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Chapter One
From horizon to horizon, it was a brown world. Not a rich brown, the color of earth, or even mud. This was a bleak, pale kind of tan. The only parts of the ground that weren't tan were the washed-out areas of thick dust and the close-packed grayish gravel beds. The whole place would have to undergo heavy renovation just to be called desolate.
A rising plume of dust, thrown up by the wheels of a three-vehicle caravan, indicated the only movement across the dry plain. Leading the way was a Toyota Land Cruiser that had seen long years of hard service. The FJ62 4x4 wagon was streaked with grime and dirt that obliterated its once white paint job.
Following the Land Cruiser were a pair of large military trucks. The first vehicle was a Soviet-made ZIL-151 6x6 with a van body and towing a small tanker trailer. Bringing up the rear of the convoy was a British Bedford 4x4. The rear of the Bedford was filled with a boxy something that stuck out at odd angles against its canvas covering. On the doors of each vehicle was a magnetic sign that read TRANS-STAN OIL EXPLORATION, barely visible under layers of dirt. Though all of the vehicles looked to be well past their prime, a practiced ear would have heard nothing but the sound of engines in perfect mechanical condition under the control of skilled drivers.
One of the drivers was considerably less skillful than the others. Peering through the streaked and smeared windshield of the Toyota, Vladimir Posenovich looked up at the few clouds in the sky. There would be little comfort from that direction. Even the sky wasn't a clear blue. What could be seen of it through the grimy windshield looked dirty from the blown dust.
Posenovich should have been happy, at least reasonably so. The German geologist who hired him had paid him in hard currency -- U.S. dollars -- and not Russian rubles. And the cloth-upholstered interior of the Toyota was comfortable; both the heater and the air conditioner worked. But it was not his car, and Posenovich was reflecting on just how far he had fallen from being a promising young military officer, a lieutenant in the Soviet army, more than fifteen years earlier.
"So, have we reached Vozrozhdeniye Island yet?" the passenger in the front seat said.
Taking a moment away from watching the open terrain ahead of them, Posenovich looked at the man sitting next to him before he answered. He didn't like what he saw. Heinrick Stahl was supposed to be a German petrochemical geologist and was in overall charge of the expedition. But Stahl did not seem like a man who worked with his hands much, especially not in the rough world of oil exploration.
The man was too smooth, too sure of himself, for Posenovich's taste. He reminded the Russian of one of the zampolit, the political officers of his military days. They would pretend to be your friend while collecting information on your reliability for their reports to Moscow.
This man just seemed too handsome to work outside, like one of those actors who played in the James Bond movies. His hands were soft and his skin only held the tan of a sportsman, not someone who worked outside under the glare of the desert sun. If he didn't watch himself carefully, Stahl would burn to a crisp in the desert air. Besides, Posenovich thought he smiled too much. He was smiling now, waiting for the Russian's answer.
"It's hard to tell anymore," Posenovich said at last. "The Aral has shrunk so much that you can't tell where the sea bottom ends and the island begins. And you should call it Rebirth Island. That's the English name for it, and your Russian pronunciation is terrible."
"Rebirth it is," Stahl said through one of his insufferable smiles.
"The waters have dropped that much?" came a voice from the seat behind Posenovich.
The woman in the backseat was pleasantly different from Stahl as far as Posenovich was concerned, and he liked her very much. She was the one bright light in the whole of the stark landscape surrounding them. Introduced as the expedition's chemist, she didn't look like any scientist Posenovich had ever known.
By any normal measurement, Veronica Haslett was a beautiful woman. Soft of voice, she tied her long blonde hair up under a blue babushka-like kerchief to protect it from the dust that covered everything, even in the closed vehicle. Only of medium height but possessing a very well-filled-out figure above and below a slim waist, Haslett was a pleasant sight in the rear-view mirror when Posenovich tilted his head.
"Oh, yes," Posenovich said, "the loss of the Aral Sea has been one of the great shames of the old Soviet Union. The plan to irrigate the desert areas surrounding here needed water, and lots of it. So the two rivers that feed the Aral, the Amu Darya, and the Syr Darya were diverted. The cotton crops grew only one year and the weak desert soil was depleted. But the old Soviet planners were stubborn. The waters were kept flowing into the fields, and the Aral Sea shrank.
"The Aral Sea was once the fourth largest inland body of water in the world. It's much less than that now. The ground we've been crossing used to be under as much as ten meters of water. Today the waters of the Aral have dropped twelve meters and they're still going down.
"That line of dunes we passed a few kilometers back was the old shoreline, I think. Or at least, they were the sands that used to surround Rebirth. That small rise we passed a few hours ago should have been Konstantin Island. It used to lie to the southwest of Rebirth. Now, it has just become another part of it."
Excerpted from The Home Team: Weapons Grade by Dennis C. Chalker All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.
