Janos glanced back at the house and saw that if he went partway down the embankment, he could not be seen from the house. He scanned the perimeter once more with the binoculars, then stepped out from behind the tree, went down the embankment, and silently came up behind the man, who stood halfway up the embankment catching his breath.
Janos took out his pistol, switched it to his left hand, grabbed the man in a choke hold with his right arm, and pushed his pistol barrel into the man’s mouth. “Silence!” he whispered.
The man’s neck was thick and strong, but he did not resist. Only after Janos had him to the ground, the baseball cap off, and what was obviously an AK-47 taken away, did Janos realize the age of the man. Young, with blond hair, and for some reason, more out of breath than a young man should be. Janos looked up toward the house, but it was out of sight.
“Do not shout,” whispered Janos, holding the young man’s collar and pulling him close. “Tell me what you know about the peninsula. Tell me who is out there.”
“No one,” whined the young man. “It is a religious retreat.”
Janos twisted the man’s collar into a noose. “How can it be both nothing and a retreat?”
“Please,” gasped the young man. “We should get away before—”
But it was too late to get away, because Janos felt steel on his neck and a deep voice shouted, “Drop your pistol and rifle, or your head will be gone!”
It was the boss man with the Hungarian accent from the two-way radio roll call he’d heard earlier back at the trailer.
When Mariya arrived at the shoreline north of the house, she heard the man shout and wanted to call out, but knew this would not help. She crouched down and saw the glint of steel from the gun in the man’s hand, its long barrel pointing directly at Janos, and a young man standing and putting on a baseball cap. What could she do without a gun? No gun, and what had she brought? Feeling she could at least throw it or hit someone over the head, she had brought along Janos’ violin case, complete with violin.
Panic had set in. Humorous talk of catching someone off guard by playing the violin or pretending there is a gun inside had gone to her head. But she had seen movement outside the trailer, and when Janos had not returned, she’d needed to do something. She’d had reason to take the violin. If Janos were to see her in the dark, he would recognize the case. Or, if she needed help or needed to warn Janos, she could pluck a string. When she had arrived at the trailer, she’d lifted the towel and seen the other man’s face. And now she stood witnessing Janos’ capture.
Mariya put the violin case down in the weeds and made sure the two other men and Janos were still down the embankment. Then she ran, as quietly as she could, to the house. They would go there. She knew they would have to go there. But they were still down the embankment out of sight and she would be there first. It was the only thing she could think of doing. She glanced in at the side window, and, seeing no one inside, tried the door. It was unlocked. She opened the door and slipped inside.
The muscular young man babbled. “Zoltan, you see me come and go … It is normal … I come and go … Why don’t you answer?”
Zoltan, with a pistol at Janos’ neck and the AK-47 aimed at the young man, mumbled reminders to Janos to not allow his neck to leave the barrel or he would die. They climbed slowly up the embankment, along the clearing, and toward the side door of the house.
At the door, Zoltan said, “You first, Ivan.”
As soon as the young man named Ivan was inside, Zoltan pushed hard with the gun to move Janos through the door. Inside, everything happened very fast.
Ivan glanced off to the side behind the door and seemed to smile. The door slammed. Mariya’s voice was almost calm.
“I will shoot. Do not turn around.”
But Zoltan did turn, like a dancer performing a pirouette. His two shots hit the wall and floor. Mariya’s two shots hit Zoltan in the side and chest. Both guns had silencers, and what Janos remembered most was Mariya making screams in her throat after each shot.
Ivan grabbed a set of keys from a row of hooks on the wall and ran while Janos kicked Zoltan’s gun away from a hand wanting to continue shooting despite the death gasps of its owner and chest blood spurting toward the ceiling.
Mariya ran to Janos, handed him the gun, put her hands over her face for a moment as if to weep, then took a deep breath. “I did it! Thank God it was loaded! I found it in the cabinet.”
Janos hugged her. “Thank God you found the safety.”
As Janos hugged her, a car started up outside and a voice came from Zoltan’s body.
“Zoltan?”
