by Ed Baldwin
Joe Smith made his way forward and got some coffee from the kitchenette beneath the cockpit. The plane, a modified Boeing 707, can carry 200,000 pounds of fuel, and/or six pallets of cargo. Built for long, grueling missions, it has a boom at the rear for delivering fuel to other aircraft in flight, two bunks in the cockpit, a flush toilet, and a kitchen comparable to that found on airliners. On either side of the cargo bay are 65 nylon web seats, folded up now, as Smith was the only passenger. He walked by his two pallets strapped to the floor of the cargo bay to the rear of the aircraft and climbed down into the boom operator’s station where he could lie on his stomach and look straight down through the refueling station.
“It’s down there,” he said to himself, watching the dark jungle of the Congo basin slide slowly by, 35,000 feet below. He’d seen the western parts of it during several visits, but the northeastern corner, where South Sudan, the Central African Republic and the Democratic Republic of the Congo come together near the headwaters of the White Nile is the deepest, darkest, most inaccessible part of it, and the likely home base of the world’s most dangerous virus. He ticked off the known outbreaks since Ebola was first described in 1976; Juba, Sudan, Yambuku, Congo, Nzara, Sudan, Gabon, Gulu, Uganda, Kikwit, Congo and several recent outbreaks in the Kasai Occidental District in the Congo. They all made a circle around that jungle down there.
It was a mystery. If Ebola killed people so fast that epidemics burned out before they could spread to the greater population, and if it did the same thing to the monkeys that infected the people, then where did the monkeys get it? A virus dies when its host dies. So where did this virus live between outbreaks? And how long has this game been going on? Just because medical science “discovers” a disease doesn’t mean it’s new. Has Ebola been living in that jungle down there for millennia, breaking out every few years to wipe out primates – monkeys and people – that get too close and then retreating back into some cave or animal reservoir? What’s it protecting? What’s it waiting for? Is it out now?
CHAPTER EIGHT
The Island
The corpse sat on the rocks, looking out to sea with vacant eye sockets. The gulls had eaten his eyes, lips and ears, leaving a skeletal, phantomlike grin. Bird droppings smattered on his blue shirt.
“Suppose that’s the guy who radioed the alarm?” Boyd asked, his voice muffled by the protective suit. “Told the world to stay away and then came out here to see if anybody would come?”
Joe mumbled something Boyd couldn’t hear as he bent over and cut the buttons off of the shirt with surgical scissors. He pulled open the shirt to expose the chest. Blood had run down from his face and dried in the blond chest hairs, protected from the gulls. There were dark blotches, two or three inches across, on his chest and abdomen.
“That’s purpura,” Joe said, straightening up and looking over at Boyd, balanced on an outcropping of black lava.
The surf was gently breaking a few yards out. Safely in the distance bobbed the Grumman Albatross, anchored in 100 feet of water off a charted but unnamed island in the Seychelles Islands in the Indian Ocean, 700 miles east of Mombasa.
“Did Ebola do that?”
“Yeah. It comes from a defect in coagulation in the small blood vessels,” Joe replied. “It does a lot of other things, too. We’ll do an autopsy. Let’s carry him up by the house and look around first. We can post him after lunch.”
Boyd chuckled at the morbid humor as they rolled the dead man onto a plastic tarp, rolled him up and carried him to the remains of a burned house 50 yards up the hill. They’d already decided their time on the island would be limited to how long they could go without food or water. Taking off the biohazard suits this close to an obvious Ebola outbreak would contaminate them. If that occurred, they had instructions from Joe’s boss at USAMRIID to camp out on the island for three weeks; the pallets they’d unloaded at Mombasa contained equipment and supplies for that.
The island was barely a hundred acres, devoid of all vegetation except for a few scraggly weeds. Formed by a volcanic eruption a century before, globs of puddinglike lava had flowed from a cone in the center of the island into the sea. This was the last place Boyd wanted to camp out for three weeks. He was going to stay in that suit no matter what.
Dropping off the body, they crisscrossed the island like two bird dogs looking for a scent, alert for any sign of who’d been here and what they’d done.
