The Cobra Event

by Richard Preston

  The Ministry of Health scientist was left standing in a heap of glass. His eyeglasses had cracked. He touched one finger to his ear. His finger came away with blood on it. His eardrum had broken.

  Yevlikov stood up. “Clean up, please.”

  “Captain! There’s another one out there!”

  “What’s he doing?”

  The second Marine Corps Phantom was flying easily, almost languidly, turning at an angle to the boat. There was a playful quality in its movements that seemed incredibly dangerous.

  One of the sailors muttered, “American gavnuki.” Shitheads.

  Now the Phantom’s wings tipped, and it banked, and it began to close with the Russian trawler. This time, they heard the Phantom coming. It was traveling slower than the speed of sound.

  There was a clattering noise mixed with a slushy sound of bodies moving through broken glass as the crew and scientists fell to the deck. This time Yevlikov remained standing. I will not bow to these people again, he said to himself.

  The incoming Phantom cocked its wings slightly as the pilot made fine adjustments to his aim. He was targeting the boat.

  He won’t open, Yevlikov said to himself.

  The Phantom opened.

  He saw the cannon tracers coming straight in. Whanging explosions tore through the bow where the shells hit, and white towers ripped the water. The Phantom floated by with a metallic whine, the pilot holding up his middle finger at them, and then there was a whomp and a flash as he kicked his afterburner in their faces, a gesture of contempt.

  “Razebi ego dushu!” Yevlikov yelled. Fuck his soul.

  The man from the Ministry of Health was kneeling now by his broken glassware, in complete paralysis. His eyeglasses were gone. Streams of blood were threading from both ears down his neck, and a wet stain had coursed down his trousers. They took him below, and Yevlikov set a course for the east, moving his trawler along the edge of the forbidden zone. “Try to find some dishes that aren’t broken,” he said to the scientists.

  SEVENTY MILES NORTH of Yevlikov’s boat, Lieutenant Commander Mark Littleberry, M.D., stood with his colleagues on the beach at Johnston Atoll, the monkey labs at their backs, the Pacific Ocean moving gently at their feet, a mild surf rushing and sliding over coral sand. The sun had touched the horizon. The mare’s tails of clouds feathered slowly, ice crystals moving in the upper air. The inversion had occurred. The winds had smoothed. The moon was rising. Conditions were perfect for a laydown.

  “I feel sorry for those guys on the tugboats,” one of the scientists remarked.

  “I feel even sorrier for the monkeys,” another scientist said.

  Each person on the beach was holding a gas mask, in case the wind shifted unexpectedly.

  “The men will be all right,” Littleberry said. Mark Littleberry was a medical doctor in the United States Navy, a tall, handsome African-American with a crewcut and gold-rimmed spectacles. He was a medical officer for the Johnston Atoll Field Trials, and he was regarded as brilliant by the other scientists in the program, but perhaps too ambitious, a man who seemed determined to rise high and do it at a young age. Littleberry had a degree from Harvard University and a medical degree from Tulane University. His Harvard degree did not make him very popular among the military people, but they listened to him because he knew the science. He had made valuable contributions toward explaining the exact ways in which the weapons they were testing entered the lungs, and he was bringing in crucial data from monkey dissections. But Mark Littleberry was becoming unhappy with his success. He had begun to ask himself what, exactly, he was doing.

  “Here it comes,” someone said.

  All heads turned to the left. They saw a Marine Corps Phantom flying low and straight, about two hundred meters above the water, traveling just under the speed of sound. It flew parallel to the beach, heading west toward the setting sun. It carried no stores underwing except for a small, strange-looking pod. They watched. In the evening light they saw it: something bleeding into the air from the wing pod. The wing pod was known as a dry line-source disseminator, and the way it worked was highly classified. What was coming out of the pod was a living weapon in the form of a dry powder.

