The Hot Zone (22 page)

In order to do this, he needed to use blood serum from human victims. The blood serum would react to viruses. He went to the freezers, and got out vials of frozen blood serum from three people. Two of the people had died; one had survived. They were:

The test was delicate, and took hours to complete. It was not made easier by the fact that he was
shuffling around in his space suit the whole time. First he put droplets of cells from the monkey culture onto glass slides, and let them dry, and treated them with chemicals. Then he put drops of the blood serum on the slides. The blood would glow in the presence of the target virus.

Now it was time to look. This had to be done in total darkness, because the glow would be faint. He shuffled over to a storage closet, and went inside it, and closed the door behind him. A microscope sat on a table in the closet, and there was a chair, and from the wall hung an air hose. He plugged the hose into his space suit and put the slides into the microscope. Then he turned out the lights. He felt around in the darkness for the chair, and sat down. This was not a fun place to be if you happened to have a touch of claustrophobia—sitting in a pitch-black Level 4 closet while wearing a space suit. Peter Jahrling had made his peace with suffocation and darkness a long time ago. He waited for a minute to give his eyes time to adapt to the dark, and the little sparkles of light in his eyes as they adjusted to the darkness eventually faded away, while cool, dry air roared around his face and whiffled the hair on his forehead. Then he looked through the binocular eyepieces of the microscope. He wore his eyeglasses inside his space suit, and that made it particularly difficult to see. He pressed the faceplate against his nose and squinted. He moved his face from side to side. His nose left a greasy streak inside his faceplate. He twisted his helmet until it
was turned nearly sideways. Finally he saw through the eyepieces.

Two circles drifted into his sight, and he focused his eyes, bringing the circles together. He was looking down into vast terrain. He saw cells dimly outlined in a faint glow. It was like flying over a country at night, over thinly populated lands. It was normal to see a faint glow. He was looking for a bright glow. He was looking for a city. He scanned the slides with his eyes, back and forth, back and forth, moving across the microscopic world, looking for a telltale greenish glow.

The Musoke did not glow.

The Boniface glowed weakly.

To his horror, the Mayinga glowed brightly.

He jerked his head back. Aw, no! He adjusted his helmet and looked again. The Mayinga blood serum was still glowing. The dead woman’s blood was reacting to the virus in the monkey house. He got an ugly feeling in the pit of his stomach. Those monkeys didn’t have Marburg. They had Ebola.
Those animals were dying of Ebola Zaire
. His stomach lurched and turned over, and he sat frozen in the dark closet, with only the sound of his air and the thud of his heart.

This can’t be Ebola Zaire, Peter Jahrling thought. Somebody must have switched the samples by accident. He looked again. Yeah, the Mayinga blood serum was definitely glowing. It meant he and Tom could be infected with Ebola Zaire, which kills nine out of ten victims. He decided that he had made a mistake in his experiment. He must have accidentally switched around his samples or gotten something mixed up.

He decided to do the test again. He turned on the lights in the closet and shuffled out into his lab, this time keeping careful track of his vials, bottles, and slides to make sure that nothing got mixed up. Then he carried the new samples back into the closet and turned out the lights and looked again into his microscope.

Once again, the Mayinga blood glowed.

So maybe it really was Ebola Zaire or something closely related to it—the dead woman’s blood “knew” this virus, and reacted to it. Good thing this ain’t Marburg—well, guess what,
it ain’t
Marburg
. This is the honker from Zaire, or maybe its twin sister. Ebola had never been seen outside Africa. What was it doing near Washington? How in the hell had it gotten here? What would it do? He thought, I’m onto something really hot.

He was wearing his space suit, but he didn’t want to take the time to decon out through the air lock. There was an emergency telephone on the wall in his lab. He disconnected his air hose to extinguish the roar of air so that he could hear through the receiver, and he punched Colonel C. J. Peter’s phone number.

“C. J.!” he shouted through his helmet. “IT’S PETE JAHRLING. IT’S REAL, AND IT’S EBOLA.”

“Naw!” C. J. replied.

“YEAH.”

