The Anthrax Protocol

by James Thompson

  “Bingo,” Blackie said, rocking back in his swivel chair. A formality lay before him, getting an agent for USAMRIID code-named Paco to the quarantine perimeter set up by the Mexican Army around Tlateloco so Janus could hand over the all-important sample.

  Within hours it would be at Fort Detrick under microscopes. . . if nothing went wrong.

  He picked up a phone and auto-dialed Paco, glancing at the clock. He didn’t care if Paco did not wish to be awakened this early. Paco had to be on the next flight to Mexico City, then to Tlateloco, to arrive by three o’clock.

  Arturo Vela, code-named Paco, answered with a sleepy voice, “Hello?”

  “This is Blackie. Get your Mexican ass out of bed and on the next plane to Mexico City. Use the federale credentials and uniform we gave you last year. You’ll be in and out before anybody is the wiser.

  “You’re picking up a container from Janus at a quarantine command post outside a place called Tlateloco, a couple of hundred miles south of Mexico City.”

  Paco yawned and asked, “And how am I to get from Mexico City to this village in the jungle?”

  “I don’t give a shit how you get there . . . hell, rent a helicopter if you have to. Just get it back here as soon as possible.”

  Blackie hesitated, and then he said, “Oh, and Janus says to watch this motherfucker. It’s really hot. Thirty dead in less than a week. CDC Wildfire is there, under Mason Williams. He and the other bug-chasers concur. They are calling it a mutant respiratory anthrax. Be real fuckin’ careful how you handle it.”

  “Do you know what time it is, Colonel? I don’t know if I can get to the airport in time to catch a flight to Mexico City that will get me there in time to do all this.”

  “I know what time I can have your court-martial scheduled for if you aren’t on the next plane to Mexico.”

  Paco sighed and said wearily. “Yes, Colonel, I understand.”

  “I hope you do, Paco, ’cause a bullet to the brain is a lot easier than a court-martial if you fail me!”

  After he hung up on Paco, Blackie sat thinking for a minute. Paco wasn’t the sharpest tack in the box, he thought. Perhaps he’d better begin to arrange some insurance in case the stupid Mexican failed in his mission.

  Blackie took out a key and opened the safe built into his desk. He took out a black book and opened it. There was a list of names of dishonorably discharged Navy SEALs and Army Rangers who he occasionally hired to do acquisitions from out of the country.

  They were the meanest sons of bitches he’d ever worked with and had never failed him in all the years he’d been doing this dirty work.

  He began to dial his encrypted phone. Might as well give them a heads-up in case he needed them later.

  As he dialed, he made a mental note to have Lieutenant Collins get the BL4 lab up and running and ready for the specimens Janus was sending. He sure as hell didn’t want to take a chance on letting a bug this hot escape their laboratory facilities into the Maryland countryside.

  Chapter 14

  Tlateloco

  Dawn broke suddenly in the tropical jungle. One minute the sky was pitch black, the next a brilliant orange sun was burning morning mist away, raising temperatures. Mason came instantly awake in the dorm, a room at the end of the Cytotec BL4 in which the team members slept on small cots lined up adjacent to one another.

  He rubbed his eyes, which were crusty and bloodshot after four hours of sleep. He’d made Shirley and Jakes go to bed at two a.m., fearing fatigue would cause an accident with these virulent samples and perhaps inadvertent infection of one of the team with a proven deadly pathogen.

  He rolled on his cot, noting that Jakes was still snoring softly and everyone else in the dorm was also still asleep. He arose quietly, making as little noise as possible. His people had worked for almost twenty-four straight hours since their arrival in Mexico and he felt they deserved their rest.

  After morning coffee jolted his system awake, he suited up in his Racal and entered the lab. The lab was the one place in the Cytotec where absolute isolation procedures were practiced.

  Prior to retiring the night before, Shirley had started cultures of the hot-bug in both blood agar and nutrient mediums, as well as chocolate agar and other more exotic mixtures. Several slides were set up for fluorescent antibody staining and DNA probes and polymerase chain reaction tests and even the much more complicated ELISA test.