Mariya let go as Janos aimed at the body. It did not move, but spoke again. “Hey, Zoltan.” A different voice. “I heard something. You should have everyone check in.”
Janos ran to the body and reached beneath the coat, pulling the handheld radio from Zoltan’s belt.
“Exactly like the one the man in the trailer had,” said Janos, taking the second radio out of his pocket and dropping it on the body. “I don’t need two of them.”
“Shouldn’t we stop the boy who ran?” asked Mariya.
“We have men to stop. Four more of them.”
Janos held his finger to his lips, took the notebook from his pocket, cleared his throat, recalled the tired sound of Zoltan’s voice and the Hungarian accent over the radio at the trailer. He held the radio close to his mouth to distort his voice and pushed the transmit bar on the side.
“There is nothing here,” he mumbled. “Vlad?”
Mariya stared at Janos, waiting.
After seconds that seemed like minutes, a voice said, “Is it okay a vehicle left?”
“Yes,” said Janos. “It is okay … Dolgi?”
“Okay.”
“Sharaf?”
“Okay.”
“Yuri?”
“Okay.”
“Dmitri?”
He lifted the transmit bar, cleared his throat, answered for Dmitri—who was either chloroformed or dead—in a deeper, more tired-sounding, non-accented voice. “Okay.”
Then they waited, and when no one broke in on the radio, Mariya smiled nervously.
Mariya was still shaking when they left the house and walked along the edge of the clearing toward the lake. She still felt the sensation, the backward thrust of the silenced gun against her hand and arm and even her chest because she had held the gun so close as she’d hid behind the door. She remembered thinking she had been shot; he had fired exactly when she had fired; he had hit her, and she would die.
Now she held the gun again. Janos had made her take it, and Janos had taken his gun from the dead man’s pocket, along with the gun she had thought was killing her. Janos said these guns were more powerful than his gun, held more bullets, and the silencers might be helpful on the peninsula. He also took the AK-47 the young man named Ivan had dropped, along with extra magazines he’d found in the house.
Back in the house, Janos studied the keys on wall hooks, all neatly labeled for the vans and cars parked in the garage. There were no keys labeled for boats. He found forty-five caliber ammunition for the silenced guns in a cabinet and had Mariya empty two boxes into her jacket pockets. He also found a flashlight. Once outside, Janos hid all the vehicle keys under a large rock. Near shore, Mariya saw three inflatable boats tied to a wooden dock.
On the way down the embankment to the lake, Mariya remembered the violin and went back to retrieve it from the edge of the woods. Janos had to stifle a laugh.
“Were you going to hit someone over the head?” he said as they ran out onto the dock.
“I’d play it and scare them to death.”
“Perhaps that wouldn’t be such a bad idea,” said Janos.
Janos placed the violin and guns on the dock and used the night vision binoculars still slung around his neck to look back toward the house. Although he saw no one, the high embankment blocked most of the house. He quickly checked each of the three boats, using the flashlight. “They
all have keys in them,” he whispered. “Here, we’ll use this one.” He stood in the last of the three. “Its gas gauge says full, and there is a spare tank.”
Mariya handed Janos the guns and violin and untied the boat while he studied the starting and running instructions printed in Russian on the motor. He primed the engine, and it started on the second try. Mariya jumped in, pushed them away from the dock, and they were off.
Janos kept the motor at idle as they headed into the vast Kiev Reservoir fed by the Dnepr, the Pripyat, and other tributaries. Looking back, he saw the light in the house, but no movement. He used the night vision binoculars, and still there was no movement. He turned the throttle a bit faster. Back at the Tuzar Camp, the horizon was not as dark as it had been earlier.
“I think the moon will rise soon,” said Mariya.
Janos took out his GPS and turned it on to acquire the satellites.
“What if the boy who ran away goes to a phone and calls the peninsula?” asked Mariya.
“I don’t think he will,” said Janos, accelerating the boat a bit more. “His speech and especially his eyes revealed a need for drugs and escape.”
“He will run away while we commit ourselves. Why do people make certain choices?”
“Do you want to go back?” asked Janos.