  It was a whitish haze that almost instantly dissipated and became invisible. The particles were very small, and they had been treated with a special plastic to make them last longer in the air. They were between one micron and five microns across, the ideal size for a weaponized bioparticle. It is the size particle that can be inhaled deep into the human lung, a particle that will stick naturally to the membrane of the lung. To get an idea of the size of such a particle, you can think of it this way: about fifty particles lined up in a row would span the thickness of a human hair. One or two such particles trapped in the lung, if they are a weapon, can cause a fatal infection that kills in three days. Particles this small do not fall out of the air. They stay aloft. You can’t smell them, you can’t see them, you don’t know they are there until you start to get sick. Not even rain can wash them out of the sky—they don’t get caught by raindrops. Rain actually improves the effectiveness of a bioweapon in the air, because rain clouds block sunlight. Bio-aerosols don’t do well in sunlight. It destroys their genetic material and kills them. Biological laydowns are best done at night.

  The jet shrank and seemed to vanish into the disc of the sun, leaving a departing rumble. It was doing a streakout across the Pacific Ocean. The streakout line was fifty miles long.

  “Beautiful,” someone said.

  “Incredible.”

  The talk among the watchers grew technical.

  “What’s the dissemination rate?”

  “One gram per meter.”

  “That’s all?”

  “A gram per meter! Holy Christ! That’s nothing.” The jet was spraying only one kilogram of hot agent per kilometer of flight.

  “If it was anthrax,” one of the scientists remarked, “they’d have to shovel it from a dump truck to have any effect on the monkeys.”

  “There’s only about eighty kilos of agent in that pod.” Less than two hundred pounds.

  “Yow. And he’s laying it for fifty miles.”

  “What is the agent?”

  “It’s the Utah cocktail. You didn’t hear me say that.” The identity of the material was classified.

  “The Utah cocktail? That’s Utah he’s laying down? Man, a fifty-mile laydown.”

  The streakout line was downwind of Johnston Atoll. The hot agent would drift away from the island. As the line of particles left by the jet moved along with the wind, it would sweep across a huge area of sea. The laydown worked along the same principle as a windshield wiper making a stroke across an area of window, except that the line of bioparticles moved straight across the sea, without turning.

  “That could create, what—two thousand square miles of hot zone?” one of the scientists said.

  “If the stuff works. It won’t work.”

  “Two thousand square miles of hot zone with just two hundred pounds of agent. Jesus. That’s two ounces of weapon per square mile. That will never work.”

  “That’s a laydown the size of Los Angeles!”

  “I wonder what it’ll do to our Russian friends out there?”

  “Poor saps.”

  “Ask the doctor here what he thinks.”

  “I think it’s going to work,” Mark Littleberry said.

  He went off by himself and walked along the beach. He was thinking about the monkeys, thinking about what he had seen recently at Pine Bluff, Arkansas, at the Biological Directorate X-201 plant, thinking about who he was. But Littleberry had work to do, people to worry about. He stayed up all night, maintaining radio contact with the Navy crews on board the tugboats. The tugboats were pulling barges full of monkeys.

  The monkey barges with their tugboats were stationed at intervals downwind. The monkeys were rhesus monkeys housed in metal cages. Some of the cages sat on the decks of the barges; some of them were in closed rooms in the holds of t
he barges. The scientists were interested in knowing if closing yourself in a room might provide some protection against a biological weapon drifting in the open air.

  Littleberry stayed by a radio set in the command center on the island. “Tugboat Charlie. Come in. This is Littleberry. How are you guys doing? Y’all hanging in there?”

  Fifty miles downwind, at the far end of the test zone, a tugboat captain was standing at the wheel of his boat. He was wearing a heavy rubber space suit with an Army gas mask that was equipped with special biological filters, HEPA filters. HEPA stands for high-efficiency particle arrestor. A HEPA filter will trap a virus or a bacterial particle before it can get into the lungs.

  “We’re dying of the heat here,” the captain said. “The heat’s gonna kill us before the bugs do.”

  “Copy, I hear you. Wind direction is south-southwest. Holding steady at eight knots. They’re going to call you in as soon as possible,” Littleberry said. He was watching the weather reports coming from the ships stationed around the test zone. Judging from the speed of the wind, he could guess where the wave of hot agent was as it moved southwest with the trades.

