Biohazard

My father read Grechko's words to me over the telephone. He couldn't contain his excitement: he had received a letter signed by the great marshal himself! Meanwhile, I felt trapped.

Not long after that I began to feel proud — and a little flattered. If the defense minister himself regarded me as irreplaceable, who was I to argue with him? I could learn to enjoy being part of this strange and secret club.

I applied myself to the training with more energy than I had shown in weeks and gave up, for the time being, all thoughts of leaving. In the end, no one in our group left the program.

New buildings were going up all around the compound. Every day prisoners from a nearby labor camp were bused in with shovels and cement mixers. Biopreparat had signed a secret contract with the Ministry of Internal Affairs to employ prisoners doing hard time of ten years or longer as the principal construction force for new biological facilities around the country.

The foundations were laid for a pilot plant that would usher in a new era in the mass production of biological weapons, a plant that came to be known as Building 107. The flurry of construction activity left little doubt that we were part of a crucial national defense drive.

I soon had other reasons to value the status that came with my career. When I was transferred to a new post in Siberia, in March 1976,1 had met the woman who would become my wife.

Lena Yemesheva was an attractive eighteen-year-old foreign-language student when we met in Alma-Ata earlier that winter. I was home for my first leave since going to Omutninsk. She was a friend of a cousin, who brought her to a Soviet Army Day concert in town. I liked her immediately. She had shining green eyes and came from a town close to the settlement in southern Kazakhstan where I had been born. Lena had studied physics before she was transferred to the Alma-Ata Institute of Foreign Languages, so we had in common a love of science as well.

We were married in August 1976 at the wedding palace in Alma-Ata and went to her father's home for a toi — the traditional Kazakh wedding feast.

Midway through our courtship, Lena had stopped asking me questions about my job. She had grown tired of my enigmatic reply that I was engaged in "secret work." Still, I was surprised at how readily she accepted the news that we would be making our first home together in the faraway Siberian city of Berdsk.

As she explained much later, all that counted in those days was the satisfaction of knowing that I was a military officer clearly marked out for the favors of the state.

The Berdsk Scientific and Production Base, or the Siberian Branch of the Institute of Applied Biochemistry, as it was formally called, was a welcome change from Omutninsk. Berdsk, about twenty-five hundred miles from Moscow, formed part of one of the most impressive scientific communities in the country. It was near the "academic city" of Novosibirsk, a center for advanced research in engineering, technology, and economics. Mikhail Gorbachev would later recruit his first perestroika brain trust from Novosibirsk's gifted group of economists and political scientists. The most interesting industrial landmark in Berdsk was a radio assembly plant built with the help of U.S. technicians in the 1940s. My assignment there soon made me forget my crisis of conscience the previous summer.

Biopreparat wanted to transform Berdsk into a prototype of a combined research center and weapons assembly line. The facility, built in the 1960s, had been used mainly as a reserve plant for assembling and filling bomblets with weaponized bacteria that would be produced at its own and other installations. As the Soviet bioweapons program expanded, such a division of labor proved cumbersome. Berdsk had no way of guaranteeing that the bomblets it produced wouldn't leak and threaten our own soldiers, Liquid or powdered simulants weren't adequate for leakage tests; you needed the real thing. But Berdsk didn't have a research and development lab of its own. Moscow headquarters ordered that one be built and purchased equipment from overseas to stock it. Rumyantsev and I found ourselves assigned together to a crash program aimed at turning the facility into an installation capable of developing new production techniques and formulations.

Hundreds of unopened boxes filled with new machines were piled up inside the facility when we arrived. They were intended for a new microbiology lab, but they had been sitting around for months. The staff only knew how to run an industrial assembly line; they had no idea how to create a laboratory.