Biohazard

I did as I was told, but I couldn't eat. Privately, I'd decided to return to Omutninsk as soon as I diplomatically could and to pretend none of this had ever happened.

Kalinin called me late in the afternoon.

"Congratulations," he said. "You are now the new deputy director of Omutninsk."

I began to stammer out a reply, but he interrupted me in mid-sentence. "Just get down here at once."

That afternoon, Kalinin was in one of his rare expansive moods. He took some pleasure in telling me what had happened. It was partly a way of flaunting his achievement before an admiring subordinate, but I'm sure he also wanted to let me know from the start who was boss.

"The thing is," he began, "a couple of the armchair generals in that room disagreed with your appointment — Benetsky, most of all."

Benetsky was Kalinin's deputy, and the man who had given me the tongue-lashing. He was also a powerful military bureaucrat who had recently been transferred from the Ministry of Defense. Everyone knew that Kalinin feared him.

"Benetsky insisted that a thirty-year-old captain can't possibly manage lieutenant colonels and majors," Kalinin said. "He said he had never heard of anything so ridiculous in all of his career."

Kalinin now had a sly smile on his face, a smile I would get to know well. "But I managed to convince him you'd do all right."

"How?" I ventured fearfully.

"You'll turn our tularemia project around."

It was an assignment no scientist of my age and experience could have expected to get so early in his career. Both Biopreparat and the Fifteenth Directorate had been searching for years for a way of making tularemia into a more effective biological weapon. I knew the project was fraught with risk, but I was caught up in the challenge.

Tularemia is a debilitating illness, rife among wild animals and common in the Rocky Mountains, California, Oklahoma, parts of eastern Europe, and Siberia. It is a hardy organism, capable of surviving for weeks, sometimes months, in decaying animal corpses. Tularemia is primarily transmitted to humans by ticks, mosquitoes, and wild rabbits, though squirrels, sheep, cats, and dogs have also been identified as carriers. While highly infectious, it almost never spreads directly from one person to another.

Victims can be laid up for weeks with chills, nausea, headaches, and fever. If left untreated, symptoms usually last two to four weeks, hut they can continue for months. Francisella tularensis is lethal in 30 percent of untreated cases.

After World War II, scientists in the United States, Britain, and Canada developed tularemia for use on the battlefield, where it could immobilize an entire division through the intensive medical care required for each stricken soldier.

Soviet commanders considered tularemia an unpredictable weapon for close-quarter tactical maneuvers. The risk of infecting one's own troops was high. But we had obtained, from a leading international research institute in Europe, a strain capable of overcoming immunity in vaccinated monkeys.

Our civilian credentials ensured that no questions were asked when we requested it. As far as we knew, there had never been an attempt anywhere in the world to weaponize a vaccine-resistant strain of tularemia. For Kalinin, the project represented a chance to prove what Biopreparat could do.

We spent months in frustrating calculations and false starts, but by the early summer of 1982, we were ready to test our new weapon on Rebirth Island. The military had been running biological weapons trials there for years, but this was the first time Biopreparat would use the testing grounds on the Aral Sea — we'd never had a weapon to test before. We knew the high command would be watching jealously and counting on us to fail.

The process of getting a biological weapon approved for inclusion in the Soviet arsenal had changed little since the war. Test results had to be vetted by officials at the Military-Industrial Commission in Moscow and the complex lab work involved in preparing what we called the "final formulation" — the liquid or powdered version of the agent to be used in bombs or sprayers— had to be written down like a recipe, so that it could be reproduced by any technician at any of our production plants.

If the Ministry of Defense was satisfied with the test results, and if the final formulation was judged to be sound, a report would be prepared for the chief of the Army General Staff, who would issue an order officially designating the new weapon part of the Soviet arsenal. The recipe would then be stamped "top secret" and filed at headquarters, with a copy to the production plant assigned to produce the weapon.

If the Ministry of Defense was not satisfied, research would begin all over again.

Five hundred monkeys were ordered from Africa for tularemia tests on Rebirth Island. We scheduled a series of special flights from the military airport at Kubinka, outside Moscow.