The Hot Zone

by Richard Preston

  Jerry continued to read. He liked to read military history. Some of the most brutal combat in history had occurred in the rolling country around Catoctin Mountain: at the cornfield at Antietam, where every individual stalk of corn had been slashed away by bullets, and where the bodies had lain so thick a person could walk on them from one end of the cornfield to the other. He could look out his bedroom window and imagine the blue and gray armies crawling across the land. That night he happened to be reading The Killer Angels, a novel by Michael Shaara about the Battle of Gettysburg:

  Then Lee said slowly, “Soldiering has one great trap.”

  Longstreet turned to see his face. Lee was riding slowly ahead, without expression. He spoke in that same slow voice.

  “To be a good soldier you must love the army. But to be a good officer you must be willing to order the death of the thing you love. That is … a very hard thing to do. No other profession requires it. That is one reason why there are so few very good officers. Although there are many good men.”

  He switched out the light, but he could not sleep. He rolled over, and the water bed gurgled. Every time he closed his eyes, he thought about his brother, John, and he saw in his mind’s eye an office splattered with blood. Eventually it was two o’clock in the morning, and he was still awake, thinking to himself, I’m just laying here in the dark, and nothing’s happening.

  GARBAGE BAGS

  NOVEMBER 29, WEDNESDAY

  Dan Dalgard slept peacefully that night, as he always did. He had never heard of Ebola virus, but the brief conversation with Colonel C. J. Peters had given him the basic picture. He had been around monkeys and monkey diseases for a long time, and he was not particularly frightened. Many days had passed during which he had been exposed to infected blood, and he certainly had not become sick yet.

  Early in the morning, his telephone rang at home. It was Colonel Peters calling. Again Peters asked him if he could send some people down to look at specimens of tissue from the monkeys. Dalgard said that would be all right. Peters then repeated his request to see the monkey house. Dalgard turned away the question and wouldn’t answer it. He didn’t know Peters, and he wasn’t going to open any doors to him until he had met the man and had a chance to size him up.

  He drove down Leesburg Pike to work, turned through a gate, parked his car, and went into the main building of Hazleton Washington. His office was a tiny cubicle with a glass wall that looked across the lawn; his door looked back to a secretarial pool, a cramped area where you could hardly move around without bumping into people. There was no privacy in Dalgard’s office; it was a fishbowl. He tended to spend a lot of time looking out the window. Today he behaved with deliberate calm. No one in the office detected any unusual emotion, any fear.

  He called Bill Volt, the manager of the monkey house. Volt gave him a shocking piece of news. One of the animal caretakers was very sick, might be dying. During the night, the man had had a heart attack and had been taken to Loudon Hospital, not far away. There’s no further information, Volt said, and we’re still trying to find out what happened. He’s in the cardiac-care unit, and no one can talk to him. (The man’s name will be given here as Jarvis Purdy. He was one of four workers in the monkey house, not including Volt.)

  Dalgard was extremely dismayed and couldn’t rule out the possibility that the man was breaking with Ebola. A heart attack is usually caused by a blood clot in the heart muscle. Had he thrown a clot that had lodged in his heart? Could Ebola cause you to throw a clot? Was Jarvis Purdy clotting up? Suddenly Dalgard felt as if he was losing control of the situation.

  He told Bill Volt that he was to suspend all unnecessary activity in the monkey rooms. As he later recorded in his diary:

  All operations other than feeding, observation and cleaning were to be suspended. Anyone entering the rooms was to have full protection—Tyvek suit, respirator, and gloves. Dead animals were to be double-bagged and placed in a refrigerator.

  He also mentioned to Volt that the news media were almost certainly going to get onto this story. He told Volt that he didn’t want any employees to go outside the building wearing their biohazard gear. If pictures of Hazleton workers wearing face masks and white suits wound up on the evening news, it could cause a panic.