  It was a soft night in the South Pacific, and a pod of sperm whales played in the forbidden zone. One of the techs on the last tugboat was sure he had seen white jets in the moonlight, whales rising and blowing. The waves flashed with phosphorescence as they slopped against the hull of the monkey barge. The men inside the rubber suits were drenched with sweat, and they worried constantly about getting a rip, a crack in their masks. The tugboat’s engines rumbled gently, pulling the monkey barge, keeping the boat on location. The captain could hear the monkeys hooting and calling. The animals were nervous. Something was up. Something bad. The humans were doing experiments again. It was enough to make any monkey a nervous wreck.

  On the tugboat’s deck, two Army technicians in space suits were tending the bubbler and the blood clock. The bubbler was sucking air through a glass tank full of oil. The oil would collect particles that were in the air. The blood clock was a rotating dish that held a circular slab of blood agar. Agar is a jelly on which bacteria grow easily. Blood agar has blood mixed into it, and it has a dark red color. Biological weapons often grow better in the presence of blood.

  The blood clock turned slowly, moving the blood jelly past a slit exposed to the open air. As particles of hot agent touched the jelly, they would bind to it and begin taking nutrients out of the blood, and they would multiply, forming streaks and spots. Later, the face of the blood clock would show the rise and fall of hot agent in the air.

  The Army techs had to shout to each other to be heard through their space suits. “I hear Nixon’s gonna use this shit in Vietnam,” one of them yelled, his voice muffled by his mask.

  “Yeah, they’re probably thinking about it,” the other tech shouted back.

  “Think what a laydown would do to the Ho Chi Minh Trail. If you did a few line laydowns from north to south, you know, right along the trail?”

  “Shit. Half the North Vietnamese Army would just disappear. They’d melt away in the jungle. Nobody would know what happened.”

  “We could say it was a plague.”

  “And it was.”

  They both laughed.

  Downwind, the Russian trawler moved along the edge of the forbidden zone. Most of the glassware had been broken, but a few petri dishes full of blood jelly sat in the racks, open to the air. Captain Yevlikov steered right on, wearing his green rubber suit, looking through the eyeholes and sweating like a man in a mine. He couldn’t see any U.S. Navy vessels, and he kept his radar turned off, but he knew there was a fleet of steel shadows out there. Logistics and transport. Surveillance. Perimeter safety. Air support. Come daylight, he was going to have more trouble, and he knew it.

  THE ACTIVITY around Johnston Atoll in 1969 was officially a “joint naval exercise,” but that was a cover for the fact that what was going on were hot field trials for the strategic use of biological weapons over large areas of territory. The trials had been gradually increasing in scope since 1964. At the peak of the trials there were enough ships involved to make up the fifth-largest navy in the world. This was as large a fleet as the naval forces used in the air tests of hydrogen bombs in the Pacific Ocean during the 1950s—a fact not lost on the Russians. Captain Yevlikov threaded his little vessel along the outskirts of a formidable naval force, wondering if he would get out alive.

  The wave of bioparticles—the bio-aerosol—moved all night. It passed the monkey barges one by one, and later it passed over the Russian trawler. At four o’clock in the morning, the order came to bring the last barge home. All the monkeys had breathed the particles by then. The last tugboat’s engines roared, and the crew drove the boat at full speed for the atoll. They wanted to get out of there in the worst way.

  The monkeys were placed in cages in the monkey labs on Johnston Atoll. During the next three days, Mark Littleberry and the other scientists saw the effects of the hot agent called the Utah cocktail.

  Half of the monkeys became sick and died. They coughed and coughed with Utah until their lungs burned up, but no moisture came out. The other half of the monkeys lived, and remained healthy. They were fine. No problems.

  The infected monkeys always died. Once a monkey showed any signs of Utah, the animal was doomed. Not a single monkey became sick and recovered. In other words, the case-fatality rate for Utah in untreated primates was 100 percent. As to whether a primate became infected or not, it seemed to be random chance. Those animals that got one or two particles of Utah lodged in their lungs ended up dead. Those animals that got no particles in their lungs, or those animals that, for some reason, were able to resist one or two particles of Utah in the lungs, were fine. There was no such thing as a mild case of Utah.

