The Cobra Event

by Richard Preston

  He said that after consulting with experts he had decided that the United States of America would renounce the use of any form of biological weapons, and he was ordering the disposal of existing stocks of the weapons. “Mankind already carries in its own hands too many of the seeds of its own destruction,” he said. “By the examples that we set today, we hope to contribute to an atmosphere of peace and understanding between all nations. Thank you.” He walked off the podium without another word.

  The next day, in an analysis of “What Nixon Gave Up,” The New York Times noted rather skeptically that the president was repudiating only “a few horrible and probably unusable weapons in the American arsenal to gain possible advantages of security for the nation and prestige for himself.” “Informed sources” said that the chemical weapons given up by Nixon were expensive and unreliable. As for biological weapons, “experts” said that the United States would have been unable to use them. “In the first place, the germs and toxins (the dead but poisonous products of bacteria) stockpiled in refrigerated igloos at the Pine Bluff arsenal in Arkansas have never been tested; it is not clear what effect they would have on enemy forces or population.”

  Of course the experts had it wrong. Either that or they lied to the Times. Nevertheless, their position prevailed. The idea that bioweapons were never fully tested, were never made to work, or are unusable is a myth that persists to this day. The existence of the Johnston Atoll field trials was not reported publicly and is unknown to most civilian scientists.

  The trials, which went on steadily from 1964 to 1969, were successful far beyond the expectations of even the scientists involved. The results were clear. Biological weapons are strategic weapons that can be used to destroy an army or a city, or a nation. (“Tactical” weapons, as opposed to strategic weapons, are used in a more limited way, on a battlefield. Chemical weapons are tactical, not strategic, since it takes a large quantity of a chemical weapon to destroy a small number of enemies. There are only two kinds of strategic weapons in the world: nuclear and biological.)

  The reasons for Richard Nixon’s decision to end the American biological-weapons program were complicated. His intelligence people were telling him that the Russians were getting ready to embark on a crash biological program, and he hoped to encourage them not to do it. The Vietnam War protests were going on, and some protesters had focused on chemical and biological weapons. Not only did the protesters not want the weapons used on anyone by their government, they also did not want them stored near where they lived, or transported across the country. Nixon had apparently considered using biological weapons in Vietnam, but military planners couldn’t figure out how to deploy them without sickening or killing vast numbers of civilians. Even so, the Pentagon was furious with Nixon for taking away a new strategic weapon.

  The success of the Pacific trials was also a factor in Nixon’s decision, for the trials had surprised everyone. The problem with bioweapons was not that they didn’t work, it was that they worked too well. They were remarkably powerful. They were difficult to defend against. They were easy and cheap to make, and while they depended on weather for their effectiveness, they were a good or even superior alternative to nuclear weapons, especially for countries that could not afford nuclear weapons.

  The meaning of the Pacific trials was not lost on the supreme leader of the Soviet Union, Leonid Brezhnev, or on his advisers. Brezhnev was reportedly furious at his scientific people for having fallen behind the Americans. The Soviets believed that Nixon was lying, that he never really canceled the American bioweapons program. They thought he had hidden it away. So Brezhnev did exactly what Nixon was trying to head off. He ordered a secret crash acceleration of the Soviet bioweapons program in response to a perceived threat from the United States.

  In 1972, the United States signed the Convention on the Prohibition of the Development, Production, and Stockpiling of Bacteriological (Biological) and Toxin Weapons and on Their Destruction, commonly known as the Biological Weapons Convention. Soviet diplomats helped to write much of the language of the treaty, and the Soviet Union became one of three so-called depository states for the treaty; the other two were the United States and Great Britain. By making themselves depository states, the three nations offered themselves as an example to be followed. It was believed that the resources of the intelligence community and the vigilance and concern of the scientific community would serve to sound the alert to any violations of the treaty.

  But that belief turned out to be only a belief in the years following the treaty. For there was no way to verify whether or not violations were taking place, and the truth is that much progress was made in the development and engineering of bioweapons in various places around the world. This was not noticed for a long time. It was an invisible history.

