第2期:抢救切尔诺贝利(2)

Two men die that night, 28 more will follow in the next few months. They are the first victims of Chernobyl. No one was prepared for such a crisis. For the next seven months, 500,000 men wage hand to hand combat with an invisible enemy.

A ruthless battle that has gone unsung which claims thousands of unnamed and now almost forgotten heroes Yet, it is thanks to these men that the worst was avoided: A second explosion, ten times more powerful than Hiroshima, which would have wiped out half of Europe.

This was kept secret for twenty years by Soviets and the West alike. Many of these images have never been seen before. They were taken by journalists who were also exposed to nuclear contamination, some whom later died.

Those images tell the story of a hidden war whose consequences continue twenty years later to worsen the toll of the disaster. This is the true story of the Battle of Chernobyl. By early morning the clouds are already being contaminated by the radioactive column rising one thousand meters into the sky.

Igor Kostine is a photographer with the news agency Novosti. When a friend and helicopter pilot phones him that morning to offer to fly him over Chernobyl all Kostine knows is that something has happened at the plant during the night.

He is the first journalist to witness the gaping hole. When we got close to block 4 and circled round it, I had no idea of the risk. When we flew over the block, I opened the window of the helicopter. I didn't realize then what a big mistake that was.

The thin translucent smoke he sees rising from the ruins is in fact highly radioactive. Kostine is one of the few Chernobyl reporters on the scene in the earliest hours of the accident, to had survived serious exposion to radiation.

When I opened the window, I couldn't hear a thing. The ruins of the reactor were below me. I felt like I was floating in the space. Like in a tomb. A real dead silence. I couldn't even hear the helicopter anymore.

Nothing. A black hole. A tomb and deathly silence.