  This is typical of biological weapons. It is essentially impossible to completely exterminate a population with a biological weapon. On the other hand, it is quite easy to crash a population, reducing it by half or more in a few days.

  The animals that had been in closed rooms belowdecks experienced the same death rate as the animals in the open air. Being in a closed room did not help. A bio-aerosol behaves like a gas. Bioparticles are not like nuclear fallout, which falls out, hence its name. The particles of a bioweapon are light and fluffy. Organic. They float in the air. They dance through the smallest cracks. You can’t hide from a living hot agent in the air.

  Day after day, Mark Littleberry walked along the monkey cages, looking in at the sick animals. They were hunched over, lethargic, broken. Some were deranged: the Utah had gone to the brain. The animals wheezed and coughed, but nothing came up, or they were curled up in the fetal position, having crashed and died.

  The doctors took some of the animals away and killed them and opened them up to see what was going on inside them. Littleberry himself opened up many monkeys. He was most impressed with the fact that the animals looked fairly healthy inside. But if you tested a dead monkey’s blood, you found that it was radiantly hot with Utah. This scared him. Later he would write in a classified report: “Well-trained physicians might not recognize the signs of infection by a military weapon in a patient, especially if it is a mixed combination. Physicians should be warned that the effects of a weaponized organism on the human body may be very different from natural disease caused by the same organism.”

  Then Littleberry began to see that the monkeys from the farthest barge were dying at the same rate as the monkeys in the barge nearest the release line. The hot agent was just as strong and deadly fifty miles downwind. After fifty miles of drift, the killing power of Utah had not diminished. This was completely unlike a chemical weapon. Sarin and Tabun, chemical nerve gases, lose killing power rapidly as they spread out. Utah was alive. Utah stayed alive. Utah needed to find blood. It needed to find a host. If it could find a host, it would make copies of itself explosively inside the host.

  The tests had rendered an area of the Pacific Ocean larger than Los Angeles as hot as hell,
in a biological sense. The scientists never found out how far the agent spread during that test, only that it went beyond the test area and kept going. It passed over the last barge and moved on through the night, undiminished in strength. It did not kill any fish or marine organisms, because they don’t have lungs. If any sperm whales crashed and died, no one noticed.

  Captain Yevlikov and his crew survived, all but the shocked man from the Ministry of Health, who had refused to wear a mask; his lungs shriveled, and they buried him at sea. The Utah grew up in little spots and colonies on the Soviet petri dishes. They froze some samples and carried them back to Vladivostok. It is believed that the frozen samples of Utah were flown by jet transport to a closed military facility known as the Institute of Applied Microbiology at Obolensk, south of Moscow, where the weapon was analyzed and Russian scientists began growing it in their laboratories. This may be how Russia obtained the American weapons-grade strain of Utah for its own arsenal of strategic life-forms. Captain Gennadi Yevlikov was given a medal for bravery and service to his country.

  The rising sun over the Pacific Ocean on the morning following the test began to neutralize the Utah, killing its genetic material. Eventually it biodegraded, and no trace of it remained in the sea or in the air. It was totally gone, and all that was left was knowledge.

  Invisible History (I.)

  THE ROOSEVELT ROOM, THE WHITE HOUSE, NOVEMBER 25, 1969

  PRESIDENT RICHARD NIXON’S prepared statement was very brief, and he took no questions from the press. Sticking to the text, he said that the United States was renouncing the first use of chemical weapons. Then he went on to what was clearly the more important subject to him: biological weapons. “Second, biological warfare, which is commonly called germ warfare—” He shook the word germ with Nixonian emphasis, as if he shuddered to his jowls at the thought of germs. “Germ warfare: this has massive, unpredictable, and potentially uncontrollable consequences. It may produce global epidemics and profoundly affect the health of future generations.”