Pripyet

The plan necessarily hinged on the enemy not knowing what they were looking for. That was both reasonable and yet the greatest calculated risk. They would, after all, have to come close to Chernobyl to be dropped off, close enough to walk in. They would have to sidealong with one of the infiltration teams, which was going to apparate from place, to place, to place to throw off the scent and confuse the trackers, the wards that were set up along the front to try and minimise the ability of the enemy to do this.

Of course, those wards were the wards of the Morsmordre. They were the enemy. But their own system was set up exactly the same way, and they knew that the defences of Voldemort's armies worked mostly the same way. If nothing else… Bellatrix had once told them as much.

Gomel if anything was more completely ruined than Bryansk, and was close enough to the front to still be under harassment fire from the Morsmordre forces. The people of the city who remained, lived like rats, in the basements of houses and apartment blocks hammered to pieces by the shelling. The Army was still dug in, amidst rubble that had been fought over in close quarters several times. The headquarters, where they landed, was amidst the Centralny District on the eastern outskirts of the city, filled with heavy, thick-built concrete apartment blocks which had stood up to the shells and bombs well, and now held observation points for their own artillery, temporary radar masts, and radio aerials.

Colonel Kabanov was there, Hermione realised with a start as they headed over through cut half-trenches that zig-zagged around the ruined towers. The mysterious man who had helped Tonks orchestrate Bellatrix's original defection was briefing the infiltration team whose entire mission and whose lives, if necessary, would serve as cover for them.

Tonks bid them wait, until he finished his briefing and turned toward them. They exchanged a salute.

Here we go, Hermione thought. The sun was now falling fast into the marshes and forests and ruins that marked the western horizon. It wouldn't be long at all; the more time they spent in Gomel, the more the risk of detection was.

Mostly they were of a similar rank. Assuming that Colonel Kabanov's rank was, indeed, his real rank. They exchanged salutes, and handshakes. The man paid special attention to Hermione, saying, after eyeing her for a moment, "you have done well for yourself, Councillor."

Hermione nodded once. "Well, Colonel, I took advantage of the opportunities presented to me. There's an English song to that effect; 'When Cannons are Roaring'. Junior Councillor Lovegood could sing it for you, but I fear we haven't the time."

There was the faintest hint of a smile of amusement from the FSB Colonel. "No, we don't," he agreed.

The witch faintly felt from behind her what might be a glare from Ron, but she didn't really care. He might think that she slept her way to power, but she had grown confident in the fact that she had earned this. Earned his enmity, too, sure; but it was indeed true that 'when cannons are roaring and bullets are roaring, he who would honour win must not fear dying', and she had dared greatly. And she wasn't going to let herself be chained to any doubt or guilt. She was certain that McGonagall would tell her to pick her head up and do exactly that.

Kabanov tapped his chronometer. "They'll be departing in five minutes. Because of the enemy detection spells, you must all side-along. Three disapparations in short succession. Then you'll be within the Exclusion Zone. They'll continue along and leave you behind. You must move without magic very rapidly from that position. We know from past attempts that the enemy will sweep the mid-point apparation locations for infiltrators."

"We'll make scarce when we get there," Tonks assured him, almost placidly. She had likely done it before. "Let's go."

"Of course." Kabanov turned and led them over to the main group, as the others got up and fell in. Larissa fell back, though, to stand with Flyorov, speaking softly. Her lips were pursed in a state of discomfort, and Hermione knew that her friend was still deeply uncomfortable about her teacher coming along on this mission. Taking these risks, at all.

The men before them were gearing up, grabbing their packs, finishing streaking paint across their faces, swinging weapons on slings over the should, barrels down, ready. Some crossed themselves, made their final prayers before going in. The group of MinKol wizards and witches came to the fore, intentionally blending in, with the same equipment. Only wands and their position in the formation marked them differently, and the later would disappear as soon as they arrived at their destination.

Hermione found herself face to face with a young blonde witch, who didn't know her name, or why she was helping to disapparate this group, to apparate them three times into the heart of the exclusion zone. She just knew it was her job.

After all, she herself had been in the same place, five years before, but even more alone, fighting for a foreign country, which was no longer completely foreign, and never would be again. Reaching out, she took the woman's hand with her own. In case this woman was captured, she shouldn't even say her name—it could lead to a much higher prioritisation of a sweep of the Exclusion Zone, for example. Kabanov had certainly briefed the others as much already. Indeed, he might not even know the real reason for their mission himself, by the design of his superiors.

"Comrade," Hermione just offered warmly, instead.

The Russian witch did not smile, the circumstances did not call for it. They'd probably never meet again. But instead of a smile, the dangerous grin Hermione got instead meant much, much more. "Ni pukha ni pera."

"ke chortu!"

