Chernobyl Read online

  All of those things happened in an instant, and then the fourth stage completed the holocaust.

  The graphite that contained the core was now exposed to the open air, with its containment shattered. Graphite is carbon. Carbon burns, even (though with more difficulty) when it is in the dense, poreless form of graphite. Moreover, thick steam from ruptured water pipes now roiled over the hot graphite. This is a classical chemical reaction that is demonstrated every day in high school chemistry labs all over the world; it is called the "water gas" process. Chemistry teachers write the equation C + H20 = CO +H2 on the blackboard for their students, meaning that the carbon and the water combine to produce carbon monoxide and free hydrogen. The carbon monoxide is quite combustible when exposed to air. The hydrogen is explosively so.

  At that point the basic event was complete. The edge of the graphite blocks had begun to burn. All the fires together produced a vertical hurricane of hot gases that carried along with it a soup of fragmentary particles and even ions of everything nearby. . including the radionuclides of the core. Lanthanum-140, ruthenium-103, cesium-137, iodine-131, tellu-rium-132, strontium-89, yttrium-91—they laced the soot of the smoke, mingled with the plutonium and uranium of the fuel elements, spread out in a cloud that ultimately would cover half a continent. The first three explosions wrecked Reactor No. 4 of the Chernobyl Power Station, but it was the fire that carried the calamity over a million square miles.

  There was no longer anything that anyone could do in the main control room for Reactor No. 4. There was nothing left of Reactor No. 4 to control. The wall of meters showed readings that were reassuringly staid or wildly impossible, but they were no longer registering any reality. The only person left in the room was the shift chief, who said, "There's nothing to do here. Everybody else has gone; you might as well get out too."

  "But then, why are you still here?" Sheranchuk asked.

  The man did not look well at all; he was sweating and rubbing at his mouth.

  "Because I haven't been relieved yet," he said.

  Halfway down the stairs again it occurred to Sheranchuk that he could simply have said the words, I relieve you, then, and the man might have accepted the release. But, after all, he was as safe there as anywhere else, Sheranchuk reasoned. In any case, he would not go back.

  At the ground level he could not resist another look outside. There were plenty of firemen present now, from the town of Pripyat as well as the plant's own brigade, and yellow militia cars were arriving with their green lights flashing. Searchlights paled the flames from burning debris and picked out the shapes of firemen on the roofs of some of the buildings. Beyond the milling firemen on the ground was the dark hulk of the plant's office block, looking curiously deserted — because, Sheranchuk saw, all of its windows had been blown out in the force of the explosion.

  Somebody was shouting at him — a militiaman, face black with smoke and sweat. "Hi, you there! Are you all right? Give a hand with these people!"

  Sheranchuk did not stop to think about whether that was what he should be doing, he simply obeyed. He was glad for the order, because an order to follow was better than helplessly trying to decide what to do. For what that was he simply could not guess.

  He helped a fireman to stumble toward the waiting ambulance; the man limped and held one hand to his face. He was not the only casualty already. The doctor who had given him a lift was loading a bundle of charred rags into his ambulance that Sheranchuk would not have thought human if it hadn't been cursing steadily in a faint, high-pitched voice. Three other firemen were coughing as they sat on the cement roadway, waiting for someone to bring them oxygen, or, better still, new lungs to replace the ones filled with smoke. (Why weren't they wearing respirators? Sheranchuk asked himself. But, for that matter, why wasn't he?) Glazouva, the tough old woman who ran the plant's night coffee stand, had managed to stay together long enough to help two of her customers to safety, but when Sheranchuk saw her, she was collapsed under the plaque of Lenin at the plant entrance, sobbing helplessly, not responding to anyone's attempts to talk to her. A militiaman lay stunned on the ground, his hair scorched where a bit of flaming debris from the sky had knocked him out and, likely enough, cracked his skull.

  There was room for only two in the ambulance, but the doctor promised to send more from the Pripyat hospital as he got in to drive away. "And hurry, please!" Sheranchuk shouted after him.

  The next ambulance to arrive, though, didn't come from Pripyat. It was from the town of Chernobyl, thirty kilometers away, and with it came half a dozen new fire trucks. There were more than a hundred firemen on the scene already, the stentorian throbbing of pumps adding to the shouts and the ominous thuds and snaps and crackling sounds from the fires; and in the center of it all, stark and incredible, the splintered walls of what had once been Reactor No. 4.

  Burns, bruises, cuts, contusions, smoke inhalation, heat fatigue, simple exhaustion — put them all together and there were forty or fifty people lined up to be taken away in the ambulances shuttling between the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Station and the hospital in Pripyat, just a few kilometers away. Sheranchuk thought it strange that when the ambulances left the plant they went without sirens or bells, and seemed to take a roundabout way that circled the town before heading directly for the hospital. Was it possible they were being considerate about waking the townspeople up? He stood amid a tangle of hose lines, his mind weary of questions, pondering that irrelevant one.

  "Hi! You! Get back behind the lines, you're just in the way here!" A brigade commander was shouting at him as a new fire truck, from one of the farm villages, tried to inch its way through the congestion to take station with the others. Sheranchuk shook his head, trying to clear it. What was the thing someone had said? People still unaccounted for, somewhere inside the plant?