  The specimens had been “cooking” for four hours and should be ready in about five hours. Meanwhile, Mason intended to try specific toxin and antigen tests and a monoclonal antibody experiment to see if the bacteria had a capsule.

  Before collapsing into his cot the previous night, Mason pulled down a reference book on microbiology and refreshed his memory about how the anthrax bacillus was supposed to react to these tests. Today, he would determine if the organism in tissues from the archaeology students was really anthrax or merely a closely related imposter.

  He had been working for three hours mixing reagents, staining slides, inoculating tissues into growth mediums, and putting drops of heavily contaminated serum in a flame spectrometer to try to identify specific chemicals in the bacteria when a loud knock on the glass of the lab door caught his attention.

  Jakes and Shirley pointed to the Racals in the adjacent room and raised their eyebrows in question. Mason stepped to a wall intercom and thumbed its transmit button. “No, I’m doing okay for now. Why don’t you guys have your breakfast, then suit up the others and Dr. Sullivan and form a search party. There’s one student still unaccounted for and I’d like to find him so we can send Lauren back to the States; also I want you to keep an eye out for the Indio boy Lauren and I saw yesterday. I still feel he might be the key to this entire mystery.”

  He started to turn away and then had another thought. “And could you take a look at Dr. Matos and see how he’s doing this morning? I checked on him briefly when I got up but he was sleeping and I didn’t want to wake him. He looked pretty ragged earlier and his temp was still elevated.”

  The two doctors nodded and moved off, Shirley rubbing her eyes while yawning. Mason watched them leave, worrying he was pushing everyone too hard, but he knew he had no choice. The first twenty-four to forty-eight hours of a Wildfire intervention were critical to the success of a mission. The disease had to be identified and local authorities, both medical and civil, needed to be apprised of whatever quarantine and medical precautions should be implemented. So very much to do, and so little time, he thought.

  Leaning over the counter, Mason peered down at the culture plates, lined up in order of importance. Several petri dishes were growing small grayish-white bacterial colonies. On the blood agar, it was too soon to tell if colonies were nonhemolytic as anthrax was.

  He broke open a box of commercial test strips and laid them on the counter. As soon as the cultures had grown enough, he would do sequential biochemical tests on the bacteria, as well as searches for presence or absence of a capsule, lack of motility, catalase positivity, lysis by gamma bacteriophage, penicillin susceptibility, and aerobic endospore production.

  He rotated his head, trying to stretch tight, cramped neck muscles inside his hood, thinking a massage would do wonders for his aching back. Unbidden, an image of Lauren intruded, breaking his concentration. There was no way he could keep his focus while thinking of a massage and of Lauren at the same time. He glanced around the lab.

  Everything was in place waiting for the damned bacteria to grow enough in culture mediums to do required biochemical and genetic testing to determine what species they were dealing with. He figured he might as well break for coffee and breakfast while he waited. There was nothing else for him to do here until cultures were ready. And he could check on Lauren and see if she had been able to get some sleep in the crowded dorm. He noticed she’d looked exhausted by the time they were able to crawl into their cots last night.

  He stepped into the shower room and washed his Racal with disinfecting solutions, hung it up, and the
n took his body shower, wrinkling his nose at the strong smell of chlorine in the water. Finally, he changed into his scrubs and went into the dining room. His staff and Lauren were finishing their morning meal when he arrived.

  Joel Schumacher looked up from his powdered eggs and toast. “Hey Mason, how’re you doin’ this morning?”

  “Good morning, Joel. Okay, I guess, other than feeling about ten years older than yesterday. How about you?”

  “I’m cool. I got the Comsat link hooked up and we’re tied into the mainframe at CDC. We’re now officially on-line to Big Mamma.”

  “Good. How about downloading everything the computer has on anthrax, especially technical specifics for identification and differentiation of all known subspecies and other bacilli that look like anthrax? I’ve checked the reference books we have here, but the computer will be more up-to-date and may give us some hints on other tests we can run.”

  “Sure, boss. No problemo.”

