The Hot Zone

by Richard Preston

  Major Nancy Jaax did all the housework. She could not stand housework. Scrubbing grape jelly out of rugs didn’t give her a feeling of reward, and in any case she did not have time for it. Occasionally she would go into a paroxysm of cleaning, and she would race around the house for an hour, throwing things into closets. She also did all the cooking for her family. Jerry was useless in the kitchen. Another point of contention was his tendency to buy things impulsively—a motorcycle, a sailboat. Jerry had bought a sailboat when they were stationed at Fort Riley in Kansas. And then there was that god-awful diesel Cadillac with a red leather interior. She and Jerry had commuted to work together in it, but the car had started to lay smoke all over the road even before the payments were finished. One day, she had finally said to Jerry, “You can sit in the driveway in those red leather seats all you want, but I’m not getting in there with you.” So they sold the Cadillac and bought a Honda Accord.

  The Jaaxes’ house was the largest Victorian house in town, a pile of turreted brick with a slate roof and tall windows and a cupola and wooden paneling made of golden American chestnut. It stood on a street corner near the ambulance station. The sirens woke them up at night. They had bought the house cheap. It had sat on the market a long time, and a story had been going around town that the previous owner had hanged himself in the basement. After the Jaaxes bought it, the dead man’s widow showed up at the door one day. She was a wizened old lady, come to have a look around her old place, and she fixed a blue eye on Nancy and said, “Little girl, you are going to hate this house. I did.”

  There were other animals in the house besides the parrot. In a wire cage in the living room lived a python named Sampson. He would occasionally escape from his cage, wander around the house, and eventually climb up inside the hollow center post of the dining-room table and go to sleep. There he would stay for a few days. It gave Nancy a creepy feeling to think that there was a python asleep inside the dining table. You wondered whether the snake was going to wake up while you were eating dinner. Nancy had a study in the cupola at the top of the house. The snake had once escaped from his cage and disappeared for a few days. They pounded and knocked on the dining-room table to try to flush him out, but he wasn’t there. Late one night when Nancy was in her study, the snake oozed out of the rafters and hung in front of her face, staring at her with lidless eyes, and she screamed. The family also had an Irish setter and an Airedale terrier. Whenever the Jaaxes were assigned to a different Army post, the animals moved with them in boxes and cages, a portable ecosystem of the Jaax family.

  Nancy loved Jerry. He was tall and fine looking, a handsome man with prematurely gray hair. She thought of his hair as silver, to go along with his silver tongue, which he used trying to talk her into buying diesel Cadillacs with red-leather interiors. He had sharp brown eyes and a sharp nose, like a hawk’s, and he understood her better than anyone else on earth. Nancy and Jerry Jaax had very little social life outside of their marriage. They had grown up on farms in Kansas, twenty miles apart as the crow flies, but had not known each other as children. They met in veterinary school at Kansas State University and had gotten engaged a few weeks later, and they were married when Nancy was twenty. By the time they graduated, they were broke and in debt, with no money to set up a practice as veterinarians, and so they had enlisted in the Army together.

  Since Nancy didn’t have time to cook during the week, she would spend her Saturdays cooking. She would make up a beef stew in a Crock-Pot, or she would broil several chickens. Then she would freeze the food in bags. On weekday nights, she would take a bag out of the freezer and heat it in the microwave. Tonight, while she thawed chicken, she considered the question of vegetables. How about canned green beans? The children liked that. Nancy opened a cabinet and pulled down a can of Libby’s green beans.

  She searched through one or two drawers, looking for a can opener. Couldn’t find it. She turned to the main junk drawer, which held all the utensils, the stirring spoons and vegetable peelers. It was a jam-packed nightmare.

  The hell with the can opener. She pulled a butcher knife out of the drawer. Her father had always warned her not to use a knife to open a can, but Nancy Jaax had never made a point of listening to her father’s advice. She jabbed the butcher knife into the can, and the point stuck in the metal. She hit the handle with the heel of her right hand. All of a sudden her hand slipped down the handle, struck the tang of the blade, and slid down the blade. She felt the edge bite deep.

