Cobra Event

by Preston, Richard

  The Reachdeep team worked for an hour or so, organizing boxes, taking inventory. Oscar Wirtz and his people began moving equipment out through a door in Pod D to a truck, where the stuff was driven up to the helicopter landing field.

  Austen took Littleberry aside. She said, 'Dr Littleberry, could we speak privately? Why do we have to have all the weapons?'

  'That's a good question. Hey, Will - come over here for a second. Do we need these armed people? I'm askin' you, Will.'

  Hopkins looked thoughtful. 'Let's hope we don't need them.'

  Littleberry said, 'If we go into shooters in New York, I'm off the team. I don't do shooters. Dr Austen joins me in this position, I believe.'

  Hopkins was exasperated. He was wearing a gun himself. 'Look, Mark, I'm running this team. We're going to do this by the book.'

  'By the book, Will?' Littleberry said. 'There isn't any book.'

  A man came in, looking surprised at the gear. He was a U.S. marshal from the Department of Justice. 'Where is Dr Austen? I've been sent to deputize her.'

  'I don't really want to be a marshal,' she said. 'The government requires it,' he said.

  'I can't use a gun.'

  'You're not allowed to use a gun,' Hopkins said. 'You aren't weapons-qualified.'

  The man from justice swore in both Austen and Littleberry as deputy U.S. marshals.

  'Good for you,' Suzanne Tanaka said to Austen. 'I wish they'd do it for me.'

  The Hot Core

  The helicopters churned north, strung out in a line, traveling at a steady 110 knots. The operations squad followed in helicopters behind the science squad.

  'I like Hueys. They're slow as hell but they get you there,' Oscar Wirtz remarked to a pilot.

  'We should have taken the Black Hawks,' the pilot said.

  Hopkins kept a Felix black box on his knees during the whole flight. For most of the time he worked on it, checking it out, fiddling with his Leatherman tool. He started the Felix and restarted it, testing it. Then he opened the second Felix and checked it out, too. He tested and retested the Boinks.

  Littleberry had been sitting near Hopkins in the Huey, almost silent during the flight. 'I'm kind of squirrelly over this, Will,' he said.

  The helicopters came up New York Bay over the Verrazano Bridge late in the afternoon. Early that morning, when Austen had left in the F.B.I. plane, the city had been wrapped in clouds. The clouds had turned into fluffy cotton with soft gray undersides, the change­able clouds of spring, and they threw spots of shadow on the buildings below.

  'These big operations,' Hopkins said, 'there's nothing like it on earth. The feeling is indescribable.'

  Austen had become frankly terrified. She had never been in an air operation, had never seen so many weapons, and she was amazed at how quickly the F.B.I. had put things together. But she had a sense that whenever a government throws its people fast into an unfolding emergency, nobody is in control. Only history is in control, and the story never goes as planned.

  As the Reachdeep Hueys approached Governors island, which sat in the East River not far from Brooklyn, the team members saw that other parts of the federal government had already arrived. There was a landing zone in the middle of the island that had once been baseball fields. Two Army Black Hawk helicopters had landed, and a third Army Black Hawk was standing off to allow the Reachdeep helicopters to land first. The Black Hawks had pallets slung under them. They contained hospital gear for a theater medical lab. One by one, the Reachdeep Hueys touched down in the field.

  Governors Island is a mile long. It is dotted with abandoned buildings from several historical periods. There are two forts dating from the War of 1812, and there are other buildings put up as recently as the 1970s. Before the American Revolution, Governors Island was where the British colonial governors of New York lived. They chose to live on the island because it put a distance of water between them and the noise and turmoil of the town. Recently the island was owned and operated by the U.S. Coast Guard, but the Coast Guard had moved its operations, leaving the place mothballed.

  There were a number of large, graceful brick dormito­ries on the island. They were trimmed with white paint and had slate roofs, and the largest building had a cupola. The eastern side of the island was separated from Brooklyn by Buttermilk Channel. Three piers stuck out of the island into the channel. A couple of Coast Guard launches were tied up at the piers. Governors Island was

  so close to lower Manhattan that the towers of Wall Street seemed to loom over it.