  Suzanne Elliot wiped orange juice off her upper lip and said, “Joel, while you’re doing that could you ask Mamma to give us all she has on incubation periods, infectivity, and modes of transmission of anthrax, as well as a printout of all previous outbreaks, especially ones that occurred in more modern times? I’d like to start a feasibility study of vector tracking and indexing of cases assuming a worst-case scenario if this bug happens to break our quarantine. Pretty soon I’ll have to issue a CDC BOL bulletin to doctors in Mexico City listing symptoms of respiratory anthrax.”

  “You ought to know the symptoms of anthrax by heart, Suzanne. Didn’t you work with that bug when you were at Fort Detrick, developing all those germ warfare killers?” Jakes asked with his typical sarcasm.

  Suzanne fixed Jakes with a flat stare. “No, as a matter of fact we didn’t. It didn’t fit the protocol since it wasn’t transmissible from person to person and there was no effective vaccine available to prevent infection of our own troops.”

  Lauren nodded good morning to Mason, and then she asked Suzanne, “What’s a BOL bulletin?”

  Suzanne glared at Jakes for a moment more and then she turned and smiled at Lauren, “Sorry about the jargon, Lauren, it’s just verbal shorthand we use among ourselves. BOL means ‘Be on the Lookout’ for. It’s a warning we send to local health departments and hospitals in areas where we fear an outbreak of a certain illness, especially a rare one like anthrax. The symptoms are rather general, a flu-like illness that rapidly develops into a severe bronchitis or pneumonia, followed as you know by bleeding problems. If this bug does escape the jungle and get into the city, we want doctors there to be able to recognize it and notify us of any new cases as early as possible so I can assign an epidemiology team from CDC to start to track them down and isolate any of their contacts. It’s the first step in stopping the spread of any infectious disease.”

  “I see,” Lauren replied sleepily.

  Mason poured himself a cup of coffee and heated an MRE containing eggs in the microwave. “Lauren, you’re looking rested this morning. I hope Sam’s snoring didn’t keep you awake last night.”

  Lauren started a smile, which degenerated into a yawn. “A bomb could’ve gone off in the room last night and I wouldn’t have heard it. I can’t remember ever being so tired in my life. I don’t know how you people do it.”

  Lionel Johnson chuckled and said in his deep voice, “Don’t think this is typical for us either, Lauren. Being a CDC investigator is kinda like being an obstetrician, ninety-five percent boredom and five percent terror.”

  When Lauren laughed, Mason said, “Lionel’s right. Most of our work consists of reading health department reports and keeping statistics on routine disease outbreaks like flu and meningitis and AIDS. Only occasionally do we have a real Wildfire emergency and have to do intensive fieldwork, like now.”

  “That reminds me, why do you call your group the Wildfire Team?” she asked.

  Mason turned away as Shirley spoke up, “Mason’s an inveterate reader, Lauren, and his taste runs to medical thrillers. His secretary started using the term Wildfire Team from Michael Crichton’s book The Andromeda Strain, and it stuck. Our official title is CDC Special Pathogens Group, but that’s a little pompous for us, so we use the Wildfire designation among ourselves.”

  Jakes poured himself a glass of tomato juice. “And it’s a lot of foolishness if you ask me,” he muttered.

  Shirley couldn’t resist an opening for a shot at Dr. Jakes. “I don’t recall anyone asking you, Sam,” she said, winking at Lauren.

  “Still, naming ourselves after a fictional potboiler, it’s undignified,” Sam replied.

  “No,” Shirley said, giving Lauren another wink, “undignified is you wearing scrubs that droop in the rear showing your butt-crack every time you bend over like some redneck plumber.”

  “What?” Jakes yelped, looking back over his shoulder at his rear end.

  “Just kidding,” Shirley said sweetly, earning a scowl from Jakes.

  “Now that you’ve heard from our resident experts on dignity,” Mason said, “would you mind accompanying my team on a search for the last missing student? We need to get the list of casualties finalized as soon as we can, so you can get back home.”

  Lauren arched an eyebrow and her lip curled in a sly smile. “Trying to get rid of me? Is my company that bad, Dr. Williams?”

