The Bug Hunter: A Novel Read online

  The

  Bug

  Hunter

  A Novel

  by Ken Davenport

  © 2019 Ken Davenport

  All Righs Reserved.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events, locales, and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.

  Book design by The Frontispiece

  Also by Ken Davenport

  The Two Gates

  To get updates on my writing and more

  visit at www.kendavenport.net

  Prologue

  Spring 2020

  Helmand Province, Afghanistan

  Wind ran off the mountains and through the valley like a river; in the winter it froze the ears and made the cheeks hurt. In the summer it parched the throat and dried the eyes, blowing a fine dust that covered you in a cocoon, nestling in the crevices of your skin and bonding to it like a tattoo. And since you’d go for months without a shower, even the fairest would start to go native: a traditional scarf framing a face stained dark by dirt and dust with a craggy beard. Nobody was winning any beauty contests.

  “God, I hate this place,” said Adnan Mishner as he scraped at his eyelids, trying to unstick them. His contacts were acting like sandpaper. “Two more days and we are out of here.”

  Gabriel Marx glanced sideways at Adnan but said nothing. His attention was fixed on the fields in front of them, rectangles of color against a brown backdrop. Gabriel was amazed that anything would grow in these valleys; they were like barren craters on the surface of the moon. And yet thousands of square miles that ringed Helmand Province were among the most fertile in the world for growing poppy, a pretty plant that fueled the Taliban insurgency. “What’s the wind doing now?”

  Adnan held up a wind meter to the sky. “Thirty-two kilometers per hour from the northwest,” he read out. “About right, and headed in the right direction.”

  “OK. Let’s go,” Gabriel said, turning to look at the marine company commander who was standing thirty feet behind them. His company, Bravo of the First Battalion, Fifth Marines, along with units from the Afghan National Army, the National Police’s Poppy Eradication Force, and the American contracting firm DynCorp were spread out in a defensive perimeter designed to protect Gabriel and Adnan from an ambush. The two men would be totally exposed when they went out into the fields. Touching a button at his collar, Gabriel said, “Captain, we’re moving out now. We will take the center route to the southern grid, release, and then double back to the east. Estimate about ninety minutes elapsed time.”

  “Roger that,” came a metallic reply from the headset in Gabriel’s Kevlar helmet.

  Gabriel looked at Adnan and said, “Let’s move. Step exactly where I do.” He then took the lead, walking carefully along the perimeter of the first field. The poppies were vivid hues of pastel pink and purple, happy colors, incongruous with the mission at hand. Adnan kept his head down, his eyes fixed on Gabriel’s footsteps, making sure to walk where Gabriel had last stepped. The trail had been swept for improvised explosive devices, but Adnan was taking no chances.

  They walked deliberately for roughly twenty minutes until they reached the northeast corner of the field they’d chosen, the northernmost of the bunch. There were eight fields in all, each roughly one hectare in size. The location of the release had to be precise, so the wind would take the cloud in the right direction and spread it evenly, to ensure each field was properly seeded.

  “This is good,” Gabriel said, dropping down to his knees so they were hidden from view. Both Adnan and Gabriel removed their backpacks. Carefully, each unzipped the main pouches and pulled out large cylindrical canisters. At one end of each was a nozzle approximately two inches across, and at the other was a plunger that resembled an old-fashioned dynamite detonator. Without a word between them, they primed the canisters for release and donned their gas masks.

  “On my mark. Three. Two. One. Go!” Gabriel said, and they twisted the plungers in unison, pointing the nozzles skyward. With a whoosh a pair of projectiles were shot into the sky, several hundred feet into the wind stream. When they reached the apex of their arcs, the projectiles released two plumes of white mist that joined and grew until the cloud was almost the size of a football field. Carried by the wind, the mist began to disperse itself over the fields, settling gradually onto the poppies like a blanket.

  Though the mist was not technically dangerous to humans, Gabriel and Adnan kept their masks on as they retraced their steps back to where the marines waited. It was protocol to do so, and Gabriel liked to be extra careful with anything that was genetically altered to kill things. He knew the guys in Vietnam had been told Agent Orange was safe too, only to find out later that it was a toxic brew. He preferred to err on the side of caution.