  Part Three

  DIAGNOSIS

  Monkey Room

  THE CENTERS FOR DISEASE CONTROL, ATLANTA, GEORGIA WEDNESDAY AFTERNOON, APRIL 22, 199-

  THE WEATHER IN ATLANTA had turned glorious, blue, sunny, and hot. The late April air was filled with a drifting scent of loblolly pines. Northeast of the city center, Clifton Road winds through hilly wooded neighborhoods and goes past the headquarters of the Centers for Disease Control, a warren of buildings made of brick and concrete. Some of the C.D.C. buildings are new, but many are old and deteriorating and stained with age, offering visible evidence of years of neglect by Congress and the White House.

  Building 6 is a stained brick monolith, almost without windows, that sits in the middle of the C.D.C. complex. It was once an animal-holding facility that stored populations of mice, rabbits, and monkeys used for medical research. The C.D.C. grew and became so short of space that eventually the animals were moved elsewhere, and the animal rooms were converted to offices. They are the least desirable offices at the C.D.C., and therefore they are occupied by the youngest people. Many of these people are in the C.D.C.’s Epidemic Intelligence Service—the E.I.S., everyone calls it. About seventy officers enroll in the E.I.S. every year. During a two-year fellowship, they investigate outbreaks of diseases all over the United States and, indeed, the world. The Epidemic Intelligence Service is a training program for people who want to go into public health as a career.

  On the third floor of Building 6, inside a windowless former monkey room, Alice Austen, M.D., a twenty-nine-year-old E.I.S. officer, was on phone duty. She was taking calls, listening to people talk about their diseases.

  “I got something bad,” a man was saying to her. He was calling from Baton Rouge, Louisiana. “And I know where I got it, too. From a pizza.”

  “What makes you think that?” she said.

  “It was a ham and onion. My girlfriend got the disease, too.”

  “What do you think you have?” she asked.

  “I don’t want to, like, get too specific. Let’s just say I got a V.D.”

  “Have you seen a doctor?” she asked.

  “I’m installing Sheetrock for this guy, and he don’t give us no medical,” the man said. “That’s why I have to call the C.D.C.” The man went on to describe how he had been eating a pizza at a local restaurant with his girlfriend when he’d found himself chewing on a piece of plastic. He’d pulled it out of his mouth and discovered it was a bandage strip stained with yellow pus. He was convinced that it had given both him and his girlfriend certain symptoms that he was reluctant to describe.

  “You could not get a sexually transmitted disease from eating a bandage,” Austen said. “You should go to an emergency room and get an exam, and your girlfriend, too. If it turns out you have gonorrhea, we recommend treatment with Cipro.”

  The man wanted to talk, and Austen couldn’t get him off the phone. She was a slender woman of medium height, with wavy auburn hair, a fine-boned face, and a pointed chin. She was a medical pathologist by training—her specialty was death. Her eyes were gray-blue and thoughtful, and seemed to absorb the light, considering the world in a careful way. Her hands were slender but very strong. She
used her hands to probe among organs, bone, and skin. She wore no rings on her fingers, and her fingernails were cut short, so as not to break surgical gloves. It was Wednesday, uniform day at the C.D.C., and Austen was wearing a Public Health Service uniform—pants and a short-sleeved khaki shirt, with the gold oak leaf of a lieutenant commander on the right shoulder. It looked like a Navy uniform. The U.S. Public Health Service is an unarmed branch of the U.S. military.

  One would not describe Alice Austen as a lonely person, or a person incapable of love, for she had many friends, and she had had her lovers, including a man who had wanted to marry her, but there always seemed to be a distance between her and the world. Like many pathologists, she was a loner by temperament, independent minded, curious about how things worked. She was the daughter of a retired chief of police in the town of Ashland, New Hampshire.

  “We got a lawyer. We’re gonna sue over that pizza,” the man was saying.

  “The bandage would have been sterilized by heat in the oven. It couldn’t hurt you,” Austen explained.

  “Yeah, but what if the pus didn’t get cooked?”

  “Those ovens are pretty hot. I think the pus was probably cooked,” she answered.

  An older man walked into Austen’s office. He raised an eyebrow. “Since when has the C.D.C. been advising people on how to cook pus?”

