The Cobra Event

by Richard Preston

  Matthew Meselson at Harvard was still insisting that the Biological Weapons Convention was not being violated. For years he had dominated the discussion of biological weapons, and his opinions had been widely accepted. He had published articles in prestigious journals supporting the view that the anthrax deaths in Sverdlovsk in 1979 had been caused by the citizens eating bad meat, and he offered detailed scientific data from Russian colleagues to support him. It seems that the creators of the biological weapons treaty had become its guardians, with too great a stake in the treaty’s “success,” and this made them blind to the reality of bioweapons.

  Russian news reporters began to investigate the Sverdlovsk accident, and in 1991, the Moscow bureau chief of The Wall Street Journal, Peter Gumbel, made three trips to Sverdlovsk, and at some personal risk, while he was being followed and harassed by the K.G.B., traced about half of the civilian victims. He located their families, who had wrenching stories to tell; he found doctors who had treated the victims; he unearthed medical evidence; and he showed that most of the victims had lived or worked next to a military compound. Meselson had written that the anthrax came from a “meat-processing plant at Aramil.” Gumbel went to Aramil and found no meat plant, only a picturesque village. He later confronted the Harvard professor with the fact that the meat plant didn’t exist. He reported rather dryly that “Prof. Meselson seemed taken aback.”

  Meselson found himself in an awkward position, to say the least. The Wall Street Journal’s investigative reporting made it appear that the scientific data that he had published about Sverdlovsk was not only wrong but might have been fabricated by his Russian colleagues. Meselson had been both a victim and an unknowing disseminator of potentially misleading or even fraudulent scientific information. He got permission to go to Sverdlovsk, and with his wife Jeanne Guillemin and a team of collaborators, demonstrated that the outbreak really had been caused by an airborne release of anthrax from a military plant. He eventually published his findings in 1994 in the magazine Science. He did not, however, see fit to credit Peter Gumbel anywhere in his article.

  He and his co-authors concluded that only a pinch of anthrax had been released into the air, not a large amount—only a minuscule whiff of anthrax that might be almost invisible if held between thumb and forefinger. Some experts disputed the notion that such a tiny amount of anthrax could kill so many people in a plume across a city. It is more logical, and it now seems widely accepted, that the amount of anthrax was more than a pinch, but no one really knows. The accident involved production of anthrax for weapons, and the story is that filters had been left off grinding machines, but the world may never learn what really happened.

  The important thing is that Matthew Meselson had done an about-face. There is a world of difference between a pinch of weapon and a ton of bad meat. The other turnaround was more impressive, and it came from Russian president Boris Yeltsin, who confirmed to the world that modern Russia had inherited a biological-weapons program from the Soviet Union. This information was corroborated and expanded upon by two more senior defectors from the Russian bioweapons program. Top officials in the Russian program have just recently released a list of the hot agents that the modern Russian military forces would be most likely to use in the event of war. In order of choice, it goes: smallpox, Black Death, and anthrax. One or more of them may be genetically engineered. Biological-weapons treaty? What treaty?

  MASACCIO AND LITTLEBERRY sat in silence for a while, as Masaccio took in the context in which the Cobra Event was being played out.

  “The cancer has metastasized,” Littleberry said. “A lot of countries are into biological weapons now. Syria has a top-notch biological-weapons program. Syria is also believed to be a sponsor of terrorism—you would know more about that than I do, Frank. If Syria’s got a program, you can wonder if Israel has gone seriously into black biology, and Israeli scientists are some of the best in the world. Iran is heavily into biological weapons; they know all about molecular biology, and they are also testing cruise missiles. Think about that. Think about line streakouts of an engineered hot agent. China has massive biological-weapons facilities out in the Sinkiang desert, but it’s hard for us to know what they’re doing, because our satellites are useless for detecting bioweapons research. We can’t see inside the buildings, and even if we could, we wouldn’t know what was growing in the tanks. We do know that the Chinese are very good in the area of molecular biology. And that’s not all. There are plenty of other countries that are developing bioweapons. None of these countries is that good. There are some clever idiots out there, and sooner or later, there is going to be a very serious biological accident. Something that will make Sverdlovsk look like a kiddie ride at the park. And I think it will be global, not just one city.”

