It seeps into the car through cracks in the doors and windows. The road is dirt by now. We come to the border station for Kazakstan, but that road leads north. We drive east, choosing unmarked forks in the road until we round a promontory to a four-mile beach of the shallow gulf and an encampment tucked into the hillside. There are army tents, an amphibious vehicle, trailers with satellite phones, faxes, computers, rows of microscopes, and burbling beakers.
Sandbags are everywhere.
In traveling around the Caspian Sea, we have seen many visions of pioneering outposts of Western commerce beginning to colonize the ruins of the former Soviet Union. We have seen the bustling, tasteful headquarters of the Azerbaijani International Oil Consortium, a mini-United Nations of oilmen standing in a city whose former glory is smudged and crumbled nearly beyond recognition. But we have never seen a starker example of the dying Soviet idea and its toxic remains. And we are about to see an example of the busy but precarious new efforts to produce something in their midst. As we approach, a figure in jeans and a T-shirt strides toward us like Chuck Yeager out of a fighter crash in the desert.