  She pushed the mute button. “Be done in a minute.”

  “A minute? The C.D.C. advises people to cook pus for a minimum of five minutes. Tell the guy to use a meat thermometer. The pus is done when it says ‘pork.’ ”

  Austen smiled.

  The man sat down at an empty desk. He was holding a file folder, slapping it against his hand restlessly. His name was Walter Mellis. He was a public-health doctor in his late fifties, and he had worked at the C.D.C. for most of his career.

  Meanwhile, on the phone: “I got the pizza in my freezer. You folks want to check it out in your hot zone?”

  When she hung up she said, “Wow.”

  “You burned up a lot of time with that guy,” Mellis remarked.

  Austen did not know Walter Mellis very well, but she knew that something was up. He wanted something from her.

  “Anyway,” he went on. “I’m looking for someone to observe at an autopsy. You’re the only E.I.S. officer trained in pathology.”

  “I’m pretty busy writing up my last outbreak,” she said.

  “I just had a call from Lex Nathanson, the medical examiner of New York,” he went on, seeming to ignore her. “They’ve had two cases of something pretty unusual. He asked me if we had anyone to send up there to help him out. Quietly.”

  “Why don’t they use the city health department?”

  “I don’t know why.” He looked a little annoyed. “I know Lex from way back, so he called me.”

  Walter Mellis had a pot belly, gray frizzy hair, and a mustache. He refused to wear his Public Health Service uniform on Wednesdays, and today he had on a shirt the color of mud, with frayed cuffs. She found herself imagining Mellis as a younger man, grooving at a Peter, Paul, and Mary concert, believing the world was about to change. Now he was getting close to retirement. He had become an aging federal official, stuck at the same government pay scale forever, while the world had changed far more than his generation had expected.

  “This could be something good,” he said. “You never know. It could be a John Snow case.”

  Dr. John Snow was one of the first great disease detectives, a founder of the science of modern epidemiology. He was a physician in London in 1853 when there was an outbreak of cholera. Snow found a cluster of cases. He began interviewing the victims and their families, carefully tracing their activities during the days just before they became sick. He discovered that the sick people had been using the same public water pump on Broad Street. The paths of the victims crossed at the water pump. Something in the water from that pump was causing the disease. Snow did not know what substance in the water was making people sick, because the microorganism that causes cholera had not been discovered, but he removed the handle from the water pump. It stopped the outbreak. He did not need to know what was in the water. This is the classic story of epidemiology.

  The C.D.C. has a coveted award called the John Snow Award. It is presented each year to the E.I.S. officer who is judged to have done the best case investigation. Walter Mellis was suggesting to Alice Austen that there was a possibility that the New York case could lead to a John Snow Award.

  She did not buy it. “Is this case part of your project?” she asked. Mellis had some kind of a mysterious project going, a project that no one at the C.D.C. wanted to be involved with, or so she’d heard.

  “My project? The Stealth Virus Project? Yes—it is. My idea is that there may be unknown viruses out there. They don’t cause obvious outbreaks. They sneak around. They’re not very contagious, so they just hit one person here and one person there. They’re Jack the Ripper viruses, serial killers—stealth viruses. Lex Nathanson knows a little bit about the Stealth Virus Project, and I’ve asked him to keep an eye out for anything like this.”

  She noticed that he was wearing a beeper on his belt. She wondered why he needed a beeper.

  “Are you telling me everything?”

  Mellis put his hand up. He sighed. He was accustomed to people ducking his project. It didn’t seem to be going anywhere. “Look,” he said, “if you don’t want to do this, I’ll call Lex and tell him we just don’t have anyone available right now. He’ll understand. It’s no big deal.”

  “No. I’ll go.”

  Mellis looked a little surprised. He opened up his file folder and pulled out a Delta Air Lines ticket and a government expense sheet. He put them on her desk. “I appreciate this,” he said.

  Vision

  ALICE AUSTEN drove her Volkswagen Jetta back to her rented condominium in Decatur, a few miles from the C.D.C. She changed out of her uniform and put on a blue silk-and-wool skirt and a silk blouse.

