“That order went out as soon as I heard about the escape. He’d already gone to ground, but we’ll find him.”

“There’s hope for you yet.”

Chapter Six

NUKUS, UZBEKISTAN

In the end, Eric Stone’s odd knowledge of regional Central Asian airports proved ineffectual. Cabrillo wasn’t headed to the reasonably stable nation of Kazakhstan but rather to its more rough-and-tumble neighbor to the south. Uzbekistan had an abysmal human rights record, no freedom of the press, and when the nation’s large cotton harvest—its principal cash crop—was ready to be brought in from the fields, forced labor was often employed. While it was not as corrupt as other former Soviet states in this part of the world, given a choice, Cabrillo would have been happy to avoid coming here.

According to Eric Stone’s research, Karl Petrovski had been forty-two when he died in a hit-and-run accident and was a respected hydrologist with degrees from both Moscow University and the Berlin Institute of Technology. His most recent employment had been with the government of Uzbekistan, copying the success Kazakhstan was starting to show in reversing the devastation wrought by the Soviets and their ill-conceived irrigation projects of the 1940s and ’50s.

Prior to the Soviet intervention, the Aral Sea had been one of the world’s largest, with an area greater than lakes Huron and Ontario combined. The Aral supported a vibrant fishing and tourist industry and was the lifeblood of the region. In an effort to boost cotton production in the surrounding deserts, the Soviet engineers diverted water from the two rivers that fed the Aral, the Amu and Syr, into massive canal networks, most of which leaked more than half the water forced through them. By the 1960s the lake level began to drop dramatically.

The Soviets knew that this would be the result of their engineering, but a centrally planned government gave short shrift to the environmental impacts of their scheme. A half century later, the Aral Sea, which meant “the Sea of Islands,” had so shriveled it was now several separate bodies of brackish water that could scarcely support life. In fact, its current salinity was three times that of the world’s oceans. The once great fishing fleets now stood rusted and abandoned upon a barren desert. The shrinking of the Aral Sea changed local weather patterns, heating the air and diminishing seasonal rainfalls. Dust, salt, and pesticide runoff from the cotton fields further poisoned the land until all that remained was a vista as desolate as the moon.