Legends

Heading down the Amu Darya at half throttle the night before so as not to anger the men fishing from its banks with spotlights and grenades, Almagul had explained about the dangers awaiting visitors to Vozrozhdeniye. Fearing that American inspection teams monitoring the 1972 treaty banning biological weapons would turn up on the island, the Soviets, in 1988, had hidden tens of tons of bacterial agents in hastily dug pits. They had also buried in shallow ditches thousands of cadavers of monkeys, horses, guinea pigs, rabbits, rats and mice that had been used to test the lethality of the bacterial agents. When the Soviet Union collapsed in the early ’90s, Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan took custody of the island, but never bothered to dig up the buried spores or the cadavers, which had infected the island’s rodent population. The rodents tended to survive the anthrax, glanders, tularemia, brucellosis, plague, typhus, Q fever, smallpox, botulinum toxin or Venezuelan equine encephalitis, but eventually transmitted the sicknesses to fleas which, in turn, transmitted them to other rodents. Which meant that a simple flea bite on the island could be fatal to a human. The risks were very real. In the two years since the death of her father, Almagul knew of fourteen men from Nukus who had disappeared while scavenging on Vozrozhdeniye Island; local authorities around the rim of the receding Aral Sea presumed the missing men had been bitten by fleas and had died of plague or another sickness on the island’s dunes, and their bones picked clean by the flamingoes.

Almagul had dropped hints that bio agents or viruses spread by fleas weren’t the only things to be found in the ghost town on the island. When Martin drew her out, she said that a handful of scavengers, commanded by a warlord, had installed themselves in the ruins of Kantubek. Did the warlord have a name? Martin asked. My father, who read the bible each night before going to sleep, called the warlord Azazel after the evil spirit in the wilderness to whom a scape-goat is sent on the day of Atonement, the girl replied. Others in Nukus say he is a Danish prince with the name of Hamlet Achba. This Hamlet and his gang demand twenty-five percent of the value of what anyone carries off from the island. Almagul was betting that the warlord wouldn’t bother a visiting journalist who wanted to write about the once secret Soviet bioweapons testing range for a Canadian magazine, or the girl who took him there and back to earn enough to see her through the winter.

Favoring his game leg, Martin started up the track that snaked through the dunes. At the top he turned to wave at Almagul, but she had hiked herself onto a crate to watch the flamingoes, with their distinctive bent bills, returning to the beach and didn’t notice him. Topping a rise, he headed toward the ghost town along the main road, which consisted of slabs of concrete set end to end. In a field at the edge of town he spotted a basketball court that had been converted into a helicopter landing pad—a great white circle had been whitewashed onto the cement and its surface blackened by engine exhaust. Farther down the street he passed a vast hangar that had once housed Kantubek’s motor pool. Most of the sections of corrugated roofing had been carted off but the vehicles, buried in drifts of sand, remained—gutted green trucks, two treadless T-52 tanks, two armored personnel carriers sitting on their axles, a faded orange bus that had been driven up onto a cement ramp to be serviced and never driven off, a once-red fire engine with the hood open and the entire motor missing, the rusting hulks of half a dozen ancient tractors with faded Soviet slogans painted on their sides. Continuing on into the town, Martin came upon an enormous building with a ragged Soviet hammer and sickle flag still flapping from the pole jutting over the tarnished double doors that led to an ornate lobby. A giant mosaic depicting the weight of the state, in the form of formations of tanks and squadrons of planes and fleets of ships, filled the entire windowless wall at the side of the lobby. Signs with the Cyrillic lettering bleached out by the sun hung off lampposts. Dust and sand stirred by gusts of wind swirled around Martin’s feet at the intersections.