The Cobra Event

by Richard Preston

Now to disarm the explosive. He could see the chip timer. It was a laboratory timer, not unlike an electronic kitchen timer. He touched the sticky end of the probe to the timer, and it stuck there. Good. He dragged the sticky probe toward him gently, and slowly the timer came along, pulling the blasting cap and the chunk of detonator with it.

  He got the chip timer in his hand. Ahh! He sighed. He turned it over and looked at the numbers.

  They were running. Currently they said: 00.00.02.

  “Yaaaaahhh!” he yelled, and he pulled the blasting cap out of the explosive and flung the cap away, down the tunnel.

  Whank!

  The cap had gone off somewhere down there.

  I wonder if it killed the rat, he thought.

  There was still a heap of viral glass lying by his face. But it was underground. It could be dealt with. There would be a biohazard cleanup. It would be a mess, but it might be manageable.

  Now I have to get my living body out of here.

  He had to rotate his body in the shaft. So he shifted his hips, jamming himself tighter in the shaft, twisting himself, and trying to crunch his body down. He got his head around enough to see into the angle more clearly. Then he got his head into the angle, into the tunnel full of hexagons of viral glass. He took a deep breath and let it out, his blowers still humming, still protecting him, he hoped—and got himself a little farther around the corner. By exhaling and pushing, he could slide along on his back.

  “Yes!”

  He propelled himself on his back out of the hole, and he stood up, his feet in viral glass. He checked his suit with the minilight. There didn’t seem to be any holes or tears, though he wasn’t sure. His Racal hood was still pressurized, and his filters were working, it seemed. He hoped he did not have any rips in the suit or cuts in his skin. I may be a walking dead man, he thought.

  There was a ladder. Cope had climbed down the ladder and left the bomb here. There was also a tunnel leading off horizontally. He had no idea where it led.

  Just then he heard gunfire—two shots. Faint. Coming down the tunnel. What was going on? It was a low tunnel. He hurried along it, hunched over, and came to a sheet of plywood across the tunnel. He pushed on it, and it popped and fell away into a large, dark, open space. “Anybody there?” he said. He shone his light around and caught a glimpse of columns, a figure moving. “Alice?” Suddenly a red light appeared on his chest. What was this?

  Then he heard Austen scream, “No!”

  There was a roar in his ears and something slammed into his chest, driving him backward, with a sensation the likes of which he had never felt before. It was a bullet in his heart, and that was when it came to him that he had been shot and was dying.

  AUSTEN HAD HEARD Hopkins say “Anybody there?” as she was lying in darkness. At the same moment she saw the gleam of his flashlight. He was waving it around, trying to determine where he was, and she saw Cope, fixed, bent, writhing slowly, taking aim at the light. The laser touched Hopkins.

  When Cope fired into Hopkins she heard a smacking oof! The minilight flew away and rolled across the floor, throwing its beam around crazily. Cope fired again, and again, and again, using the laser to aim.

  Shrieking, she got to her feet and raced across the space and fell on Cope, knocking him off balance. She tore at him. She had a glimpse of Cope’s eyes glittering in the light of the minilight. Then she had his gun, and she aimed it at his face, and she shoved the barrel into his mouth. A red laser light reflected out of his mouth, and she saw the blisters. Their faces were inches apart.

  There was a clunking sound, and the lights in the tunnel came on.

  She was lying across Cope with his gun jammed into his mouth.

  He trembled. An arm lashed out, while the other bent suddenly, and his neck arched and lashed around. Lesch-Nyhan writhing. In the light of the fluorescent lamps he looked shrunken, pathetic. “You killed him,” she whispered. She stood up slowly, keeping the Colt aimed near those eyes. The red spot trembled on his forehead. Her finger tightened.

  “Don’t…Alice.”

  She spun around. Hopkins was standing behind her, bent over, the wind knocked out of him. There were two bullet pocks in his armored vest. The other shots had missed him. He was holding what looked like a bunch of junk taped together.

  “…Arrest…,” he choked. The bullets had given him a good thump, knocking the wind out of him.

  She shook her head.

  “You…power,” Hopkins said, doubled over, looking at her.