“Ebola? It’s gotta be a contamination,” C. J. said.

“NO, IT ISN’T A CONTAMINATION.”

“Could you have gotten your samples mixed up?”

“YEAH, I KNOW—MY FIRST THOUGHT WAS THAT SOMEBODY HAD SWITCHED THE SAMPLES. BUT THEY WEREN’T SWITCHED, C. J.—BECAUSE I DID THE TEST TWICE.”

“Twice?”

“EBOLA ZAIRE BOTH TIMES. I’VE GOT THE RESULTS RIGHT HERE. I CAN PASS THEM TO YOU. TAKE A LOOK FOR YOURSELF.”

“I’m coming down there,” C. J. said. He hung up the phone and hurried downstairs to Jahrling’s hot lab.

Jahrling, meanwhile, picked up a sheet of waterproof paper on which he had written down the results of his tests. He slid the paper into a tank full of EnviroChem. The tank went through the wall to a Level 0 corridor outside the hot zone. The tank worked on the same principle as a sliding cash drawer in a teller’s window. You could pass an object from the hot zone through the tank into the normal world. The object would be disinfected on its way through the tank.

C. J. stood at a thick glass window on the other side, looking in at Jahrling. They waited for several minutes while the chemicals penetrated the paper and sterilized it. Then C. J. opened the tank from his side and removed the paper, dripping with chemicals, and held it in his hands. He motioned to Jahrling through the window:
Go back to the phone
.

Jahrling shuffled back to the emergency telephone and waited for it to ring. It rang, and there was C. J.’s voice on the line: “Get out of there, and let’s go see the commander!”

It was time to move this thing up the chain of command.

Jahrling deconned out through the air lock, got dressed in his street clothes, and hurried to C. J. Peters’s office, and they both went to the office of the commander of
USAMRIID
, a colonel named David Huxsoll. They brushed past his secretary—
told her it was an emergency—and sat down at a conference table in his office.

“Guess what?” C. J. said. “It looks like we’ve found a filovirus in a bunch of monkeys outside Washington. We’ve recovered what we think is Ebola.”

Colonel David Huxsoll was an expert in biohazards, and this was the sort of situation he thought the Institute was prepared to handle. Within minutes, he had telephoned Major General Philip K. Russell,
MD
, who was the commander of the United States Army Medical Research and Development Command, which has authority over
USAMRIID
, and had set up a meeting in Russell’s office in another building at Fort Detrick.

Colonels Huxsoll and Peters spent a few moments talking about who else should be brought in. They hit upon Lieutenant Colonel Nancy Jaax, the Institute’s chief of pathology. She could identify the signs of Ebola in a monkey. Huxsoll picked up his phone. “Nancy, it’s Dave Huxsoll. Can you get over to Phil Russell’s office right now? It’s damned important.”

It was a dark November evening, and the base was beginning to quiet down for the night. At the moment of sundown that day, there was no sun visible, only a dying of the light behind clouds that flowed off Catoctin Mountain. Jaax met Jahrling and the two colonels on their way across the parade ground beside the Institute. A detail of marching soldiers stopped before the flagpole.
The group of people from the Institute also stopped. From a loudspeaker came a roar of a cannon and then the bugle music of “Retreat,” cracklish and cheap-sounding in the air, and the soldiers lowered the flag while the officers came to attention and saluted.

C. J. Peters felt both embarrassed and oddly moved by the ceremony. “Retreat” ended, and the soldiers folded up the flag, and the Institute people continued on their way.

General Russell’s office occupied a corner of a low-slung Second World War barracks that had been recently plastered with stucco in a hopeless effort to make it look new. It had a view of the legs of Fort Detrick’s water tower. Consequently, the general never opened his curtains. The visitors sat on a couch and chairs, and the general settled behind his desk. He was a medical doctor who had hunted viruses in Southeast Asia. He was in his late fifties, a tall man with hair thinning on top and gray at the temples, lined cheeks, a long jaw, pale blue eyes that gave him a look of intensity, and a booming, deep voice.

