Meltdown Read online

  Happy to be hidden behind the opaque lenses of the sunglasses, he let his eyes explore the redhead’s curves from behind. She was exquisite, quite well proportioned even if she was a bit skinny for his tastes. If there were more time, he might introduce himself and invite her for a drink.

  Not today. Today he must rent a car and drive halfway across this enormous country to make a pickup before he could really get down to business. Perhaps he could find some companionship once the job was finished. That day would come very soon. And when it did, Samael was due for a long vacation. This operation would make him wealthy enough, though he wasn’t doing it just for the money.

  In the last year, the United States’ commitment to Israel had cooled considerably, and he doubted the current government understood just what was at stake there. Even in this age of global interconnectedness, America enjoyed its delusion that it could protect itself by withdrawing from the battlefield and retreating to its own shores.

  Samael Berg intended to shatter that false security and to show America just how vulnerable she was.

  4

  Near Chernobyl, Ukraine

  THE ANCIENT LADA COUPE rattled along, straddling the place where a center line had once been painted on the otherwise deserted road. On both sides, the countryside was in full bloom, taking its first full breaths of the warm air after yet another long, hard Ukrainian winter. Though the land was verdant and level—perfect for farming—no plow had touched it in decades. Perhaps none would ever touch it again.

  Grigor Lychenko hummed to himself as he piloted the car around the worst of the potholes. He was in an uncharacteristically good mood. This was the last time he would ever have to drive this route. The only work he would be doing today would be boxing up the few meager possessions he intended to keep from his office and bidding farewell to his co-workers.

  His passenger, Dimitri Sarkhov, was napping with his head against the side window. The swarthy older man was the janitor at the office complex where Grigor had worked for the last fourteen months. The two men had met only in the last month and recently had agreed to carpool to save on fuel. Despite the brevity of their acquaintance, the man had become a friend—his only friend, he now realized. Dimitri was always interested in Grigor’s stories, and the two men had shared many a beer at local taverns and klubs. Grigor was going to miss him.

  It occurred to him that the first time he’d followed this road had been an even happier day. On that day he’d been surrounded by his wife and two young children. They’d sung songs and waved to the farmers as they’d headed for their new home. He thought hard for a moment. That was in…1983. Yes, that was the year. Everything was different then.

  Back then, the road to Pripyat was wide and new, as were many of the cars. As a government scientist, Grigor’s job had been to go wherever the USSR sent him. He had used every contact he had to get himself transferred to the military laboratory near Chernobyl. It was so much nicer than Moscow. Instead of being surrounded by grimy streets clogged with traffic, his family would be living in one of the jewels of Soviet social engineering, a nearly new city of fifty thousand surrounded by undulating wheat fields, right on the shores of the mighty Dnieper River. The streets were orderly and spacious, the air was clean, and there was even an amusement park being constructed in the center of town.

  His work was to be important, as well. Grigor’s wife said he’d sounded like a little boy when he’d given her the news. “I’ll be the lead scientist in the lab! And the project is so important I am not even allowed to speak of it!”

  What he could not tell her was that they were creating a new form of rocket fuel, one so powerful and efficient that it would catapult the Soviet space program so far ahead that her rivals would never be able to compete.

  His wife had gone to work as a librarian at the large school building near their home, which allowed her to look after Myra, their school-aged daughter, and kept their infant son, John, from ever having to spend the night in the huge state-run nursery. That made them both happy, since Grigor couldn’t bear the thought of his little one lost in that sea of wooden cribs along with the children of all the night-shift workers from the plant.

  Life went on happily for two years, even as Grigor was called to Moscow more and more to report on his team’s progress.

  That’s where he was when the accident happened.

  When the reports came on television that there had been a fire at Chernobyl, Grigor hadn’t been especially worried. There were fires and small accidents there all the time. Everyone knew that the reactor was poorly maintained. Then news arrived that the town of Pripyat had been evacuated. Nothing serious, they said. Just a precaution for the good of the workers. Those workers, he found out later, had been told to take only their identification and a change of clothes as they were loaded onto buses for Kyiv.

  Then he’d received a cable that his family was in the hospital there.

  Grigor went immediately to the train station in Moscow and tried to get the overnight to Kyiv. But no trains were going that direction. By the end of that horrible day, he was nearly apoplectic.

  It was two full weeks before he was able to return. By the time he arrived at the hospital, his wife and beloved son were dead. His daughter was clinging to life, gravely ill from radiation poisoning.

  He later found a friend from Pripyat who told him the awful story of what had actually happened. On the night the fire occurred, many of the residents of their apartment building had gone up on the roof to gaze at the beautiful blue glow emanating from the plant less than a kilometer away. What they couldn’t have known was that they were staring directly into the unshielded reactor core—each of them receiving a lethal dose of radiation in the process.

  In the following days, the rest of the scientists he’d had charge over, all of whom had to cross within one hundred yards of the reactor on their way home from work that night, also dropped dead of the exposure, one by one.