  Dalgard called the hospital and reached Purdy’s doctor. The doctor said that Purdy’s condition was guarded but stable. Dalgard told the doctor that if any aspect of Purdy’s, heart attack wasn’t typical, he should please call Colonel C. J. Peters at Fort Detrick. He was careful not to mention the word Ebola.

  Later that morning, C. J. Peters and Nancy Jaax headed out from Fort Detrick for Virginia, and Gene Johnson came with them. The officers wore their uniforms, but they drove in civilian cars so as not to attract attention. The traffic moved slowly. It was a clear, cold, windy day. The grass along the road was wet and green, still growing, untouched by frost. They turned off Leesburg Pike at the Hazleton offices. Dalgard met them in the lobby and escorted them to another building, which was a laboratory. There a pathologist had prepared a set of slides for Nancy to look at. The slides contained slices of liver from monkeys that had died in the monkey house.

  She sat down at a microscope, adjusted the eyepieces, and began to explore the terrain. She zoomed around and paused. The terrain was a mess. Something had ravaged these cells. They were blitzed and pock-marked, as if the liver had been carpet bombed. Then she saw the dark blobs in the cells—the shadows that did not belong there. They were crystalloids. And they were huge.

  This was extreme amplification.

  “Oh, fuck,” she said in a low voice.

  The bricks did not look like crystals. Ebola bricks come in all kinds of shapes—horseshoes, blobs, lumps, even rings. Some of the cells consisted of a single brick, a huge mother of a brick, a brick that had grown so fat that the whole cell had plumped up. She saw clusters of cells packed with bricks. She saw rotten pockets where all the cells had popped and died, forming a liquefied spot that was packed with wall-to-wall bricks.

  While she looked at the slides, C. J. Peters and Gene Johnson took Dan Dalgard aside and questioned him closely about the use of needles at the monkey house. The Ebola virus had spread in Zaire through dirty needles. Had the company been giving monkeys shots with dirty needles?

  Dalgard was not sure. The company had an official policy of always using clean needles. “Our policy is to change needles after every injection,” he said. “Whether it is done religiously is anybody’s guess.”

  Nancy collected some pieces of sterilized liver and spleen that were embedded in wax blocks, and she put the blocks in a Styrofoam cup to take back to Fort Detrick for analysis. These samples were exceedingly valuable to her and to the Army. What would be even more valuable would be a sample containing live virus.

  C. J. Peters asked Dalgard again if they could all go see the monkey house.

  “Well—let’s not go there now,” Dalgard replied. He made it clear to the officers that the building was private property.

  “What about some samples of monkey? Can we get some samples?” they asked.

  “Sure,” Dalgard said. He told them to drive out Leesburg Pike in the direction of the monkey house. There was an Amoco gas station on the pike, he said, and the colonels were to park their cars there and wait. “A guy is going to come and meet you. He’ll bring some samples with him. And he can answer your questions,” he said.

  “The samples ought to be wrapped in plastic and put in boxes for safety,” C. J. said to Dalgard. “I want you to do that.”

  Dalgard agreed to wrap the samples in plastic.

  Then C. J., Nancy, and Gene drove out to the gas station, where they parked in a cul-de-sac by the highway, near some pay telephones. By now it was early afternoon, and they were hungry—they had missed lunch. Nancy went into the gas station and bought Diet Cokes for everyone and a pack of cheddar-cheese crackers for herself, and she bought C. J. some peanut-butter crackers. The Army people sat in their two cars, eating junk f
ood, feeling cold, and hoping that someone would show up soon with samples of monkey.

  C. J. Peters observed the comings and goings at the gas station. It gave him a sense of life and time passing, and he enjoyed the pleasant normality of the scene. Truckers stopped for diesel and Cokes, and businesspeople stopped for cigarettes. He noticed an attractive woman park her car and go over to one of the pay telephones, where she spoke at length to someone. He whiled away the time imagining that she was a housewife talking to a boyfriend. What would these people think if they knew what had invaded their town? He had begun to think that the Army might have to act decisively to put out this fire. He had been in Bolivia when a hot agent called Machupo had broken out, and he had seen a young woman die, covered with blood. North America had not yet seen an emergence of an agent that turned people into bleeders. North America was not ready for that, not yet. But the possibilities for a huge break of Ebola around Washington were impressive when you thought about it.

