The Cobra Event

by Richard Preston

  The long knife made a whisking sound as it passed over the diamond block. Then she refined its edge on the steel rod—zing, zing, zing.

  West of Babylon

  IRAQ, THURSDAY, APRIL 23

  APRIL IN IRAQ is normally dry and blue, but a cool front had moved down from the north, bringing an overcast sky. The United Nations Special Commission Biological Weapons Inspection Team Number 247—UNSCOM 247, it was called—was traveling along a narrow paved highway at the edge of the desert to the west of the Euphrates River, with its headlights on, moving slowly. The convoy consisted of a dozen four-wheel-drive vehicles. They were painted white, and they displayed large black letters, “UN,” stenciled on their doors. The vehicles were plastered with gluelike dust.

  The convoy arrived at a crossroads and slowed to a crawl. All the vehicles’ turn signals went on at the same time, blinking to the right. Vehicle by vehicle, the UNSCOM 247 convoy turned to the northeast. Its destination was the Habbaniyah Air Base, near the Euphrates River, where a United Nations transport aircraft waited to fly the inspectors out of the country to Bahrain. There they would split up and go their separate ways.

  A white Nissan Pathfinder 4 × 4 in the middle of the convoy slowed when it came to the crossroads. Its right turn signal came on, like the others. Then, suddenly, with a roar and a whipping whirl of tires, the Nissan broke out of line. It swung left onto a ribbon of cracked tar heading west, and departed at high speed into the desert.

  A hard voice broke over the radio: “Snap inspection!”

  It was the voice of Commander Mark Littleberry, M.D., U.S. Navy (Retired). Littleberry was in his sixties. He was a tough-looking man (“the indestructible Littleberry,” his colleagues called him), but his age showed in the gold-rimmed half-glasses perched on his nose and in the silver at his temples. Littleberry worked as a paid consultant to various U.S. government agencies, most especially to the Navy. He had top security clearances. Through his Navy connections, he had been appointed an UNSCOM biological-weapons inspector. Now he was sitting in the passenger seat of the breakaway Nissan, with a military map of Iraq draped across his knees. He was holding a small electronic screen in his hands.

  The Iraqi minders had been traveling behind the UNSCOM convoy in a rattletrap column of vehicles—beat-up Toyota pickup trucks, smoking dysfunctional Renaults, hub-capless Chevrolets, and a black Mercedes-Benz sedan with tinted windows and shiny mag wheels. Most of these vehicles had been seized in Kuwait by Iraq during the Gulf War, and they had seen constant use by the Iraqi government in the years afterward. Some of the cars had been cannibalized from junk parts, and they had body panels of differing colors.

  When the Nissan broke away and Mark Littleberry’s words “snap inspection” crackled over the radio, it created confusion among the Iraqi minders. Their vehicles came to a grinding halt, and they started yelling into hand-held radios. They were reporting the breakaway to their superiors at the National Monitoring Center in Baghdad, which is the Iraqi intelligence office that supplies minders to U.N. weapons-inspection teams. There was a pause. The minders were waiting for orders, since no minder who valued his life would do anything without orders.

  A snap inspection is a surprise weapons inspection. Inspectors suddenly change their itinerary and go somewhere without giving advance notice. But this time there was a problem. Commander Mark Littleberry did not have permission from the chief inspector, a French biologist named Pascal Arriet, to do a snap inspection. This was a rogue snap.

  Suddenly four Iraqi vehicles detached from the column and took off after the Nissan, which had picked up considerable speed. Its engine howled. The Nissan hit sand drifts that covered the road in places, flinging out boiling yellow-brown puffs of dust. It seemed to leap out through the dust with its headlights glowing, surfing waves in the road, nearly becoming airborne.

  “Damn it, Hopkins! We’re going to roll over!” Mark Littleberry said to the man driving, Supervisory Special Agent William Hopkins, Jr., of the Federal Bureau of Investigation.

