Sokolov felt pressure in his ears. Descent. Fifteen minutes to the drop.
Colonel Grishin entered the BMD through the turret hatch and assumed position in the commander’s seat, flicking switches and checking the communications equipment. On his command, the crew tightened their straps and reported their status.
“Ready!” Sokolov said, repeating after the Alpha fighters, the straps digging into his limbs.
This is it, he thought, adrenalin surging.
Seconds stretching, Sokolov waited for the signal, bracing himself, jarred when it came — a siren blasting inside the Ilyushin.
“Get ready!” Grishin commanded again.
As instructed, Sokolov tensed his muscles — arms, legs and neck — and pressed himself against the seat to avoid injury.
The ramp began to open and the entire plane shook violently, as if it were about to crash. Then the turbulence subsided but a thunderous howl of the air current filled the Ilyushin, together with the screaming voice of the turbofans. Sokolov strained his muscles, expecting the worst.
Sokolov then felt a pull as the BMD rolled along the floor railing, propelled by the launch system.
Suddenly there was nothing underneath but a chasm that sucked them in.
Expelled from the Ilyushin, the BMD fell down like a sedan hurtling off a bridge. The vehicle angled sharply from its normal axis, accelerating towards the earth nose-down. Gripped by pure fear as the BMD rotated, Sokolov’s heart thumped, his breath cut short. To his vestibular sense, the world was somersaulting, the vehicle going past ninety degrees in an attempt to swing upside down. He clenched his fists harder. The BMD possessed the aerodynamics of a brick and weighing fourteen tons, it plummeted like one.
A jolt went through his body as the canopy ripped open. Only seconds after release, the parachute had deployed. The BMD straightened. Encapsulated, Sokolov felt like he was dropping inside a high-speed elevator.
“At ease!” Grishin’s voice barked in the comms device.
He slackened his grip on the seat. But his nerves stayed taut, the rate of descent too rapid for comfort. He would not be safe until his feet were back on solid earth.
The BMD floated down for what seemed an eternity. Finally, the word LANDING lit up on the electronic display before Grishin.
“Attention!”
Sokolov contracted his muscles again, hoping he would still be alive when they struck against the ground.
Ten seconds later, a cloud of smoke covered the BMD. Hanging underneath the BMD was a probe released by the parachute system. Upon contact with the surface, the probe engaged rocket thrusters located beneath the parachute, cushioning the BMD’s fall.
After the final impact came stillness. Sokolov exhaled. They had arrived.
“Is everyone all right?” Grishin asked his men, who replied in the affirmative. “Sokolov?”
“Fine,” Sokolov said, unbuckling the straps, eager to get out of the BMD as the field manual required. His first airborne experience was something he wished he never had to relive.
He put on his tactical goggles, pushed open the hatch above him and slid out of the BMD. Kicked up by the vehicle’s drop, a billow of particles was settling down again, and Sokolov tasted the salt carried by a sharp wind. The late afternoon sun hung low in the blue-tinted sky, where the tiny speck of the Ilyushin was all but invisible, flying deep into Uzbekistan.
He jumped down on the arid soil, his boots stepping on sand mixed with grain of sediment. He crouched down, feeling the heat that radiated off the ground, and found a strange pebble under his feet.
But the white, round object was no pebble. It was a tiny seashell. A relic of the Aral.
They had made landfall on a plateau, in the middle of the desert formed around Renaissance Island, some thirty kilometers south of the island proper. Sokolov saw the waterless sea of grey sand stretching into infinity. Along with the rolling sand dunes, the desert landscape was streaked with ridges of salt and sediment turned into rock. The view was clouded with whirling dust, and the distorted quiver of warm air.
The other two BMDs were nowhere to be seen. Could it be that Asiyah and the Vympel team had crashed? The thought made Sokolov anxious.
Grishin’s crew wasted no time preparing the BMD for action, as they discarded the parachute system and released the protective covers encasing its tracks. The powerful diesel engine rumbled, and as the driver raised the ground clearance to its maximum, the fighting vehicle resembled a deadly beast awaking from sleep.
Following the Alpha fighters, Sokolov climbed back into the troop compartment.
Grishin radioed the commanders of the two other BMDs, who reported successful landing. Relief washed over Sokolov as he learned that Asiyah was fine. On the satellite navigation screen, Sokolov saw the position of the vehicles. Having launched at eight-second intervals, the BMDs had dispersed in a straight line, spaced within a kilometer. Grishin peered through his periscope, watching the other BMDs pull up from behind a dune, sand pouring off their tracks.
As soon as the group assembled, they moved out towards the objective: Aralsk-7.
6
The BMD column raced across the rugged terrain, as if challenging a stage in the Dakar Rally for record time.
Time was all that mattered now, the decisive factor of lighting and weather conditions. The assault team operated within a limited bracket, when the sun was no longer scorching at fifty or sixty degrees Celsius, but nightfall was already fast approaching. At dusk, the temperature would drop to near freezing, and the intensifying wind would bring frostbite, and possibly a dust storm. Even with night vision equipment, the darkness would slow them down in unfamiliar, hazardous surroundings, and hand the advantage to the enemy.
In the sand behind them, the caterpillar treads left a wake of furrows over a pattern of wind-blown ripples, as if the sea were still there. But the Aral was far deadlier than any sea, or any desert. Jagged reefs protruded from the former sea floor, concealed by a shroud of sand.
It was extreme territory that welcomed no man, after what mankind had done to it. The BMDs were lost in the several million hectares of desert, but they were intruders nonetheless.
Inside the rumbling BMD, Sokolov expected a collision with a dune or an outcropping at any second, but the driver navigated the route expertly.
An hour later, they reached it.
Renaissance: no longer an island, nor even a peninsula, but a mesa, the highest point of the Aral Desert.
The plateau they had parachuted on was part of a natural slope that extended from the southwestern tip of Renaissance, elevating gradually to rise thirty meters above the desert. Driving uphill, the BMDs came atop the flatbed of the island’s overgrown mass. It was the most remote part of Renaissance, the venue of the testing polygon, accessible from the settlement by truck. The land here differed from the desert surroundings below — there was no sand on the hard, cracked earth, only a thin layer of gray salt dust covering the even surface. Beyond the edge of the polygon, the southern shore of the island had turned into a cliff. The rocky canyon yawning deep down at the base of the cliff had once been a harbor teeming with fish. Now all life had vanished from the Aral Desert. Even the anthrax spores had been long dead.
Beyond the polygon, the scenery remained flat and empty. The island’s vegetation had withered. Only mounds of brown bunchgrass dotted the flat ground, along with dry, skeletal twigs of the occasional saxaul shrub.
The barrenness became even more pronounced as it contrasted with the single trace of human presence.
The man-made landmark appeared out of nowhere, running like a scar on the island’s body.
It was a gravel road.