The Hot Zone (16 page)

“We were going where no one had gone before,” Johnson said to me. “We brought the Biosafety Level 4 philosophy to the jungle.”

They wore orange Racal space suits inside the cave. A Racal suit is a portable, positive-pressure space suit with a battery-powered air supply. It is for use in fieldwork with extreme biohazards that are believed to be airborne. A Racal suit is also known as an orange suit because it is bright orange. It is lighter than a Chemturion, and unlike a Chemturion, it is fully portable, with a self-contained breathing apparatus. The main body of the suit (apart from the helmet and the blowers) is disposable, so that you can burn it after using it once or twice.

Wearing their Racal space suits, they laid out a trail that wound into Kitum Cave, marking the trail with avalanche poles so that people would not get lost. Along the trail, they placed cages holding the monkeys and guinea pigs. They surrounded the cages with electrified wire, powered by a battery, to discourage leopards from trying to eat the monkeys. They placed some of the monkeys directly underneath bat colonies in the roof of the cave, hoping that something would drop on a monkey that would cause the animal to break with Marburg.

They collected somewhere between thirty thousand and seventy thousand biting insects inside the cave—the cave is full of bugs. “We put
stickum paper over cracks in the cave, to catch crawling bugs,” Johnson said to me. “We hung light traps inside the cave to collect flying insects. The light traps were battery powered. You know how to collect ticks? They come out of the ground when they smell carbon dioxide from your breath. They smell it and come up and bite your ass. So we brought these huge tanks of carbon dioxide, and we used it to attract ticks. We trapped all the rodents that went into the cave. We used Havahart traps. Way at the back of the cave, by a pool of water, we found sand flies. These are biting flies. We saw leopard tracks all over the place, and Cape-buffalo tracks. We didn’t take any blood samples from large animals, nothing from leopards or buffalo. Nothing from the antelopes.”

“Could Marburg live in large African cats?” I asked. “Could it be a leopard virus?”

“Maybe. We just didn’t have permits to trap leopards. We did collect genet cats, and it wasn’t there.”

“Could it live in elephants?”

“Did you ever try to draw blood from a wild elephant? We didn’t.”

The Kenyan naturalists trapped and netted hundreds of birds, rodents, hyraxes, and bats. In the hot necropsy zone, under the tarp, they sacrificed the animals and dissected them while wearing Racal suits, taking samples of blood and tissue, which they froze in jars of liquid nitrogen. Some local people—they were Elgon Masai—had lived inside some of the caves on Mount Elgon and had
kept their cattle in the caves. The Kenyan doctors drew blood from these people and took their medical histories, and drew blood from their cattle. None of the local people or the cattle tested positive for Marburg antibodies—if they had tested positive, it would have shown that they had been exposed to Marburg. Despite the fact that nobody showed signs of having been infected, the Elgon Masai could tell stories of how a family member, a child or a young wife, had died bleeding in someone’s arms. They had seen family members crash and bleed out, but whether their illnesses were caused by Marburg or some other virus—who could tell? Perhaps the local Masai people knew the Marburg agent in their own way. If so, they had never given it a name.

None of the sentinel monkeys became sick. They remained healthy and bored, having sat in their cages in the cave for weeks. The experiment required that they be sacrificed at the end of the time so that the researchers could take tissue samples and observe their bodies for any signs of infection. At this point, the hard part of primate research began to torment Gene Johnson. He could not bring himself to euthanize the monkeys. He couldn’t stand the idea of killing them and couldn’t go into the cave to finish the job. He waited outside in the forest while another member of the team put on a space suit and went inside and gave the monkeys massive shots of sedative, which put them to sleep forever. “I don’t like killing animals,” he said to me. “That was a major
issue for me. After you’ve fed and watered monkeys for thirty days, they become your friends. I fed ’em bananas. That was terrible. It sucked.” He put on his orange Racal space suit and opened up the monkeys under the necropsy tent, feeling frustrated and sad, especially when all the monkeys turned out to be healthy.

The expedition was a dry hole. All of the sentinel animals remained healthy, and the blood and tissue samples from the other animals, insects, birds, Masai people, and their cattle showed no signs of Marburg virus. It must have been a bitter disappointment for Gene Johnson, so disheartening that he was never able to bring himself to publish an account of the expedition and its findings. There seemed to be no point in publishing the fact that he hadn’t found anything in Kitum Cave. All that he could say for sure is that Marburg lives in the shadow of Mount Elgon.

What Johnson did not know at the time, but what he sensed almost instinctively after the failure of the Kitum Cave expedition, was that the knowledge and experience he gained inside a cave in Africa, and the space suits and biohazard gear he carried back with him to Fort Detrick, might serve him well at another time and in another place. He kept his African gear hidden away at the Institute, piled in olive-drab military trunks in storage rooms and in tractor trailers parked behind buildings and padlocked, because he did not want anyone else to touch his gear or use it or take it away from him. He wanted to be ready to
use it at a moment’s notice, in case Marburg or Ebola ever came to the surface again. And sometimes he thought of a favorite saying, a remark by Louis Pasteur, “Chance favors the prepared mind.” Pasteur developed vaccines for anthrax and rabies.

