The Hot Zone

by Richard Preston

  Then he and Jason drove for half an hour in the direction of Washington and picked up Jaime at her gym. They decided to have supper at McDonald’s. The Jaax family, minus the mother, sat at a table, and while they ate, Jerry explained to the children why Mom was working late. He said, “Tomorrow morning, we’re going to be going down to a civilian place in space suits. There’s an important thing going on there. There are some monkeys that are sick. The situation has kind of an emergency feel to it. We’ll be gone real early, and we may not get back until real late. You kids will be on your own.” They didn’t react much to what he said.

  Jerry went on, “It’s possible that humans could get sick from the monkeys.”

  “Well, there’s not really any danger,” Jaime said, chewing her chicken nuggets.

  “Well, no, it’s not really dangerous,” he said. “It’s more exciting than dangerous. And anyway, it’s just what your mom and I are doing right now.”

  Jason said that he had seen something on television about it. It was on the news.

  “I think what your mom does is something pretty unusual,” Jerry said to his son. And he thought, I’ll never convince him of that.

  They returned home around nine-thirty, and Jerry had trouble making the kids go to bed. Perhaps they were afraid of what was happening but didn’t know how to express it; he wasn’t sure. More likely, they sensed an opportunity to have their own way when their mother wasn’t around. They said they wanted to wait up for her. He thought he would wait up for her, too. He made them put on their pajamas, and he brought them into bed with him, and they curled up on Nancy’s side of the water bed. There was a television in the room, and he watched the eleven-o’clock news. A newscaster was standing in front of the monkey house, and he was talking about people dying in Africa. By this time, the children had fallen asleep. He thought about his dead brother John for a while, and then he picked up a book to try to read.

  He was still awake when Nancy arrived home at one o’clock in the morning, looking fresh and clean, having taken a shower and shampooed her hair on her way out of Level 4.

  As she looked around the house to see what needed to be done, she saw that Jerry had not tended to the animals. She put out food for the cats and dogs, and changed their water. She checked on Herky, the parrot, to see how he was doing. He started making noise the moment he perceived that the cats were being fed. He wanted some attention, too.

  “Mom! Mom!” Herky hung upside down and laughed like a maniac, and cried, “Bad bird! Bad bird!” She took him out of his cage and stroked him on the head. He moved onto her shoulder, and she preened his feathers.

  Upstairs in the bedroom, she found the children asleep next to Jerry. She picked up Jaime and carried her into her own bedroom and tucked her into bed. Jerry picked up Jason and carried him to his bed—he was getting too big for Nancy to haul around.

  Nancy settled into bed with Jerry. She said to him, “I have a gut feeling they’re not going to be able to contain the virus in that one room.” She told him she was worried that it could be spreading into other rooms through the air. That virus was just so damned infective she didn’t see how it would stay in one room. Something that Gene Johnson had once said to her came into her mind: “We don’t really know what Ebola has done in the past, and we don’t know what it might do in the future.”

  Then Jerry broke the news to her about her father. Nancy was beginning to feel extremely guilty about not going home to be with him as he lay dying. She felt the tug of her last obligation to him. She wondered if she should bag this monkey thing and fly to Kansas. But she felt that it was her duty to go through with the operation. She decided to take a chance that her father would live awhile longer.

  PART THREE

  SMASHDOWN

  INSERTION

  DECEMBER 1, FRIDAY

  The alarm went off at four-thirty. Jerry Jaax got up, shaved, brushed his teeth, threw on clothes, and was out of there. The teams were going to wear civilian clothes. No one wanted to attract attention. Soldiers in uniforms and camouflage, putting on space suits … it could set off a panic.