  Will Hopkins was a rangy man in his early thirties. He had brown hair, a square face, and a seven-day beard. He wore baggy khaki trousers and a formerly white shirt (now streaked with dust), and Teva sandals with green socks. There was a plastic pocket protector in his shirt pocket. It was jammed with pens and pencils and bits of junk. The belt that held up his trousers was a length of nylon webbing. Slung on the webbing was a Leatherman Super Tool, a combination pliers and screwdriver and knife and various other tools. The Leatherman on his belt identified Hopkins as a “tech agent”—an F.B.I. agent who deals with gadgets. Anything secret, especially if it’s high-tech, is guaranteed to break down, and a tech agent never goes anywhere without a Leatherman tool.

  Hopkins had earned a Ph.D. in molecular biology from the California Institute of Technology, where he had become adept with the machines and gadgets that are used in biology. He was a Caltech gadgeteer. His current job title was Manager of Scientific Operations—Biology, Hazardous Materials Response Unit, Quantico.

  As the vehicle lurched and bounced, Littleberry watched the screen mapper in his hands, and he compared it to the military map on his knees. The mapper was a glowing panel that showed a changing outline of the terrain. It was linked to some Global Positioning Satellites overhead. The current location of the car appeared on the screen.

  The Nissan hit a dip in the road. Two black metal Halliburton suitcases sitting on the back seat went bouncing into the air.

  “Watch it!” Littleberry yelled.

  “Are you sure this is the right road?”

  “I’m sure.”

  Hopkins mushed his foot on the accelerator and the Nissan moaned, the tires whomping over cracks in the road. The engine was running hot and hard, just under the redline. He looked in the rearview mirror. Nothing. He could almost hear the satellite calls to New York and Washington, Paris, Baghdad, Moscow: two UNSCOM inspectors had just gone out of control in Iraq.

  A long line of vehicles stretched behind the Nissan. First came the four Iraqi chase vehicles, which seemed to be losing hubcaps and bits of metal every time they hit a bump. Next came the entire UNSCOM 247 convoy, lumbering at a more dignified pace. Pascal Arriet had given orders for the rest of the convoy to follow Littleberry and Hopkins, and now he was speaking in French and English to various relay contacts on his shortwave radio, telling them there was a problem. As the leader of the convoy, Pascal Arriet had the same authority as the captain of a ship. He was supposed to be obeyed without question. Behind the U.N. convoy came yet more Iraqi vehicles. In all, there must have been at least twenty vehicles following them.

  In the Nissan, a hand-held shortwave radio beeped; it was sliding around on the dashboard.

  Hopkins picked it up. “Hello?”

  A crackly voice came out. “This is Arriet, your commander! Turn back! What are you doing?” He was speaking on a secure radio channel. The Iraqis couldn’t hear him.

  “We’re taking a shortcut to Habbaniyah Air Base,” Hopkins said.

  “I command you to turn back. You have not permission to leave the group.”

  “We’re not leaving. It’s a temporary detachment,” Hopkins said.

  “Nonsense! Turn back!” Arriet said.

  “Tell him we’re lost,” Littleberry said, staring at the electronic mapping screen.

  “We got lost,” Hopkins said to the radio.

  “Turn back!” Pascal Arriet shouted.

  “It’s impossible,” Hopkins said.

  “Turn back!”

  Driving with one hand, Hopkins popped a panel from the shortwave radio with his thumb. He fiddled with some wires. His fingers moved rapidly, with precision. Abruptly some grunting shrieks came out of the radio.

  “You’re breaking up,” Hopkins said to the radio. “We’ve got trouble with the ionosphere.”

  “L’ionosphere? Crétin! Idiot!”

  Hopkins placed the radio on the dashboard, wires dangling out of it. It continued to squawk and squeal. He
reached into the radio with his fingertips and yanked out a part the size of a sunflower seed. It was a resistor. The squeals were transformed into a weird rubbery sound. The car swayed as he worked on the radio.

  “I hope you can fix that,” Littleberry said.

  The French voice was sounding more and more hysterical on the shortwave radio.

