“Over there is Kantubek,” the girl was shouting now as she veered toward a dune at the foot of the town and idled the motor to let the skiff glide onto the sandy shore. Martin scrambled onto the bow and jumped the last half-meter to shore and turned to haul the skiff higher onto the beach. Clearly emotional at this first trip back to the island since the death of her father, Almagul joined him and stood with her gloved hands on her hips, looking around anxiously. Her Soviet manufactured djeans, tied with a rope through the loops at the waist, were tucked into fisherman’s rubber boots secured at the tops with lengths of elastic. She kicked at broken test tubes and petri dishes half buried in the sand, and waved toward the piles of debris littering the path that curved up the dunes toward dozens of wooden buildings in various stages of dilapidation. Martin could see mountains of rusting animal cages of all shapes and sizes, rotting timber, scores of broken crates. He glanced at the sky, measuring the height of the sun. “I’ll explore the town,” he told the girl. “If all goes well, I’ll be back here by mid afternoon.”
“I am not able to remain past the setting of the sun,” Almagul informed him. “My father had an iron rule never to spend the night on the island. In the light of day is possible to see rodents, maybe even fleas. After it turns dark …”
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.
And then his street sense kicked in—he felt the eyes burning into the back of his neck before he caught sight of the scavengers edging into view from behind buildings around the intersection. There were five of them, all wearing canvas laced leggings and canvas gloves that stretched to the elbows and glass face masks that Uzbek cotton farmers used when their crops were being dusted. Each of the men wore a curved Cossack saber from his belt and cradled a vintage bolt-action rifle in the crook of an arm, with a condom over the muzzle to protect the barrel from sand and moisture. Martin’s fingers instinctively slipped behind his back to where his automatic would have been if he’d been armed with one.
One of the scavengers motioned for Martin to raise his hands over his head. Another came over and frisked him for weapons. Martin’s hands were secured in front of him at the wrists with a dog’s leash and he was pulled around a corner and down a side street. When he stumbled, a rifle butt jabbed him sharply between the shoulder blades. Two blocks farther along a door was pushed open and Martin was prodded into a building and across a lobby with only a handful of its white marble tiles still in place. He and the others splashed across a shallow trough filled with a liquid that smelled of disinfectant, then walked under a shower head that sprayed him and the guards with a fine mist of disinfectant. He could hear the voices of other scavengers, speaking in a strange language he couldn’t identify, exchanging remarks with the five who had brought him in. Double doors were jerked open and Martin found himself in an auditorium with most of the folding seats unbolted and stacked against one wall. Eight men wearing white laboratory coats and latex gloves were sitting on the few seats still intact. Slouched in a high-backed throne-like wooden chair set in the middle of the stage, with a painted backdrop from an old socialist realist operetta behind him, the warlord presided over the assemblage. He was a dwarf of a man, so short that his feet didn’t reach the ground, and dressed in a rough gray sleeveless scapular that plunged to the tops of spit-shined paratrooper boots resting on an upturned ammunition box. His bare arms were as muscular as a weight lifter’s. He wore a shoulder holster over the scapular, with the steel grip of a large navy revolver jutting from it. The old-fashioned motorcycle goggles covering his eyes gave him the appearance of an insect. A stiff czarist-era admiral’s hat sat atop his oversized head. He talked for several minutes in a low growl with one of the men in jumpsuits standing behind him before raising his head to look directly at Martin. Lifting one stubby arm, he gestured for him to approach and, his voice pitched girlishly high, barked something in the strange language of the scavengers.