  It was five o’clock by the time he arrived at the Institute. There was no sign of dawn in the sky. A crowd of people had already gathered by a loading dock on the side of the building, under floodlights. There had been a hard freeze during the night, and their breath steamed in the air. Gene Johnson, the Ajax of this biological war, paced back and forth across the loading dock among a pile of camouflaged military trunks—his stockpile of gear from Kitum Cave. The trunks contained field space suits, battery packs, rubber gloves, surgical scrub suits, syringes, needles, drugs, dissection tools, flashlights, one or two human surgery packs, blunt scissors, sample bags, plastic bottles, pickling preservatives, biohazard bags marked with red flowers, and hand-pumped garden sprayers for spraying bleach on space suits and objects that needed to be decontaminated. Holding a cup of coffee in his fist, Gene grinned at the soldiers and rumbled, “Don’t touch my trunks.”

  A white unmarked supply van showed up. Gene loaded his trunks into the van by himself and set off for Reston. He was the first wave.

  By now, copies of The Washington Post were hitting driveways all over the region. It contained a front-page story about the monkey house:

  Deadly Ebola Virus Found in Va.

  Laboratory Monkey

  One of the deadliest known human viruses has turned up for the first time in the United States, in a shipment of monkeys imported from the Philippines by a research laboratory in Reston.

  A task force of top-level state and federal experts on contagious diseases spent much of yesterday devising a detailed program to trace the path of the rare Ebola virus and who might have been exposed to it. That includes interviews with the four or five laboratory workers who cared for the animals, which have since been destroyed as a precaution, and any other people who were near the monkeys.

  Federal and state health officials played down the possibility that any people had contracted the virus, which has a 50 to 90 percent mortality rate and can be highly contagious to those coming into direct contact with its victims. There is no known vaccine.

  “There’s always a level of concern, but I don’t think anybody’s panicked,” said Col. C. J. Peters, a physician and expert on the virus.

  C. J. knew that if people learned what this virus could do, there would be traffic jams heading out of Reston, with mothers screaming at television cameras, “Where are my children?” When he talked to the Washington Post reporters, he was careful not to discuss the more dramatic aspects of the operation. (“I thought it would not be a good idea to talk about space suits,” he explained to me much later.) He was careful not to use scary military terms such as virus amplification, lethal chain of transmission, crash and bleed, or major pucker factor. A military biohazard operation was about to go down in a suburb of Washington, and he sure as hell didn’t want the Post to find out about it.

  Half of this biocontainment operation was going to be news containment. C. J. Peters’s comments to The Washington Post were designed to create an impression that the situation was under control, safe, and not all that interesting. C. J. was understating the gravity of the situation. But he could be very smooth when he wanted, and he used his friendliest voice with the reporters, assuring them over the telephone that there really was no problem, just kind of a routine technical situation.Somehow the reporters concluded that the sick monkeys had been “destroyed as a precaution” when in fact the nightmare, and the reason for troops, was that the animals hadn’t been destroyed.

  As to whether the operation was safe, the only way to know was to try it. Peters felt that the larger danger could come from sitting back and watching the virus burn through the monkeys. There were five hundred monkeys inside that building. That was about three tons of monkey meat—a biological nuclear reactor having a core meltdown. As the core of monkeys burned, the agent would amplify itself tremendously.

  C. J. arrived at the loading dock of
the Institute at five o’clock in the morning. He would accompany the group down to the monkey house to see Jerry’s team inserted, and then he would drive back to the Institute to deal with the news media and government agencies.

  At six-thirty, he gave an order to move out, and the column of vehicles left Fort Detrick’s main gate and headed south, toward the Potomac River. It consisted of a line of ordinary automobiles—the officers’ family cars, with the officers inside wearing civilian clothes, looking like commuters. The line of cars followed behind two unmarked military vehicles. One was a supply van and the other was a snow-white ambulance. It was an unmarked Level 4 biocontainment ambulance. Inside it there were an Army medical-evacuation team and a biocontainment pod known as a bubble stretcher. This was a combat medical stretcher enclosed by a biocontainment bubble made of clear plastic. If someone was bitten by a monkey, he would go into the bubble, and from there he would be transferred to the Slammer. The supply van was a white unmarked refrigerator truck. This was to hold dead monkeys and tubes of blood.