  Just as they reached the edge of the last field, Gabriel heard the .50 caliber heavy machine gun open up; the marines had started taking fire from a series of buildings across a canal that ran through the valley. And then came the shrill sound of mortars, and Gabriel knew that this was no random encounter with a few Taliban taking potshots from long distance.

  Gabriel turned to yell at Adnan just as the first mortar hit, blowing a huge hole in the ground in the center of the marines’ position and pelting Gabriel with rocks. He pulled Adnan to him and could see a look of terror in his eyes. Adnan was a civilian and had never been shot at before.

  “Stay with me, and do exactly as I do!” yelled Gabriel. Adnan put a viselike grip on Gabriel’s arm and nodded. There was a gap of about a hundred meters between where they were and where the marine MRAPs and other heavy vehicles were; they’d have to make a run for it.

  Gabriel waited for the next mortar round to hit and then immediately ran out into the open. He zigzagged and tried to stay low, dragging Adnan behind him. They managed to reach safety, diving headlong into the shadow of an armored truck. Adnan ripped off his mask and promptly threw up.

  Bravo Company was fully engaged in the firefight by then, and the noise was deafening. As Gabriel sat back against the huge tires of the truck that was shielding them, he looked off into the distance and could just see the last bit of the mist they’d unleashed settling to earth.

  Within an hour of their shooting off the canisters, the mist started working its destructive magic. Though it looked like a gas, it was actually a specially designed aerosol that carried thousands of Tubulifera thrips, a tiny winged insect with a needlelike mouth that fed on poppies by piercing their skin and sucking on their sap. This weakened the plant and destroyed vital cellular activity, reducing the yield but not permanently destroying the crop. Thrips were capable of asexual reproduction, and several thousand released into the air would in short order turn into a million or more. This alone would be a threat to the health of the poppy fields they were targeting.

  But these weren’t your ordinary garden thrips. These bugs had been genetically altered at the Biomedical Research Laboratory at George Mason University to carry a virulent strain of tospovirus, engineered specifically for this purpose to be immune to pesticides. Transmitted in the insect’s saliva, this virus produced a fatal disease in the poppy plant that was both incurable and devastating. Within weeks the targeted fields would begin to whither and die; the only option would be to burn the poppies to the ground and start over.

  The infected thrips had been shipped to Afghanistan aboard a military transport and delivered to Gabriel one week before. Since then they’d been unleashed on more than one thousand hectares of poppies all over Helmand Province.

/>   Later that night at Forward Operating Base Eagle, Gabriel lay in the dark staring at the ceiling of the tent he shared with Adnan. The accommodations were terrible. The tents were made of cheesecloth and weren’t waterproof. The floors were dirt and sometimes mud. Gabriel marveled at how the marine and army units in Afghanistan existed for months in these conditions. As a former marine who’d served in Iraq, Gabriel was used to roughing it. But Afghanistan was a particular kind of shit hole. The food was so bad that it wasn’t a question of if you were going to get the runs but rather when; since arriving ten days earlier, Gabriel had been subsisting on power bars and bottled water. He was in a perpetual state of hunger, and it made him irritable and short-tempered.

  Adnan came into the tent after his umpteenth trip to the head. He hadn’t followed Gabriel’s diet and was paying the price.

  “My ass hurts so bad,” Adnan said, falling onto his cot.

  “I tried to tell you. But maybe you thought your blood would ward off the runs. Didn’t work out so well.”

  Adnan grunted. “Apparently just because I was born in Cairo doesn’t mean my stomach can handle putrid goat and rice.”

  Adnan Mishner had been born to an Egyptian mother and an American father; his parents had met in Alexandria when his father was assigned to the US Agency for International Development. Adnan was born in Cairo in 1992 and lived in Egypt until he was five, when his father returned to Washington, DC. He was a brilliant student who went to Yale and later got his PhD in entomology at Cornell University. He was recruited by the Department of Homeland Security to work on developing insects to be used as vectors and assigned to the Biomedical Research Lab based at George Mason University.

