ABERDEEN -- An AWOL soldier has been sentenced to 45 days in the Aberdeen City Jail and $3,000 in penalties for trespassing, after he built a bizarre underground bunker.
25-year-old Mikhail Sharov -- absent without leave from the Army's 82nd Airborne Division -- apparently lived three months in the elaborate bunker he dug on city property.
Police discovered the bunker after receiving a tip from a bike rider who noticed a pipe protruding from the ground. He heard banging noises and suspected he had stumbled across a meth lab.
The bunker -- dug into the side of a hill -- contained stacks of books on how to disarm or kill an adversary, and how to build guns and rocket-propelled grenades. There were manuals about rifles and tips on how to be a sniper. There was a bulletproof vest, night goggles, a palm pilot, cellphone, laptop computer and lots of ammunition -- but no guns or illegal weapons.
There were maps detailing locations of natural gas pipelines and electrical generation and transmission facilities in the Northwest, plus information about water-management techniques.
Says Aberdeen Police Captain John Green: "It's all very concerning, but it is not unlawful to possess all this stuff."
Agents from the FBI and the federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco & Firearms interviewed Sharov in jail Tuesday and searched the bunker, but Green says neither agency indicated any charges would be filed.
Sharov, arrested in his bunker last week for trespassing, pleaded guilty in Municipal Court. He could have received up to 90 days in jail.
"All he said is that he was between jobs, and that's why he built the bunker," Green says.
Sharov has been absent without official leave from his division -- based at Fort Bragg, North Carolina -- since December. Aberdeen detective Jon Hudson says he was an E-4 enlisted man training to be a paratrooper.
The Army was notified and provided a bus ticket to North Carolina. Military officials say they hope Sharov will turn himself in.
Police say Sharov told them he will probably head for California next. He says he doesn't want any of the material from the bunker.
They describe the Russian-born Sharov as intelligent and educated. He graduated from a Virginia high school at 16 and by 18 had earned a computer science degree and a minor in chemistry from Radford University.
He worked for Microsoft for a couple of years before joining the Army. His parents live near Baltimore and work as research biologists at the Institute on Aging at Johns Hopkins University.
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