Biohazard

A half-dozen tumbledown buildings served as the scientific headquarters, as well as the barracks, for a migratory population that sometimes numbered as many as 150 people, including scientists, technicians, and a unit of soldiers responsible for firing the weapons and tying down the animals. A secret landing strip had been built nearby, but airplane traffic was kept to a minimum. When the first teams arrived in April, a thin layer of green grass covered the sandy soil. By June, the vegetation had withered to brown shoots. Winds swirling off the desert steppes provided the only respite from the heat. There were no birds, and the dust settled everywhere, getting into clothes, hair, and eyes, sweeping through the animal cages and into the food and scientists' notebooks.

The Aral Sea was once the world's fourth-largest inland body of water, but it has been shrinking every year since the 1960s when, in a wrong-headed agricultural experiment, Soviet state planners ordered the diversion of the Aral's river sources into concrete irrigation canals. The canals were to transform this part of Central Asia into a cotton bowl. After the first bumper harvests, the desert soil was exhausted, and local residents have been reaping the consequences ever since. The rivers silted over and clouds of toxic salts billow across the region every year, leaving one of the world's highest cancer rates in their wake.

We made a unique contribution of our own to the region's multiplying environmental tragedies.

In 1972, two fishermen died when a shift in the direction of the wind sent a cloud of plague over their boat. In the 1970s and 1980s, abnormally high incidences of plague were detected among rodents in inhabited areas north of the testing ground. Following the Soviet collapse in late 1991, doctors reported outbreaks of plague in several areas of Central Asia. It is impossible to prove that these outbreaks were connected to our activities, but it seems more than likely.

The army's Fifteenth Directorate, which ran the Rebirth Island complex, operated a year-round command post in Aralsk, the closest mainland community. A single, nearly impassable dirt road linked Aralsk with the outside world. The town was once a fishing port, but the shrinking sea left it stranded like a shipwreck sixty miles from shore. Once home to several thriving fish canneries, Aralsk had begun to shrivel up, following the pattern of the sea from which it took its name.

We used to say that the most fortunate inhabitants of the Soviet Union were the condemned monkeys of Rebirth Island. They were fed oranges, apples, bananas, and other fresh fruits rarely seen by Soviet citizens. Our work teams could only admire this vision of plenty from afar. Each piece of fruit was carefully inventoried and guarded to dissuade members of the scientific teams from giving in to temptation. It was grudgingly acknowledged that our test subjects needed to stay healthy until their last breath, while the scientists, who had to subsist on rations of cold porridge and fatty sausage, were expendable.

Our team members were better off than those who spent their lives in the area. Scientists on the occasional foraging trips into town were shocked to see the earthen huts with no running water that served as dwellings for most of the inhabitants. Malnutrition and hepatitis were common.

This was a familiar scene to anyone who has ever traveled in the rural areas of the former Soviet Union, but it never failed to infuriate me. I was born several hundred miles away, on the site of another failed agricultural experiment in southern Kazakhstan. All Kazakhs know that the money spent on Soviet military programs could have fed and clothed hundreds of communities like Aralsk. But in those days, we would never have dared say such a thing.

When the day's experiments were completed, the small migrant population of scientists and soldiers could only look forward to nights of interminable boredom. Once or twice a week, sentimental Soviet war movies were shown on a rickety movie projector powered by the camp's sole electric generator. Drinking was the most popular social activity on the island. Although no vodka was available, some enterprising souls obtained bottles of distilled spirits. Some took their solace a bit too seriously: alcoholism was a chronic problem among the scientists on these expeditions.

Sex was the second most popular activity. Scientists rarely mixed with the soldiers, mostly young recruits, but the Biopreparat teams often included female technicians. The combination of loneliness and boredom fueled numerous affairs, as well as gossip, which spiced up the dry reports we received back in Moscow. The end of a testing period would inevitably bring news of a divorce or a pregnancy that would be hard to explain back home.