Boyd climbed the volcanic cone, a pile of lava 60 feet high in the center of the island, and scanned for anything they’d missed. It was the loneliest place he’d ever been, nothing in sight in any direction, and it had taken them four hours of flying over empty ocean to get here. The breakers outlined an underwater lava presence much larger than the actual island, at least 2 miles in diameter. This was really a vent in the middle of a caldera, or crater, of a volcano rising a mile above the surrounding floor of the Indian Ocean. A fit place to tinker with a virus that could scrub the planet of human life, Boyd thought as he looked down into the hole in the cone. He couldn’t see the bottom.
There were three buildings and a makeshift privy on the island. The main building, about the size of an average ranch house, was in the middle of the widest part of the island and protected from the prevailing winds by the cone. Behind it was a small generator house. On the other end of the island, exposed to the wind and just above high tide had been a small building of just a few hundred square feet. Like the main house, it was twisted rubble.
Approaching the main house, Boyd pulled back a panel of twisted metal roof, exposing the ash of the building’s wooden structure and a few metal appliances. The first section was a kitchen with camp stove, chest-type freezer and small refrigerator. Plastic water pipe began as a melted blob a few feet away and snaked up the hill to a large plastic bladder filled with rainwater collected from plastic sheeting staked to the nearby hillside. The refrigerator held bottles of French and German wine and Dutch beer along with some badly spoiled sausage and German mustard. The freezer had ready-made frozen food, spoiled, but protected from the fire. The labels were all in French. Various pots and kitchen utensils were scattered about. Joe joined him and they pulled back another roofing panel.
At first Boyd thought the body was a piece of furniture, a pillow perhaps, black and red. Joe walked right to it and brushed off a light coating of ash.
“A male,” Joe said, pointing to the crusted remains of genitalia.
The charred body lay stiffly on its back, stubs of arms and legs pointing in four directions. The pelvis was attached to an intact thorax by an intact spine. The intestines had boiled out of the abdominal cavity and lay, thoroughly cooked, to one side. The charred head had detached from the neck and lay with its chin up and its forehead next to the floor, staring back at the door with vacant sockets.
Boyd was grateful smell didn’t penetrate into the suit, but he remembered enough about burned bodies from a plane crash the year before to become nauseous anyway. He walked through the laboratory, which was filled with microscopes, computers, centrifuges and incubators, one larger than the freezer in the kitchen. In one corner, the remains of two biohazard suits were piled, their bright silver external covers scorched but not melted.
“I’m going up here,” Boyd said, gagging as he climbed over the next panel of roofing to get out of the building. Choking back his lunch, he headed back to a smaller building about 40 yards away. Approaching, Boyd thought it looked like the outhouse he and his father had used until he was 9, but when he got there he found a perfectly good 8,000 kilowatt gasoline generator housed in a wood frame building with cheap plastic siding and no roof.
“Odd,” he said to himself, seeing that the siding covering the structure was untouched by the fire at the main house. Instead, the inside of the little building was scorched, though not enough to stop the generator from running until it had run out of fuel. He looked up at the nails that had held the slanted roof beam in place. They pointed skyward.
Ten yards behind the b
uilding lay the scorched, twisted metal roof. The wooden frame blown off with the metal roof was entirely burned away, even the ashes were scattered by the wind.
“Blew the roof off,” Boyd said to himself, looking back at the little house. Boyd turned over the metal roof, hoping he wouldn't find another body. Instead, duct taped to the roof, he found a melted plastic device with solid state electronics – a cell phone. He cut the duct tape away and put the cell phone in a specimen bag and into a cargo pocket on his thigh. Returning to the generator house, he reconstructed in his mind that the cell phone had been taped behind the main roof beam at the lower back of the house, out of sight. It had triggered an explosive device, probably incendiary. Instead of setting the building on fire, as had probably happened in the other two buildings, the explosion was confined to a smaller space and had blown the roof off, leaving it to burn furiously a few feet away.
“Primate cages,” Joe said solemnly as they stood looking at the remains of the third building.