  The team got their gear out into the field, ducking under the helicopter blades and dragging their boxes. Frank Masaccio was waiting with a group of his senior investigators. He greeted the team, shaking their hands, welcoming them. 'Isn't this a great place?' he said. He put his hands in the pockets of a black trench coat. 'Now it's yours. Don't let the New York office down. I'll be there for you.'

  Seagulls were wheeling overhead in the clear light, and a sea breeze rippled across the island. The smell of salt water came off the bay.

  Walter Mellis was with Masaccio. He had caught a flight from Atlanta after the SIOC meeting. Mellis was looking scared. He shook Alice's hand. 'Finally I get to congratulate you in person.'

  'I wish you had told me.' 'You didn't have clearance.' 'You put me in the F.B.I.'

  'You're still C.D.C. We're sending up an epidemic task force.' This was a team of epidemiologists who would monitor the city for any further cases of Cobra, and who would follow up on people who had had contact with potential Cobra cases, so that any spread of the disease in the city would, it was hoped, be kept under control. 'Our labs are ready to do the backup work,' Mellis said to her. 'I'll be flying samples down.'

  The F.B.I. helicopters had been offloaded. Two stayed on the island to help ferry people in and out of the city, while the third helicopter returned to Quantico.

  On the water's edge at the western side of the island, facing lower Manhattan and the Statue of Liberty, there was an old brick hospital. It was the old Coast Guard base hospital. There was already activity going on there - Army soldiers and officers in green fatigues were

  hurrying up and down the front steps, carrying equip­ment and supplies. The idea was to bring the place up to standard as a biocontainment Army field hospital.

  An Army colonel in fatigues was standing on the steps. 'You must be Dr Austen. I'm Dr Ernesto Aguilar. I'm chief of the TAML unit,' he said.

  'How's the hospital, sir?' she asked him.

  'It's got rooms, and that's all we need,' he said. 'In a few hours, this will be a real hospital.'

  The hospital was simple and spare, with a pervasive smell of linoleum. Mark Littleberry began prowling around, opening doors. He and Hopkins explored the entire building from top to bottom, getting a sense of how the rooms were structured, where the windows were located, and where the air would flow. Littleberry, the team biohazard officer, found a group of rooms near the back side of the building that he liked - a warren of interconnecting chambers. This area was going to be the Reachdeep lab, the biocontainment core. The rooms were empty, except for a few wooden tables and some metal chairs. There was a large conference area adjacent to the rooms. It looked out through a line of windows across the bay to lower Manhattan and the Statue of Liberty. Outside the conference room there was an observation deck with a metal railing around it. A large investigation requires regular team meetings: this is standard practice. At least once a day all managers of an investigative group meet and share the evidence, trade ideas, and discuss leads that need to be run out.

  'This is a good setup, Will,' Littleberry said. 'It beats Iraq,' Hopkins said.

  The electronics specialist Austen had met on her way to SIOC, Special Agent Caroline Landau, flew over in a helicopter, bringing with her various types of communi­cation gear. It was combined with the gear that Oscar Wirtz had brought from Quantico. The agents set up a row of satellite dishes on the deck outside the conference room. Inside, Landau put up video monitors, racks of en
crypted cellular telephones, and Saber radios. People in conference could make instant visual contact with the Command Center of the New York office or the F.B.I. headquarters in Washington. The gear also included high-speed satellite connections to the Internet and the World Wide Web.

  Mark Littleberry planned the layout of the biocontain-ment core, working with Hopkins, Biocontainment of infective evidence was the goal, so that the evidence could be studied safely in a Biosafety Level 3 zone. They called it the Evidence Core.

  The Evidence Core was hot. It consisted of three connected rooms. The first room was the materials room, for holding and analyzing the basic physical evidence. There would be a variety of machines in this room. The second room was the biology room, for growing cultures in flasks and for preparing and looking at samples of tissue in regular optical microscopes. The third room, the imaging room, was for the electron microscope and equipment associated with it.