  There was not a uniform in the group, although a few members of the ambulance team wore camouflage fatigues. The caravan crossed the Potomac River at Point of Rocks and hit Leesburg Pike just as rush hour began. The traffic became bumper to bumper, and the officers began to get frustrated. It took them two hours to reach the monkey house, contending the whole way with ill-tempered commuters. Finally the column turned into the office park, which by that time was filling up with workers. The supply van and the ambulance were driven along the side of the monkey house, up onto a lawn, and were parked behind the building, to get them out of sight. The back of the building presented a brick face, some narrow windows, and a glass door. The door was the insertion point. They parked the supply van up close to the door.

  At the edge of the lawn, behind the building, there was a line of underbrush and trees sloping down a hillside. Beyond that, there was a playground next to a day-care center. They could hear shouts of children in the air, and when they looked through the underbrush, they could see bundled-up four-year-olds swinging on swings and racing around a playhouse. The operation would be carried out near children.

  Jerry Jaax studied a map of the building. He and Gene Johnson had decided to have all the team members put on their space suits inside the building rather than out on the lawn, so that if any television crews arrived there would be nothing to film. The men went through the insertion door and found themselves in an empty storage room. It was the staging room. They could hear faint cries of monkeys beyond a cinder-block wall. There was no sign of any human being in the monkey house.

  Jerry Jaax was going to be the first man in, the point man. He had decided to take with him one of his officers, Captain Mark Haines, a former Green Beret. He was a short, intense man with a whipcord body who had been through the Green Berets’ scuba-diving school. He had jumped out of airplanes at night into the open sea, wearing scuba gear. (“I’ll tell you one thing,” Haines once said to me. “I don’t do scuba diving for fun as a civilian. The majority of my diving has been in the Middle East.”) Captain Haines was not a man who would get claustrophobia and go into a panic in a space suit. Furthermore, Captain Haines was a veterinarian. He understood monkeys.

  Jaax and Haines climbed into the supply van and pulled a plastic sheet across the van’s back door for privacy, and stripped naked, shivering in the cold. They put on surgical scrub suits and then walked across the lawn, opened the glass door, and went into the storage room, the staging area, where an Army support team—the ambulance team, led by a captain named Elizabeth Hill—helped them into their space suits. Jerry knew nothing about field biological suits, and neither did Captain Haines.

  The suits were orange Racal suits, designed for field use with airborne biological agents, and they were the same type of suit that had been used at Kitum Cave—in fact, some of them had come back from Africa in Gene Johnson’s trunks. The suit has a clear, soft plastic bubble for a helmet. The suit is pressurized. Air pressure is supplied by an electric motor that sucks air from the outside and passes it through virus filters and then injects it into the suit. This keeps the suit under, positive pressure, so that any airborne virus particles will have a hard time flowing into it. A Racal suit performs the same job as a heavy-duty Chemturion space suit. It protects the entire body from a hot agent, surrounding the body with superfiltered air. Army people generally don’t refer to Racals as space suits. They call them Racals or field biological suits; but they are, in fact, biological space suits.

  Jaax and Haines put on rubber gloves, and the support team taped the gloves to the sleeves of the suits while they held their arms out straight. On their feet, they wore sneakers, and over the sneakers they pulled bright yellow rubber boots. The support team taped the boots to the legs of the suits to make an airtight seal above the ankle.

  Jerry was terribly keyed up. In the past he had lectured Nancy on the dangers of working with Ebola in a space suit, and now he was leading a team into an Ebola hell. At the moment, he didn’t care what happened to himself, personally. He was expendable, and he knew it. Perhaps he could forget about John for a while in there. He switched on his electric blower, and his suit puffed up around him. It didn’t feel too bad, but it made him sweat profusely. The door was straight ahead. He held the map of the monkey house in his hand and nodded to Captain Haines. Haines was ready. Jerry opened the door, and they stepped inside. The sound of the monkeys became louder. They were standing in a windowless, lightless, cinder-block corridor that had doors at either end: this was the makeshift air lock, the gray zone. The rule inside the air lock was that the two doors, the far door and the near door, could never be open at the same time. This was to prevent a backflow of contaminated air from coming into the staging room. The door closed behind them, and the corridor went dark. It went pitch-dark. Aw, son of a bitch. We forgot to bring flashlights. Too late now. They proceeded forward, feeling their way down the walls to the door at the far end.