“Of course not,” said Mariya. “We both know we could go back to the left bank and drive away. But we will not, because the young people Shved was trying to help are out there. It is the only answer. We have both become displaced persons in Ukraine. If we allow murderers to escape, they’ll come looking for us. It would be against all laws of nature and God for us to turn back.”
Janos reached forward and touched Mariya. “I could not have said it better.”
To the east behind them, the shoreline sunk lower. On the GPS screen, the peninsula stuck out from the right bank like a tongue. Ahead in the darkness, Janos saw the vague shape of the peninsula’s tree line growing into the horizon.
CHAPTER
THIRTY
While Pyotr and Rogoza sat on the sofa, Maxim Vakhabov paced in front of the fireplace. They remained silent when one of Vakhabov’s men came in and briefed the brute quietly in Russian. The man who briefed Vakhabov wore a green overcoat similar to those worn by KGB border guards before the breakup of the Union. During the whispered briefing, Pyotr was able to understand that the men had disarmed what Vakhabov called “boy soldiers,” unloaded their weapons, and grouped them on the beach, where they could be watched. They had also done a head count. The result, including boy soldiers, was fifty-seven young people and twelve “Chernobyl cripples” in a separate building. Pyotr also heard the whispered word “drugged.”
Vakhabov’s rifle leaned against the wall to one side of the fireplace, and he made a point of occasionally reaching out to touch it as he walked past. No shots had been fired outside, and Pyotr felt profound disappointment in the young men, especially Ivan and Vasily, wherever they were. Vakhabov turned on another lamp at the side of the sofa after the guard left, and now he faced Pyotr and Rogoza. Vakhabov’s facial hair was not really a beard; it looked more like the matted-down fur of a raccoon. The skin beneath the coarse beard was pockmarked.
Vakhabov returned to speaking Ukrainian as they had earlier. “I understand, Pyotr Alexeyevich Andropov, you take pride in your given name and your patronymic name shared with Pyotr Alexeyevich Romanov, ruler of the Russian Empire.”
“I am descended from a Marxist-Leninist Russian family,” said Pyotr.
“I suppose you learned discipline from your family,” said Vakhabov.
“Yes, I have succeeded in convincing young people to lend a hand caring for the Chernobyl refugees who suffered most. Orphanages gave them up to my care some years ago.”
Vakhabov scowled. “It is a cover for your trafficking operation! How many stay, and how many go, Pyotr Alexeyevich? How many have gone with you to your bed?”
Pyotr stood, but Vakhabov retrieved his rifle before Pyotr could take a step.
In the total darkness behind her cottage, Sofya Adamivna Kulinich took Lazlo by the hand across a rutted field and into a thick birch forest. During their trek, he thought he heard the buzzing of motors to the east and some shouts, but now it was quiet except for their feet dragging in weeds and underbrush.
She stopped and whispered directly up into his ear. “Careful. It is an electrified fence. Do you hear the buzz in the distance?”
“I heard motors and shouting,” whispered Lazlo.
“I did not because of hearing loss.”
Now Lazlo did hear a soft buzzing. “How do I get through the fence?”
She let go of his hand. “Use your flashlight. But be careful not to aim it up.”
Lazlo turned on the flashlight and saw matted-down weeds and a wire fence consisting of several rows of intertwined wire reaching from the ground to at least a meter above his head.
Sofya pointed north. “This way, before you get to the peninsula’s north shoreline on the Pripyat River outlet, you will see a very old and large tree stump. Do not trip over it. Several meters beyond the stump, the path along the fence goes out around an area of young birch trees. Stay in the dense forest of young trees. You will have to squeeze through them. Do not go beyond the forest of young birches, or you will be at the shoreline where there is sometimes a guard. Hidden near the ground in the birches will be a hole in the fence one can crawl through.”
“Who made the hole?” whispered Lazlo. “Why is it there?”
“Before his death, Tatiana’s husband, Anatoly Nikolaevych, made the hole with insulated tools to allow rabbits through. He was a hunter and had seen dead ones who had tried to crawl through narrow spaces.”