The Army had always had a hard time figuring out what to do with Nancy and Jerry Jaax. They were married officers at the same rank in a small corps, the Veterinary Corps. What if one of them (the wife) is trained in the use of space suits? Where do you send them? The Army assigned the Jaaxes to the Institute of Chemical Defense, near Aberdeen, Maryland. They sold their Victorian house and moved, bringing their birds and animals with them. Nancy was not sorry to leave the house in Thurmont. They moved into a tract house, which was more to her liking, and there they began to raise fish in tanks, as a hobby, and Nancy went to work in an Army program to study the effects of nerve gas on rat brains. Her job was to open up the rat’s head and figure out what the nerve gas had done to the brain. This was safer and more pleasant than working with Ebola, but it was a little dull. Eventually she and Jerry both received promotions to lieutenant colonel and wore silver oak leaves on their shoulders. Jaime and Jason were growing up. Jaime became a superb gymnast,
short and wiry like Nancy, and Nancy and Jerry had hopes for her in the nationals, if not the Olympics. Jason grew into a tall, quiet kid. Herky, the parrot, did not change. Parrots live for many years. He went on shouting “Mom! Mom!” and whistling the march from
The Bridge on the River Kwai
.

Colonel Tony Johnson, Nancy’s commanding officer when she had worked at
USAMRIID
, remembered her competence in a space suit and wanted to get her back. He felt she belonged at the Institute. He was eventually appointed head of pathology at Walter Reed Army Medical Center, and when that happened, his old job came open, the job of chief of pathology at the Institute. He urged the Army to appoint Nancy Jaax to the position, and the Army listened. They agreed that she ought to be doing hot biological work, and she got the job in the summer of 1989. At the same time, the Army appointed Jerry Jaax head of the veterinary division at the Institute. So the Jaaxes became important and rather powerful figures. Nancy went back to biological work in space suits. Jerry still didn’t like it, but he had learned to live with it.

With these promotions, the Jaaxes sold their house in Aberdeen and moved back to Thurmont, in August 1989. This time, Nancy told Jerry it was not going to be a Victorian. They bought a contemporary Cape house with dormer windows, with a lot of land around it, meadow and forest, where the dogs could run and the children could play.
Their house stood on the lower slope of Catoctin Mountain, overlooking the town, above a sea of apple orchards. From their kitchen window, they could look into the distance over rolling farmland where armies had marched during the Civil War. Central Maryland stretched away to the horizon in folds and hollows, in bands of trees and rumpled fields, studded by silos that marked the presence of family farms. High over the beautiful countryside, passenger jets crisscrossed the sky, leaving white contrails behind them.

The city of Reston, Virginia, is a prosperous community about ten miles west of Washington, D.C., just beyond the Beltway. On a fall day, when a western wind clears the air, from the upper floors of the office buildings in Reston you can see the creamy spike of the Washington Monument, sitting in the middle of the Mall, and beyond it the Capitol dome. Reston was one of the first planned suburbs in America, a visible symbol of the American belief in rational design and suburban prosperity, a community of gently curved streets, making arcs through landscaped neighborhoods, where disorder and chaos were given no sign of acknowledgment and no places to hide. The population of Reston has grown in recent years, and high-technology businesses and blue-chip consulting firms have moved into office parks there, where glass buildings grew up during the nineteen-eighties like crystals. Before the crystals appeared, Reston was surrounded by farmland, and the town still contains meadows. In spring, the
meadows burst into galaxies of yellow-mustard flowers, and robins and thrashers sing in stands of tulip trees and white ash. The town offers handsome, expensive residential neighborhoods, good schools, parks, golf courses, excellent day care for children. There are lakes in Reston named for American naturalists (Lake Thoreau, Lake Audubon), surrounded by water-front homes. Reston is situated within easy commuting distance of downtown Washington. Along Leesburg Pike, which funnels traffic into the city, there are developments of executive homes with Mercedes-Benzes parked in crescent-shaped driveways. Reston was once a country town, and its rural past still fights obliteration, like a nail that won’t stay hammered down. Among the upscale houses, you see the occasional bungalow with cardboard stuffed in a broken window and a pickup truck parked in the side yard. In the autumn, vegetable stands along Leesburg Pike sell pumpkins and butternut squash.

Not far from Leesburg Pike there is a small office park. It was built in the nineteen-sixties, and is not as glassy or as fashionable as the newer office parks, but it is clean and neat, and it has been there long enough for sycamores and sweet-gum trees to grow up around it and throw shade over the lawns. Across the street, a McDonald’s is jammed at lunch hour with office workers. In the autumn of 1989, a company called Hazleton Research Products was using a one-story building in the office park as a monkey house. Hazleton Research Products is a division of Corning, Inc.
Coming’s Hazleton unit is involved with the importation and sale of laboratory animals. The Hazleton monkey house was known as the Reston Primate Quarantine Unit.

Each year, about sixteen thousand wild monkeys are imported into the United States from the tropical regions of the earth. Imported monkeys must be held in quarantine for a month before they are shipped anywhere else in the United States. This is to prevent the spread of infectious diseases that could kill other primates, including humans.

Dan Dalgard, a doctor of veterinary medicine, was the consulting veterinarian at the Reston Primate Quarantine Unit. He was on call to take care of the monkeys if they became sick or needed medical attention. He was actually a principal scientist at another company owned by Corning, called Hazleton Washington. This company has its headquarters on Leesburg Pike in Vienna, Virginia, not far from the monkey house in Reston, and so Dalgard could easily drive his car over to Reston to check on the monkeys if he was needed there. Dalgard was a tall man in his fifties, with metal-framed glasses, pale blue eyes, a shy manner, and a soft drawl that he had picked up in Texas at veterinary school. Generally he wore a gray business suit if he was working in his office, or a white lab coat if he was working with animals. He had an international reputation as a knowledgeable and skilled veterinarian who specialized in primate husbandry. He was a calm, even-tempered man with a kind of dreamy nature; a man
given to staring out the window of his office, thinking about one thing or another. On evenings and weekends, he repaired antique clocks as a hobby. He liked to fix things with his hands; it made him feel peaceful and calm and daydreamy, and he was patient with a jammed clock. He sometimes had longings to leave veterinary medicine and devote himself full-time to clocks.