The Deep Zone

“Are you drunk, Brainard?”

He looked at the clock: just past eleven A.M.

“Barnard, sir. No, sir. Not anymore.”

“Drugs?”

“No, sir.”

The man lit a cigar, offered one to Barnard, who declined with roiling gut. “You’re a college grad?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Where’d you go?”

“University of Virginia, sir.”

“ROTC?”

“Yes, sir.”

“What do you want to do? Back in the world?”

“I’m not sure, sir.”

“Not a military career, though?”

“No way in hell, sir. No disrespect.”

The major sat forward, his belly straining the buttons of his shirt, poked his cigar toward Barnard, and said angrily, “Then why in the hell do you want to go back in there? You don’t need to get your ticket punched for promotion. What are you thinking?”

Barnard understood the man’s outburst, didn’t take it personally—the rear-echelon major being made to feel bad.

“Don’t be an idiot, Brainard. You don’t have to go back.”

He was just twenty-three then and knew that he didn’t know many things. But this one he did. He could not go home while men he knew and cared about were still back there. His men. He might escape a death now by going home, but it would be a bad trade: good death with his men here for bad death at the end of a Smith & Wesson or rope back home.

“Yes, I do.” Barnard looked out the office’s floor-to-ceiling windows. He could not see the mountains or his men from here, but he could feel them. It was like standing waist-deep in an undertow.

“Sir.”

Earlier in his career at the CDC, he had spent years in BSL-3 and BSL-4 laboratories dealing with the microbial world’s worst demons, group A strep, Yersinia pestis, anthrax, Ebola-Z, and others. As time went on and he was promoted out of the labs, he understood that with his experience he could better serve as a supervisor and, later, a director. But he was never entirely free of the same kind of guilt he’d felt that day in Saigon. It was as though he were attached to Four with a long elastic cord that stretched but never let go and relaxed only when he was back in there with his people and the demons.

He went to a small but spotless locker room with stainless steel walls and ceiling. He stripped naked and hung his clothes and the blue lab gown in a locker. He put his rings and watch on the locker’s shelf. Then he walked through a door into a shower room and scrubbed himself under 120-degree water with Biodyne disinfectant until, after five full minutes, a timer went off. In the next room he toweled dry and put on sterile green surgical scrubs, including plastic booties and latex gloves. He went through another heavy, stainless steel bulkhead with airtight seals that locked automatically. No two could be open at the same time. The next space was the “weeya,” the work and interaction area, a place just outside the suit room, where researchers could sit down and rest, make notes, converse about what went on deeper in. It was deserted now. Then through another airlock into the suit room, where the blue BSL-4 suits hung, like huge blue cadavers, from heavy hooks in the ceiling.

Barnard’s name was printed in black letters across the upper back of his Chemturion 3530, as if it were a football uniform. He lifted the bulky, ten-pound suit from its hook, then pulled open the heavy plastic zipper that ran diagonally from its left shoulder down to its right thigh. He stepped into the legs one at a time, got his feet into the attached yellow rubber boots, hitched the suit up, pushed his left arm in and then his right. He drew the zipper head up to its closure point on his left shoulder, folded over the zipper cover, and secured it with Velcro tabs. The clear plastic hood hung down his back. He pulled it up over his head and closed the zipper that ran 180 degrees, left to right, where the hood bottom joined the suit body. He pushed a switch on a control box attached to the suit’s left hip and waited while the Chem-Air PLSS unit inflated the suit around him. As long as the air pressure in the suit remained higher than the ambient pressure outside, pathogens could not infiltrate even if the suit was breached. The battery-powered Chem-Air also supplied him with quadruple-HEPA-filtered breathing air from a yellow Accurex ultra-high-pressure bottle that contained 20 cubic feet of compressed air at a pressure of 5,500 psi. The bottle was about the size and shape of a thermos and weighed four pounds. This would be Barnard’s air source until he was inside the lab itself, where he would connect an air hose to a fitting on the right shoulder of his suit.

Barnard stood and waited for another two minutes, monitoring air flow and pressurization, to make sure that the suit was intact. Then he went through yet another air lock. This one was what they called a submarine door because its design had been copied from submarines’ watertight bulkheads. He pushed a lever from left to right, releasing a locking latch. Then he turned a large steel wheel counterclockwise. He pulled a second latch, opening the bulkhead door, stepped through, and reversed the whole procedure.

He stood in a small room with a grate floor and seamless stainless steel walls from which multiple nozzles protruded. He pushed a doughnut-sized red button—in BSL-4 areas, everything was bigger, to compensate for the reduced manual dexterity—to initiate the chemical-shower decon sequence and stepped onto two white footprints in the middle of the steel-grate floor. High-pressure jets sprayed green Chemex decontamination solution at him from above, both sides, front, and behind. He raised his hands over his head, as though preparing to dive into water, and pirouetted slowly around and around, exposing every square millimeter of surface to the spray, which resembled antifreeze fluid in color and viscosity. He lifted both boots, one at a time, to let the spray hit the soles. Excess liquid drained through the grates into collection reservoirs. After two minutes the jets cut off and powerful fans blew warm air for another three minutes, clearing the suit of decon liquid and drying it.

On the far wall was another big red button, with two lights, one red and one green, beside it. He pressed the button and waited. A stainless steel door slid open, right to left, he stepped through, and the door whisked shut behind him, pneumatic airtight seals inflating once it was closed.

He was now standing in one of the deadliest spots on earth. A pinhole-sized breach in his suit would seem, to any circulating pathogens, like an open barn door. If anything happened to interrupt his suit’s positive pressure after such a breach, they would flood in by the millions and he would die one of the most horrible deaths imaginable in less than a week.

BSL-4 labs tended not to be large because they were prohibitively expensive to build and maintain. It was not just the labs themselves but all the safety and containment systems they required, air and fluid collection and disposal, fail-safe redundancies, and ultrasophisticated instruments like scanning electron microscopes. Each square foot of lab space cost $2,000 and required fifteen additional square feet of support facility at the same cost. Thus a one-thousand-square-foot lab needed fifteen thousand square feet of support works, the whole thing costing $32 million altogether. More expensive, foot for foot, than the space shuttle.

Stainless steel counters ran at waist height down both sides of the room. On top of them sat exotic instruments, glass boxes, trays of cultures. Over the counters hung aluminum hoods with ventilator fans that continually drew air out of the lab, maintaining its negative pressure. Evvie Flemmer was working at one counter.

“Took you a while.” Casey was smiling, his voice muffled by the plastic hood. “Turn around and I’ll hook you up.”

“I’m rusty donning the Chemturion,” Barnard said, a bit sheepishly. “Don’t get down here as often as I would like. Skills deteriorate.” He waited while Casey connected the coiled, ceiling-mounted yellow hose that would give him breathing air from the lab’s integral supply. With twisting and contortions, one person could do it, but having a partner made it much easier. A self-locking nozzle mated with a circular valve seat on the back of the right shoulder of Barnard’s suit. Once it was in place, Casey pushed a butterfly-valve handle that opened the nozzle, delivering air. Finally, Casey rotated the switch on Barnard’s Chem-Air PLSS unit, depowering it.

“You said you had something promising.”

“Yes. Come over here,” Casey said, moving to the electron microscope.

The instrument looked like a white stovepipe eight feet tall and bristling with extensions, controls, and