  “When you were in Iraq, did you get sick like this?” Adnan asked.

  “Everyone gets sick at first. But your stomach gets used to it.”

  Adnan thought for a moment. “When were you in Iraq?”

  “In 2004 and 2006 Fallujah, Ramadi.”

  “Did you kill a lot of people?”

  Gabriel paused. He’d been asked this question before but hadn’t been expecting it from Adnan. This was the kind of question that civilians who didn’t know anything about the military asked. It was a very personal question—perhaps the most personal—and Gabriel hated it.

  “Why do you want to know that?” he asked.

  “I don’t know. Just curious, I guess.”

  “I did what needed to be done,” he said simply.

  “Does it bother you?”

  “Not a bit. And unless you’ve been in combat, you’ll never understand.”

  Adnan stared at Gabriel through the dark. “I hated the Iraq War. Terrible mistake.”

  “Nobody likes war, Adnan. And maybe it wasn’t the right thing to do. But hindsight is twenty-twenty.”

  “You don’t need hindsight to see that it was based on greed. The killing of Muslims in the name of oil—” Adnan caught himself, not wanting to anger Gabriel. They still had to share a tent, and he realized that the former marine had likely lost good friends in Iraq. “Anyhow, now we’re still in Afghanistan—nearly twenty years after 9/11. It’s . . . obscene.”

  “So if you hate what America is doing, why are you here now? You could have refused this assignment.”

  “Yes, I could have. But I don’t like drugs, Gabriel. My brother died of a heroin overdose when he was nineteen.”

  Even after he’d spent many months with Adnan, this was new information to Gabriel. “I didn’t know that.”

  “His name was Salman,” Adnan said so softly it was barely audible. “It means blessing in Arabic. He was a sweet boy, kind and gentle. But he was also easily influenced. When he was seventeen, he met a girl who was into drugs. By the time he left high school, he was lost to my family.”

  Gabriel had seen his fair share of drugs growing up and knew the power of addiction. “What happened?”

  “He overdosed,” Adnan said simply. “They found him in an abandoned house with a needle in his arm.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “The Taliban’s opium is a source of heroin on the world market. So this is my way of fighting back for my brother.”

  “It’s also a source of revenue for the insurgency. So you’re doing more than just fighting the drug war.”

  Adnan considered that for a moment before replying. “Maybe so. But that’s not why I’m here. And for my money, we should all pack up and go home.”

  Gabriel rolled over in his cot and thought about his own brother, wounded not by opioids but by an IED planted next to a road in a small village outside Lashkargah, Afghanistan. Chris Marx, a strapping Army Ranger, had lost half of his leg and part of his left hand to a homemade bomb in a milk jug and now rode a desk in the FBI field office in Chicago. He’d survived physically but had been emotionally damaged in a way that Gabriel thought might never heal.

  So when the CIA had recruited Gabriel out of his viticulture graduate program at Oregon State, he’d felt he couldn’t say no. He’d just finished his master’s degree and had already accepted a position at a winery in Sonoma County. He’d studied viticulture so he could ultimately start his own winery; since he was a kid on his parents’ farm in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, he’d loved growing things. After a trip to the Napa Valley in college, Gabriel had decided he preferred wine grapes to food crops. He immersed himself in the culture of wine, something unusual in rural Ohio, where he went to college. He ventured that he was the only subscriber to Wine Spectator within a hundred-mile radius.

  Gabriel quickly found that his role with the CIA was complex and exciting. The agency was coordinating an interdepartmental effort—along with the army and Department of Homeland Security—to develop insect-borne pathogens to combat bioterrorism and to ultimately develop an offensive capability. Gabriel spent time working with Adnan at the Biomedical Research Laboratory. The researchers there had trained Gabriel in the science of insect genomics and taught him how to handle insect vectors in the field. This mission with Adnan was the culmination of that training.

