The Hot Zone (28 page)

“Mom! Mom!” Herky hung upside down and laughed like a maniac, and cried, “Bad bird! Bad bird!” She took him out of his cage and stroked him on the head. He moved onto her shoulder, and she preened his feathers.

Upstairs in the bedroom, she found the children asleep next to Jerry. She picked up Jaime and carried her into her own bedroom and tucked her into bed. Jerry picked up Jason and carried him to his bed—he was getting too big for Nancy to haul around.

Nancy settled into bed with Jerry. She said to him, “I have a gut feeling they’re not going to be able to contain the virus in that one room.” She told him she was worried that it could be spreading into other rooms through the air. That virus was just so damned infective she didn’t see how it would stay in one room. Something that Gene Johnson had once said to her came into her mind: “We don’t really know what Ebola has done in the past, and we don’t know what it might do in the future.”

Then Jerry broke the news to her about her father. Nancy was beginning to feel extremely guilty about not going home to be with him as he lay dying. She felt the tug of her last obligation to him. She wondered if she should bag this monkey thing and fly to Kansas. But she felt that it was her duty to go through with the operation. She decided to take a chance that her father would live awhile longer.

The alarm went off at four-thirty. Jerry Jaax got up, shaved, brushed his teeth, threw on clothes, and was out of there. The teams were going to wear civilian clothes. No one wanted to attract attention. Soldiers in uniforms and camouflage, putting on space suits … it could set off a panic.

It was five o’clock by the time he arrived at the Institute. There was no sign of dawn in the sky. A crowd of people had already gathered by a loading dock on the side of the building, under floodlights. There had been a hard freeze during the night, and their breath steamed in the air. Gene Johnson, the Ajax of this biological war, paced back and forth across the loading dock among a pile of camouflaged military trunks—his stockpile of gear from Kitum Cave. The trunks contained field space suits, battery packs, rubber gloves, surgical scrub suits, syringes, needles, drugs, dissection tools, flashlights, one or two human surgery packs, blunt scissors, sample bags, plastic bottles, pickling preservatives, biohazard bags marked with red
flowers, and hand-pumped garden sprayers for spraying bleach on space suits and objects that needed to be decontaminated. Holding a cup of coffee in his fist, Gene grinned at the soldiers and rumbled,
“Don’t touch my trunks.”

A white unmarked supply van showed up. Gene loaded his trunks into the van by himself and set off for Reston. He was the first wave.

By now, copies of
The Washington Post
were hitting driveways all over the region. It contained a front-page story about the monkey house:

Deadly Ebola Virus Found in Va
.
Laboratory Monkey

C. J. knew that if people learned what this virus could do, there would be traffic jams heading out of Reston, with mothers screaming at television cameras, “Where are my children?” When he talked to the
Washington Post
reporters, he was careful not to discuss the more dramatic aspects of the operation. (“I thought it would not be a good idea to talk about space suits,” he explained to me much later.) He was careful not to use scary military terms such as
virus amplification, lethal chain of transmission, crash and bleed
, or
major pucker factor
. A military biohazard operation was about to go down in a suburb of Washington, and he sure as hell didn’t want the
Post
to find out about it.

Half of this biocontainment operation was going to be news containment. C. J. Peters’s comments to
The Washington Post
were designed to create an impression that the situation was under control, safe, and not all that interesting. C. J. was understating the gravity of the situation. But he could be very smooth when he wanted, and he used his friendliest voice with the reporters, assuring them over the telephone that there really was no problem, just kind of a routine technical situation.
Somehow the reporters concluded that the sick monkeys had been “destroyed as a precaution” when in fact the nightmare, and the reason for troops, was that the animals hadn’t been destroyed.

As to whether the operation was safe, the only way to know was to try it. Peters felt that the larger danger could come from sitting back and watching the virus burn through the monkeys. There were five hundred monkeys inside that building. That was about three tons of monkey meat—a biological nuclear reactor having a core meltdown. As the core of monkeys burned, the agent would amplify itself tremendously.

C. J. arrived at the loading dock of the Institute at five o’clock in the morning. He would accompany the group down to the monkey house to see Jerry’s team inserted, and then he would drive back to the Institute to deal with the news media and government agencies.

At six-thirty, he gave an order to move out, and the column of vehicles left Fort Detrick’s main gate and headed south, toward the Potomac River. It consisted of a line of ordinary automobiles—the officers’ family cars, with the officers inside wearing civilian clothes, looking like commuters. The line of cars followed behind two unmarked military vehicles. One was a supply van and the other was a snow-white ambulance. It was an unmarked Level 4 biocontainment ambulance.
Inside it there were an Army medical-evacuation team and a biocontainment pod known as a bubble stretcher. This was a combat medical stretcher enclosed by a biocontainment bubble made of clear plastic. If someone was bitten by a monkey, he would go into the bubble, and from there he would be transferred to the Slammer. The supply van was a white unmarked refrigerator truck. This was to hold dead monkeys and tubes of blood.