  The butcher knife clattered to the floor, and big drops of blood fell on the counter. “Son of a bitch!” she said. The knife had sliced through the middle of her right hand, on the palm. It was a deep cut. She wondered if the knife had hit bone or cut any tendons. She put pressure on the cut to stanch the bleeding and went over to the sink, turned on the faucet, and thrust her hand under the stream of water. The sink turned red. She wiggled her fingers. They worked; so she had not sliced a tendon. This was not such a bad cut. Holding her hand over her head, she went into the bathroom and found a Band-Aid. She waited for the blood to coagulate, and then she pressed the Band-Aid over the cut, drawing the sides of the cut together to seal the wound. She hated the sight of blood, even if it was her own blood. She had a thing about blood. She knew what some blood could contain.

  Nancy skipped the children’s baths because of the cut on her hand and gave them their usual snuggle in bed. That night, Jaime slept in bed with her. Nancy didn’t mind, especially because Jerry was out of town, and it made her feel close to her children. Jaime seemed to need the reassurance. Jaime was always a little edgy when Jerry was out of town.

  PROJECT EBOLA

  1983 SEPTEMBER 26

  The next morning, Nancy Jaax woke up at four o’clock. She got out of bed quietly so as not to wake Jaime and showered and put on her uniform. She wore green Army slacks with a black stripe down the leg, a green Army shirt, and in the cold before sunrise she put on a black military sweater. The sweater displayed the shoulder bars of a major, with gold oak leaves. She drank a Diet Coke to wake herself up, and walked upstairs to her study in the cupola of the house.

  Today she might put on a biohazard space suit. She was in training for veterinary pathology, the study of disease in animals. Her speciality was turning out to be the effects of Biosafety Level 4 hot agents, and in the presence of those kinds of agents you need to wear a space suit. She was also studying for her pathology-board exams, which were coming up in a week. As the sun rose that morning over the apple orchards and fields to the east of town, she opened her books and hunched over them. Grackles began croaking in the trees, and trucks began to move along the streets of Thurmont, below her window. The palm of her right hand still throbbed.

  At seven o’clock, she went down to the master bedroom and woke Jaime, who was curled up in the bed. She went into Jason’s room. Jason was harder to wake, and Nancy had to shake him several times. Then the babysitter arrived, an older woman named Mrs. Trapane, who got Jaime and Jason dressed and gave them their breakfasts while Nancy climbed back up to the cupola and returned to her books. Mrs. Trapane would see Jason off to the school bus and would watch Jaime at home until Nancy came back from work that evening.

  At seven-thirty, Nancy closed her books and kissed her children good-bye. She thought to herself, Have to remember to stop at the bank and get some money to pay Mrs. Trapane. She drove the Honda alone to work, heading south on the Gettysburg road, along the foot of Catoctin Mountain. As she approached Fort Detrick, in the city of Frederick, the traffic thickened and slowed. She turned off the highway and arrived at the main gate of the base. A guard waved her through. She turned right, drove past the parade grounds with its flagpole, and parked her car near a massive, almost windowless building made of concrete and yellow bricks that covered almost ten acres of ground. Tall vent pipes on the roof discharged filtered exhaust air that was being pumped out of sealed biological laboratories inside the building. This was the United States Army Medical Research Institute of Infectiou
s Diseases, or USAMRIID.

  Military people often call USAMRIID the Institute. When they call the place USAMRIID, they drawl the word in a military way, making it sound like “you Sam rid,” which gives it some hang time in the air. The mission of USAMRIID is medical defense. The Institute conducts research into ways to protect soldiers against biological weapons and natural infectious diseases. It specializes in drugs, vaccines, and biocontainment. At the Institute, there are always a number of programs going on simultaneously—research into vaccines for various kinds of bacteria, such as anthrax and botulism, research into the characteristics of viruses that might infect American troops, either naturally or in the form of a battlefield weapon. Beginning with the Second World War, Army labs at Fort Detrick performed research into offensive biological weapons—the Army was developing strains of lethal bacteria and viruses that could be loaded into bombs and dropped on an enemy. In 1969, President Richard M. Nixon signed an executive order that outlawed the development of offensive biological weapons in the United States. From then on, the Army labs were converted to peaceful uses, and USAMRIID was founded. It devoted itself to developing protective vaccines, and it concentrated on basic research into ways to control lethal microorganisms. The Institute knows ways to stop a monster virus before it ignites an explosive chain of lethal transmission in the human race.