  He wondered about AIDS. What would have happened if someone had noticed AIDS when it first began to spread? It had appeared without warning, secretly, and by the time we noticed it, it was too late. If only we had had the right kind of research station in central Africa during the nineteen-seventies … we might have seen it hatching from the forest. If only we had seen it coming … we might have been able to stop it, or at least slow it down;… we might have been able to save at least a hundred million lives. At least. Because the AIDS virus’s penetration of the human species was still in its early stages, and the penetration was happening inexorably. People didn’t realize that the AIDS thing had only just begun. No one could predict how many people were going to die of AIDS, but he believed that the death toll, in the end, could hit hundreds of millions—and that possibility had not sunk in with the general public. On the other hand, suppose AIDS had been noticed? Any “realistic” review of the AIDS virus when it was first appearing in Africa would probably have led experts and government officials to conclude that the virus was of little significance for human health and that scarce research funds should not be allocated to it—after all, it was just a virus that infected a handful of Africans, and all it did was suppress their immune systems. So what? And then the agent had gone on a tremendous amplification all over the planet, and it was still expanding its burn, with no end in sight.

  We didn’t really know what Ebola virus could do. We didn’t know if the agent in the monkey house was, in fact, Ebola Zaire or if it was something else, some new strain of Ebola. An agent that could travel in a cough? Probably not, but who could tell? The more he thought about it, the more he wondered, Who is going to take out those monkeys? Because someone is going to have to go in there and take them out. We can’t just walk away from that building and let it self-destruct. This is a human-lethal virus. Who is going to sack the monkeys? The guys who work for the company?

  He had begun to wonder whether the Army should move in with a military biohazard SWAT team. His own term for this type of action was nuke. To nuke a place means to sterilize it, to render it lifeless. If the hosts are people, you evacuate them and put them in the Slammer. If the hosts are animals, you kill them and incinerate the carcasses. Then you drench the place with chemicals and fumes. He wondered if the Army would have to nuke the monkey house.

  Gene Johnson sat in the passenger seat next to C. J. Peters. His mind was somewhere else. His mind was in Africa. He was thinking about Kitum Cave.

  Gene was very worried about this situation, not to say shit scared. He thought to himself, I don’t know how we are going to get out of this one without people dying. His worry was growing all the time, every minute. The U.S. military, he thought, is stepping into a crisis that is already full-blown, and if something goes wrong and people die, the military will be blamed.

  Suddenly he turned to C. J. and spoke his mind. He said, “It looks inevitable that we’re going to have to take out all the monkeys. A Level 4 outbreak is not a game. I want to warn you about just how detailed and major an effort this is going to be. It’s going to be very complex, it’s going to take some time, and we have to be very fucking careful to do it right. If we are going to do it right, the gist of what I’m saying, C. J., is that we cannot have amateurs in key positions. We need to have experienced people who know what they are doing. Do you understand what’s going to happen if something goes wrong?” And he was thinking: Peters—Peters—he’s never been in an outbreak this complicated—none of us has—the only thing like it was Kitum Cave. And Peters wasn’t there.

  C. J. Peters listened to Gene Johnson in silence, and didn’t reply. He felt that it was sort of irritating to get this kind of advice from Gene—when he’s telling you the obvious, telling you what you already know.

  C. J. Peters and Gene Johnson had a stressful, complicated relationship. They had journeyed together in a truck expedition across central Africa, looking for Ebola virus, and a lot of tension had built up between the two men by the end of the trip. The traveling had been brutal, as hard as any on earth—roads didn’t exist, bridges were gone, the maps must have been drawn by a blind monk, the people spoke languages not even the native translators could understand, and the expedition had not been able to find enough food and water. Worst of all, they ran into difficulty finding human cases of Ebola—they were not able to discover the virus in a natural host or in people.