  Grigor had never returned to his home in Pripyat. He spent every ruble he had saved and pulled every string he could think of to be given permission to take his daughter to a special camp that had been set up in Cuba for children affected by the disaster. Once there, he secured a job with a Cuban pharmaceutical company and battled depression with alcohol as his Myra lingered for five years before succumbing to lymphoma.

  That was when he’d met Adela Fernandez, a no-nonsense Cuban policewoman who had awakened him out of a drunken stupor one night in Havana by dumping a bucket of ice water on him. For some reason, she took pity on him and drove him home instead of to the cárcel. Miraculously, they became friends, then lovers. Adela was as saucy and unpredictable as his wife had been staid and unadventur-ous. She was just what he needed. As far as Grigor was concerned, this fiery cubana had raised him from the dead.

  It wasn’t long after that, as they lay on the beach one night, staring at the stars, that Grigor remembered the ITEB.

  Iso-Triethyl Borane was the additive they’d been experimenting on in his lab in Ukraine. In more than ten years of alcohol-fogged depression, he’d never considered that the stockpile they’d kept at the lab might still be intact. Working in pharmaceuticals, Grigor knew how valuable the chemical was. And he was the only surviving member of the team. So if the ITEB was still there, safely hidden underground in the lab, and he could find a way to get it out…he could be a very rich man. He remembered how easy it had been to convince Adela to leave Cuba and come to this desolate place. Chernobyl.

  He took a job inside the “dead zone” researching the effects of long-term radiation exposure on various materials. He knew full well that, in the process, he was subjecting himself to doses fifty times higher than the average person received, even though his office was situated in the actual town of Chernobyl, more than eight kilometers from the site of the accident. In fact, the job required him to work only two weeks at a time, then rest for two weeks to lessen the risk.

  That was how he’d regained access to the dead zone. He n
ever returned to Pripyat because he knew that doing so would tear open the wounds that had only recently begun to heal. But he did return to the lab. Under the excuse of taking samples near the reactor, he found the crumbling entrance and descended the dank, rusting stairs to the bunkerlike laboratory. He found the lab looted by vandals.

  His hopes soared, however, when he found the stockpile of ITEB just as it had been in 1986. Apparently the vandals had left the tall metal cylinders alone, figuring they were too heavy to haul back up the stairs. If only they’d known what the chemical inside was worth.

  Though it was backbreaking work to get the heavy tanks up to his car, little by little Grigor began smuggling the chemical back to his flat in Kyiv, while Adela looked for a buyer.

  There had been many obstacles to their success, but that was all behind them now. Grigor had officially quit his job, and the final payment was safely in his bank account. While he still had some gambling debts to settle, the money left over would be enough for him and Adela to move to a tropical island, buy a home, and do as little as possible for the rest of their lives.

  Grigor had finally attained his dream: to know luxury like only the privileged few. The journey to get here was painful and at times desolate—like this road—but the destination was finally in sight.

  He reached over and shook Dimitri. “Wake up, my friend. It is a beautiful day, and you have yet to congratulate me on my retirement.”

  Dimitri sat up and rubbed his stubbly face. “Ech. I still don’t understand why you’d give up such a stable position. The pension can’t be that good.” He picked up a newspaper from between his feet and began leafing through it. “Where will you live?”

  Grigor shrugged. “That is Adela’s decision,” he lied. “All I know is that we’re headed somewhere warm.”

  “What, Crimea?”

  Grigor threw a sideways glance at his passenger. Adela had insisted that they not tell anyone where they were headed. But Dimitri was his friend. Other than Adela, he was the only person Grigor felt he could trust. He grinned. Well, why not? “We’re going to the Seychelles.”

  Dimitri’s bushy eyebrows shot up. “Seychelles? I’d like to see how you plan to do that on a scientist’s retirement. You sure you didn’t win a jackpot or something?” The older man gave him a look that immediately made Grigor regret having said anything.

  Grigor shook his head, careful not to put away his smile. Dimitri waved a hand at him.

  “Bah! I give you six months. Maybe less. You’ll be back here begging for work again before you know it.”

  Grigor’s smile turned to a laugh. He wanted more than anything to brag to his friend how much money he’d made selling the ITEB on the black market. But he restrained himself. Some triumphs were too dangerous to share.

  Kiev

  The Lada was a rattletrap. Its brakes protested as the taxi driver ground to a halt in the shadow of the most monolithic apartment complex Mary had ever seen.

  The ride from Borispol International Airport outside the city had taken forty minutes, and Mary was surprised at how many ornately decorated churches they’d passed as the taxi had wound its way through Kiev. For some reason, that clashed with her view of what this former Communist state should have looked like. But then she remembered that the Soviet Union only went back to just before World War I, and the churches were obviously much older than that.

  The apartment complex, on the other hand, was postmodern socialist through and through.

  The driver grunted, motioning to a dark entrance on the building. Mary hadn’t seen it. It was almost invisible due to the unkempt trees that hung low over the crumbling sidewalk. She could just make out a crude, hand-painted numeral four above the entrance.

  “This is it?”