Four soldiers joined them, and Kabanov's chronometer hit the mark. His raised hand dropped.

Hermione and all the others were torn away, funnelled through a spinning feeling of sickening chaos and spat out in a fallow field. Landing, breathing hard, popping out of the other end of the straw, whatever you wanted to call it. She gained her feet, grabbed the woman's hand a second time. She had the better of it, since the rest of their little group were sidealongs. She had to trust the others were doing just as well—had to trust that no inexperienced witch or wizard splinching the disapparation would make this a very short operation.

And then, hands locked in the ultimate gesture of trust from one witch to another, they tore their way through reality a second time.

And then a third. Buildings loomed around them, silent and dark and profoundly unnatural. The moon seemed obscured above. Vines grew along the walls, and the cracks in the pavement were filled with grass.

Hermione felt so ill, so intensely ill, and so ill at ease, too. You're here, she thought, it drove home for her—where she was, what she was to do. But she staggered to her feet and snapped a salute to the young witch.

And then she was gone, with the rest of the infiltration force. Left behind—Larissa, Master Flyorov… Luna, Tonks. Ron.

Ron, like Hermione, had remained on his feet. He took two steps over, and clapped her shoulder. "Come on, 'Mione, we've got to move out fast."

She spun with him to the others, helping them up. They were surrounded by abandoned apartment blocks: The ghost city of Pripyat. And they had to take cover fast, before the Morsmordre was there to hunt for them.

Larissa helped Flyorov along, and flashed her a thumbs-up.

But the ghostly silence seemed to close in all around. There were plenty of places on Earth that were more terrifying. But perhaps nothing else quite so eerie. Every hair of her body stood on hand, and they made haste through a tangled maze of ruined and abandoned apartments, filled with goods left behind.

Distantly, in that utter stillness and silence, they could hear the snap of a group apparating in.

They were already being hunted.

They'd all already cast all the concealment charms they could, focused on magical detection, not physical. For a moment, there was silence in the small group. They stood on the second floor of one of the apartment blocks, in the stairwell, where they could easily cover against anyone coming up. Master Flyorov was badly out of breath, and still sick from the chain apparations. Larissa, having helped him that far, leaned on the wall, forcing her breaths to be slow and deep to steady her heartrate.

Tonks and Luna covered them from behind. Hermione—looked across the stairwell, at Ron. "They don't know we're here. We keep moving deeper into the city, toward the reactor, they'll give up and go home eventually. They don't know anyone is here. It's just a routine counter-infiltration sweep to eliminate the possibilities for where the infiltrators went."

"Rought. No magic until then." Ron said it emphatically.

"Agreed. Alright, everyone, we're going to take the fire escape and move into the next building. No excess noise. No magic. So, mask up." She thought about asking Tonks for the reading from the Geiger counter, but she saw the former Auror had put it away. Sensible. We need to move with the sole objective of evading detection, we can worry about the rads when we're closer. A few hours in Pripyat won't kill us … The reactor hall will be another matter entirely. The thoughts passed quickly through her as she brought the PMK-2 gas mask up and over her face. Her vision restricted, her breath was hot on the skin of her face, like some kind of alien caress. She pulled the straps taut, and checked the fit. The others did the same, and then it was time to go—they could afford no waiting, no resting, nothing.

They hastened on, deeper into the city, breathless and quiet. Footfalls of boots on long-rotted carpets, on long-cracked concrete, were the only sound of their presence, and they were all under a Muffliato charm—but no more magic was cast, nothing more to alert the enemy. They would have to trust that their current protections were adequate. An active use of magic might quickly bring attention against them. They had to assume that the enemy was very skilled in counterinsurgency operations.

The trees growing through what had once been grass made it easy to avoid the enemy. Each rustle of a leaf, each footfall, contained two dangers. The radiation they might be exposed to was combined with the risk of alerting the enemy. They tracked their way through the forests, approaching what was from the map one of the disposal sites. There, they'd have to cross the railway tracks. They paused by what at first seemed to be a laager of vehicles, but was really a great field of abandoned equipment. Beyond, dark against a dark sky, was the Sarcophagus. They were about half a kilometre from the railway tracks. It would be more than a kilometre beyond them in turn to reach that horrifying dark shape, looming up in the dark along the river.

Hermione grabbed her water bottle and attached it through the special top to the gas mask. With a snap of a bayonet lock, it was in place, and she could drink clean water without losing her protective seal. Larissa stepped up to her. "We're definitely clear far enough we can take a reading."