  There was a glass window looking from the Core into the conference room. The Core rooms were accessible through a vestibule safety room. This room served as a decontamination chamber, where the team members would put on and take off their protective biohazard gear. They would use bleach in hand-pump sprayers to decontaminate their protective suits. The suits were disposable F.B.I. field biohazard suits.

  A Coast Guard ferryboat arrived and docked at the pier on the north end of the island. The boat carried an unmarked white truck. The truck contained the Army's portable electron microscope. The truck was backed up to a loading bay in the hospital, and Army technicians

  carried the microscope in sections into the imaging room in the Core, and set it up, while Suzanne Tanaka received instructions from them and helped with the work.

  The electron microscope was a massive instrument, six feet tall. It used a beam of electrons to make highly magnified images. It was going to be a crucially important tool for making magnified pictures of biologi­cal samples. The samples in this microscope would be hot. Since the team needed to have real-time instant access to images, the microscope had to be placed in the Biocontainment Core.

  The team's living quarters were situated in an empty Coast Guard dormitory next door to the hospital, in one of the brick buildings. It was surrounded by elm trees and plane trees. Like the hospital, it looked out on New York Bay toward the Statue of Liberty and lower Manhattan. The team members each had his or her own room. The rooms contained a metal bed with Coast Guard blankets and sheets, and that was all.

  'We're going to run this forensic investigation around the clock,' Hopkins said to the team. 'When you need to sleep, let people know where you are, and try to keep a sleep session to four hours or less.'

  'Aye, aye, Captain Ahab,' Jimmy Lesdiu said.

  The operations squad of Reachdeep - Oscar Wirtz's ninjas - had set themselves and their equipment up, and for the moment they had nothing to do. So they cleaned their weapons and checked and double-checked their gear. They hated this kind of waiting. Some of the younger members of the Reachdeep operations squad complained about it to Wirtz. He told them to relax. He pointed out that successful hunters spend most of their time holding themselves still.

  The Evidence Core would be kept at Biosafety Level 3 Plus, under negative air pressure. This was so that

  infective particles would not leak out of the rooms through cracks. Mark Littleberry figured out how to do it. He and Hopkins pounded a hole in one of the exterior walls of the Core, taking turns with a sledgehammer. Then they attached a flexible plastic air duct to the hole, taping all the cracks with sticky duct tape. They ran the duct into a portable HEPA filter unit supplied by the Army. It was essentially a vacuum cleaner attached to the Core. It sucked contaminated air out of the Core and filtered it before discharging the air out a window through a second plastic duct. This system kept the Core in a state of negative air pressure, which is standard for Level 3 Plus. Any dangerous particles in the air would not leak out of the Core, but would flow inward and toward the vacuum cleaner, where they would be trapped in the HEPA filters.

  Hopkins threw a switch on the filter machine and it hummed quietly. They finished setting up the air­handling system and had turned it on by nine o'clock in the evening, four hours after the helicopters had touched down on Governors Island.

  'We've got negative pressure in the Core now,' Hopkins explained to the others. 'If I must say so myself, this is a gadgetized hot zone.'

  'Every time I hear you say that word gadget, Hopkins,' Littleberry said, 'I,know we're in trouble.'

  The Reachdeep team gathered in the conference room. Hopkins spoke to them. 'You could think of this lab as a spaceship,' he said. 'We're going to lose touch with the world for a little while, with our families and friends. We are going on a voyage to explore a crime.'

  'And to go where no man knows what he is doing,' Suzanne Tanaka said.

  'One question, Will,' James Lesdiu said. 'Is this really going to work?'

  'I have no idea,' Hopkins said.

  'Is it really safe, is what I'd like to know,' Walter Mellis said. He was waiting for samples that he could fly back to Atlanta.

  'It's as safe as we can make it,' Mark Littleberry said. Elsewhere in New York City it was a calm spring evening. In the cafes in Greenwich Village, people were gathering at the outdoor tables, drinking and eating. There had been nothing in the newspapers, as yet, about F.B.I. teams landing on Governors Island. The news media had not noticed the increased activity. The Coast Guard had used the island for years as a staging place for rescue operations, and the neighborhoods in Brooklyn closest to the island were accustomed to helicopters coming and going. People did not focus on the fact that the Coast Guard was no longer there, and that the helicopters were from the F.B.I. and the U.S. Army.