Two dozen wire cages were scattered about under the metal roof. Five of them contained cooked monkeys. This building had been smaller and of lighter construction, so the fire hadn’t been as hot. The monkeys presented a grotesque array of singed, charred and contorted creatures, confined to contemplate their fate as the building had burned.
Things must have heated up pretty quick, Boyd thought, as he easily found two of the cell phones concealed in the remnants of electrical junction boxes near the center of the building. Someone got double-crossed here.
“Look here! Incredible!” Joe said, beckoning toward a scorched bundle at the corner of the building. “Two monkeys out of a cage and wrapped in paper, probably died before the fire. I can’t believe these guys were so careless. They violated every principle of maintaining laboratory animals. To just leave dead primates wrapped for disposal not 6 feet from the rest of the population is cruel, criminal and highly dangerous. Maybe they didn’t know what they were dealing with,” he added, shaking his head and stooping again to turn over one of the creatures and look into the bloated face of a dead monkey.
If there had been any doubt about why Joe was needed on this mission it was dispelled in the next half hour. He laid all the monkeys out in a row in front of the building, opened his equipment container and arranged syringes and specimen containers by each body. Then he went quickly down the line attaching a fresh 4-inch-long needle to each syringe and probing the chest of each monkey to draw blood directly from the heart. Ignoring Boyd, Joe next produced some large wide-mouth jars and filled them from a gallon jug of formalin, placing one at the head of each monkey. He plugged a small recorder into his biohazard suit and attached it to his chest, then approached the first monkey and opened his instruments. Grabbing a scalpel he made a sweeping circumferential cut around the forehead of the monkey, peeling the scalp back from the front. Next, he produced a battery-operated hand saw and sawed the top of the skull off in the same plane. When he reached in and cut the spinal cord with a scalpel and removed the brain with one hand, Boyd vomited into his suit.
“Monkey Number One is a pigtailed Macaque that appears to have died of natural causes before the fire. The brain shows numerous petechial hemorrhages over the cortex. Upon slicing …” Joe continued dictating as he worked. Using a cutting board and large knife, he sliced the brain like a loaf of bread. Seeing something that interested him, he cut a small square out with the knife and dropped it into the formalin. Still retching, Boyd retreated to the generator house to look for more clues.
Savoring the sheer misery of living with vomit inside his helmet, Boyd coughed and spit to try to clear the air passage and get his lunch to drop down inside the suit itself. He walked around aimlessly, unable to concentrate, until finally it dried and he could breathe again. While wandering around, Boyd encountered a marshy area where water had accumulated in a depression in the lava. It was only a few inches deep and was mostly filled with green slime and a few scraggly cattails clinging to life at the edges. He took a picture.
Boyd returned to the monkey house to find Joe tidying up. He packed the seven specimen jars and the vials of blood into a box and closed the lid, securing it with a seal. He produced a gallon of diesel fuel from his equipment box and dowsed the dissected remains, now piled unceremoniously in a heap. The flames shot 10 feet into the air, and black smoke billowed.
“Now for our fellow scientists,” Joe said, dragging his equipment back toward the main house. Boyd rushed over to help. Soon the labeled jars were at the head of each man and the recorder was turned on. Blood was drawn in the same fashion as with the monkeys, and Boyd was astonished to see fresh appearing liquid blood flow into the syringe from the charred corpse.
“The first human is thoroughly charred, the skull is separated from the spine and the extremities are mere stubs …” Boyd circled the autopsy site, eyes on the Albatross, bobbing in the waves, wishing he were there.
“Need you to take some pictures here,” Joe said. “I’ve got stuff all over my hands. Get the back of this guy’s head.” With that, Joe picked up the skull that had separated from the charred body. The back of the skull was open and the inside was empty. Joe held it with one hand and pointed with the other. Retching quietly, Boyd took the pictures, and then walked away, hoping for some fresh air.
When Boyd heard the electric saw start up again he retreated to the ocean and the rocky outcropping where the first man had communed with the gulls for a week before they’d found him.
Sitting on the rock, looking out over the Indian Ocean, Boyd thought about the blond man. When he came here to sit, he must have known he was dying. The buildings were probably burning, meaning his partner, companion, co-worker, friend, whoever, was already dead. He may have been angry that their mission, whatever it was, had turned out so badly. Did they fail? Had there been someone else here?
