At the mention of her father, Asiyah’s gaze bored through Frolov, but she remained silent.
“Kasymov always conveyed the image of a leader who prized the support from across the Atlantic. At times he was a bigger proponent of any White House policies than the White House itself. By the time Kasymov came to power, the Amber Room and the treasures had long since become secondary for the Fourth International. Much more important was the location. The same place chosen by the Trotskyites more than fifty years ago to stash their loot has become the venue of the world’s most highly classified military programme. That was why Timur Kasymov had to stop Malinin from telling the world where to look for that train’s cargo yet again. So he killed Malinin for the same reason Malinin himself had murdered Kaganovich. The irony.”
Indulged in his own speech, Director Frolov eyed his captives with satisfaction.
“One may be forgiven for thinking the treasures are cursed. But if there is any curse, it must be lying on the patch of land where the relics ended their journey. The final destination where the conspirators hid the cargo and never retrieved it. A sea that will never be such, and an island that has grown so large that it ceased to exist. The place is called Renaissance Island in the Aral Sea. Or at least what has remained of both.”
16
The Aral Sea was a tragedy more devastating than even Chernobyl.
Technically, the Aral was an inland sea, isolated from the World Ocean like a gigantic saline lake. With a surface area of 68,000 square kilometers, it was the fourth-largest lake in the world. A prosperous fishing industry supported thousands of people in the Aral community, making it an oasis in the middle of the steppes. But very soon, the Aral Sea would become a wasteland.
In the 1930s, Soviet leadership began to undertake a staggering project to irrigate the cotton fields of Central Asia, and they thought of no better way to do it than to draw off the water from the Amu Darya and Syr Darya — the only two rivers feeding the Aral Sea. Construction of the numerous canals intensified to divert the rivers. The madness reached its peak until the water flow into the Aral Sea stemmed completely in the 1960s. From then on, the Aral had begun to shrink. Disappear.
Evaporate.
The rate at which the sea had shallowed was shocking. In a few decades the Aral had lost a water mass equal to the combined amount of Lakes Erie and Ontario. The drop of the Aral’s water level accelerated with such ferocity that it defied belief — going down by 20 cm each year, then 60 and then all of 90 cm.
When the Aral Sea was first explored in 1849, the Russian expedition discovered Renaissance Island, positioned in the sea almost centrally. Although it was the largest island in the Aral, it measured a mere two hundred square kilometers in size. Renaissance Island had been a heavenly spot overgrown with shrubs, a sanctuary of untouched wildlife. The island’s bays teemed with fish. Herds of wild Saiga antelopes grazed freely. When the edges of the Aral Sea rapidly contracted on every map, water levels plummeting, the island conversely multiplied in size. As a result of the Aral’s shoaling, Renaissance Island effectively became a peninsula in 2001, it’s southern tip meeting with the main landmass. By then, the Aral had reduced to a quarter of it’s original area, having already split into two separate pools of highly-saline water. In a few more years, the two basins divided further into pools and pockets of water, only ten percent of the sea left. The island had merged with the desert around it.
Man’s barbaric incursion into nature had destroyed the ecosystem of an entire region. All the sealife in the Aral had died when the salt reached an extreme concentration. The flora along the coast had perished as well, trees and bushes gone forever, the land barren. The climate had changed, suffering dramatically — the summers taken over by scorching dry heat, the winters lingering, becoming colder. Winds ruled the Aral now, creating dust storms that carried the salt and toxic pollution for distances up to 500 km, destroying crops far out. Villagers had abandoned their homes, tens of thousands of people driven away by the salt-filled environment. Years later, many would be diagnosed with lung disease and cancer.
The death of the Aral Sea could not be undone. There was no reversing the impact.
All this time until 1992, even as the Aral Sea was diminishing, Renaissance Island was the site of a Soviet military base called Aralsk-7. For almost forty years, Aralsk-7 was the country’s most highly classified research facility.”
Every student in the EMERCOM Academy knew of its history, and Eugene Sokolov was no exception. Aralsk-7 stood at the forefront of the Soviet Union’s germ warfare program.
Although such developments were banned by the relevant 1972 UN Convention against the research, production and stockpiling of biological weapons, both the U.S. and the U.S.S.R. were locked in the WMD race. A nuclear war was impossible and unwinnable. So a biological war was actually preferable—and more likely than anyone could imagine. The Americans never shut down their own experiments, at locations such as Fort Detrick. The Soviets, in their time, built the world’s most extensive bioweapons system, with dedicated R&D centers all around the country. The most notable facilities for research and manufacture were located in Sverdlovsk and Sergiev Posad, while the main testing site was Aralsk-7, Renaissance Island, the Aral Sea.
Aralsk-7 mainly dealt with anthrax, smallpox and bubonic plague. There was enough stock to kill anything in sight ten times over, but when the base was closed down in 1992, all of the biological agents had been disposed of. An American inspection team visited Aralsk-7 in 1994 to confirm that the site presented no danger. All the rumors about the anthrax spores spreading from the island never went beyond local lore.
Frolov was making it seem that every trail led to Kazakhstan — and therefore, to Asiyah.
The FSB Director explained, “Aralsk-7 was established only in 1954. But Renaissance Island had been used by the military much earlier. In 1936, the first secret expedition arrived on the island, assigned by the Red Army Medical Institute to study germs. A precursor of sorts to the work to be carried out years later. A group of a hundred scientists worked on the island for a little more than a year. Then in 1937 they were called back and most of them arrested on charges against the security of the state. It was 1937, after all.” Frolov snickered, finding it funny. “So it appears that those accusations were justified in hindsight. Trotsky had built extensive connections during his exile in Kazakhstan. It may have been that one of the hundred specialists on the island was in fact a Trotskyite agent. Someone who made Renaissance Island known to the Fourth International. So in 1941 the rogue team had a stopover site at their disposal. The island was empty; from there the transfer of the valuables out of the Soviet Union would be made.”
“In other words, you’re trying to convince us that Renaissance Island is the place where boxes chock-full of ancient artifacts have been lying untouched for more than half a century?” Constantine asked, his voice sardonic. “And that none of the several hundred — or thousand — people who constructed and operated Aralsk-7 never noticed it right under their noses?”
Frolov was unfazed.
“The fact is, they didn’t hide it on Renaissance Island proper. Renaissance had an archipelago of tiny islands dotted around it, some of them used for underground storage. I find it perfectly possible that the Trotskyite mole inside the original Red Army expedition could create a cache on one of the nearby islands without anyone knowing. Naturally, it would never be found later, when all the activity was focused around Aralsk-7.”