As were most WWII Soviet tankers, Alexi was short and sinewy—the kind of muscle that comes from hard labor. His hands were so calloused they looked like leather.

Alexi set the bowl aside and grabbed a bottle of vodka from the shelf and poured three shots. They all drank. Alexi and Elena talked for a few minutes before she turned to Fisher.

“He’ll talk to you. I told him you weren’t with the government—he doesn’t like the government—and that you’re writing a book about Chernobyl since the accident.”

“Have him tell us the story of that night—the night the soldiers disappeared.”

Elena translated Fisher’s words, then listened as Alexi began talking. She translated.

“He says it was past midnight and he was fishing in the cooling pond beside the plant. He saw an Army truck appear on the road on the other side of the pond and then circle around to the ‘mounds’—the bunker area—but before it got there, the headlights went out and the engine went quiet. A few minutes later another truck appeared, this one from the opposite direction, and parked facing the Army truck.

“The men who got out of the second truck weren’t in uniform, so he got curious. He snuck through the reeds until he could see better. There were the two soldiers from the Army truck and four civilian men from the second truck. They talked for a few minutes; then the four civilians disappeared behind the truck and then reappeared wearing ‘cosmonaut gear.’”

“A biohazard suit,” Fisher said.

“Yes, I think so.”

Alexi kept talking.

“Two of the men were each carrying a big shiny footlocker. They all walked behind one of the mounds. The soldiers stayed behind, leaning against their truck, smoking.

“About twenty minutes passed, and then the four men reappeared from behind the mound carrying the boxes, two of them to each box. They loaded the boxes into the back of the second truck, then stripped off their suits and joined the soldiers at their truck.

“They talked for a few minutes, and then one of the civilians opened the door to the truck, took out a suitcase, and walked back. He handed the briefcase to one of the soldiers. And that’s when . . . That’s when it happened.”

“What?” Fisher asked.

She held up her hand to silence him, then leaned closer to Alexi and put her hand on his forearm. They spoke for a while, then she leaned back and frowned. She turned to Fisher.

“He says after the civilian handed over the briefcase, his three partners drew pistols and started shooting. The first soldier went down, but the second was faster. As he fell, he got off two rounds from his rifle, killing one of the civilians. Then the leader—the one with the briefcase—walked over and shot each soldier a final time time in the head, then reloaded and emptied his pistol into the dead civilian’s face. The three of them dragged the bodies behind the mounds, then climbed into the truck and drove away.

“He says he buried the two soldiers and the civilian in the woods beyond the bunkers.”

“Did you know about this?” Fisher asked.

“All I knew was the rumor: that Alexi had seen the men the night they disappeared.”

“Did he tell anyone about this?”

Elena asked him, then said, “He thinks he did, but he’s not sure. He may be confused.”

“Tell me.”

“He says he told the area commander.”

34

ITtook only fifteen minutes to reach the site Alexi had described. Before they got there, Fisher told her to pull over. He reached up and switched off the dome light, then opened the door. “I’ll meet you on the main road in two hours,” he said.

“Let me go with you. I can help you.”

“You can help me by going home and waiting. I just need to check a few things; I’ll move faster alone. Pop the trunk.”

She did so. Fisher walked back and retrieved the bag of gear Elena had put together for him—a pair of hooded biohazard coveralls, a respirator, goggles, boots, and a double set of gloves.

“You remember how to put it all on?” she asked.

“Yes.”

“And the duct tape? On the wrists and ankles and neck? Make sure you get a good seal.”

“I will.”

Fisher closed the door and Elena drove away. He waited until the Kadett’s taillights disappeared around the bend, then shouldered his duffel and walked into the woods.

FISHERdidn’t think Alexi was confused. He believed every word of the old tanker’s story. Someone had bought their way into the Exclusion Zone and then bought access to one the bunkers, and you don’t buy that kind of access from a pair of privates in the Ukrainian Army, but from staff officers—like an area commander. Whether the man knew his soldiers were going to be murdered, Fisher didn’t know, but according to Elena the commander in question, a colonel, had retired two months earlier and moved to the resort city of Yalta, on the Black Sea.

Alexi claimed that upon hearing the story of the shooting, the colonel thanked him, promised there would be a full investigation, and then swore him to secrecy. Alexi didn’t quite believe him, so he told the colonel the soldiers and the other man had been taken away in the civilians’ truck.

“The civilian he didn’t care much about,” Elena had translated, “but he didn’t think the colonel would do right by the dead soldiers. They were comrades; they deserved a soldier’s burial.”

Fisher could only speculate as to why the colonel left Alexi alive, but he suspected Alexi’s renown in Chernobyl had something to do with it. If two young privates go missing, it’s desertion. If Alexi goes missing, it’s a mystery that locals want solved.

FOLLOWINGhis memory of the map Elena had drawn him, Fisher weaved his way through the darkened woods until he came to a stream, which he followed east until it widened into an inlet choked with reeds and cattails. He was now on the eastern side of the plant’s cooling pond.

He pulled out his Geiger counter and passed it over the dirt and nearby foliage. The rapid tick-tick-tickin his earpiece made his skin crawl, but the numbers were within acceptable range. According to Grimsdottir, his exposure here would amount to three chest X-rays.

Over the tops of the cattails he could see the outline of the power plant. He was a quarter mile from the site of the worst nuclear disaster in history.

The morning after the explosion, rescue workers finally realized they were fighting a losing battle against the fires in the crater, which were being fed by not only by the molten slag of the remaining fuel rods but also by the highly flammable graphite that had sloughed off the casings of the rods. Helicopters were called in to dump neutron absorbants into the pit.

Over the next six days nearly two thousand sorties were flown through the radioactive plume gushing from the reactor. Five thousand tons—some ten million pounds—of lead, sand, clay, dolomite, sodium phosphate, and polymer liquids were dropped into the crater until finally, a week after the initial explosion, the fires died out. None of the pilots who flew over the pit survived the exposure.

Across the cooling pond, Fisher could see the bunker mounds. They were arranged in three-by-three squares, each square separated from its neighbor by a hundred yards. The mounds, which were nothing more than bus-sized shipping containers, had been covered by layers of earth and then topped off with a conrete lid. As with everything at Chernobyl, nature had reclaimed the bunkers, turning them into shrub-covered hillocks. If he hadn’t known what they were, Fisher might have mistaken the mounds for natural terrain features.

He made his way through the reeds until he reached the opposite shore. He was about to cross the road when he heard the growl of an engine. He crouched down.