The Hot Zone (34 page)

He mopped up some blood from the monkey, and Nancy rinsed her gloves in the pan of green EnviroChem.

Her father died that day, while Nancy worked in the hot suite. She flew home to Kansas and arrived by taxi on Saturday morning at her family’s plot at a graveyard in Wichita just as the funeral service began. It was a cold, rainy day, and a tiny knot of people holding umbrellas huddled around a preacher by a stone wall and a hole in the earth. Lieutenant Colonel Nancy Jaax moved forward to see more clearly, and her eyes rested on something that she had not quite anticipated. It was a flag draped over the casket. He had been a veteran, after all. The sight broke her down, and she burst into tears.

At four o’clock in the afternoon, Thursday, December 7, the last monkey was killed and bagged, and people began deconning out. They had had a bad time trying to catch the little monkey that had escaped; it took hours. Jerry Jaax had entered the room where it was hiding and spent two or three hours chasing it in circles with a net. Finally the monkey got itself jammed down in a crack behind a cage with its tail sticking out, and Sergeant Amen hit the tail with a massive dose of anesthetic. In about fifteen minutes, the monkey became still, and they dragged it out, and it went the
way of the other monkeys, carried along in the flow of material.

They radioed Gene Johnson to tell him that the last monkey was dead. He told Sergeant Klages to explore the building, to make sure that there were no more live monkeys in any rooms. Klages discovered a chest freezer in a storage room. It looked sinister, and he radioed to Johnson: “GENE, I’VE GOT A FREEZER HERE.”

“Check it out,” Johnson replied.

Sergeant Klages lifted the lid. He found himself staring into the eyes of frozen monkeys. They were sitting in clear plastic bags. Their bodies streamed with blood icicles. They were monkeys from Room F, the original hot spot of the outbreak, some of monkeys that had been sacrificed by Dan Dalgard. He shut the lid and called Johnson on the radio:

“GENE, YOU’RE NOT GOING TO BELIEVE WHAT I’VE FOUND IN THIS FREEZER. I’VE GOT TEN OR FIFTEEN MONKEYS.”

“Aw, shit, Klages!”

“WHAT SHOULD I DO WITH THEM?”

“I don’t want any more problems with monkeys! No more samples! Decon them!”

“I ALSO FOUND SOME VIALS OF SEDATIVE.”

“Decon it, baby! You don’t know if any dirty needles have been stuck in those bottles. Everything comes out of this building! Everything comes out!”

Sergeant Klages and a civilian, Merhl Gibson, dragged the bags out of the freezer. They tried to cram the monkeys into hatboxes, but they didn’t fit. They were twisted into bizarre shapes. They left them in the hallway to thaw. The decon teams would deal with them tomorrow.

The 91-Tangos shuffled out through the airlock corridor, two by two, numb and tired beyond feeling, soaked with sweat and continual fear. They had collected a total of thirty-five hundred clinical samples. They didn’t want to talk about the operation with each other or with their officers.

When the team members left for Fort Detrick, they noticed that Gene Johnson was sitting on the grass under the tree in front of the building. He didn’t want to talk to anyone, and they were afraid to talk to him. He looked terrible. His mind was a million miles away, in the devastated zone inside the building. He kept going over and over what the kids had done. If the guy has the needle in his right hand, you stand on his left. You pin the monkey’s arms behind so it can’t turn around and bite you. Did anyone cut a finger? So far, it looked as if all the kids had made it.

The decon team suited up immediately while the soldiers were coming out of the building. It was now after dark, but Gene Johnson feared Ebola so much that he did not want to let the building sit untouched overnight.

The decon team was led by Merhl Gibson. He put on a space suit and explored the building to
get a sense of what needed to be done. The rooms and halls were bloodstained and strewn with medical packaging. Monkey biscuits lay everywhere and crunched underfoot. Monkey feces lay in loops on the floor and was squiggled in lines across the walls and printed in the shapes of small hands. He had a brush and a bucket of bleach, and he tried to scrub a wall.

Then he called Gene on the radio. “GENE, THE SHIT IN HERE IS LIKE CEMENT, IT WON’T COME OFF.”

“You do what’s best. Our orders are to clean this place up.”

“WE’LL TRY TO CHIP IT OFF,” Gibson said.

The next day, they went to a hardware store and bought putty knives and steel spatulas, and the decon team went to work chipping the walls and floor. They almost suffocated from the heat inside their suits.

