Sokolov had always held Alpha and Vympel in high regard. Their job, like his, was saving lives, and they defended Russia with valor, even if they received their own share of betrayals from the government. Yeltsin had disbanded Vympel in 1993 after their refusal to storm the beleaguered Parliament. And he had humiliated Alpha in Budennovsk, saving the terrorists instead of the hostages.
Two officers came out to greet the arriving visitors. Both almost matched Sokolov in height, and dressed in black battle uniforms they carried a no-nonsense air about them. Victor quickly made the introductions. Colonel Ivan Grishin, a mustached man with piercing brown eyes, had no insignia but for a sleeve patch which showed the letter A over the traditional sword-and-shield pattern. Major Cyril Petrov, his blond hair cropped, his lively eyes set in an angular face, belonged to Vympel.
“We’ve been waiting for you,” said the Alpha man. “Given the constraints of the timescale, we have our work cut out for us.”
2
The progression of images that appeared on the wall-sized screen mesmerized Sokolov. A slideshow as vivid as the one Victor was presenting had an even bigger effect in the near-empty briefing room, with a silent audience of only five people. It was the death of the Aral Sea, and the history of Renaissance Island.
The sequence opened up with a topographic map of the Aral Sea dated 1957, showing a huge water mass of over a thousand cubic kilometers, Renaissance Island just an irregular speck in the middle of it. Pictures taken from reconnaissance aircraft gave a measure of its vastness. Suddenly, the idyllic view was replaced by satellite photographs that carried a sense of foreboding. The photos were grim — Sokolov looked at them like a doctor examining a radiographic set in the knowledge that the patient was doomed. First came the black-and-white shots from the sixties, and within a decade, the difference became noticeable: the jagged coastline evening out as it nibbled up the sea around the rim, Renaissance Island becoming more prominent.
The sea’s ailment spread like cancer, and indeed by the time it metastasized it was too late to stop it. The tumor that was Renaissance Island grew as the sea around it shrank. The rate at which it was happening on the screen was truly shocking, ever more rapid in the final years. Now in maximum detail, color and resolution, the Aral Sea was all but dead — ashen in pallor from the salty wasteland that had devoured it, the tiny pockets of water a shallow green. Renaissance Island had also dematerialized, joining the mainland as a peninsula, an isthmus, and then dissolving in it as a lifeless canyon.
As the last photo stayed on the screen, no one spoke.
On his laptop, Victor switched the slideshow to a still picture with a top-down view of the original Aralsk-7 base.
“This is our objective,” he said. “Major Sokolov, would you please give us a run-down on the layout, from your professional viewpoint?”
Sokolov cleared his throat.
“As you can see here, the standout feature was the airfield which had four runways crisscrossing in a wind rose fashion of sorts. About two kilometers east from the airfield were the military quarters, designated on all maps as a town named Kantubek. It consisted of the barracks, command posts, and utility buildings such as the mess hall, weather station, hospital, library, boiler plant, and the like. The actual bioweapons complex stood separately further south — the main laboratory block and support facilities, about a dozen buildings in all, surrounded by a fence. So Aralsk-7 had a compact arrangement, the airfield and two stations all located within a couple of kilometers of each other. The only exception was the open-air polygon where the chemical battalion conducted aerosol testing, which had to be placed as far away as possible, on the southernmost tip of Renaissance Island.”
“How much of the infrastructure has survived?” asked Major Petrov of Directorate V.
“This is what it looks like now,” Victor said, bringing up another picture of Aralsk-7. “Shot taken from a Persona-N1 satellite.”
Despite the myth created by intelligence agencies and sustained by pop culture, spy satellites were not the all-seeing wonders that could hang in space indefinitely, watch over the planet, and raise the alarm as they zoomed in on a terrorist suspect. In reality, satellite reconnaissance was essentially an upgraded version of aircraft reconnaissance. Orbit, speed, weather conditions and optical diffraction accounted for the basic drawbacks that it suffered from.
On this occasion, the shots offered clear detail, although the ground resolution was limited to large-scale views of Aralsk-7 and Kantubek.
If anything, the rundown condition of Kantubek matched expectations. Even an overhead perspective conveyed a sense of abandonment. The town’s buildings stood damaged by decades of neglect. Sections of the barracks roofing had collapsed. Paint had eroded. Brown rust had smothered every metallic surface, making the settlement blend with the desert landscape, the roads and walkways swept by sand and salt.
The same could not be said of Aralsk-7. Even an expert in imagery intelligence could not determine whether the buildings had been deserted for thirty years or merely thirty days. The difference hardly caught the eye. After all, given the nature of the compound’s activities, it was expected to last much longer than ordinary Soviet housing, and it had also been spared from plundering.
But when another picture appeared next to the current image, the difference became striking. It was a photograph taken some years earlier, revealing Aralsk in as much ruin as Kantubek. The comparison of the two pictures laid side-by-side made the renewal of the complex apparent. Every building had received an overhaul, looking solid a with new coating of white and gray paint. The layout of Aralsk-7 remained unchanged, for the most part. There were around twenty buildings in total. The three-storied laboratory was the largest, standing on the northwestern edge of the complex. The rest were research and support facilities of smaller sizes, arranged in a grid. A few of the buildings from the Soviet era had vanished, the area becoming more compact. Gone was the old metal fence enclosing the complex; a thick concrete wall now ran along the perimeter. Three other low buildings were located further south, outside the defensive barrier.
“All of Aralsk-7 has been rebuilt to last another hundred years,” Asiyah commentated to her silent audience. “The old buildings were reinforced and refitted. Some were demolished and exact replicas constructed in their places. The area has remained unchanged, measuring roughly three hundred by four hundred meters, plus the barracks of the security force, a hundred meters away, converted from the quarters of visiting Soviet inspectors. What we are seeing on the screen is a new complex altogether.”
“And now it’s up to us to put an end to whatever is going on there,” said the colonel from Directorate A.