  Well, that at least was something he could do. He retreated toward the gate, slowly, until the fire commander wasn't looking at him anymore, then hurried to the nearest entrance to the plant. Exactly why he did that Sheranchuk would have been unable to say. It was partly to see if there was anyone who needed help getting out, partly because he just couldn't stay away.

  Inside the building the noise from outside dwindled, but there were new and worrisome sounds. He could hear the creaks and thuds from what was left of Reactor No. 4, and an irregular throbbing that bothered him. The building he was in was attached to the turbine hall shared by Reactors 3 and 4, and it had not been left untouched. The walls were seamed with huge cracks. In places whole sections of paneling had fallen out, and these he had to dodge around. The floor of the hall he trotted along bulged in places, and was littered with fluorescent light fixtures, fire extinguishers — fire extinguishers! — and odds and ends of unidentifiable things that had been shaken off the walls and ceilings by the blast. Most of the windows here, too, had been blown out, and broken glass crunched under his feet as he raced from door to door in the halls. A nasty, choking chemical-smoky smell was everywhere. It made him cough as he trotted along, stumbling in the gloom because only a few emergency lights were still going.

  Most of the doors were tidily locked for the weekend. When he flung others open, he shouted inside to see if anyone were there, but there were no answers. He was on the fifth floor of the building when he began to think he was accomplishing nothing productive with his time.

  He stopped and considered. It did not occur to him that he was being courageous, only that he might be doing something that had no purpose.

  The irregular throbbing was still there. He listened, frowning, one hand against the vibrating beige wall of the corridor. It took a moment to recognize that what he heard was the sound of turbines still running in the hall that served both Reactors 3 and 4.

  Its control room was only two stories away, and Sheranchuk took the stairs on a dead run, arriving breathless in the room. There were only three men there, the shift chief and two operators, and they turned to greet him with angry expressions as he burst in. He stared around th
e room incredulously. The immaculate control room was dirty. When he gripped the back of a chair to steady himself, sooty dust came away on his fingers. "What's going on here?" he demanded.

  "The devil knows," the shift chief snarled, waving a hand at the instrument wall. The lights were flickering, but Sheranchuk could read the indicators.

  Startled, he shouted an obscenity. "Be careful! You'll have this one off too!"

  The supervisor rasped furiously in return, "Screw God and your mother, both What are we supposed to do? First that cow Number Four blows up, then we try to stabilize our own reactor, then we get the order to evacuate the whole plant at once! So we begin to shut this one down — then they countermand the order and it's keep the working units working, boys, we need the power."

  "But Turbine Six—" Sheranchuk began, waving a hand at the hydraulic pressure meters.

  "Turbine Six your mother's ass! They've all gone mad! Your pipes have sprung a leak, plumber!"

  Instinctively Sheranchuk picked up a phone to call the pump control room, but, of course, there wasn't any sound from the instrument; its cables, too, like most of the others in that building, had been fried somewhere along the line. Sheranchuk didn't wait to argue. He went down the stairs faster than he had come up, nearly falling half a dozen times in the gloom. When he reached the pump control room, he almost expected it to be empty, but at least one of his people was there — the pipefitter they called "Spring," Arkady Pono-morenko. "You're not an operator!" Sheranchuk said accusingly.

  "There's no operator here," the football player explained softly, shy and deferential even now. "I was told there was damage to the pumps, so I came to take a look. Look, Leonid, the pressure is dropping; I've tried to cut in another pump, but still it falls."

  "We have to have pressure," Sheranchuk snapped. "Here, let me see." He shouldered the pipefitter roughly out of his way, glaring at the intractable pressure gauges before him. But Spring had been right; of the main pumps all were already engaged, though three of them did not seem to be operating at all, and the pressure in the system was slowly creeping downward.

  Sheranchuk rubbed a fist across his eyes. Outside he heard someone shouting, but he paid no attention. "We'd better have a look," he said. "There's probably no power down below; is there a light here?"

  "I've already got it out," said Spring eagerly, holding out a hand torch.

  "Come on, then!" But just outside the door a fire brigade commander was hurrying toward them shouting.

  "Is this the place where the plumbers are? Look, you two! We've got some kind of flame going that we can't put out, somebody said it's yours."

  "Flame?" Sheranchuk repeated. Then, understanding, "Oh, the hydrogen flare! Yes, of course, it only needs to be turned off—"

  "Then come along and do it!" yelled the fireman.

  "I'll do it," the pipefitter volunteered. "It's only a matter of turning a valve, after all, and then I'll come back to help

  you."

  He didn't wait for permission. He simply pressed the torch into Sheranchuk's hand and loped away with the brigade commander. Sheranchuk put the matter out of his mind. It was the hydraulic system that was his business, not a simple flame that only needed to be shut off like the stove in his wife's kitchen.

  Five minutes later he was standing on the bottom step of the flight that led down to the basement, shining the light into a steamy gloom, appalled at what he saw.