Lazlo reached for her hand, drew comfort from its warmth and rugged softness. “Thank you, Sofya Adamivna Kulinich. I hope I will be able to visit after my mission.”
“You must,” she said, squeezing his hand and reaching up to kiss his cheek. “I know you will do good. But you must be careful.” She let go of his hand and crossed herself. “Go with God … and return with God, because sometimes I am frightened he has abandoned us.”
Vasily carried Lyudmilla fireman style with her face near his ear so blood would not go to her head. Because of her frailty, she was not a burden but rather like a scarf. His AK-47 hanging on its strap from the same shoulder where her head lay was almost as heavy. Although she did not speak, she responded.
“Did you have enough water at my cabin?”
He felt her nod.
“Do not worry. I know a way out.”
Another nod.
Vasily had reaffirmed his decision to take Lyudmilla with him when he heard boats and shouting at the beach. Ivan, although still collaborating with Pyotr, was insane; Pyotr had failed in his attempts to make good out of evil; and, finally, Vasily had seen Father Vladimir Ivanovich Rogoza arrive on one of the left-bank SBU boats in a state of panic. Therefore, he and Lyudmilla would escape west, toward Chernobyl. Or at least he would put her somewhere on the far side of the fence where no one could get to her. After this, he was not sure. Perhaps if he returned…
A shadow came upon him suddenly, rising from the ground near the fence. Vasily dropped to his knees, lowered Lyudmilla to the ground, and shouldered his AK-47. “Do not move!” he whispered harshly toward the shadow. “I have a rifle pointed at you.”
The shadow steadied—not an animal. A man’s voice responded, calm and quiet. “I have a flashlight. I will point it at myself so you will see I am harmless.”
“Do it now!” ordered Vasily, still whispering.
The man was at least sixty, with gray hair sticking out beneath a colorful knitted cap. He tried to smile and shrugged his shoulders. He looked non-threatening. “My car broke down. I took a private Chernobyl tour today … No, yesterday already. I became lost and drove in circles. I apologize if I trespass. Cell phone is useless, and besides that, I am thirsty.”
“You are lying,” said Vasily. “Why would yo
u crawl through a hole in a fence when no building is visible? Why didn’t you knock on a door in Opachychi?”
“I see you carry someone,” said the man. “Can I do anything? You are not a guard.”
“What are you talking about?”
“We both know to keep our voices quiet. You have not shouted or ordered me to go with you.”
“I could still do this.”
“My name is Lazlo Horvath. I have come to the Zone to help someone, as you are obviously helping someone. We are brothers in the night. If you wish to shoot me, shoot me. But I am now going to point my flashlight at the person you have put on the ground.”
When the man pointed the flashlight at Lyudmilla, a woman shrieked from the other side of the fence. “She is hurt! Bring her to me! I will take her to my cottage.”
When the man with the flashlight pointed in the direction of the voice, Vasily saw one of the old women of Opachychi standing on a tree stump with her hands to her face—one of the women he had often spied through binoculars while scouting the peninsula.
“Not so loud,” whispered Vasily. “The SBU guards will hear you.”
“There is only one tonight,” said the old woman.
“How do you know?” asked the man with the flashlight.
“I went to the guardhouse after I left you. He is watching a movie with the sound turned up. The truck is gone, which means others have gone to Ivankiv for all-night drinking.” She turned to Vasily. “Point your gun somewhere else, whoever you are. And give the poor child to me. You will help this man named Lazlo Horvath because I know him to be virtuous.”
Dawn was near. Nadia could see it in the softening of stars. She preferred dawn because at dusk, in the mountains, the insides of the filmmakers had been exploded by Ivan and the others during their attack, some of the insides spattering her costume. Although it had been better living here with Lena, she wished she were back on the streets of Kiev. Perhaps insane men had destroyed everything, even Kiev. Was it war? Had ethnic and religious zealots gone completely mad? Not long before, insane men had come ashore; the peninsula’s young men, who once terrified her, now lay on the beach, themselves terrified, their guns cast aside.
Traffyck: The Thrilling Sequel to Chernobyl Murders Page 33