  To Cope she said, “You’re under arrest.”

  Hopkins tried to straighten up, and coughed. “Need to…charge—”

  “You are charged with murder,” she said.

  Cope spoke. “F.B.I. bitch.”

  “Try again, sir. I’m a public health doctor.”

  His eyes widened. His lips drew off his teeth, and his face rippled. Something she said may have triggered the seizure.

  THERE WAS a growing chatter of voices on their radio headsets, and then they heard sounds in the air, culminating with a rush of people running up the Second Avenue tunnel. It was Oscar Wirtz with the operational group.

  Simultaneously, a SWAT team of New York City police officers wearing respirators was moving down through the street hatch by the Manhattan Bridge, descending the stairs and ladders. You could hear the rattle of feet on steel gratings and the clink of their weapons.

  As the operations groups converged on the scene they saw what had happened. The suspect was down in some kind of seizure. Hopkins told them that the tunnel might be biologically hot, because a grenade had gone off, and there was viral glass in the area.

  “Where’s Mark?” Hopkins asked.

  “He was behind us, Will,” Wirtz said.

  Just then they heard Littleberry. He was coming up the Second Avenue tunnel toward them. His voice sounded crackly on the radio, hard to understand. Then they heard him shout, “Down! Get down! He left one back—” A flash ended his words.

  They saw the blast wave come up the tunnel toward them. The wave came from the bomb that Cope had left sitting beside a column near the hatchway. No one had noticed it except Littleberry. He had been trying to warn them when it detonated.

  The blast wave took the form of a meniscus, a thin, curved, bubble of powdered viral glass. It moved down the tunnel and passed over them and was gone. For an instant it showed them the face of Cobra virus in fully weaponized form. It filled the tunnel with a gray haze that was alive and aching to find blood.

  The echo of the blast died down, leaving the tunnel in complete silence.

  Cope turned his head and seemed to gaze down the tunnel.

  Hopkins went down on his knees.

  Austen knelt beside him. She placed her hand on his back. She saw the tears falling inside his faceplate.

  “OUT! EVERYONE, OUT!” Oscar Wirtz was screaming. “WE’VE GONE HOT!”

  THEY MADE THEIR EXIT through the steel hatch at the foot of the Manhattan Bridge, into a maelstrom of emergency lights near Chatham Square, in Chinatown. Moments earlier, the deep booming thud of the explosion, which had occurred some fifty feet underground, had alerted emergency crews. The streets were jammed with emergency vehicles. There were people wearing Tyvek suits and talking on cell phones—managers from the mayor’s Emergency Management Office. Television crews were not being allowed to get anywhere near the action. The area was awash in halogen lights, the air full of the chatter of hand-held radios and the constant deafening flutter of a half-dozen helicopters hovering overhead. Frank Masaccio had called every emergency unit he could think of, and he was still yelling into his headset at the Command Center, calling all units to converge on the hatchway at the Manhattan Bridge.

  The Cobra Event had not been lost on New York City residents. Early-morning groups of onlookers were being pushed back by police officers. In the east over Brooklyn, a red thread of a cloud suggested that dawn was coming. There was no traffic on the Manhattan Bridge—the bridge had been blocked off—and mo
st of the subway lines in lower Manhattan were out of service.

  At the Command Center in the Federal Building, and at SIOC in Washington, a feeling was spreading that the situation was still dicey but might possibly be manageable. Fragmentary reports were coming in. A bomb had gone off, but the explosion had occurred underground in an abandoned tunnel, and an attempt would be made to keep the dust from the bomb contained in the tunnel. The reports were broken, confused, sometimes contradictory, coming from different places, but some things were beginning to emerge. Frank Masaccio listened to his headset. He said: “He’s what? The subject is under arrest? Are you sure? Are you absolutely sure? Who made the arrest?” He suddenly leaped to his feet. “Austen made the arrest? Are you kidding me?”