  Major Nancy Jaax entered the building through the back entrance and showed her security badge to a guard behind a desk, who nodded and smiled at her. She headed into the main block of containment zones, traveling through a maze of corridors. There were soldiers everywhere, dressed in fatigues, and there were civilian scientists and technicians wearing ID badges. People seemed very busy, and rarely did anyone stop to chat with someone else in the corridors.

  Nancy wanted to see what had happened to the Ebola monkeys during the night. She walked along a Biosafety Level 0 corridor, heading for a Level 4 biocontainment area known as AA-5, or the Ebola suite. The levels are numbered 0, 2, 3 and finally 4, the highest. (For some reason, there is no Level 1.) All the containment levels at the Institute, from Level 2 to Level 4, are kept under negative air pressure, so that if a leak develops, air will flow into the zones rather than outward to the normal world. The suite known as AA-5 was a group of negative-pressure biocontainment rooms that had been set up as a research lab for Ebola virus by a civilian Army scientist named Eugene Johnson. He was an expert in Ebola and its sister, Marburg. He had infected several monkeys with Ebola virus, and he had been giving them various drugs to see if they would stop the Ebola infection. In recent days, the monkeys had begun to die. Nancy had joined Johnson’s Ebola project as the pathologist. It was her job to determine the cause of death in the monkeys.

  She came to a window in a wall. The window was made of heavy glass, like that in an aquarium, and it looked directly into the Ebola suite, directly into Level 4. You could not see the monkeys through this window. Every morning, a civilian animal caretaker put on a space suit and went inside to feed the monkeys and clean their cages and check on their physical condition. This morning there was a piece of paper taped to the inside of the glass, with handwritten lettering on it. It had been left there by a caretaker. The note said that during the night two of the animals had “gone down.” That is, they had crashed and bled out.

  When she saw the note, she knew that she would be putting on a space suit and going in to dissect the monkeys. Ebola virus destroyed an animal’s internal organs, and the carcass deteriorated abruptly after death. It softened, and the tissues turned into jelly, even if you put it in a refrigerator to keep it cold. You wanted to dissect the animals quickly, before the spontaneous liquefaction began, because you can’t dissect gumbo.

  When Nancy Jaax first applied to join the pathology group at the Institute, the colonel in charge of it didn’t want to accept her. Nancy thought it was because she was a woman. He said to her, “This work is not for a married female. You are either going to neglect your work or neglect your family.” One day, she brought her résumé into his office, hoping to persuade him to accept her. He said, “I can have anybody I want in my group”—implying that he didn’t want her because she wasn’t good enough—and he mentioned the great Thoroughbred stallion Secretariat. “If I want to have Secretariat in my group,” he said, “I can get Secretariat.”

  “Well, sir, I am no plow horse!” she roared at him, and slammed her résumé on his desk. He reconsidered the matter and allowed her to join the group.

  When you begin working with biological agents, the Army starts you in Biosafety Level 2, and then you move up to Level 3. You don’t go into Level 4 until you have a lot of experience, and the Army may never allow you to work there. In order to work in the lower levels, you must have a number of vaccinations. Nancy had vaccinations for yellow fever, Q fever, Rift Valley fever, the VEE, EEE, and WEE complex (brain viruses that live in horses), and tularemia, anthrax, and botulism. And, of course, she had had a series of shots for rabies, since she was a veterinarian. Her immune system reacted badly to all the shots: they made her sick. The Army therefore yanked her out of the vaccination program. At this point, Nancy Jaax was essentially washed up. She couldn’t proceed with any kind of work with Level 3 agents, because she couldn’t tolerate the vaccinations. There was only one way she could continue working with dangerous infectious agents. She had to get herself assigned to work in a space suit in Level 4 areas. There aren’t any vaccines for Level 4 hot agents. A Level 4 hot agent is a lethal virus for which there is no vaccine and no cure.