  “Our Iraqi friends can’t hear our radios,” Littleberry said to Hopkins, “so they don’t know Pascal is ordering us to turn back. If I know Pascal, he won’t dare tell the Iraqis we’ve gone AWOL. He’ll follow us, because he’s under orders to keep the group together at all costs. So the Iraqis are gonna think this is an authorized inspection, since Arriet is following behind us. They may let us in.”

  “Are we going to wear any safety gear?”

  Littleberry turned around and reached into the back seat, next to the black suitcases, and pulled out a full-face biohazard mask, equipped with purple HEPA filters. He gave it to Hopkins to clip on his belt.

  “We’re not interested in the whole building,” Littleberry went on. “There is a door I want to have a peek at. The folks at the National Security Agency have some information on that door.”

  “You’re sure you know how to get to the door?”

  Littleberry pushed a button and held up the screen mapper. It showed a detailed diagram of a building. “We pretend to stumble into the door by accident. Don’t follow me in there, Will. Give me a minute and I’ll come out.”

  “Then what?”

  “Big apology. We rejoin Pascal. He will be furious, but he’ll have to pretend the thing was authorized. We’ll be in Bahrain by tonight.”

  Hopkins didn’t ask Littleberry what they were looking for, but he knew it was not a chemical weapon. He assumed it was bacteria or a virus. A bacteriological weapon is grown in a fermenter tank, and it gives off a yeasty smell, somewhat like beer, or sometimes a meaty smell, like a meat broth. Virus weapons are not grown in fermenter tanks, because a virus doesn’t cause fermentation when it grows. A virus converts a population of living cells into more virus. What happens is called amplification of the virus. The machine that amplifies a virus is called a bioreactor. Nothing ferments inside the tank, and no gases are let off, so there is no odor.

  A bioreactor is a rather small tank with a sometimes complicated interior. The tank contains a warm liquid bath that is saturated with living cells. The cells are infected with a virus that is replicating. The cells leak virus particles, and the bioreactor becomes charged with them. A virus particle is a tiny nugget of protein (sometimes with a membrane) that surrounds a core of genetic material, which consists of strands of DNA or RNA, the ribbonlike molecules that carry the master software code that directs the activities of life. A typical virus particle is a thousand times smaller than a cell. If a virus particle were an object about an inch across, a human hair would be a thousand feet across. Viruses use their software code to take over a cell and direct the cell’s own machinery to make more virus particles. A virus keeps a cell alive until the cell is full of copies of virus particles, and then the cell explodes and releases hundreds or even thousands of copies of the virus.

  A wide variety of viruses are made into weapons. Hopkins understood that there were many possibilities as to what they might find in the building they were headed for. Keeping track of what strains of weapons the Iraqis were working with in their laboratories was exceedingly difficult. Some of the possibilities included VEE and EEE (brain viruses), Congo-Crimean hemorrhagic fever, Ebola virus (highly infective in the lungs when it’s freeze-dried), Marburg, Machupo, Rift Valley fever, Lassa, Junin, Sabia, enterovirus 17, camelpox, monkeypox, and smallpox. And there was always the possibility that you would run into a virus that no one had thought could be used as a weapon. You could also run into a virus that you had never heard of before.

  THE NISSAN was a speck moving fast, trailing dust, on a road that went straight over a landscape of browns and grays. The road bent north now. It went through scattered patches of desert brush, and it crossed pans of chalk-white earth. In the distance ahead of them, a line of date palms appeared and passed at an angle. Hopkins noticed headlights behind them, shining through dust in the Nissan’s wake. The Iraqi vehicles were closing the gap.

  Hopkins realized that he had just driven past a single-lane service road. It was unmarked. He spun the wheel and pulled the emergency hand brake at the same time. The Nissan went off the road into some dry flats and spun around in a boil of dust. It disappeared in its own cloud. Suddenly it popped out of the cloud going in the opposite direction, headlights shining, bouncing over open land. With a lurch, the Nissan veered onto the service road. Hopkins gunned the engine. The road headed east.

  “Go left, Will, God damn it!”

  Will swung onto another road. It passed among cotton fields. The plants were green, the cotton bolls ripening in the gray desert air.

