Biohazard

Markin wrote that he didn't want to return to Stepnogorsk. "I respectfully ask that you allow me to retire to the collective farm where my ailing mother lives," the letter said. "But I beg you not to think that there is any other reason for my departure. I am not a traitor, just an insignificant person who would like to live in the peace of nature."

I handed the letter back to Bulgak.

"I guess he's found a way to escape his wife." I smiled.

Bulgak didn't smile. "We can't let him go," he insisted. "He knows too much."

"I le knows a lot," I agreed. "But what foreign spy is going to plod through the mud of Gorky to find him out? I don't think we have anything to worry about. Besides, he's not in the army or the KGB. You can't keep him here."

Bulgak looked away distractedly. "We'll see," he said.

A few days later, I found Bulgak in a more cheerful mood.

"One of my men just spoke with the local commander in Gorky about the Markin problem," he grinned. "The guys there are complaining that they have two headaches now."

"What does that mean?"

Bulgak gave me a pitying look. "If you followed politics," he lectured, "you would learn what's really going on in the world. Don't you know that's where they've got Sakharov?"

Andrei Sakharov, a Nobel Prize-winning physicist and the father of our hydrogen bomb, had been exiled to Gorky in 1980 for public criticism of the Soviet leadership. It seemed strange to put Markin in the same class of "headache" as the outspoken physicist.

Bulgak and I were going over new security regulations some weeks later when he sat up in his chair like a man pricked by a needle.

"What's wrong?" I asked.

"I almost forgot," he said. "Remember the two headaches I told you about? In Gorky?"

I told him I did.

"Well," he went on, relishing every word, "Gorky only has one headache again."

"What does that mean?"

"It means," said Bulgak, "that Markin is no more."

"You mean he left Gorky?"

"Unwillingly," he said. "He's dead."

"What happened?" I asked uneasily.

"It seems he drowned. He was drinking a little too much and he went out for a swim and never came back."

"I didn't know Markin liked to swim."

An enigmatic smile played on Bulgak's features.

"The important thing is that Gorky has only one headache again," he said.

"Was he killed?"

Bulgak looked hurt.

"How would I know?" he said. "What matters is that we don't have to worry about Markin anymore." By 1986 we had over nine hundred people at the plant, and more were coming every month. The contingent from Sverdlovsk, which included the unfortunate Nikolai Chernyshov, helped us achieve a breakthrough in developing the most effective anthrax weapon ever produced. But the pressure-cooker atmosphere took a heavy toll. There were one or two accidents every week.

Once Gennady Lepyoshkin, the chief of our biosafety directorate, reported that a technician had been infected with anthrax in a lab that was supposed to be sterile. He had an abrasion on his neck, one of the most dangerous places in the body through which to contract cutaneous anthrax. When the neck swells, it interferes with breathing.

At first we treated him with streptomycin and penicillin, the most effective antibiotics for use against cutaneous anthrax, but a painful swelling erupted on his chest and spread over his body, making it increasingly difficult for him to breathe. Within three days, death seemed inevitable. A gloomy message was being prepared for Moscow when, in a final attempt to save his life, we gave him an abnormally high dose of anthrax antiserum. The shock dose worked: he began to recover.

The technician's narrow escape drove home the potency of our new weapon. Our powdered and liquid formulations of anthrax were three times as strong as the weapons that had been manufactured at Sverdlovsk. It would take only five kilograms of the Anthrax 836 developed at the Kazakhstan base to infect half the people living in a square kilometer of territory; the Sverdlovsk weapon needed at least fifteen kilograms to achieve the same impact.

The destructive power of the new weapon was confirmed in tests on Rebirth Island in 1987. Lepyoshkin, who became my senior deputy that year, flew down to the Aral Sea to supervise the field trials. When he reported success, Moscow finally took Sverdlovsk Compound 19 off the roster of anthrax production plants.

Stepnogorsk more than compensated for the lost capacity of the army plant. Our factory could turn out two tons of anthrax a day in a process as reliable and efficient as producing tanks, trucks, cars, or Coca-Cola.

With the creation of the world's first industrial-scale biological weapons factory, the Soviet Union became the world's first — and only — biological superpower.