Philip Hemplow: Sarcophagus

She was standing beside him before he noticed her. He took the phone away from his ear, and all-but snarled at her. “What do you want, Cox?”

Victoria didn’t reply. Her attention was fixed on the phone. Its screen was black. It wasn’t even switched on.

She didn’t have time to worry about her apparently-unravelling colleague for long. By the time she had eaten some bread and a bowl of okroshka , the e-mails had started flooding onto her phone; then came the calls.

An hour later her schedule for the afternoon was already full. Conference calls with Octra, in which most of the talking was done by lawyers. Back-channel conversations with her contacts at the IAEA. Frantic discussion about the chances of a criticality excursion if the reactor’s fuel mass came into contact with melted snow. At five pm she was due to explain the situation, in person, to the Ukrainians. A meeting with a melange of government agencies had been arranged, and she was to put herself at their disposal.

The assorted generals and deputy ministers had no intention of entering the Zone of Alienation, of course. They were descending on the Radioecology Training Centre in nearby Slavutych instead, a discreet distance from the capital, and away from nosing journalists. Victoria unpacked her trouser suit and got Osterberg to issue her with a travel pass. Slavutych was on the other side of the lake, which meant workers commuting there from the Zone had two choices: they could either drive for four hours around the southern end of the water and back up the east shore, or they could go northeast, across the southernmost tip of Belarus, shaving three hours off the journey. The pass would enable her to bypass Customs when she reached the Belarusian border. She dropped a Geiger counter onto the passenger seat as well. The Ukrainian traffic police were notoriously officious, eager to find infractions wherever they could. A Geiger counter ticking away inside a car from Chernobyl ought to be enough to give them pause.

Despite Osterberg’s imprecations to avoid the place, she made a detour to Reactor Number 4 and sat in the car with the engine idling, facing off against a pair of armoured personnel carriers that blocked the road. The sun was setting, already lost behind the thick clouds around the horizon as the sky darkened rapidly to night. Floodlights bolted to a large crane bathed the reactor roof in stark, white light, making it glow like a bonfire in the dusk, enabling the men up there to carry on labouring well into the night. The sight reminded Victoria of eye witness accounts from the 1986 disaster, of the air above the plant glowing as it was ionised by leaking radiation. The light then had been blue, the wintry, auroral blue of ionised nitrogen. Above it, they said, the dust had been red, reflecting back the angry flickering of the graphite fire raging below.

There were other accounts, too. The story of the ‘black bird of Chernobyl’ was widely known. Witnesses had claimed that a black, headless man, with twenty-foot wings, and burning red eyes on his chest, had been seen at the plant in the days before the disaster, then escaped in the explosion. Most of those witnesses were now dead, their genomes shredded by the lethal rays, but they had spoken of the beast swooping and gliding through thunderheads of nuclear dust above the burning plant. Those who had seen it, and lived, claimed to have suffered petrifying nightmares and sinister, inexplicable telephone calls in the aftermath.

It was all bunk, Victoria reminded herself, putting the Patriot back into gear and pulling a U-turn. She’d spent months in the Zone, and she’d never seen a birdman or a Kaptar . The ‘black bird’ had been a stork, the nightmares were post-traumatic stress, and the phone calls—if they had happened—were probably from some Soviet authority trying to manage the coverup. Myths and ghost stories were just peoples’ way of sublimating the true horror. Years ago one of Osterberg’s students had told her that the ‘black bird’ was just an appropriation of a much older story, about a giant headless crow that had slaughtered a military unit during the Crimean war. The tale had unearthed itself from the collective unconscious and done the rounds again.

In her rearview mirror the reactor looked like a stadium hosting a rock concert, its location marked by the eerie corona of light; or like the site of a Black Mass, steeped in unearthly energy. The glow spread down the flanks of the pyramid from the plinth at its apex. The flight of steps leading down from it was a barcode of light and shadow. At its base, the entrance to the thing’s hidden interior was visible as an arch of complete blackness, flanked by ornamental pillars. Mercifully, the giant hieracosphinxes that crouched in front of the temple complex were mere silhouettes; just the suggestion of a threat.

Victoria blinked and looked in the mirror again. No pyramid. No sphinxes. Just the reactor and the APCs and, further away, the hungry maw of the Carapace.

She found that even though she was nervous about the forthcoming meeting she was looking forward to her sixty mile drive. Getting out of the Zone would be a relief, even if it was only for a few hours. Keeping one eye on the road ahead, she fiddled with the radio until she found the World Service. After being sequestered in the exclusion zone she had no idea what might have been going on in the outside world—but the news report failed to hold her attention.

She tried to concentrate on the meeting ahead, and the traps that the civil servants, the lawyers, and the politicians might lay for her. Be noncomittal, she told herself. Guarantee nothing. Just give the facts. Don’t speak for Octra, just speak for yourself.

She tried to rehearse some answers to the most obvious questions that she could be asked, but her attention kept wandering. Names kept intruding on her thoughts. It was a few minutes before she realised that she was semi-consciously evaluating baby names, and forced herself to stop. Biological imperatives be damned. She didn’t have room in her life for a baby. She didn’t have room in her flat for a baby. It would mean turning her study into another bedroom. Although she could always move her desk into the living room, by the bookshelf. No, she reminded herself angrily, she couldn’t—because she wasn’t going to have Malcolm’s baby.

She stepped on the accelerator, driving faster so that she would be forced to concentrate on nothing but the road ahead.

The meeting went much as she expected. The public servants and politicians were planning for the worst, but only insofar as making sure their departments didn’t catch the blame for any catastrophe. Victoria answered their questions through an interpreter, and watched the power games play out. A few of the representatives were keen to transfer responsibility for on-site decision making to the VV , but the VV commander in the room angrily resisted the idea. Everyone was in favour of just hauling the Carapace into position unfinished, and finding some way to upgrade it later. There was a lot of faux-sincere talk about ‘not repeating the mistakes of the past’ which got everyone in the room nodding and trying to look sombre.

After a couple of hours they seemed to run out of platitudes and plots, and sent for their drivers. Victoria escaped before any of them could corner her, one-on-one, and got her SUV out of the car park before the exit was clogged by government cars.

Driving back through Belarus, she was surprised by how reluctant she was to return to the Zone. She had little doubt that the Carapace would work, that it would protect the reactor from the snow. Osterberg would find a way to dismantle the remaining obstructions and get the winches online in time, and all would be well—she was certain. Why, then, did she feel so apprehensive?