  As Adnan began to snore, Gabriel counted the days before he’d be back home. He was tired of Afghanistan and tired of Adnan. Tomorrow they’d start their treacherous journey, escorted by an Afghan army unit, back to Bagram Airfield to fly back to the States.

  Time to return to the wine, he thought as he drifted off to sleep.

  The convoy taking them back to Bagram had been driving for more than an hour, moving slowly along unpaved roads rutted by recent rain. They had just passed through a small village of mud huts when Gabriel heard what sounded like a firecracker going off, followed instantaneously by the familiar ping of a bullet striking steel. At first it was sporadic, like someone shooting at tin cans for target practice. But then came the sound of automatic gunfire, and the driver of their Humvee veered off the road and into a ditch. Thankfully they didn’t tip over.

  Gabriel and Adnan sat pressed against each other in the back of the Humvee, unable to see anything through the dirty bulletproof glass. But they could hear shouting, followed by automatic gunfire and then high-pitched screaming. By the time they managed to get out of their vehicle, it was all over.

  Adnan reached the little girl first; she was no more than eight years old, with jet-black hair. She wore a tattered yellow dress that was blackened by the growing stain of blood. She’d been shot in the stomach, the bullet ripping through her as if she were a rag doll, exiting her back and exposing her spine. Rolling her over, Adnan put his hand on her face and hopelessly felt for a pulse. Her brown eyes were open, but she was no longer there.

  Gabriel put his hand on Adnan’s shoulder, and after a moment, he let go of the little girl. He slowly stood and looked around. The Afghan army had decimated the village; there were bodies of old men, women, and children everywhere. “No, no, no!” he screamed.

  “Adnan! We have to go! We are exposed here!” Gabriel
yelled, grabbing him by the arm, pulling him toward the Humvee.

  “They’re all dead! Don’t you see?”

  “Yes, I see,” said Gabriel, pushing Adnan into the vehicle. Gabriel got in after him and yelled at the driver to go.

  Adnan sat looking at his blood-soaked hands and started to cry. “Murderers,” he repeated over and over again.

  Part One

  Six Years Later

  CHAPTER ONE

  Argun, Chechen Republic

  Frost clung to the windows of the cinder-block house like cloudy white paint, and even sitting inside, perched on a rickety wooden stool set on a dirt floor, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi could see his breath in the air. His hands cupped a mug of steaming hot tea, and he thought again about how much he hated Chechnya. “The shittiest piece of earth I have ever seen,” he had called it when he first arrived. Coming from a man who’d spent years shuttling between cave-like bunkers in war-torn Syria, that was saying something.

  “Is it all set?” al-Baghdadi asked, a note of skepticism in his voice.

  “Yes,” said Aslan Basayev, with more confidence than he felt.

  Al-Baghdadi stared at the dim screen on the tablet connected to the dark web via a satellite link. The screen was open to a Tor browser connected to a highly encrypted blockchain network that was created at great effort specifically for this purpose. He had uploaded the final set of instructions and was ready to hit Submit.

  Basayev was anxious. While the Russians were no longer patrolling the skies over Chechnya looking for communication signals to drop their five-hundred-kilogram bombs on, years of fear had left their mark. “Do it, Abu Bakr. Do it now,” he pleaded.

  For a man who’d personally sawed off the heads of many an infidel, al-Baghdadi was strangely nervous. This was a moment he’d dreamt about for so long; as the head of the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS), al-Baghdadi had been in hiding for the past ten years. As Osama bin Laden had been, he was public enemy number one of the world’s intelligence agencies and had a $100 million bounty on his head. As his armies had crumbled around him in 2017 and 2018, ISIS had been routed from its capital of Raqqa in Syria and forced into ever-smaller areas. By 2019 al-Baghdadi had taken refuge for a time in the hands of Chechen Islamists who had come to Syria to fight and kill Russian troops, but even that had been short-lived. With Russian-backed Syrian forces closing in, al-Baghdadi and a handful of top Chechen leaders had managed a harrowing escape into Turkey. From there they’d crossed through Georgia into Chechnya, where they’d been in hiding.