  She put some extra clothing into a travel bag, along with a book to read, although she knew she’d never read it. A big chunk of space in the bag was taken up by her leather work boots, which were encased in a white plastic garbage bag tied with a twist tie. The boots were Mighty-Tuff boots, the kind construction workers wear, with steel toes and nonskid waffle soles. They were her autopsy boots. She put her laptop computer, a cellular telephone, and a green federal-issue cloth-covered notebook—an epi notebook, they called it—into her briefcase. The green epi notebook was for keeping all her data and records of the investigation. She packed a small digital electronic camera. It took color photographs and stored them in memory cards. The memory cards could be plugged into her laptop computer, and she could review the images on the screen.

  She placed a leather folder containing her autopsy knife and sharpening tools on top of the things in her travel bag. The knife is a pathologist’s main piece of professional equipment. She also threw in a Boy Scout knife, fork, and spoon set, for eating meals in a rented room. She would not be staying in a hotel. The C.D.C. travel allowance was ninety dollars a day for accommodations in New York City. You can’t get much in the way of a hotel room in New York for ninety dollars, so she would be staying in a bed-and-breakfast.

  HER FLIGHT TOOK OFF in clear weather. The moon was down, and the stars were bright in the dark sky. Austen watched North America move slowly below the aircraft, a cobweb of lights imposed on blackness. Cities approached and fell behind—Charlotte, Richmond, then Washington, D.C. The Mall was visible from thirty thousand feet, a luminous rectangle against the Potomac River. The federal government looked small and helpless from up here, like something you could step on with your foot.

  They went into a holding pattern around Newark Airport, and when they turned and prepared to land, coming in from the north, they passed close to Manhattan. Looking out her window, Austen unexpectedly saw the organism called New York City. The beauty of it almost took her breath away. The core of the city seemed to emerge from th
e black waters that surrounded it in a lacework of light and structure, like a coral reef that glowed. She saw the buildings of midtown Manhattan shimmering in the Hudson River, so remote and strange as to seem almost imaginary. The Empire State Building was a spike washed with floodlights. Beyond Manhattan lay expanses of Brooklyn and Queens. To the south she recognized the luminous bulge of Staten Island, and the lights of the Verrazano Bridge hanging in a chain. Closer to the airplane, the waters of Upper New York Bay spread out like an inky rug, devoid of light, except for the sparkling hulls of ships at anchor, their bows pointed to sea with an incoming tide.

  Austen thought of a city as a colony of cells. The cells were people. Individually the cells lived for a while and were programmed to die, but they replaced themselves with their progeny, and the organism continued its existence. The organism grew, changed, and reacted, adapting to the biological conditions of life on the planet. Austen’s patient, for the moment, was the city of New York. A couple of cells inside the patient had winked out in a mysterious way. This might be a sign of illness in the patient, or it might be nothing.

  THE BED-AND-BREAKFAST apartment where the C.D.C. had rented a room for Alice Austen was in Kips Bay, on East Thirty-third Street, between Second and First avenues. Kips Bay is a sixties-era development of blocklike concrete buildings surrounded by gardens, nestled up against a huge complex of hospitals. Her hostess was a German widow named Gerda Heilig, who rented out a room looking toward the New York University Medical Center and the East River. It was a pleasant room with a desk and an antique carved German bed that squeaked when Austen sat on it. The room was full of books in German. There was no telephone.

  Austen placed her knife pack on the desk and opened it. Inside the leather folder were two short knives and a long knife. They were her autopsy blades. The short knives were like fish-fillet knives. The long one was a prosector’s knife. It had a straight, heavy, carbon-steel blade. The knife was two and a half feet long. It was almost like a short sword. It had a comfortable handle made of ash wood, the same wood used in axe handles. She kept a diamond sharpening stone in her prosection pack and a round edging steel. In case they asked her to participate in the autopsy, she wanted to be ready with her own knife. She wet the stone with water under the bathroom faucet, and ground her knife on it, testing its edge on her thumbnail. When you touch the edge of a prosector’s knife to your thumbnail, you want it to stick, to grab the nail, the way a razor grabs. If the edge slides or bounces over your thumbnail, it is not sharp.