Biohazard

Omutninsk was a placid community of single-family wooden houses and narrow streets whose inhabitants seemed pleasantly oblivious to our activities. They had long experience in the art of weapon making. In the seventeenth-century, Peter the Great built an iron foundry in Omutninsk that became one of Russia's first weapons factories, turning out primitive cannons for the czar's armies. Three centuries later, military production still dominated the local economy. A dilapidated metallurgical plant responsible for supplying parts for rifles and artillery pieces employed most of the townspeople.

If the people of Omutninsk seemed to have little interest in what was going on in their backyard, some of us were beginning to wonder what we had gotten ourselves into.

Over quiet drinks in the town's only restaurant we argued incessantly about the work we were being groomed for. Some of the young scientists felt proud to be associated with secret affairs of state. Others were repelled by the idea of turning diseases into weapons — even if the project was defined as a national priority.

One of the four medical graduates who came with me from Tomsk, a tall, burly Siberian named Vladimir Rumyantsev, grew petulant and increasingly depressed. After returning from the restaurant, he would lie on his bed and stare at the ceiling for hours, nursing a bottle of vodka. We had become close during training, and I felt freer to exchange confidences with him than with others in the group.

"Kan, we're doctors!" he once exclaimed. "How can we do this?"

I was asking myself the same question. In the Oath of a Soviet Physician, which I'd taken at graduation, I had pledged to help the sick, "to do no harm," and to be on call "day, night, and vacation period." So far, I was principally fulfilling the third part of my pledge.

But I liked the lab work. I discovered an affinity for the meticulous processes involved in culturing organisms. The challenge of manipulating the tiny worlds that appeared under my microscope engaged me more intensely than anything I had ever done before. In the evenings, in medical texts and journals borrowed from the library, I read about the behavior of diseases until each one took on a distinct personality in my mind. I knew that the results of my studies could be used to kill people, but I couldn't figure out how to reconcile this knowledge with the pleasure I derived from research.

About four months into training, I decided to escape. It wasn't a bold attempt — I didn't want to confront the KGB or my military superiors, who seemed to have such a high sense of my potential— and I wasn't too surprised when it failed.

I took the train to Kirov, five hours away, and mailed a long letter to my father. I had not told my parents about my assignment, except to say that it was related to secret military matters. I thought I could avoid KGB interception by posting the letter as far as possible from the base, I still kept my words as vague as possible. I assumed my father could read between the lines. He knew the military far better than I.

My father, Bayzak Alibekov, was wounded seven times in World War II. He was decorated for bravery in the historic tank battles around Kursk and had risen to the rank of lieutenant colonel of police in Alma-Ata, after four frustrating years as a rural policeman. Our family boasted an illustrious lineage: my grandfather had been a hero on the Communist side of the Russian civil war. He was Kazakhstan's First People's Commissar of Internal Affairs, responsible for police and security in the 1920s and 1930s, and a street in Kazakhstan's old capital was named after him. Perhaps my background would give me an honorable way out.

In the letter, I asked my father to write to Marshal Andrei Grechko, then the minister of defense and one of the country's most admired military figures, to request that I be reassigned.

A week later I called my father from the long-distance telephone office in Omutninsk.

"Are you sure you want to do this?" he asked.

"Yes," I said eagerly. "You could tell the marshal that, as a wounded war veteran, you need your son close to home."

"That's true enough," he laughed. "I'm becoming a deaf old man."

He didn't ask me what I was doing for the army, and I didn't volunteer any information. He protested at first, but when he heard the anguish in my voice, he agreed to write the letter.

A warm and respectful note addressed to my father arrived in Alma-Ata a month later. "Dear Comrade Alibekov!" it began. "I salute you for your services to the Motherland, and I respect your wishes regarding your son. However, you must know that your son has been chosen to conduct very important work for our country, and we cannot spare him. It is always important for a son to be with his elderly parents, but of course you have another son and daughter living close by who can perform their obligations."