  He nodded. “Da. Yunosti block. Dneprovskiy district.”

  She paid the driver, then went to exit the taxi, only to realize there was no handle on the inside of the door. So she waited until the driver sauntered around to her side to open it.

  He stood sucking on his cigarette, regarding her with a lascivious smile as she stepped to the curb.

  Mary pretended to know where she was going until the taxi had driven off in a cloud of blue smoke. Then she stopped and regarded the building again.

  Seven stories high, the unpainted concrete tenements seemed to stretch to the horizon in both directions. Even more amazing was that this was only one of several such buildings, arranged like giant dominoes laid sideways. She took a moment trying to count the balconies on one floor of the building in front of her, but gave up due to the overgrown trees that were blocking her view. Nevertheless, there had to be at least two thousand apartments in each building. She shook her head. Unbelievable.

  From the looks of the common areas between the buildings, it would take a good-sized crew of Mexican landscapers about a year to get the green space under control. In fact, if there hadn’t been people coming and going from the buildings, she would have wondered if they were even livable. Several people sat on dilapidated park benches, smoking and regarding her with suspicious frowns.

  She swallowed, then strode past the benches and followed the cracked walkway toward the entrance of the building, hoping the driver hadn’t made a mistake on the address she’d given him. She retrieved her phone from her pocket and scrolled through her text messages until she found the one she wanted. She’d been exchanging SMS and e-mails with Olenka, their Ukrainian agent, for almost a week. Her last message read simply, “4 Lagerna St., Dneprovskiy, Level 4 Door B.”

  Stepping carefully around a rusted-out bathtub that was parked beside the entrance, Mary peered inside and wished she could turn around and go back to the airport. The dimly lit stairwell smelled like an outhouse, but even worse was that it brought to mind that underground bunker in Panama. She shuddered. Was that only two weeks ago?

  The men of Task Force Valor had almost been killed saving her, and the memory of it still felt like a karate kick to the chest. How could they trust her to lead this mission? How could she trust herself? She was bright and tough, but if that wouldn’t make up for her inexperience, she was in trouble. She’d failed in Panama—let herself be ambushed and held hostage by petty thugs. That mistake put the lives of the entire team at risk. She was determined to put that failure behind her.

  But what if it happened again?

  Approaching footsteps jerked Mary back to the present. She whirled to see a short teenage girl with bright purple hair and multiple facial piercings hurrying toward her. Mary stepped aside, and the girl brushed past without making eye contact, then went clomping up the stairs in garish patent leather boots.

  Mary shrugged. Well, if she can do it… She took a deep breath and started up the dank, graffiti-covered stairwell.

  At each landing there were a collection of shabby dark-stained doors, out from under which other smells drifted—most notably ammonia and the smell of some unidentifiable food. These mixed with the familiar sounds of crying babies and blaring televisions to make the building seem a bit less foreboding. On the fourth floor, it took only a moment to find the door she was looking for. A faded 4B was painted beside it.

  Rather than knocking, Mary reached into her pocket and retrieved her phone. She keyed in a quick text message, “PHX AT DOOR,” and sent it. Better to be sure she was at the right place than to pound on the door and find out she was wrong.

  A moment later, she heard someone turning the locks, then the door swung inward.

  Olenka Mankovska stood before her in blue jeans and a gray turtleneck under a fitted denim waistcoat. Her blond hair was long and straight, and her blue eyes shone as she smiled across the threshold. “Come in.”

  Borispol International Airport, Kiev, Ukraine

  The Boeing 737 bounced hard as it hit the runway. Only then did Sweeney wake up. Groggy, he sat forward and raised the window shade, letting in a blast of bright sunlight. He squinted into it and saw a flat, grassy landscape that ended in rows of tall pines. For a moment, he thought
he was back home in Alabama. A closer look showed him that this airport was much too large for home.

  A gruff female voice came over the airplane intercom. Though he didn’t understand a word of what she said, Sweeney immediately remembered where he was: on the very last row of a completely overbooked airplane that had just landed in Ukraine.

  He checked his watch. Zero six twenty. But I never changed my watch when we left Bragg…which means here it’s… He didn’t know.

  He peered over the seat in front of him, trying to catch a glimpse of Rip and John—somewhere way forward of his choice seat. They were supposed to pretend they weren’t traveling together, which was stupid. As if three guys traveling to Ukraine would arouse suspicion. He’d Googled it before they left, and this eastern European country was famous for its “mail-order brides.” Then again, what kind of guy would actually do that? He wondered how many of the men on this flight were headed here for that very reason.

  His own dating life had been hit or miss for the last few years, limited to a few brief relationships that usually lasted just until his next deployment. For some reason, he seemed to attract women who were either incredibly needy or incredibly shallow, or both. Besides, the team had been so busy saving the world for the last few months that there hadn’t been time to think of women, or much else.

  Then there was Mary. Attractive? Definitely. But he was starting to see there was a lot more to her than beauty. Yeah, like control issues. That’s all I need. As much as he wanted to talk himself out of thinking about her, something in him wasn’t listening.