Milton Frantig, the man who had thrown up on the lawn, had now been kept in isolation at Fairfax Hospital for several days. He was feeling much better, his fever had vanished, he had not developed any nosebleeds, and he was getting restless. Apparently he did not have Ebola. At any rate, it did not show up in his blood tests. Apparently he had a mild case of flu. The C.D.C. eventually told him he could go home.

•  •  •

By day nineteen after the whiffing incident, when they hadn’t had any bloody noses, Peter Jahrling and Tom Geisbert began to regard themselves as definite survivors. The fact that Dan Dalgard and the monkey workers had so far shown no signs of breaking with Ebola also reassured them, although it was very puzzling. What on earth was going on with this virus? It killed monkeys like flies, they were dripping virus from every pore, yet no human being had crashed. If the virus wasn’t Ebola Zaire, what was it? And where had it come from? Jahrling believed that it must have come from Africa. After all, Nurse Mayinga’s blood reacted to it. Therefore, it must be closely related to Ebola Zaire. It was behaving like the fictional Andromeda strain. Just when we thought the world was coming to an end, the virus slipped away, and we survived.

The Centers for Disease Control focused its efforts on trying to trace the source of the virus, and the trail eventually led back to the Ferlite Farms monkey-storage facility near Manila. All of the Reston monkeys had come from there. The place was a way station on their trip from the forests of Mindanao to Washington. Investigators found that monkeys had been dying in large numbers there, too. But it looked as though no Philippine monkey workers had become sick either. If it was an African virus, what was it doing in the Philippines? And why weren’t monkey handlers dying? Yet the virus was able to destroy a monkey. Something very strange was going on here. Nature
had seemed to be closing in on us for a kill, when she suddenly turned her face away and smiled. It was a Mona Lisa smile, the meaning of which no one could figure out.

The decon team scrubbed the building with bleach until they took the paint off the concrete floors, and still they kept scrubbing. When they were satisfied that all of the building’s inside surfaces had been scoured, they moved on to the final stage, the gas. The decon team taped the exterior doors, windows, and vents of the building with silver duct tape. They taped sheets of plastic over the exterior openings of the ventilation system. They made the building airtight. At various places inside the monkey house, they set out patches of paper saturated with spores of a harmless bacterium known as
Bacillus subtilis niger
. These spores are hard to kill. It is believed that a decon job that kills
niger
will kill almost anything.

The decon team brought thirty-nine Sunbeam electric frying pans to the monkey house. Sunbeam electric frying pans are the Army’s tool of choice for a decon job. The team laid an electric cable along the floor throughout the building, strung with outlets, like a cord for Christmas-tree lights. At points along the cable, they plugged in the Sunbeam frying pans. They wired the cable to a master switch. Into each Sunbeam frying pan
they dropped a handful of disinfecting crystals. The crystals were white and resembled salt. They dialed the pans to high. At 1800 hours on December 18, someone threw the master switch, and the Sunbeams began to cook. The crystals boiled away, releasing formaldehyde gas. Since the building’s doors, windows, and vents were taped shut, the gas had nowhere to go, and it stayed inside the building for three days. The gas penetrated the air ducts, soaked the offices, got into drawers in the desks, and got inside pencil sharpeners in the drawers. It infiltrated Xerox machines and worked its way inside personal computers and inside the cushions of chairs and fingered down into the floor drains until it touched pools of lingering bleach in the water traps. Finally the decon team, still wearing space suits, went back inside the building and collected the spore samples. The Sunbeam treatment had killed the
niger
.

There is an old piece of wisdom in biohazard work that goes like this: you can never know when life is exterminated. Life will survive almost any blitz. Total, unequivocal sterilization is extremely difficult to achieve in practice and is almost impossible to verify afterward. However, a Sunbeam cookout that lasts for three days and exterminates all samples of
niger
implies success. The monkey house had been sterilized. Ebola had met opposition. For a short while, until life could re-establish itself there, the Reston Primate Quarantine Unit was the only building in the world where nothing lived, nothing at all.

The strain of Ebola virus that had erupted near Washington went into hiding somewhere in the rain forest. The cycling went on. The cycling must always go on if the virus is to maintain its existence. The Army, having certified that the monkey house had been nuked, returned it to the possession of Hazleton Research Products. Hazleton began buying more monkeys from the Philippines, from the same monkey house near Manila, and restocked the building with crab-eating monkeys that had been trapped in the rain forests of Mindanao. Less than a month later, in the middle of January, some of the monkeys in Room C began dying with bloody noses. Dan Dalgard called Peter Jahrling. “Looks like we’re affected again,” he said.