“Nobody would die that way,” Boyd said, standing, looking around his feet at the rocks. No rational man would just sit there and look out at the sea and die. He’d have something to say to someone. He’d write a letter or note.
“Hey, Boyd!”
Boyd stood and looked up to see Joe waving.
“Got something here. Need you to have a look.” Joe was pointing down at the bodies.
Reluctantly, Boyd returned. The charred body’s chest had been opened with the saw and the heart and lungs were remarkably fresh appearing.
“Get the camera. This guy’s been shot,” Joe said, pointing to the heart, which had a small hole in one side. “I think the bullet is still in there.” He knelt back down and was kneading the heart with both hands. “Can’t feel well enough with these damn gloves. Need a picture of the hole there, and there’s another one in the spine.”
Busy with the camera, Boyd’s nausea passed. He didn’t even mind when Joe cut the lungs from the trachea and lifted them out. He took additional photos with Joe passing a metal probe through the hole in the heart back to the two holes in the back.
“One gunshot enters the pleural cavity through the body of T-5, passes beneath the tracheal bifurcation and penetrates the descending aorta and the left ventricle. The bullet is within the cavity of the ventricle. The other entrance wound is through the sixth rib, 3 centimeters left of the body of T-6, and passes through the left lung. The exit is not in the chest wall; presumably it exited through the abdominal wall, which is burned away. The pleural space has an estimated 1000 ml of blood.”
Joe droned on about bone fragments and missing tissue while Boyd kept right up with the camera as the autopsy proceeded into the abdominal cavity.
“I gotta pee,” Joe said, standing right in the middle of removing a kidney.
“Let it fly,” Boyd said, laughing.
“You gone yet?” Joe asked suspiciously, as if Boyd would spread the tale if he did and Boyd didn’t.
“It just feels warm for awhile. Hell, I’ve had a face mask full of vomit for an hour. Wet pants are nothing compared to that.”
Joe stretched, took a co
uple steps toward the Albatross and stood looking at it for a minute, then returned to work, shaking his head.
Soon the organs were sliced, pieces put into the jar and the rest returned to the body cavity. Boyd held open the body bag and Joe lifted the body into it, then poured a gallon of formalin over it and zipped it up.
Unwrapping the other man, the one from the rocks by the sea, Joe rolled him on his back and went through his pockets.
“Uh oh,” He said, his hand deep in the man’s right front pocket. He pulled out a .32-caliber automatic pistol. “Looks like there may have been some friction here on the island.”
“Murder weapon?”
“Probably so. That looked like a .32-cal bullet I got out of the heart,” Joe said, looking at the pistol. “Walked up behind his buddy and shot him in the back.”
Joe cleared a bullet from the chamber of the pistol and dropped the pistol and the bullet into a plastic bag and dropped that into a cargo pocket on his leg. He leaned back to the man and checked his other pockets, retrieving a wallet and some keys, which he bagged. He began dictating again.
“The second man is a blond Caucasian of medium build approximately 35 years old …” He ran his scissors up the legs of the man’s trousers to the waist and pulled them away. “Ah, what’s this,” he said, turning off the recorder. He pulled a small notebook out of the red bikini briefs the man wore.
“I knew it!” Boyd exclaimed triumphantly. “He had to leave a note. That’s going to tell us what happened here.”
He reached down and retrieved the notebook and opened it excitedly.
“Shit. It’s in French.”
CHAPTER NINE
Last Will and Testament
Henri,
I am dying. The irony is that I’ve accomplished one of the most complete technical achievements in history, and through the perfidy of my employer, am reduced to recording it in a simple laboratory notebook in pencil, just like Pasteur before me. All the rest of the documentation has been destroyed by the fire. Greed blinded me to the risk, and when I was out maneuvered by this virus, there was no way to escape. Cooperate with the authorities. Mosby must be stopped. Give them this letter. You’ve broken no laws and are entitled to the money. Enjoy it and remember our dreams.
