Who dances at the pinnacle of the world
still needs to heed the old rule:
Don't slip!
Nina, Igor and Jennie stayed at the ranch for another three days. It was holiday season, a season to celebrate the relative peace of a nuclear weapons free world. What greater cause could anyone have for celebration? On the night of the third day, however, this celebration of peace was interrupted. It wasn't the siren, this time, but the telephone that brought us back to reality. It was eleven thirty. I remember watching Sergei's face while he was on the phone. Initially he was laughing, then he became dead serious. This change shook me. It didn't fit into this time of celebration. Even after he hung up, his expression remained a blank stare.
"What has happened?" I asked.
He shook his head and asked me to get the jet ready.
"Now! Tonight?"
He nodded and sat down at the table. There wasn't much to explain. A revolt had erupted at a nuclear materials lab, over safety concerns. Four people had already been injured, one seriously. A plutonium compound had leaked in the air-conditioning system from a waste encasement process. It had reached alarming levels, which, however, the officials in charge had interpreted as being still safe. The legal limits, apparently, had not been exceeded, at least not by much. However, an American scientist from among the refugees had challenged those limits. He had told everyone that those so-called acceptable limits were in fact ridiculously high. The dispute developed quickly into some bitter fighting during a shop meeting, the established forum where worker's concerns ought to be aired, but seldom are. Two camps developed. On one side stood most of the production workers and managers who would loose their bonus payments if the plant were shut down for a cleanup. Their argument was that the government regulations were adequate to protect workers. They called the Americans saboteurs and troublemakers. However, as the arguments became more heated, the opposing camp grew. Suddenly, the Russian workers began to be concerned about their health, and became less inclined to risk their well being for anything. It seemed that the American refugees were well on the way of winning their case.
That's apparently, why Sergei became involved. I could sense by the way he acted that he was annoyed by the whole affair. He called the dispute childish. His take was that within a month or two the plant's design could be altered and the exposure be removed. Then there would be peace forever, while without this response, the situation was destined to explode into something messy. Those managers were playing with people's lives. He hated that. That's also why he was concerned about time.
He spoke with a low voice as he repeated his instructions to me, to get the jet ready and to have the fuel tanks topped off. Our destination was Beregovo at the Hungarian border. He said he didn't want to hear anything about refueling in Odessa. He didn't even want to stop there to let Nina, Igor and Jennie off; "They'll have to come with us. We'll take them home on our way back."
Nina disagreed. "The Air Fore people we take me back," she said.
We left the ranch forty minutes later. Total darkness covered the meadow as we lifted off. The runway was sanded, though barely visible in the floodlights of the plane. Little did Sergei realize, or any of us for that matter, that he would never see his meadows again.
Once airborne, I pushed the plane into a steep climb. Something wasn't quite right about the mission. I couldn't put my finger on what it was. Normally I wouldn't have minded to set out on a sixteen-hundred-kilometer journey in the middle of the night in order to help resolve a dispute. But this time I did mind. Maybe I was only tired. We should have gone to bed and flown in the morning. But this, too, wasn't what was troubling me.