  HOPKINS AND AUSTEN stumbled across tangles of fire hoses. She kept one arm around his waist, almost holding him up. The two of them were still dressed in their space suits, but no one paid much attention to them, because many people were wearing protective clothing, and no one knew who was who. Fire Department personnel swarmed around, putting on green chemical-hazard suits, shouting amid a crackle of radios. Crews from the New York City Fire Department began placing sheets of plastic tarpaulin over a half-dozen air vents that led to the underground structures of the Second Avenue tunnel complex. It was presumed that virus particles would even now be flowing out of these vents. As soon as the tarps were laid down, the emergency crews began piling mats of fiberglass batting on top of them, and then fire trucks began pumping water mixed with bleach onto the batting, soaking the fiberglass with liquids that would kill a virus. Then the Fire Department’s HEPA trucks moved in. They would eventually begin pumping air out of the Second Avenue tunnel, passing it through large, truck-sized filters.

  Hopkins and Austen made their way over to a Fire Department truck that was bathed in lights. It was the New York City human-decontamination truck.

  “Go ahead, Will,” Austen said.

  He climbed inside the truck and closed the door. He stood in a decon chamber. A chemical spray went on. The chemicals bathed the outside of his suit. Finally the sprays stopped. Then he removed all of his gear, piling the helmet and filters and suit and boots and everything else into a biohazard disposal bag, until he was standing naked in the decon chamber. A water spray went on. It was a hot shower. He washed his body twice, the first time with a bleach solution, the second time with water and disinfecting soap. Whether any particles had been trapped in his lungs during the operation was something that would not be known for several days. He went through a door into the decon truck’s change room. There, Fire Department people gave him a blue sweat suit to wear. It was marked with the letters N.Y.F.D.

  Austen entered the truck and followed the same procedure.

  Cope had been brought up by some of the Reachdeep ninjas. He was tied to a chair they had found in one of the empty rooms. They had lashed him to it with nylon rope, to control the biting and the thrashing. He was lifted up through the hatchway by the Manhattan Bridge. The chair was placed on the ground, the ropes were cut away, and he was lifted onto a gurney under bright lights. He seemed to be conscious but did not speak.

  The gurney was loaded into an ambulance that screamed to the Wall Street Heliport, where a medevac helicopter lofted him to Governors Island. On the island, he made no statement to federal investigators. He died in the Medical Management Unit four hours later.

  IN THE CLASSIFIED after-action report, the experts generally agreed that New York City had been very lucky. Fire trucks poured chemicals and water into the tunnels all day, and the air vents were piled with batting soaked with chemicals. Meanwhile, the HEPA filter trucks—they were essentially vacuum cleaners on wheels—drew air out of the tunnel system and passed it through filters. The filters accumulated stray particles of Cobra, and the air was discharged into the city.

  In the end, fourteen citizens contracted Cobra virus infections at scattered locations around New York, for, inevitably, some particles escaped the chemicals and filters, and ultimately found a human lung. The fourteen cases were scattered across the Lower East Side and into Williamsburg in Brooklyn, and the plume of cases went as far out into Queens as Forest Hills. It created an epidemiological nightmare for the Centers for Disease Control. Almost all of the resources of that agency were used in tracing and managing the fourteen cases of Cobra that occurred following the blast in the tunnel. All active cases of Cobra were flown to Governors Island for treatment in the Army unit.

  Five emergency workers who had been at the scene also came down with Cobra virus infection. They were mainly Fire Department people who had worked near the tunnel vents, who had laid down the tarps and fiberglass material, but who, in the chaos, had not had time to put on breathing masks. The number of deaths among emergency workers—just five—was considered miraculous. Many experts had been expecting the city’s emergency personnel to be decimated during the Cobra Event.

  Captain Dorothy Each, who had been bitten by Hector Ramirez, died on Governors Island. Of a total of nineteen cases of Cobra in New York resulting from the bomb blast, eighteen victims died. One eight-year-old girl survived but ended up with chronic Lesch-Nyhan disease and permanent brain damage. All of the patients were given anticonvulsants and the experimental anti-smallpox drug cidofovir, but the treatments had no effect. The overall toll of infections in the Cobra Event stood at thirty-two cases, including the index case of Harmonica Man, Kate Moran, and many others, and also counting Thomas Cope. Ben Kly did not count as a Cobra case, because he had not been infected, although he died as a result of the Cobra infection of Glenn Dudley. Mark Littleberry counted simply as a man lost in action.