  Littleberry went on to say that he sometimes wondered if there had already been major accidents. “The Gulf War Syndrome,” he said, “is almost certainly caused by exposure to chemical weapons. But we have not yet totally ruled out the possibility that it’s some kind of biological weapon. Maybe early in the war the Iraqis did a line laydown of some experimental agent that we never noticed. One jet flying along—we might not have recognized it as a laydown. It might mean that the Gulf War Syndrome could be contagious and spreading. I doubt it, but you never know. Now think about the AIDS virus. There’s a lot of evidence that AIDS is a natural virus that comes from the Central African rain forests, but in fact the origin of AIDS is unknown. We cannot rule out the possibility that AIDS is a weapon. Is AIDS something that escaped from a weapons lab somewhere? I don’t think so, but I keep wondering.”

  “Is Cobra like that? Did it escape from somewhere, Mark?”

  “I doubt it. Someone stole it from a lab, is my guess.”

  “What about Russia? What’s going on there now?”

  “That’s real touchy stuff. Real ugly. Real sensitive.”

  “Of course,” Masaccio said.

  “There’s a building at the Koltsovo Institute of Molecular Biology that doesn’t have a name or a number,” Littleberry said. “We nicknamed it Corpus Zero, and we demanded to be allowed to go inside.”

  After a lot of hesitation, the Russian minders finally agreed to allow the inspectors to have a very brief tour of Corpus Zero. Since that time, no inspector from the United States or anyplace else has been allowed back inside Corpus Zero. What is known about Corpus Zero is based on one brief visit in 1991.

  Corpus Zero is situated in a corner of the Koltsovo campus. It is a large building, made of brick, with small windows, a building shaped like a cube.

  “We didn’t know what was going on inside Corpus Zero. The satellite imagery didn’t show anything,” Littleberry said.

  All of the Koltsovo staff had been sent home at the time of the inspection, so Corpus Zero was deserted when the inspection team entered with a group of minders. There wasn’t much to see. The building appeared to contain only office space and normal biology labs. On one of the laboratory benches, an inspector discovered a piece of paper pinned to the side of the bench with a tack. On it was written in English, “The eagle can’t catch a fly.” It seemed to be a way of thumbing one’s nose at the inspectors.

  The inspectors were touring some offices when Littleberry told everyone that he was going to the men’s room. As he was coming out of the men’s room, he found that the team and the minders had gone down a hallway and were starting to turn a corner. He saw his chance. He went in the other direction.

  Littleberry had gone AWOL.

  Telling the story to Frank Masaccio, Littleberry found himself drifting back in time. The memory was so clear, set off in distinct edges from the foggy haze that followed.

  The corridors in Corpus Zero were in the shape of a ring, he realized. All the corridors circled around the center of the building but did not give access to the center. There had to be something hidden in the center of Corpus Zero. The building must have a hot zone at its core.

  How to reach the core? On the inside wall of
a corridor, he found an unmarked steel door. It did not have a biohazard symbol on it. Littleberry opened it. He found himself in a corridor heading inward. The light was dim, and he turned on his flashlight.

  It was a blank corridor. He kept going, and opened a far door. He found himself in a vast interior space. It was the center of Corpus Zero, and it was pitch-dark. He switched on his flashlight. He was standing in a hangar-like room, several stories tall. In the center sat an enormous steel cube. He played his flashlight over the cube. Sticking out of the cube in various places were probes and tubes—they were obviously sensor devices, monitoring devices. They were there to monitor something happening inside the cube.