  Hopkins pondered the question of where to put the Felix gene scanners. They did not need to be operated inside the Core. The Felix system had been developed at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, in California, as a system for use by military forces in identifying unknown biological agents. Biological samples for read­ing in the gene scanners could be sterilized with chemicals before being brought out of the Core. Certain chemicals would kill a virus without disrupting the virus's genetic material. You could put a sterile virus sample into Felix and it would analyze the DNA successfully, even when the organism was dead.

  Hopkins found some tables and began setting up the Felixes in the conference room. He placed a few chairs around the tables, and he ran data cables from the Felixes over to the communication center. In that way, Hopkins joined Felix to the World Wide Web.

  At seven o'clock in the evening, a Coast Guard ferryboat had arrived at the island bearing a refrigerated

  morgue truck, courtesy of the City of New York. With the truck came Dr Lex Nathanson. For any autopsies that fell under the jurisdiction of the chief medical examiner - and any deaths in New York City related to Cobra were of that type - Nathanson would be present at the autopsy and would sign the death certificate and seal the evidence.

  The morgue truck contained the bodies of Peter Talides, Glenn Dudley, and Ben Kly, sealed in triple body pouches. Nathanson rode in the front of the truck with an F.B.I. evidence specialist who was carrying a large NATO biohazard tube containing the two cobra boxes. They also brought a red plastic biohazard drum contain­ing Harmonica Man's clothes and harmonicas.

  Frank Masaccio's people had taken control of Kate Moran's bedroom, the art classroom at the Mater School, Peter Talides's house, and Penny Zecker's shop on Staten Island. The agents were evidence specialists. They were not trained in biohazard work, but they wore respirator masks and coveralls and hoped for the best. It would take them days to sift these locations for further evidence. It was standard operating procedure for a criminal investi­gation. It had to be done.

  'I think we're ready to go hot,' Hopkins said.

  Outside the windows of the meeting room came the continual flutter of helicopters bringing in Army hospital equipment, and the Reachdeep team could hear the vo
ices of Army doctors and medical staff moving through the halls of the hospital, setting up rooms for patients as yet unknown.

  The team members put on surgical scrub suits and filed into the staging room for the Core. They opened some fiberglass boxes and pulled out black F.B.I. biohaz­ard suits made of Tyvek. They put on rubber boots, and

  drew on double surgical gloves. The staging room was crowded with team members bumping into one another. 'This is not my idea of fun,' James Lesdiu said, shaking out an extra-large black suit and stepping into it.

  Hopkins slung a nylon belt around his suit and hung his Leatherman pocket tool on that. They put on soft, flexible breathing helmets known as Racal hoods, trans­parent plastic head-bubbles with a filtered air supply. A battery-powered blower, worn at the waist, drives filtered air into the helmet, keeping it under positive pressure, so that infective bioparticles in the air will not sneak in. The batteries for the blowers last eight hours and supply a large volume of filtered air, enough for a person exerting himself heavily. Unlike the Racal hood, the space suit itself is not pressurized. It is a neutral-pressure whole­body suit. The lungs and the eyes are the most vulnerable membranes exposed to the air, so they require the superior protection of a pressurized helmet.

  Hopkins fitted a Racal hood over his head, showing the others how to do it. The hood had a kind of double flap that went down over the chest and shoulders. He zipped his suit up over the shoulder flaps of the hood, closing it at the neck. 'We should be able to do a complete suiting procedure in four minutes or less,' he said. 'It's going to be important for us to move in and out of the Core quickly.' He turned to Austen. 'This is a lot easier and simpler than those dinosaur Level 4 space suits you guys have at C.D.C.'

  'The dinosaurs work,' Austen said.

  'Reachdeep is a small, furry mammal,' he said. 'Go light, move fast, and have sharp teeth.'

  'And get stepped on, Hopkins?' she said.

  Littleberry pushed open the door, and the team members went into the Core, deploying for their tasks. Hopkins placed the NATO canister on a table. He opened it. He removed a plastic cylinder and opened that.