  The C.D.C. task force and the city department of health monitored people who had come into contact with active cases of Cobra. The United States Public Health Service invoked its long-standing legal powers to place people into quarantine. Those quarantined were held in the Coast Guard dormitories on Governors Island. In the nineteenth century, when there had been no cures for most infectious diseases, the only way to prevent the spread of a disease was quarantine. Quarantine is an old practice, and it can sometimes work.

  Quarantine

  AUSTEN AND HOPKINS were put in a quarantine unit at New York University Medical Center on the East Side of Manhattan, where they remained in Level 3 biocontainment, under the observation of doctors, for a period of four days. They had done their work and they needed some peace. Frank Masaccio would not allow them to be held on the island. He felt that they had been through enough, and should not have to be kept near people dying of Cobra.

  Hopkins called Annie Littleberry in Boston, the widow of Mark Littleberry. He explained to her that Mark had served his country to the end. He told her that in recent weeks Mark had made important contributions to the safety of people everywhere in the world. He had helped develop evidence for the existence of a continuing biological-weapons program in Iraq, a program that had apparently moved into the genetic engineering of viruses, and Mark had helped break open a case of a corporation involved in criminal activity in the United States. “We think that some big prosecutions are going to occur as a result of Mark’s work. One or more multinational biotechnology companies based in Switzerland and Russia are likely to end up with their top executives under warrant for arrest in the United States,” he said. “It’s going to be a nightmare for the diplomats. Mark would be proud, I know he would. It was something Mark always enjoyed doing—creating extra work for the diplomats, Mrs. Littleberry.”

  “I’M GOING NUTS IN HERE,” Hopkins said to Austen on the afternoon of the fourth day.

  They were dressed in bathrobes and hospital pajamas, and they had been pacing in opposite directions across a small recreational room on the twentieth floor of the hospital, which looked out across the East River, where barges churned through the gray tides and traffic murmured along on the East River Drive.

  They felt fine. They were the equivalent of the lucky monkeys in the Johnston Atoll tests, the survivors, who migh
t have received one or two particles in the lungs but had remained healthy. It seemed hard to believe that both of them had had no exposure to the Cobra virus, especially Austen. Probably they had received an exposure. On the other hand, perhaps the protective suits had worked.

  They had spent the past four days talking on the telephone, it seemed, to every senior official in the United States government. For the moment the news media knew little of the details of the operation: in press conferences, Frank Masaccio’s people had been describing Austen and Hopkins merely as nameless “federal agents” who had “arrested the suspect Thomas Cope,” and no mention was made of Reachdeep. As far as the public knew, the Cobra Event had been one more brutal act of terrorism, resulting in somewhat more than a dozen fatalities. It had been nowhere near as bad as the bombing of the Murrah federal building in Oklahoma City. Few people understood just how grave the situation had been. Austen and Hopkins were grateful for Masaccio’s efforts to protect their privacy.

  In the relatively brief meetings they had had with each other, neither of them had mentioned a subject that had become increasingly obvious to both of them during the final days of the investigation and especially at the end.

  The telephone rang. Hopkins picked it up. “Supervisory Special Agent Hopkins speaking.”

  He had a stiff way of answering telephones. It annoyed her, and she wondered if it was part of his Bureau training.

  “Yes, Frank, she’s here in the room. I don’t think she wants to speak with you right now—”

  She said: “For the third time, tell him no.”

  “But he’s serious. He says you could rise fast.”

  “I’m going back to work for Walter Mellis. That’s it.”

  “It’s final, Frank. She’s going to stay at the C.D.C. Okay, Frank. Okay, yeah, I know, I’m disappointed, too…”

  He hung up. He threw himself into a chair. “Agh!” he said, apropos of nothing. He was wearing foam slippers, like the kind you get on airplanes, and he tapped them on the floor. Then he stood up, stretched his arms, cracked his knuckles, and walked over to the window. He sighed. “I knew damned well from the moment they put us in here that we weren’t going to get sick. It’s a law of the universe. When they put you in quarantine, it guarantees your health.”