  It was during that trip, perhaps as a result of the chronic food shortage, that C. J. had taken to eating termites. The ones that swarmed out of their nests. They had wings. Gene, who was more fastidious than C. J., had not been quite so eager to try them. Popping termites in his mouth, C. J. would make remarks like, “They have this extra … mmm …,” and he would smack his lips, smack, smack, and you’d hear a mouthful of termites crunching between his teeth, and he’d spit out the wings, pah, ptah. The African members of the expedition, who liked termites, had pushed Gene to try them, too, and finally he did. He placed a handful of them in his mouth, and was surprised to find that they tasted like walnuts. C. J. had spoken longingly of finding the African termite queen, the glistening white sac that was half a foot long and as thick as a bratwurst, bursting with eggs and creamy insect fat, the queen you ate alive and whole, and she was said to twitch as she went down your throat. Although snacking on termites had amused them, they had argued with each other about how to do the science, how to search for the virus. In Africa, Gene had felt that C. J. was trying to run the show, and it irritated Gene to no end.

  Suddenly a blue, windowless, unmarked van turned off the road and pulled through the gas station and parked next to them. The van parked in such a way that no one on the road or at the gas station could see what went on between the two vehicles. A man swung heavily out of the driver’s seat. It was Bill Volt. He walked over to the Army people, and they got out of their cars.

  “I’ve got ’em right back here,” he said, and he threw open the side door of the van.

  They saw seven black plastic garbage bags sitting on the floor of the van. They could see the outlines of limbs and heads in the bags.

  C. J. said to himself, What is this?

  Nancy gritted her teeth and silently pulled in a breath. She could see how the bags bulged in places, as if liquid had pooled inside them. She hoped it wasn’t blood. “What on earth is all of that?” she exclaimed.

  “They died last night,” Volt said. “They’re in double bags.”

  Nancy was getting a nasty feeling in the pit of her stomach. “Has anybody cut himself fooling around with these monkeys?” she asked.

  “No,” Volt replied.

  Then Nancy noticed that C. J. was looking sideways at her. It was a significant look. The message was, So who’s going to drive the dead monkeys back to Fort Detrick?

  Nancy stared back at C. J. He was pushing her, and she knew it. They were both division chiefs at the Institute. He outranked her, but he was not her boss. He can push me just so far, and I can push him right back. “I’m not putting that shit in the
trunk of my car, C. J.,” she said. “As a veterinarian, I have certain responsibilities with regard to the transportation of dead animals, sir. I can’t just knowingly ship a dead animal with an infectious disease across state lines.”

  Dead silence. A grin spread over C. J.’s face.

  “I agree that it needs to be done,” Nancy went on. “You’re a doc. You can get away with this.” She nodded at his shoulder boards. “This is why you put on those big eagles.”

  They burst into nervous laughter.

  C. J. inspected the bags—it was a relief to see that the monkeys were double-bagged or triple-bagged—and he decided to take them back to Fort Detrick and worry about health laws afterward. His reasoning, as he explained to me later, went like this: “If the guy drove them back to the Reston monkey facility, I felt there would be a certain added risk to the population just from his driving them around in the van, and there would be a delay in diagnosing them. We felt that if we could quickly get a definite diagnosis of Ebola it would be in everyone’s favor.” Surely some smart Army lawyers could figure out why the act of carrying Ebola-ridden dead monkeys across state lines in the trunk of a private automobile was so completely legal that there had never even been any question about it.

  His old red Toyota was not in the best of shape, and he had lost any interest in its resale value. He popped the trunk. It was lined with carpet, and he didn’t see any sharp edges anywhere that might puncture a plastic bag.

  They didn’t have rubber gloves. So they would do the lifting bare-handed. Nancy, keeping her face well away from the enclosed air of the van, inspected the outsides of the bags for any droplets of blood. “Have the exteriors of the bags been disinfected?” she asked Volt.

  Volt said he’d washed the outsides of the bags with Clorox bleach.