“Is this Reachdeep?” Austen asked. “It’s huge.”
“Oh, no. Most of this is other F.B.I. stuff. We just have a little corner of Pod D.”
“What is this place?” Austen asked.
“It’s the radio-silence chamber. The Bureau does electronic work in here.”
Austen didn’t ask him what kind of electronic work he meant. She had a feeling she wouldn’t get a full answer.
Hopkins led her through a warren of makeshift corridors that zigzagged through stacks of boxes and metal storage shelves. They passed an old broken-down pickup truck. The dashboard was open. It was full of communications gear, with data cables hanging out. The truck was a surveillance vehicle.
They emerged into a warren in the middle of an area walled off by boxes where people were working furiously.
“Will! Hey, Will’s here!” A man came over to greet them. He was about fifty years old, very fit, with a seamed face and huge shoulders. He was Special Agent Oscar Wirtz, the Tactical Operations officer for Reachdeep—the weapons-and-space-suits man. He was also a logistics specialist. Oscar Wirtz knew how to pack aircraft with gear quickly. This turns out to be a valuable skill in the F.B.I. He was wearing a large black gun in a shoulder holster. He shook Austen’s hand with a grip that was not merciful. “Welcome to Reachdeep,” Wirtz said to her.
Austen met the other team members. They were people whom Hopkins had selected for the operation. Most of the selecting had happened over the telephone, while she had been asleep in the car and Hopkins had been driving.
The team’s imaging specialist and microbiologist was a pleasant woman in her late twenties named Suzanne Tanaka. She was not an F.B.I. agent; she was a civilian laboratory technician. Until recently she had been working for the United States Navy.
“Suzanne was bugging us to hire her,” Hopkins explained, “so we finally stole her away from the Navy.”
“Should I bring the mice, Will?” she asked.
“Sure, bring a few. Not too many,” he said.
Tanaka busied herself with some plastic boxes holding laboratory mice.
Austen said to her, “Do you know how to work an electron microscope? Because we need to look at tissue samples right away.”
“Sure,” she said. “That’s my specialty.”
“Suzanne, have we worked out where we’re going to get an electron microscope?” Hopkins said.
“The Army’s sending us one in a truck. They’re also sending someone to show me its quirks.”
“Good,” Hopkins said. “Those scopes all have quirks.”
Hopkins looked at his watch. “Where’s Jimmy Lesdiu? Our materials genius.”
“Right here.”
An extremely tall man stood up from behind a tower of boxes. Special Agent James Lesdiu was a forensic materials analyst. He analyzed hair and fibers, and surfaces and chemicals. He would be coordinating with the F.B.I.’s forensic group in Washington by videoconference during the operation.
“I don’t know if I can load this man on a helicopter—he’s too tall,” Oscar Wirtz said. Lesdiu was six feet eight inches tall.
“You’d better load me, Wirtzy, because Will can’t make this case without me,” Lesdiu replied.
“Here’s what I want, Jimmy,” Hopkins said to Lesdiu. “I want an infrared laser unit. A little weenie one, desktop size.”
“Got it already,” Lesdiu said. He pointed a long, skeletal finger at a gray military transport box.
“Mass-spec machine,” Hopkins went on. “For identifying materials.”
“Got that, too. It’s a little one. What else?”
“I want an X-ray diffraction machine. Small. Portable.”
“Got it. I’ve got everything you need.”
In a corner of the staging area, a half-dozen men and women, special agents, were sorting their biohazard space suits and body armor. The space suits were jet black, apparently for use in night operations. They were also making inventory of ten-millimeter handguns, pump-action .00 shotguns, and Heckler & Koch ten-millimeter MP5 assault rifles, along with ammunition, lights, and special breathing equipment. Oscar Wirtz called them up and introduced Austen to them. They were all with the F.B.I.’s Hostage Rescue Team, or H.R.T., which is stationed at Quantico. “They’re going to handle the operations side of this mission,” Wirtz said, “if we have an operation.”
They were known in the F.B.I. as ninjas.
“We take turns looking after Will,” said a ninja by the name of Carlos Pedernal.
“That’s because Will’s a scientist. He can’t look after himself,” Oscar Wirtz said.
“You know, we don’t need any ninjas,” Will said, stepping around the weapons and looking at them. “If I need you guys, I’ll call for you.”
“Get real, Will,” Wirtz said. “Look, you want to lean the operations squad forward. Lean ’em way forward. You want to bring them to the island now, Will. If there’s an action, it could develop fast.”
Wirtz turned to Austen. “The idea, in case Will hasn’t explained it to you, is that you scientists are the evidence gatherers. If a terrorist weapon goes off, you have to go into a hot zone to gather evidence fast. You may need to have ninjas around you to keep you out of harm’s way.”
Austen felt like saying that she could take care of herself, but she didn’t say anything.
Then Mark Littleberry entered Pod D, accompanied by two F.B.I. agents. They were carrying a total of five Halliburton suitcases. He’d picked up two Felix machines and three Boinks in Bethesda.
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 encrypted 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 biocontainment 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 air-handling 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.”
The Cobra Event Page 17