The virus was Ebola. It had come from the Philippines. This time, since there had been no human casualties during the first outbreak, the Army, the C.D.C., and Hazleton jointly decided to isolate the monkeys—leave them alone and let the
virus burn. Dan Dalgard hoped to save at least some of the monkeys, and his company did not want the Army to come back with space suits.

What happened in that building was a kind of experiment. Now they would see what Ebola could do naturally in a population of monkeys living in a confined air space, in a kind of city, as it were. The Ebola Reston virus jumped quickly from room to room, and as it blossomed in the monkeys, it seemed to mutate spontaneously into something that looked quite a lot like influenza. But it was an Ebola flu. The monkeys died with great quantities of clear mucus and green mucus running from their noses, mixed with blood that would not clot. Their lungs were destroyed, rotten and swimming with Ebola virus. They had pneumonia. When a single animal with a nosebleed showed up in a room, generally 80 percent of the animals died in that room shortly afterward. The virus was extraordinarily contagious in monkeys. The Institute scientists suspected that they were seeing a mutant strain of Ebola, something new and a little different from what they had seen just a month before, in December, when the Army had nuked the monkey house. It was frightening—it was as if Ebola could change its character fast—and could look like the flu. As if a different strain could appear in a month’s time. The clinical symptoms of the disease served as a reminder of the fact that Ebola is related to certain kinds of flu-like illnesses seen in human children. It seemed that the virus could adapt quickly to new hosts, and that it could
change its character spontaneously and rapidly as it entered a new population.

Ebola apparently drifted through the building’s air-handling ducts. By January 24, it had entered Room B, and monkeys in that room started going into shock and dying with runny noses, red eyes, and masklike expressions on their faces. In the following weeks, the infection entered Rooms I, F, E, and D, and the animals in these rooms virtually all died. Then, in mid-February, a Hazleton animal caretaker who will be called John Coleus was performing a necropsy on a dead monkey when he cut his thumb with a scalpel. He had been slicing apart the liver, one of the favorite nesting sites of Ebola. The scalpel blade, smeared with liver cells and blood, went deep into his thumb. He had had a major exposure to Ebola.

The liver that he had been cutting was rushed to
USAMRIID
for analysis. Tom Geisbert looked at a piece of it under his microscope and, to his dismay, found that it was “incredibly hot—I mean, wall to wall with virus.” Everyone at the Institute thought John Coleus was going to die. “Around here,” Peter Jahrling told me, “we were frankly fearful that this guy had bought the farm.” The C.D.C. decided not to put him into isolation. So Coleus visited bars and drank beer with his friends. While he was incubating the virus.

“Here at the Institute,” Peter Jahrling said, “we were absolutely appalled when that guy went out to bars, drinking. Clearly the C.D.C. should not have let that happen. This was a serious virus
and a serious situation. We don’t know a whole lot about the virus. It could be like the common cold—it could have a latency period when you are shedding virus before you develop symptoms—and by the time you know you are sick, you might have infected sixteen people. There’s an awful lot we don’t know about this virus. We don’t know where it came from, and we don’t know what form it will take when it appears next time.”

John Coleus had a minor medical condition that required surgery. Doctors performed the operation while he was in the incubation period after his exposure to Ebola. There is no record indicating that he bled excessively during the surgery. He came through fine, and he is alive today, with no ill effects from his exposure.

As for the monkey house, the entire building died. The Army didn’t have to nuke it. It was nuked by the Ebola Reston virus. Once again, there were no human casualties. However, something eerie and perhaps sinister occurred. A total of four men had worked as caretakers in the monkey house: Jarvis Purdy, who had had a heart attack; Milton Frantig, who had thrown up on the lawn; John Coleus, who had cut his thumb; and a fourth man. All four men eventually tested positive for Ebola Reston virus. They had all been infected with the agent. The virus had entered their bloodstreams and multiplied in their cells. Ebola proliferated in their bodies. It cycled in them. It carried on its life
inside the monkey workers. But it did not make them sick, even while it multiplied inside them. If they had headaches or felt ill, none of them could recall it. Eventually the virus cleared from their systems naturally, disappeared from their blood, and as of this writing none of the men was affected by it. They are among the very, very few known human survivors of Ebola virus. John Coleus certainly caught the virus when he cut himself with a bloody scalpel, no question about that. What is more worrisome is that the others did
not
cut themselves, yet the virus still entered their bloodstreams. It got there somehow. Most likely it entered their blood through contact with the lungs. It infected them through the air. When it became apparent to the Army researchers that three of the four men who became infected had not cut themselves, just about everyone at
USAMRIID
concluded that Ebola can spread through the air.