  A metal prefabricated building loomed at the end of the road. It was windowless, about forty feet tall. It looked like a warehouse. Silvery vent pipes stuck up from the roof. The structure was surrounded by a barbed-wire fence, and there was a gate and a very strong-looking guard post.

  Hopkins removed his foot from the gas pedal and began to slow down.

  “Don’t!” Littleberry said sharply. “Come up to the perimeter like you are not prepared to stop.”

  Hopkins floored the gas. Suddenly, up ahead, there were flashes of light at the guard post. The guards had opened fire in their direction.

  Hopkins gasped. He ducked sideways on the seat. The Nissan slid down the road, out of control.

  Littleberry stared straight ahead into the gunfire, holding the steering wheel for Hopkins. “Get your face out of my lap. They aren’t going to pop a U.N. vehicle.”

  Hopkins peered over the dashboard and took the wheel again. The car was going very fast.

  “The brakes, Will.”

  He jammed on the brakes. Too late. The Nissan spun around backward and slid into the gate, ballooning the wire mesh, punching out both taillights. The gate broke open wide. An instant later, the Iraqi chase cars came screeching and sliding in behind the Nissan in a great cloud of dust.

  A rear door of the Mercedes opened, and a thin young man wearing acid-washed blue jeans and a white short-sleeved polo shirt stepped out. He was wearing an ostentatious gold wristwatch, and he had an anxious expression on his face.

  “Wow, you are really scaring us, Mark,” the young man in jeans said. His name was Dr. Azri Fehdak, but the U.N. inspectors referred to him as the Kid. He was a molecular biologist educated in California. He was believed to be one of the top scientists in Iraq’s bioweapons program.

  “It’s a snap inspection,” Littleberry said to the Kid. “Our chief inspector ordered it.”

  “But there is nothing here,” Azri Fehdak said.

  “What’s this building?”

  “I believe this is the Al Ghar Agricultural Facility.”

  A door to the building stood wide open. Inside, in the dim shadows, the inspectors could see ultramodern, gleaming stainless-steel biological production equipment.

  A woman came scurrying out of the door, wearing a white lab coat. She was accompanied by several men. “What is this?” she demanded sharply. Under her lab coat she had on an expensive-looking dress. She wore cat-eye designer glasses, and her wavy brown hair was tied back in a loose roll.

  “United Nations weapons-inspection team, ma’am,” Will Hopkins said.

  “We’re on a snap inspection,” Littleberry added. “Who are you?”

  “I am Dr. Mariana Vestof. I am the consulting engineer. This is the manager-générale, Dr. Hamaq.”

  Dr. Hamaq was a short, stubby man who apparently spoke no English. His eyes moved searchingly across their faces, but he said not a word.

  She protested: “We have already been inspected here.”

  “We’re just doing a quick follow-up,” Littleberry said. “What are you making here, currently?”

  “These
are virus vaccines,” she said, waving her arm.

  “Oh, good, okay. What kind, exactly?”

  The Kid said, “I will check.”

  “Does Dr. Vestof know?”

  “Our work is medical!” she said.

  “Let’s go,” Littleberry said. He reached into the car and grabbed one of the black metal suitcases and took off running for the building. The minders parted to let him by. Everyone seemed thoroughly confused.

  “Mark! What about our biohazard suits?” Hopkins called after him.

  “Never mind the goddamned space suits!” Littleberry yelled back. “Come on, move it, Will! On the Q.T.!” Littleberry wanted to get what he was after before the minders went berserk and shot someone.

  Hopkins grabbed his suitcase and the shortwave radio and ran after Littleberry, a motorized Nikon camera slopping around his neck, a face mask dangling by a hook on his belt. A crowd of people followed them into the stainless-steel jungle. There was no smell in the air.

  The building, which was windowless, was lit with fluorescent lights. The floor was a kind of pebbled terrazzo. All around them were stainless-steel tanks and tangles of pipes and hoses. The tanks were bioreactors, and they were on wheels. Workers reached them by standing on movable catwalks. The equipment in the Iraqi plant was portable. The entire plant could be moved.