  A few of the others grinned when Mason seemed embarrassed. “No, certainly not. It’s just that . . . um . . . I don’t want you to stay in a danger area any longer than necessary, that’s all.” As he finished talking the members of the team couldn’t help but notice his face was flaming red all the way to his ears.

  Suzanne stood up, brushing crumbs from her hands as she looked from Mason to Lauren, a speculative gleam in her eyes. “Come on everyone, the chief is hinting that we’ve wasted enough time sitting around here shooting the breeze. Time to get to work.”

  “While you’re searching the area, Joel and I will download CDC data on anthrax from Mamma and I’ll get the lab ready for tests on our cultures as soon as they’ve finished cooking,” Mason said, trying to regain some semblance of authority.

  “By the time you get back, I’ll be ready to do specific tests to see if we’re really dealing with anthrax.”

  Shirley asked, “Do you think we need to wear those damned Racals or just face masks?”

  “I think we’d better err on the side of caution right now. Let’s use the Racals until we’re one hundred percent sure our bug is transmitted air to air only and not by contact. We should know for certain by this afternoon.”

  * * *

  Guatemotzi watched the soldiers from deep shadows below the jungle canopy, wondering why they wore those curious masks. In heat so intense under a midafternoon sun he felt they must be suffering greatly, for he knew they were unaccustomed to the heavier air of summer.

  When soldados came through Michoacán they continually sought shade, as if the sun burned their skins. Guatemotzi and his people often watched them drive trucks along jungle roads and it was said they were looking for revolutionaries, or traffickers in las drogas. Sometimes there was shooting, and Mexican soldiers had guns that fired many bullets in a single stream at a human target.

  Thus Guatemotzi feared them, as did everyone in the village, and when they came to ask questions about las drogas or those who wanted to overthrow the government, no one spoke of the men hidden deep in the jungle who lived in small camps and turned leaves into white powder, or harvested a plant called marijuana, both taken to the cities at night in small trucks or on the backs of horses.

  What was most puzzling were the actions of los soldados now as they formed this circle around Tlateloco. In his heart he felt he knew the soldiers were about to make war against Los Oráculos, and there were so many soldiers against so few of the ancient warriors with orange skins. Guatemotzi believed it was to be a test of strength, the power of these messengers from the ancient gods of the Aztecs pitted against the soldiers. And it did not appear Los Oráculo
s carried weapons, only small knives they used to cut up the dead Americanos. A test of magic powers and not guns, for surely the gods of the Aztecs would not send warriors without powerful magic that could defeat the weapons of the soldiers. Guatemotzi wondered when the battle would begin and if the orange skins Los Oráculos wore would turn aside bullets.

  * * *

  He had been dozing behind an escoba palm where he could see the winding path to Tlateloco when movement in the jungle brought him fully awake with his heart racing. One of the orange-skinned warriors was approaching a group of soldiers guarding the road.

  “Only one?” he whispered, speaking his native tongue, which he preferred over the Spanish taught by the priests, for it was far easier to speak and think in Nahuatl. He could not make himself believe only one warrior had been sent to defeat so many soldados. The chief of Los Oráculos must believe very strongly in their magic powers.

  A soldier wearing a mask came toward the Aztec warrior and they met where the road made a turn. Neither one appeared to be ready for battle. They stood before each other, doing nothing, until the warrior took a small pouch from his waist and gave it to the soldier.

  An offering, Guatemotzi thought. Los Oráculos want peace, not war. Perhaps they are giving the soldiers parts of the dead Americanos’ bodies as a gift to prevent a battle between them. It was a strange sight, to see a messenger from the Aztec gods give this soldado his pouch. The masked soldier turned around and went back to the others while the warrior disappeared into the jungle. What a curious meeting it was, the gift of a pouch halting a war between them.

  He crept deeper into the forest when the soldier climbed in an automobile with no roof and drove back toward the city. Were the black pouch and its contents being offered to the presidente of Mexico so there could be peace between the new god, Jesus, and the gods of his ancestors? Guatemotzi’s father and everyone else in the village would greet this news with great happiness. Now, perhaps the dreaded soldados would stop coming to Michoacán with guns to ask their questions of Guatemotzi’s people.