  Nancy Jaax woke up her children at seven-thirty. She had to shake Jason, as always, to get him out of bed. It didn’t work, so she turned one of the dogs loose on him. He hit the bed flying and climbed all over Jason.

  She put on sweatpants and a sweat shirt and went downstairs to the kitchen and flipped on the radio and tuned it to a rock-and-roll station and popped a Diet Coke. The music fired up the parrot. Herky began to scream along with John Cougar Mellencamp. Parrots really respond to electric guitar, she thought.

  The children sat at the kitchen table, eating instant oatmeal. She told them that she would be working late, so they would be on their own at suppertime. She looked in the freezer and found a stew. It would do fine for the kids. They could defrost it in the microwave. She watched from the kitchen window as they walked down the driveway to the bottom of the hill to wait for the school bus.… “This work is not for a married female. You are either going to neglect your work or neglect your family” were the words of a superior officer long ago.

  She cut a bagel for herself, and brought along an apple, and ate them in the car on the way to Reston. By the time she arrived at the monkey house, Jerry had already suited up and gone inside.

  The staging room was crowded, warm, loud, confused. The experts on the use of space suits were giving advice to team members as they suited up. Nancy herself had never worn a Racal field suit, but the principles are the same as with a heavy-duty Chemturion. The main principle is that the interior of the space suit is a cocoon housing the normal world, which you bring with you into the hot area. If there were a break in the suit, the normal world would vanish, merging with the hot world, and you would be exposed. She spoke to the soldiers as they suited up. “Your suits are under pressure,” she said. “If you get a rip in your suit, you have to tape it shut right away or you’ll lose your pressure, and contaminated air could flow inside the suit.” She held up a roll of brown sticky tape. “Before I go in, I wrap extra tape around my ankle, like this.” She demonstrated how to do it: she wou
nd the roll around her ankle several times, the way you tape up a sprained ankle. “You can tear off a length of tape from your ankle and use it to patch a hole in your suit,” she said. “A hundred chancy things can happen to rip your suit.”

  She told them about Ebola in monkeys. “If these monkeys are infected with Ebola, then they are so full of virus that a bite from one of them would be a devastating exposure,” she said. “Animals that are clinically ill with Ebola shed a lot of virus. Monkeys move real quick. A bite would be a death warrant. Be exquisitely careful. Know where your hands and body are at all times. If you get blood on your suit, stop what you are doing and clean it off right away. Don’t let blood stay on your gloves. Rinse them off right away. With bloody gloves, you can’t see a hole in the glove. Also, one other thing. You really don’t want to drink a lot of coffee or liquids before going in. You will be in your space suit for a long time.”

  The batteries that pressurized the suit had a life span of six hours. People would have to leave the hot area and be deconned out before their batteries failed, or they would be in trouble.

  Jerry Jaax and Captain Mark Haines felt their way down the dark corridor, toward the door that led into the hot zone. They opened it and found themselves standing at the junction of two corridors, bathed in a cacophony of monkey cries. The air-handling equipment still wasn’t working, and the temperature in the place seemed as if it was above ninety degrees. Jerry’s head bubble fogged up. He pushed the bubble against his face to rub the moisture off the faceplate, and now he could see. The walls were gray cinder block, and the floor was painted concrete.

  Just then, he noticed a blur of motion on his left, and he turned and saw two Hazleton workers walking toward him. They weren’t supposed to be in here! The area was supposed to be sealed off, but they had come in by another route that led through a storeroom. They wore respirators, but nothing covered their eyes. When they saw the two men in space suits, they froze, speechless. Jerry could not see their mouths, but he could see their eyes, wide with astonishment. It was as if they had suddenly discovered that they were standing on the moon.