  The hydraulic shock of the explosion had gone completely through the return-water system. Every pipe on the floor had been neatly severed at the joints, the flanges that linked the units together opened like flowers. The water that should have flowed through them back into the systems of Reactors 3 and 4 was pulsing slowly out of the opened joints to add to the steaming, centimeters deep pond on the floor of the underground pipe hall.

  Sheranchuk's first rational thought was that Reactor No. 3 had to be shut down. If the return-water system was breached, at some time not very far in the future, the pumps would have nothing to send through the core of No. 3 but air, and then No. 3 would join No. 4 in blowing up. His second thought was that the person with the authority to order the shutdown was Chief Engineer Varazin, wherever Varazin might be. He reached those conclusions slowly and painstakingly; but his body acted without waiting for a formal decision. Long before he had concluded that he must find Varazin he was already out of the building, running along in the dark night away from the hullabaloo at the fire, heading toward the door of Reactor No. 2.

  The door was more than a hundred meters away and, even running, Sheranchuk had time to notice that there were bright stars in the sky and a scent of something green and flowery— lilacs, again? — in the air. At this end of the great joined structures the smoky smell was gone, sucked away by the strong wind. There was nothing, Sheranchuk thought detachedly, to keep him from going on running, straight ahead, over the fence if he had to, and away.

  Of course, he did nothing of the kind. When he came to the door he grabbed for the knob.

  The door was locked.

  Sheranchuk shouted angrily, but once again his body acted without waiting for instructions from his rational mind. The door at the end of the block would be open, though with a guard to keep intruders away.

  The door was indeed open, and with no guard in sight. Sheranchuk pounded up the stairs, pausing only at the fifth level to cross quickly over to the No. 1 turbine room (no, no one there, though the turbines were howling peacefully away) and to peer into the refueling chamber over the No. 1 reactor. It was empty, too, and quite normal in every way to the eye, with the great crane squatting silently in one corner. No one was in the crane's control room, either, but Sheranchuk had not really expected to find Varazin there.

  He was breathing quite hard by the time he got back across the building and up to the main control room for No. 1 Reactor.

  Varazin wasn't there either. The six people in the room were the normal nighttime crew. They looked pretty strained, not to say scared, but they were carrying out their duties in the business-as-usual way. "Varazin? No," said the shift supervisor. "Someone said that when last heard from he was heading for Pripyat, but I didn't see him myself."

  "Could he be in Number Two?" Sheranchuk fretted. "I'd best run over there and see—"

  The shift chief looked astonished. "As you wish, but wouldn't it be better simply to telephone?"

  "Telephone?" Sheranchuk blinked at the strange idea, then recollected himself. And indeed, the phone in Control Room No. 2 was picked up at the first ring, though Varazin was not there either. The shift chief for No. 2 volunteered that Khrenov had stopped by a litde earlier to urge them to stay at their posts, but Khrenov was no use to Sheranchuk. On the chance, he tried to ring No. 3, but its lines were still out of order.

  "I'll have to go to Number Three," he groaned, and was gone before anyone in the room responded.

  At the stairs he realized there was an alternative to seven flights down and seven back up again. The alternative was to cross the roof of the building.

  But that was not to be either. As soon as he opened the door to the roof a fireman shouted at him to go back. Indeed, there wasn't any choice. All across the broad expanse of roof joining the reactor buildings was a spattering of bonfires, some tiny, some huge. Firemen were limping about in the softened waterproofing of the roof, trying to get hoses on them all at once, but as soon as one fire was out another would start up. At the entrance of the stairs for No. 3 Sheranchuk saw a curious sight picked out in the searchlights of the firefighters: a sort of black fountain, half a meter high, dark droplets flung up and cascading back down to the source. Smoke was rising from it, and as he watched, it burst into flame when the chunk of white-hot graphite that had buried itself in the bitumen finally ignited the stuff.

  It would have to be seven floors down and seven back up again, after all — only now, because he had made the extra climb to the roof, it was eight each way.

  When at last, sobbing and coughing for breath,
he got to the main control room for Reactor No. 3 he saw that the two operators had become six, as volunteers came in to replace the absent ones. But the shift chief was obstinate. No, Chief Engineer Varazin was not here, nor had he been since the explosion. Yes, granted, there was something wrong with the turbines and the water system. But no, positively no he would not shut his reactor down.

  "Do your mother! You must" Sheranchuk gasped. "Are you crazy? Do you know what will happen when the water runs out?" But the engineer, his face a frozen mask, was shaking his head.

  "We have no orders!" he said.

  "Orders! I order you!" Sheranchuk shouted.

  "In writing, then, if you- please," said the engineer, ludicrously firm, "for I will not take the responsibility of failing to fulfill our plan, with only four days to go until the end of the month." And incredibly, comically, Sheranchuk found himself scribbling a written order for which he had no authority at all—I direct that Unit No. 3 he placed at once in standby mode—before the man would stand aside and allow the operators to get on with their work. Only two operators now, Sheranchuk noted; the others had fled. The two remaining, cursing and swearing, labored over the boards until a series of thuds, almost lost in the constant noise of fire and firefighting, told them that all the boron rods were firmly socketed.

  "What are you doing, Sheranchuk?" asked a gentle, sorrowing voice from behind him.