  He circled the cube, his footsteps echoing on the concrete floor, and he found a control room. There were computer consoles and all manner of gauges and controls. The room was deserted, the staff gone, the computers turned off.

  Littleberry turned and faced the cube. That was when he saw the stairs. The stairs led halfway up the side of the cube to a door. The door had a circular wheel handle, like a pressure door in a submarine. His flashlight played over the door, and then he saw the symbol. The door was marked with a red biohazard flower.

  The flower beckoned to Littleberry like his own fate. Fuck it, I’ll hold my breath, he said to himself. When he arrived at the landing at the top of the stairs, he spun the wheel. Locks pulled back. He took a breath, opened the door, and shone his flashlight in.

  He began to descend a stairway into the chamber. He knew what the chamber was. It was an explosion-test chamber. It was for testing small bioweapons in the air. The chamber is used to simulate a battlefield environment that has gone hot with a biological weapon.

  He heard a whimpering sound.

  “Hello?” he said.

  There was no answer.

  At the bottom of the chamber he found a passage leading off horizontally. He looked into it and pointed his flashlight around, and found the cages for the test animals. In one of the cages a female monkey sat crouched. He saw that she was a rhesus monkey. She reached toward him and drew her hand away.

  “Sorry, sweetheart,” he said. “I don’t have any food.”

  He played his flashlight over the animal. Like all female primates, she had breasts for suckling her young. He saw that her nipples were leaking blood. Her body was peppered with a rash of black blood blisters, half-hidden in her fur. The blisters looked like garnets in the light of his flashlight. He saw pools of blood at the bottom of the animal’s cage. She was hemorrhaging from the vagina. She was a simulated human female in a simulated biological war zone.

  She gave an alarm cry, faint. Her teeth were covered with blood.

  He had not held his breath. He turned and made his way back up the stairs. He had been inside an explosion test chamber at Koltsovo. This one was used for testing freeze-dried Ebola virus preparations that the Soviet Union was developing for missile warheads. The same chamber was also used for testing smallpox for warheads.

  Three days after he walked into the Ebola chamber in Corpus Zero, Littleberry developed a fever and collapsed. He was rushed to the Koltsovo biocontainment hospital. It was a hospital with dozens of beds, behind steel airlock doors, where nurses and doctors wore space suits.

  “I had airborne Ebola,” Littleberry said.

  “Why aren’t you dead?” Masaccio asked him.

  “With a biological weapon, there will always be survivors. Maybe the Russian treatments worked on me. We still don’t know.”

  Mark Littleberry remained in the Koltsovo hospital for four weeks. The medical staff were embarrassed and deeply apologetic, and did their best to take care of him.

  “What was it like, having that?” Masaccio asked.

  “All I remember is the way I cursed those folks in space suits every time they tried to turn me over in bed.”

  “One thing I’ve got to ask you, Dr. Littleberry. Do we have a secret biological weapons program?”

  Littleberry stared at him. “Jesus—you ought to know, Frank.”

  “Well, I don’t. The C.I.A. doesn’t always tell me things.”

  “There are two answers to your question,” Littleberry said. “One, I personally have no evidence that the U.S. military has a secret bioweapons program. The second answer is, we could have it anytime we wanted. Our biotechnology industry is second to none.”

  “So why don’t we do it?” Masaccio asked.

  “It would leak pretty quick. This is the world’s leakiest government, and public opinion would stop it. I like to think so, anyway.”

  THE STAFF AT the Koltsovo Institute of Molecular Biology numbered four thousand at the time of the first biological-weapons inspection, in 1991. By 1997, after economic troubles had hit Russia, the staff at Koltsovo had shrunk to about two thousand. Two thousand scientists and staff members from Koltsovo no longer work there. Some of them have gone missing, and the Russian government itself does not seem to know where to find them. Some of them have left Russia. Some of them are working for bioweapons programs in other countries, probably in Iran and Syria, possibly in Iraq, and perhaps in Asian countries. What strains they took with them, and where they are now, is a question that bedevils intelligence agencies.