Hermione unhooked the bottle from her mask, relieved from even a single gulp of water, and nodded. Securing it back to her belt, she picked up the Geiger counter instead. It screamed, but not as horribly as she had feared. "Fifty röntgens per hour." Which wasn't terrible, but they were also still two klicks from the sarcophagus. It was horrifying to think that it hadn't been maintained at all in six years, something that was abstractly bad even in the briefings, but now seemed ominous in the extreme when you could actually look at the rust-streaked greying mass, taking on the appearance of some ruin of an ancient temple to a Dark God, in the depths of the Pripyet marsh on this strange night. Not until they were sure they were not being pursued (or, she supposed, it didn't matter anymore) could she stretch out and try to use her power to shield them, the way Bellatrix had shown.

And then there was a light. They all froze in place as it cut ahead of them, a thin stabbing beam in the dark. Luna dashed ahead of the others as Ron and Hermione covered her on the right, Tonks and Larissa on the left. She scrambled up the embankment to the tracks, and looked off, down to the southwest, pressed low to the ground, small and lithe and in their camo fatigues, invisible against the ballast and the lush vegetation that grew in short thickets along the tracks.

She raised one hand, and signed. Train.

They must have reactivated the line to bring troops and supplies to the front, Hermione realised. The railway from Chernogov to Ovruch ran right through the exclusion zone, but through-traffic had been abandoned after the Incident. However, the Morsmordre certainly cared nothing for the consequences of running trains through the exclusion zone. She was able to signal Luna to fall back when there was a sharp report down the line, from the direction of the train. Hermione tensed in fear, shot a look to Luna, horrified that she'd see the strange woman shot, but then realised there had been a flash.

A Torpedo.

Someone was warning the train to stop. The squeal of metal on metal from the brakes grinding the rust off of the ill-used rails echoed down the line. Luna slid back down the embankment, and then dashed back toward the group. "The wizards hunting us decided they wanted to talk to the train driver," Luna explained distantly. "I don't think they're going to leave."

The tension closed in on them. They only had so much time. The masks were damned uncomfortable, but absolutely necessary to avoid detection spells.

Tonks cursed softly. "We can't cross the tracks in the light. They'll run along slowly, looking for any sign of us."

"I wonder if they reactivated the track protection circuits," Luna idly mused, rambling about something that was utterly irrelevant—probably learned when she was on an armoured train—and seemed a perfect distraction.

"I can tell if they did," Hermione murmured. She had an idea suddenly—because Luna's offhand strange comments always meant something, and the track protection circuits…

"Tonks, get everyone into an approach position to dash off."

"...Mione?"

"Just do it. Please." She started off toward the tracks, jogging until she got close enough that the trees no longer screened her. There she dropped down to her bell, and crawled up through the brush and the ballast toward the track. There she could see the figures of the Morsmordre wizards who were sweeping Pripyat, talking to the train driver. They appeared as giant shadows, cast by the bright beam of the locomotive's headlamp, and flickering as they moved around and talked where they had brought the train to a stop with a signal torpedo.

The ability to apparate meant they could quickly obtain almost limitless magical reinforcements if they had the cause to. Hermione could not let them have the cause. That locomotive was certainly very old, and like anything else captured from the Russian or Ukrainian governments, left in as poor condition as possible when the Morsmordre overran it, and likely maintained with few spare parts for the past several years.

The track circuit was a low voltage current run through the track to warn of any block in the line. An object crossing both tracks would automatically turn the signals to danger. So would a gap in one of the rails at any point. Hermione extended her wand, and summoned the electric magic that Bellatrix had taught her. "Revealio wave." She could feel the low voltage current humming in her wand. So it's there.

Fuck. Luna's always right. Hermione grinned despite herself. The next spell was another part of the electric magic that Bellatrix had taught her. Synchronise your magic with the wave—and it would not be clear to anyone that it was magic. With luck, the spells the enemy used—she wanted to call them snatchers, though unfortunately they were a far cry from that—just wouldn't appreciate this magic which lapped around them like the rise and fall of the sea.

So, next, she took advantage of the fact there were metal rails, metal wheels, a metal locomotive…

Ah, yes, there you go… Her wand shifted, gently.

The headlamp on the locomotive went out.

Tonks needed no prompting to get everyone moving, as Hermione lunged up from cover and tamped her boots down on the rotting sleepers, then scrambled down the other side, her wand out to cover her friends if the entire plan went south. She could hear cursing down the line from the direction of the locomotive, still dimly lit by side-lights.

One after the other, Larissa helping Flyorov across until only Ron remained, they lunged across the tracks, down the other side, and into cover again. Ron made the trip last. They had shelter in piles of abandoned equipment, but none of them wished to linger. Ahead, the decaying fence had been torn open by animals, and entry into the final perimeter around the old Nuclear Power Plant was a trivial affair.

Behind them, the light on the locomotive snapped back on again, the fused wire having been repaired. With shouts and the harsh whine of the diesel engine, it slowly got back underway.

