The Boy from Reactor 4

CHAPTER 65





“THE PLAN FROM here on out…” Nadia said. “Adam. It’s dangerous.”

“No,” Adam said. “The plan is good.”

“It’s really dangerous and unnecessary.”

“No, it’s necessary.”

“The man who’s chasing us is Ukrainian. He’s powerful in Ukraine. Not in Russia. If he were, he would have caught us by now. Let me buy tickets for the flight to New York tonight.”

“No.”

“Actually, it’s New Jersey. United Airlines. It connects through Los Angeles.”

“No. You don’t understand how it is here. Russia, Ukraine, the other Soviet countries—they’re all independent, but they’re still linked. They’re linked by bad governments. We follow my father’s plan. He may be dying, but he’s still smart. He’s never told me a lie.”

“I’m not saying he’s not smart, Adam, but he’s not here now—”

“My father’s plan. We stick to my father’s plan.”

“Adam—”

“No.”

Nadia looked across the street at the airport and sighed. She checked her wrist, forgetting it was bare. “What time is it?” she said.

“Twelve thirty.”

“Okay. We stick with the plan. God help us.”

Four trees stood in front of the modest peach-yellow cement terminal. The grass along the front hadn’t been cut for a year. They entered through a pair of rusty steel-framed glass doors. Two weathered men in plaid shirts and jeans were buying Fanta sodas from a babushka at a small convenience shop. A fourth old man, with his back to Nadia, was chatting up a woman in a uniform at the check-in counter. When the woman glanced at Nadia and Adam, he turned.

He looked like a tunnel rat made of sinew and bone, with a fair Russian complexion. Gray stubble covered his sunken face. A cigarette hung on the edge of his lips. After glancing at Nadia and Adam, he pulled a small white envelope out of his coat pocket and handed it to the woman. After peeking inside the envelope, she turned away. He approached with the swagger of a younger, albeit equally short, man.

“Why do policemen work in pairs?” he said to Adam in guttural Russian.

“Specialization,” Adam said. “One can read, the other can write.”

“Ruchkin,” he said, tapping his chest. Ruchka is also the word for “hand.” “Quick. This way.” He pointed toward a side door with a sign that said AUTHORIZED PERSONNEL ONLY.

They rushed down a short corridor and exited through a sheet-metal door. Power lines ran along a grassy field on one side of the single runway. Two white planes with red propellers sat along the other side. One of the wheels on one of the planes rested at an angle, as though it were ready to break. A red-and-white smokestack dominated the horizon. There was no control tower in sight, though there was a small shack beside the terminal.

A black delivery truck was backed up to the plane with better wheels. A pair of burly young men in army fatigues finished loading it with wooden crates. They nodded at Ruchkin and took off in the truck.

Nadia and Adam boarded the plane. Ruchkin started the engine and guided the plane to the far end of the runway. Pointing the nose toward the other end, he exchanged words with someone on the other end of the radio.

The plane teetered and tottered down the short runway with the speed of a broken-down Yugo. The engine groaned. Nadia bounced on her seat as though it were a trampoline. As the runway ended, the nose slowly lifted in the air and, against all odds, the plane took off.

Ruchkin said something over his shoulder, but Nadia and Adam couldn’t hear him over the engine’s wail. Nadia unbuckled her seat belt and leaned forward.

“Vodka and water in the cooler on the floor,” he said. “Help yourself.”

“Thank you,” Nadia said.

“How did you know my father?” Adam said. “Were you in business with him?”

“No. I was in gulag with him. Nine years.” He turned and flashed a smile filled with gold and decayed teeth. “For bootlegging.”

“Oh,” Adam said. “Were you friends?”

“We ran the Red Cross together.”

“Red Cross?” Nadia said. “I didn’t know there was Red Cross assistance in the gulags. I thought the West was clueless about what went on there.”

“It was. In gulag, control of the infirmary was everything. Who got sent, who got treated, who survived. To control the infirmary, you had to control the doctors. In gulag, Red Cross meant control of the doctors.”

“How did you do that?” Adam said.

Nadia shot him a glance to stop asking questions, but it was too late.

“We bought them vodka, candy, and cigarettes. And made friends with them.”

“Really?” Adam said.

Ruchkin shrugged. “Sure. That didn’t always work. Some didn’t want to listen. That’s where the Red Cross came in.” Ruchkin twisted his face toward Adam. He wore an earnest expression. “But we never killed anyone who wasn’t an a*shole. Except this woman doctor. And even that was an accident…”

Adam looked down and sank back in his seat. Nadia raised her hand to touch him and remembered he had told her never to do so. She pulled it away and looked out the window instead.

Adam didn’t ask any more questions.

The plane never reached a high elevation, as though Ruchkin were purposefully avoiding detection. Half an hour into the flight, a snippet of coastline came into view on the right side.

“It’s going to get bumpy here along the coast,” he said. “But don’t worry. I’ve done this trip many, many times. You know what they call this route, don’t you? Magadan to Chukotka? They call it ‘Gateway to Hell.’”

Four hours later, they landed on a runway at Ugolny Airport, serving Anadyr, the capital of the Chukotka Autonomous Okrug. Anadyr is the largest town in the extreme northeastern part of Russia and the last before land yields to water.

At Ugolny, they never left the runway. Two men hauled two dozen crates from the plane into a large helicopter with camouflage paint. Ruchkin then flew Nadia and Adam an additional three hundred kilometers to a secluded landing spot in Provideniya, the largest settlement at the tip of Chukotka.

They flew for six hours cumulatively and crossed one time zone during the trip. It was 8:35 p.m. on Saturday when they arrived in Provideniya.