  Biopreparat is broke and is trying to make money, any way it can, in order to keep its scientists and staff employed. The Russian government does not want its biological scientists leaving Russia, because they could carry their knowledge and military strains of viruses to a country that is an enemy of Russia. In Russia today, you can buy face cream made by Biopreparat. You can buy Biopreparat vodka. It is known as “Siberian Sunshine.” Biopreparat scientists have told Americans that it is made in former anthrax tanks, and they don’t seem to be joking. The vodka is probably safe to drink, for if Biopreparat knows anything, it knows how to sterilize a hot zone. Biopreparat is now a joint stock corporation. You can buy shares in Biopreparat on the Moscow stock exchange.

  The Russian Ministry of Defense was always in control of the country’s bioweapons-development work, and it also controlled the stockpiling and deployment of the weapons. The Ministry of Defense paid for the research done by Biopreparat, and used the fruits of the research in warheads. It is very difficult to find a knowledgeable expert who believes that Russia has given up developing offensive biological weapons. The program is probably smaller in scope, but it is believed to continue at secret locations, more deeply buried than before. Defense is still supremely important to Russia. As molecular biology becomes cheaper and easier to do, and as virus-production facilities become smaller and more portable, a biological-weapons program can continue to move forward almost unnoticed. The fly becomes smaller, faster, harder to catch.

  In recent visits to Koltsovo, American scientists have noticed that the lights are burning in the windows of Corpus Zero at three o’clock in the afternoon, when it begins to grow dark in Siberia during the fall and winter. The lights are out almost everywhere else in Koltsovo, but they remain lit on all floors of the building with no name. The Russian managers of the site have said to American visitors that “only three married couples work there, and they have had their smallpox vaccinations.” It is obvious that many more people than that are employed at Corpus Zero. What the staff is doing with the Ebola-smallpox aerosol test chamber inside Corpus Zero is unknown. Who is paying for the research being done in Corpus Zero and what type of research is being done there are unknown.

  “Biopreparat was a Humpty Dumpty,” Littleberry told Masaccio. “It fell and broke when the Soviet Union broke. Biopreparat has gone into pieces that have fallen in different directions. The Biopreparat that’s visible is the part that makes face cream and vodka. Another chunk was pulled into the Russian military. There may be other invisible pieces of Biopreparat floating around. Dangerous fragments. Maybe Biopreparat has an Evil Child. Maybe the Evil Child had no connection to Russia anymore.”

  “So you think an Evil Child has put together the Cobra virus?” Masaccio said, incredulously. “You think i
t’s the Russians?”

  Littleberry smiled. “Not exactly. This Cobra virus is so beautiful and so new that it has to be American engineering, Frank. Has to be. Looking at that virus is like looking at a starship. But the smallpox in it—that’s ancient and old and smells like Russia. Will Hopkins keeps talking about reaching through Cobra to find its maker. Here’s what I think. I think Cobra has two makers. One is American and one is Russian. They’ve gotten together somehow, and there’s money involved. There has to be. I think there’s a company in this. Cobra does comes from an Evil Child. And I think the Evil Child is an American company that is operating somewhere near New York City.”

  Part Six

  THE OPERATION

  Boy

  THURSDAY, APRIL 30

  ALICE AUSTEN WAS with Colonel Ernesto Aguilar and two Army nurses on board an Army medevac helicopter that had just lifted off from the Thirty-fourth Street Heliport. It was carrying a five-year-old boy named Hector Ramirez, who lived on Avenue B. Hector was conscious, lying buckled on a gurney and covered with blankets. His lips, behind a clear oxygen mask, were bloody and torn. He had been in grand mal seizure in the emergency room of Bellevue Hospital, but the seizures had abated. The boy stared at the ceiling of the chopper, and his brown eyes had a tawny gold center.