In front of them, an office-building which had been used by the administration and security personnel even during the era of the "Liquidators", abandoned only when the site was overrun by the Morsmordre, loomed. Another safe shelter. Mostly safe.

If Pripyat was a memorial to a vanished country and a vanished era, this building was a memorial to a time most people would kill for now, in a country still fighting for survival. The signs, the check-in sheets, the maps and plans, the abandoned radios and televisions, they all hinted at that world which Hermione had only seen in the summer, when home with her parents from Hogwarts—the world of muggles, in the mid-90s, when the future seemed so much different than the one that they lived in now.

Taking cover inside the buildings, in the abandoned monument to an earlier abandonment, they listened to the sound of the locomotive passing by. They could not eat, they could not rest. Just drink water and trust that would be enough.

The locomotive passed on down and onto the bridge with its train. The outside world faded away into this strange tomb of technological civilisation. A tomb where Flyorov said that the very boundaries of the magical and technological worlds bled together.

When they headed back out of the office building to advance toward the Sarcophagus, it seemed terrifyingly true, primeval, real. The dark marsh all around, welcoming them with a power of a dark life, which laughed at the radiation in the exclusion zone, and had come back to claim a world without humans. One klick along a road to Hell. One klick to deconstruct technological civilisation—to descend into the terrifying madness of the power on the other side of those ailing walls, where somewhere inside, magic, creation and history laughed at the works and feats and pretensions of humanity.

Now they passed through the last set of security perimeter fencing with a few quick, non-persistent spells. Their destination was obvious, even in the very depth of night. The abandoned ruins of the Reactor No.4 control centre beckoned to them, as they entered the building itself. Now, they had to be confident enough to use spells, spells modified from a scourgify to constantly keep their skin clean of the outside influence—of any kind of particulate—bubble-headed charm to trap outside air against them for the next hours, because filtered masks would not necessarily be sufficient.

It all felt so terribly inadequate, even if the intellect screamed at the whimpering heart, that it could be done, it could be done right, and thousands of people had worked here, for shifts longer than they would endure, and gotten the very job done of building this sarcophagus.

And so with those maudlin thoughts, they stood in a monument to muggle hubris. Involuntarily, Hermione grinned. Bellatrix would have said something absolutely amazing then—and possibly very irritating. She promised herself if she made it out alive that she'd share this memory with her lover via pensieve.

Tonks' hair was pitch black. Hermione couldn't even remember seeing that before. She stepped, slowly, her boots crunching on the ruins of the room. Looked around one more time at the abandoned equipment. Faced Flyorov.

The old professor stood with a haunted look, thirty years of living life past a horrible night having come back to him.

"Vasily Gregorovich," Tonks said, very gently. "Best for us to hurry."

He shook his head, laughed once, in acknowledgement of how obvious that statement was. "Alright then. This way." he gestured, his own wand again firm in the grip of his hand, down the corridor that led toward the entombed remains of the reactor. The sarcophagus was in their way, but if you wanted to use magic to get to hell faster, there were plenty of opportunities for that.

And then, back toward the building entrance, that heard a sharp crack of apparation.

Hermione closed her eyes for a half-second, gripped her wand at the ready. They got us, anyway.

"Come on, no more time!" Tonks yelled, and pressed forward.

As they ran forward, Hermione turned on the Geiger counter. The skittering sound it made of the continuous field of background radiation descending on them, trying to get through their magic to destroy them—and far too successful at it—seemed like the perfect soundtrack for a battle in Hell. But it was also a warning to their enemies, because Hermione stretched out with the electric magic for her shields, just like Bellatrix had taught her. She brought up the wave-forms from her magical core, and she began to turn the radiation aside, even as the field peaked around them.

Their pursuers had no such protection.

Notes:

1. The exchange in Russian could be idiomatically translated something like this:

"Ni pukha ni pera." - "Don't catch anything." (literally - 'neither fur nor feather'.)
"ke chortu!" - "To hell with that!"

2. I use the spelling Pripyet for the marsh, and Pripyat for the abandoned city. This is purely an idiosyncratic distinction; one is the Russian spelling, one is Ukrainian. I suppose I am saying that the marsh is essentially Russian at some level (cultural, if you will); or known to the Russian language, whereas now Pripyat is on Ukrainian territory and well, that's the proper name.

3. PMK-2 is the standard gas mask of the Russian Army in the 90s - a "bayonet lock" is the particular fitting that you insert a water bottle into and securely fasten to avoid the admission of contaminants into the breathing space. You can then drink through the mask.

4. I think I've mentioned this before, but a torpedo is basically a small pyrotechnic railways used to common use as a warning signal; placed on the tracks the noise of the report and the train being shaken is a signal for the train to stop.