“Sir, is the shipment still here in Ashgabat?” the Ambassador asked.
“No. A few weeks ago we transferred six boxcars filled with 55-gallon drums onto the IRIR where it was moved through Mashhad. The shipment was transferred to Damghan.”
“IRIR?”
“The Islamic Republic of Iran Railways.”
“How many of these 55-gallon drums were in the boxcars?”
“The bill of lading was for 500 drums.”
“And the contents within those drums?”
“Pesticides. Iran is rich with agriculture, Madam Ambassador.”
Ambassador Dunn turned her attention over to the Deputy Chairman of the Cabinet of Ministers for Trade, Commerce, Textiles and Customs.
“Sir, does Deputy Chairman Gurbannazarow conduct a lot of business with Iran?”
“We are very close trading partners. But Turkmenistan is more of a trading gateway, an intersection of world trade for the region. We collect a tax for all goods traveling between Russia and the region. We take great pride in our rail system.”
Billy Finn nodded to the Ambassador and took the floor.
“Sir, do you ever inspect the contents of shipments that pass through your yards, to verify that the contents match the freight bills?”
“Do we taste the tea to make sure it’s tea? Do we turn on the radios to make sure they’re radios? Do we test the pesticides to make sure they kill the red palm weevil bug that eats away at Iranian date palm trees and pistachios? No.”
“You mentioned Damghan as being the final destination. Isn’t that where the Iranians produce their biological and chemical weapons?” Camp quizzed the Deputy Minister of Trade.
“I know nothing about weapons, Mr. Campbell, but as for trade, Damghan is a manufacturing city. There are many chemical factories and distributors for plastics, petroleum products and additives.”
“Do the IRIR trains come to Ashgabat for switching, or do you transfer loads off the Trans-Caspian onto IRIR once they reach Mashhad?” Camp asked.
“We transfer here… onto IRIR trains in the main rail yard.”
“Do Iranians come here to conduct business often?” Finn asked.
“Of course, we are friends. They especially enjoy holidays close to the Caspian Sea.”
The meeting was adjourned, and the Ambassador thanked the Turkmenistan staff and Deputy Ministers for their time and candor. The Ambassador’s scheduler stepped into the conference room and handed Camp a note as final farewells were being exchanged.
CALL GENERAL FERGUSON AT ISAF ON SECURE LINE ASAP.
Camp and Billy Finn were escorted to a small video conference room. The vapor locked door made a swishing sound as they locked themselves in.
Major Spann answered the SIPRNET line that was ringing less than a foot away from Ferguson.
“General Ferguson’s Office, Major Spann speaking.”
“Major, Captain Campbell and Billy Finn.”
“Please hold, captain.”
Ferguson took another 45-seconds shuffling through the papers that he wasn’t even looking at prior to the call.
“Camp, what did you find out over there?” Ferguson finally asked.
“Sir, the Kirov Oblast shipment passed through here about two weeks ago. Five hundred 55-gallon drums of red palm weevil pesticides transferred over to the Islamic Republic of Iran Railway and moved to Damghan.”
“So CIA was correct; it did originate in Kirov?”
“Affirmative.”
“Okay, well that’s not good then. I just received a classified briefing from the SECDEF’s office. They’ve put a new stealth drone over Iran and were tracking your SkitoMister. The drone was en route from Kandahar when the SkitoMister went airborne. A chopper set it down in the Bourvari District, a compilation of five villages full of Persian-Armenians. The SkitoMister was placed on a maintenance truck that drove all of the roads in the five villages. According to the video feed it appeared as though they were spraying.”
“Spraying what?” Camp asked.
“The SECDEF is adamant that we not jump to conclusions on the whole tularemia thing. For all we know these are pesticides and a legitimate use of the SkitoMister. We don’t have an exactly stellar record of intelligence in the region.”
“Why these particular villages, general? Is this an agricultural area?” Finn asked.
“There’s some agriculture in the Bourvari, Billy, but the only notable thing is the people.”
“Persian-Armenians?”
“Christians, Billy… they’re all Christians.”
Camp and Finn took a few seconds to digest the news.
“What’s next, general?”
“Get yourselves back to Kabul, and we’ll take it from there.”
22
National Interagency Biodefense Center
BSL-4 Facility
Fort Detrick, Maryland
Lieutenant Colonel Leslie Raines and two microbiologists were suited up and inside the BSL-4 lab. Tissue samples from all 16 dead rhesus monkeys were under the scope. The team needed to reverse-engineer what was clearly a vaccine-resistant strain of tularemia. The dead monkeys were living proof.
The challenge of vaccine development was more than developing suitable antigens, adjuvants and delivery methods. Numerous regulatory, technical and manufacturing obstacles needed to be considered in order to translate a vaccine candidate developed in a controlled lab over to a human setting in a clinic. It was the difference between the classroom and the streets.
Raines was focused on the adjuvants, substances that could be added to existing tularemia vaccines to boost the vaccine’s ability to produce an immune response. If Raines could cook an adjuvanted vaccine, then LyonBio should be able to produce more doses of vaccine with smaller amounts of the antigen, the active ingredient that delivered the immune response.
Even though the public demand for safe and effective vaccines remained strong, very few of the major pharmaceutical companies had the knowledge or facilities required to develop and manufacture new vaccine products. Most of the traditional work focused on small-molecule drugs and therapeutic proteins.
Raines had no choice but to choose an offshore firm. There were too many restrictions on which additives could be introduced into American-made vaccines. The complexity of the technology, the need for specialized facilities and the endless regulatory hurdles were major obstacles in the US. And with the emergence of an expanding animal rights movement that was waging effective battles on all five fronts — political, legal, social, violence, and psychological — basic science was anything but basic in America.
At her core, Raines was a biomedical researcher, a basic scientist. Raines started with in silica modeling. She used the finest Silicon Valley computers and software programs and looked for ways to exploit naturally occurring tularemia into a lethal bio-weapon. Based on some vulnerable areas she discovered within the gene make-up of tularemia, she cooked up an in vitro recipe that she hoped would be vaccine-resistant. In vitro was the research conducted in a Petri dish or within glass. Raines developed both her toxin and her vaccine inside test tubes. She had to find a delivery mechanism that would spread an aerosolized version of the bacteria that could be inhaled. Aerosolized tularemia was tricky. If the bacteria broke down too much during physical alteration, it would lose its potency. Raines then needed to test both the toxin and the vaccine in a living organism. She gave the existing baseline vaccine to four rhesus monkeys and delivered the inhalation tularemia. It was a pre-clinical animal trial, or what was called in vivo research conducted within a living organism.