  Ebola virus is named for the Ebola River, which is the headstream of the Mongala River, a tributary of the Congo, or Zaire, River. The Ebola River empties tracts of rain forest, winding past scattered villages. The first known emergence of Ebola Zaire—the hottest type of Ebola virus—occurred in September 1976, when it erupted simultaneously in fifty-five villages near the headwaters of the Ebola River. It seemed to come out of nowhere, and killed nine out of ten people it infected. Ebola Zaire is the most feared agent at the Institute. The general feeling around USAMRIID has always been “Those people who work with Ebola are crazy.” To mess around with Ebola is an easy way to die. Better to work with something safer, such as anthrax.

  Eugene Johnson, the civilian biohazard expert who was running the Ebola research program at the Institute, had a reputation for being a little bit wild. He is something of a legend to the handful of people in the world who really know about hot agents and how to handle them. He is one of the world’s leading Ebola hunters. Gene Johnson is a large man, not to say massive, with a broad, heavy face and loose-flying disheveled brown hair and a bushy brown beard and a gut that hangs over his belt, and glaring, deep eyes. If Gene Johnson were to put on a black leather jacket, he could pass for a roadie with the Grateful Dead. He does not look at all like a man who works for the Army. He has a reputation for being a top-notch field epidemiologist (a person who studies viral diseases in the wild), but for some reason he does not often get around to publishing his work. That explains his somewhat mysterious reputation. When people who know Johnson’s work talk about him, you hear things like “Gene Johnson did this, Gene Johnson did that,” and it all sounds clever and imaginative. He is a rather shy man, somewhat suspicious of people, deeply suspicious of viruses. I think I have never met someone who is more afraid of viruses than Gene Johnson, and what makes his fear impressive is the fact that it is a deep intellectual respect, rooted in knowledge. He spent years traveling across central Africa in search of the reservoirs of Ebola and Marburg viruses. He had virtually ransacked Africa looking for these life forms, but despite his searches he had never found them in their natural hiding places. No one knew where any of the filoviruses came from; no one knew where they lived in nature. The trail had petered out in the forests and savannas of central Africa. To find the hidden reservoir of Ebola was one of Johnson’s great ambitions.

  No one around the Institute wanted to get involved with his Ebola project. Ebola, the slate wiper, did things
to people that you did not want to think about. The organism was too frightening to handle, even for those who were comfortable and adept in space suits. They did not care to do research on Ebola because they did not want Ebola to do research on them. They didn’t know what kind of host the virus lived in—whether it was a fly or a bat or a tick or a spider or a scorpion or some kind of reptile, or an amphibian, such as a frog or a newt. Or maybe it lived in leopards or elephants. And they didn’t know exactly how the virus spread, how it jumped from host to host.

  Gene Johnson had suffered recurrent nightmares about Ebola virus ever since he began to work with it. He would wake up in a cold sweat. His dreams went more or less the same way. He would be wearing his space suit while holding Ebola in his gloved hand, holding some kind of liquid tainted with Ebola. Suddenly the liquid would be running all over his glove, and then he would realize that his glove was full of pinholes, and the liquid was dribbling over his bare hand and running inside his space suit. He would come awake with a start, saying to himself, My God, there’s been an exposure. And then he would find himself in his bedroom, with his wife sleeping beside him.

  In reality, Ebola had not yet made a decisive, irreversible breakthrough into the human race, but it seemed close to doing that. It had been emerging in microbreaks here and there in Africa. The worry was that a microbreak would develop into an unstoppable tidal wave. If the virus killed nine out of ten people it infected and there was no vaccine or cure for it, you could see the possibilities. The possibilities were global. Johnson liked to say to people that we don’t really know what Ebola has done in the past, and we don’t know what it might do in the future. Ebola was unpredictable. An airborne strain of Ebola could emerge and circle around the world in about six weeks, like the flu, killing large numbers of people, or it might forever remain a secret feeder at the margins, taking down humans a few at a time.