming above the trees.