C. J. Peters handed the general a folder containing the photographs of the life form that inhabited the monkey house.

General Russell stared. “Holy shit,” he said. He drew a breath. “Man. That’s a filovirus. Who the hell took this picture?” He flipped to the next one.

“These were done by my microscopist, Tom
Geisbert,” Jahrling said. “It could be Ebola. The tests are showing positive for Ebola Zaire.”

C. J. then gave an overview of the situation, telling the general about the monkeys in Reston, and finishing with these words: “I’d say we have a major pucker factor about the virus in those monkeys.”

“Well, how certain are you that it’s Ebola?” General Russell asked. “I’m wondering if this could be Marburg.”

Jahrling explained why he didn’t think it was Marburg. He had done his test twice, he said, and both times the samples were positive to the Mayinga strain of Ebola Zaire. As he spoke to the general, he was very careful to say that that test did not in itself prove that the virus was Ebola Zaire. It showed only that is was closely related to Ebola Zaire. It might be Ebola, or it might be something else—something new and different.

C. J. said, “We have to be very concerned and very puckered if it is of the same ilk as Ebola.”

They had to be very puckered, Russell agreed. “We have a national emergency on our hands,” he said. “This is an infectious threat of major consequences.” He remarked that this type of virus had never been seen before in the United States, and it was right outside Washington. “What the hell are we going to do about it?” he said. Then he asked them if there was any evidence that the virus could travel through the air. That was a crucial question.

There
was
evidence, horrifying but incomplete,
that Ebola could travel through the air. Nancy Jaax described the incident in which her two healthy monkeys had died of presumably airborne Ebola in the weeks after the bloody-glove incident, in 1983. There was more evidence, and she described that, too. In 1986, Gene Johnson had infected monkeys with Ebola and Marburg by letting them breathe it into their lungs, and she had been the pathologist for that experiment. All of the monkeys exposed to airborne virus had died except for one monkey, which managed to survive Marburg. The virus, therefore, could infect the lungs on contact. Furthermore, the lethal airborne dose was fairly small: as small as five hundred infectious virus particles. That many particles of airborne Ebola could easily hatch out of a single cell. A tiny amount of airborne Ebola could nuke a building full of people if it got into the, air-conditioning system. The stuff could be like plutonium. The stuff could be worse than plutonium because it could replicate.

C. J. said, “We
know
it’s infectious by air, but we don’t know
how
infectious.”

Russell turned to Jaax and asked, “Has this been published? Did you publish it?”

“No, sir,” she said.

He glared at her. She could see him thinking, Well, Jaax, why the hell
hasn’t
it been published?

There were plenty of reasons, but she didn’t feel like giving them just now. She believed that Gene Johnson, her collaborator, had difficulty writing papers. And, well, they just had not gotten
around to publishing it, that was all. It happens. People sometimes just don’t get around to publishing papers.

Hearing the discussion, Peter Jahrling chose not to mention to the general that he might have sniffed just a little bit of it. Anyway, he hadn’t
sniffed
it, he had only
whiffed
it. He had kind of like waved his hand over it, just to bring the scent to his nose. He hadn’t
inhaled
it. He hadn’t like jammed the flask up into his nostril and snorted it or anything like that. Yet he had a feeling he knew what the general might do if he found out about it—the general would erupt in enough profanity to lift Jahrling off his feet and drop him into the Slammer.

Then there was the additional frightening possibility that this virus near Washington was not Ebola Zaire. That it was something else. Another hot strain from the rain forest. An unknown emerger. A new filovirus. And who could say how it moved or what it could do to humans? General Russell began to think out loud. “We could be in for a hellacious event,” he said. “Given that we have an agent with a potential to cause severe human disease, and given that it appears to be uncontrolled in the monkey house, what do we do? We need to do the right thing, and we need to do it fast. How big is this sucker? And are people going to die?” He turned to Colonel C. J. Peters and asked, “So what are our options here?”

C. J. had been thinking about this already. According to standard doctrine, there are basically
three ways to stop a virus—vaccines, drugs, and biocontainment. There was no vaccine for Ebola. There was no drug treatment for Ebola. That left only biocontainment.