There was not a uniform in the group, although a few members of the ambulance team wore camouflage fatigues. The caravan crossed the Potomac River at Point of Rocks and hit Leesburg Pike just as rush hour began. The traffic became bumper to bumper, and the officers began to get frustrated. It took them two hours to reach the monkey house, contending the whole way with ill-tempered commuters. Finally the column turned into the office park, which by that time was filling up with workers. The supply van and the ambulance were driven along the side of the monkey house, up onto a lawn, and were parked behind the building, to get them out of sight. The back of the building presented a brick face, some narrow windows, and a glass door. The door was the insertion point. They parked the supply van up close to the door.

At the edge of the lawn, behind the building, there was a line of underbrush and trees sloping down a hillside. Beyond that, there was a playground next to a day-care center. They could hear shouts of children in the air, and when they
looked through the underbrush, they could see bundled-up four-year-olds swinging on swings and racing around a playhouse. The operation would be carried out near children.

Jerry Jaax studied a map of the building. He and Gene Johnson had decided to have all the team members put on their space suits inside the building rather than out on the lawn, so that if any television crews arrived there would be nothing to film. The men went through the insertion door and found themselves in an empty storage room. It was the staging room. They could hear faint cries of monkeys beyond a cinder-block wall. There was no sign of any human being in the monkey house.

Jerry Jaax was going to be the first man in, the point man. He had decided to take with him one of his officers, Captain Mark Haines, a former Green Beret. He was a short, intense man with a whipcord body who had been through the Green Berets’ scuba-diving school. He had jumped out of airplanes at night into the open sea, wearing scuba gear. (“I’ll tell you one thing,” Haines once said to me. “I don’t do scuba diving for fun as a civilian. The majority of my diving has been in the Middle East.”) Captain Haines was not a man who would get claustrophobia and go into a panic in a space suit. Furthermore, Captain Haines was a veterinarian. He understood monkeys.

Jaax and Haines climbed into the supply van and pulled a plastic sheet across the van’s back door for privacy, and stripped naked, shivering in
the cold. They put on surgical scrub suits and then walked across the lawn, opened the glass door, and went into the storage room, the staging area, where an Army support team—the ambulance team, led by a captain named Elizabeth Hill—helped them into their space suits. Jerry knew nothing about field biological suits, and neither did Captain Haines.

The suits were orange Racal suits, designed for field use with airborne biological agents, and they were the same type of suit that had been used at Kitum Cave—in fact, some of them had come back from Africa in Gene Johnson’s trunks. The suit has a clear, soft plastic bubble for a helmet. The suit is pressurized. Air pressure is supplied by an electric motor that sucks air from the outside and passes it through virus filters and then injects it into the suit. This keeps the suit under, positive pressure, so that any airborne virus particles will have a hard time flowing into it. A Racal suit performs the same job as a heavy-duty Chemturion space suit. It protects the entire body from a hot agent, surrounding the body with superfiltered air. Army people generally don’t refer to Racals as space suits. They call them Racals or field biological suits; but they are, in fact, biological space suits.

Jaax and Haines put on rubber gloves, and the support team taped the gloves to the sleeves of the suits while they held their arms out straight. On their feet, they wore sneakers, and over the sneakers they pulled bright yellow rubber boots. The
support team taped the boots to the legs of the suits to make an airtight seal above the ankle.

Jerry was terribly keyed up. In the past he had lectured Nancy on the dangers of working with Ebola in a space suit, and now he was leading a team into an Ebola hell. At the moment, he didn’t care what happened to himself, personally. He was expendable, and he knew it. Perhaps he could forget about John for a while in there. He switched on his electric blower, and his suit puffed up around him. It didn’t feel too bad, but it made him sweat profusely. The door was straight ahead. He held the map of the monkey house in his hand and nodded to Captain Haines. Haines was ready. Jerry opened the door, and they stepped inside. The sound of the monkeys became louder. They were standing in a windowless, lightless, cinder-block corridor that had doors at either end: this was the makeshift air lock, the gray zone. The rule inside the air lock was that the two doors, the far door and the near door, could never be open at the same time. This was to prevent a backflow of contaminated air from coming into the staging room. The door closed behind them, and the corridor went dark. It went pitch-dark. Aw, son of a bitch. We forgot to bring flashlights. Too late now. They proceeded forward, feeling their way down the walls to the door at the far end.

Nancy Jaax woke up her children at seven-thirty. She had to shake Jason, as always, to get him out
of bed. It didn’t work, so she turned one of the dogs loose on him. He hit the bed flying and climbed all over Jason.

She put on sweatpants and a sweat shirt and went downstairs to the kitchen and flipped on the radio and tuned it to a rock-and-roll station and popped a Diet Coke. The music fired up the parrot. Herky began to scream along with John Cougar Mellencamp. Parrots really respond to electric guitar, she thought.

The children sat at the kitchen table, eating instant oatmeal. She told them that she would be working late, so they would be on their own at suppertime. She looked in the freezer and found a stew. It would do fine for the kids. They could defrost it in the microwave. She watched from the kitchen window as they walked down the driveway to the bottom of the hill to wait for the school bus.… “This work is not for a married female. You are either going to neglect your work or neglect your family” were the words of a superior officer long ago.