the valley that leads to the cave, they cleared away some underbrush and put up blue tarpaulins. The cave itself was considered to be a Level 4 hot zone. The tarp closest to the cave covered a gray area, a place where the worlds met. The men took chemical showers under the gray-area tarp, to decon their space suits after a visit to the cave. Another tarp covered a Level 3 staging area, where the men changed in and out of their space suits. Another tarp covered a Level 4 necropsy area. Under that tarp, wearing space suits, they dissected any small animals that they had trapped, looking for signs of Marburg virus.
“We were going where no one had gone before,” Johnson said to me. “We brought the Biosafety Level 4 philosophy to the jungle.”
They wore orange Racal space suits inside the cave. A Racal suit is a portable, positive-pressure space suit with a battery-powered air supply. It is for use in fieldwork with extreme biohazards that are believed to be airborne. A Racal suit is also known as an orange suit because it is bright orange. It is lighter than a Chemturion, and unlike a Chemturion, it is fully portable, with a self-contained breathing apparatus. The main body of the suit (apart from helmet and the blowers) is disposable, so that you can burn it after using it once or twice.
Wearing their Racal space units, they laid out a trail that wound into Kitum Cave, marking the trail with avalanche poles so that people would not get lost. Along the trail, they placed cages holding the monkeys and guinea pigs. They surrounded the cages with electrified wire, powered by a battery, to discourage leopards from trying to eat the monkeys. They placed some of the monkeys directly underneath bat colonies in the roof of the cave, hoping that something would drop on a monkey that would cause the animal to break with Marburg.
They collected somewhere between thirty thousand and seventy thousand biting insects inside the cave— the cave is full of bugs. “We put stickum paper over cracks in the cave, to catch crawling bugs,” Johnson said to me. “We hung light traps inside the cave to collect flying insects. The light traps were battery powered. You know how to collect ticks? They come out of the ground when they smell carbon dioxide from your breath. They smell it and come up and bite your ass. So we brought these huge tanks of carbon dioxide, and we used it to attract ticks. We trapped all the rodents that went into the cave. We used Havahart traps. Way at the back of the cave, by a pool of water, we found sand flies. These are biting flies. We saw leopard tracks all over the place, and Cape-buffalo tracks. We didn’t take any food samples from large animals, nothing from leopards or buffalo. Nothing from the antelopes.”
“Could Marburg live in large African cats?” I asked. “Could it be a leopard virus?”
“Maybe. We just didn’t have permits to trap leopards. We did collect genet cats, and it wasn’t there.”
“Could it live in elephants?”
“Did you ever try to draw blood from a wild elephant? We didn’t.”
The Kenyan naturalists trapped and netted hundreds of birds, rodents, hyaxes, and bats. In the hot necropsy zone, under the tarp, they sacrificed the animals and dissected them while wearing Racal suits, taking samples of blood and tissue, which they froze in jars of liquid nitrogen. Some local people—they were Elgon Masai —had lived inside some of the caves on Mount Elgon and had kept their cattle in the caves. The Kenyan doctors drew blood from their cattle. None of the local people or the cattle tested positive for Marburg antibodies—if they had tested positive, it would have shown that they had been exposed to Marburg. Despite the fact that nobody showed signs of having been infected, the Elgon Masai could tell stories of how a family member, a child or a young wife, had died bleeding in someone’s arms. They had seen family members crash and bleed out, but whether their illnesses were caused by Marburg or some other virus—who could tell? Perhaps the local Masa people knew the Marburg agent in their own way. If so, they had never given it a name.
None of the sentinel monkeys became sick. They remained healthy and bored, having sat in their cages in the cave for weeks. The experiment required that they be sacrificed at the end of the time so that the researchers could take tissue samples and observe their bodies for any signs of infection. At this point, the hard part of primate research began to torment Gene Johnson. He could not being himself to euthanize the monkeys. He couldn’t stand the idea of killing them and couldn’t go into the cave to finish the job. He waited outside in the forest while another member of the team put on a space suit and went inside and gave the monkeys massive shots of sedative, which put them to sleep forever. “I don’t like killing animals,” he said to me. “That was a major issue for me. After you’ve fed ‘em bananas. That was terrible. It sucked.” He put on his orange Racal space suit and opened up the monkeys under necropsy tent, feeling frustrated and sad, especially when all the monkeys turned out to be healthy.
The expedition was a dry hole. All the sentinel animals remained healthy, and the blood and tissue samples from the other animals, insects, birds, Masai people, and their cattle showed no sign of Marburg virus. It must have been a bitter disappointment for Gene Johnson, so disheartening that he was never able to bring himself to publish an account of the expedition and its findings. There seemed to be no point in publishing the fact that he hadn’t found anything in Kitum Cave. All that he could say for sure is that Marburg lives in the shadow of Mount Elgon.
What Johnson did not know at the time, but what he sensed almost instinctively after the failure of the Kitum Cave expedition, was that the knowledge and experience he gained inside a cover in Africa, and the space suits and biohazard gear he carried back with him to the Institute, might serve him well at another time and in another place. He kept his African gear hidden away at the Institute, piled in olive-drab military trunks in storage rooms and in tractor trailers parked behind buildings and padlocked, because he did not want anyone else to touch his gear or use it or take it away from him. He wanted to be ready to load it on an airplane at a moment’s notice, in case Marburg or Ebola came to the surface again in Africa. And sometimes he thought of a favorite saying, a remark by Louis Pasteur, “Chance favors the prepared mind.” Pasteur developed vaccines for anthrax and rabies.
1989 Summer
The Army had always had a hard time figuring out what to do with Nancy and Jerry Jaax. They were married officers at the same rank in a small corps, the veterinary Corps. What do you do with a married pair of doggy doctors who need to be promoted? What if one of them (the wife) is trained in the use of space suits? Where do you send them? The Army assigned the Jaaxes to the Institute of Chemical Defense, near Aberdeen, Maryland. They sold their Victorian house and moved, bring their birds and animals with them. Nancy was not sorry to leave the house in Thurmont. They moved into a tract house, which was more to her liking, and there they began to raise fish in tanks, as a hobby, and Nancy went to work in an Army program to study the effects of nerve gas on rat brains. Her job was to open up the rat’s head and figure out what the nerve gas has done to the brain. This was safer and more pleasant than working with Ebola, but it was a little dull. Eventually she and Jerry both received promotions to lieutenant colonel and wore silver oak leaves on their shoulders. Jaime and Jason were growing up. Jaime became a superb gymnast, short and wiry like Nancy, and Nancy and Jerry had hopes for her in the nationals, if not the Olympics. Jason grew into a tall, quiet kid. Herky, their parrot, did not change. Parrots live for many years. He went on shouting “Mom! Mom!” and whistling the march from The Bridge on The River Kwai.
Colonel Tony Johnson, Nancy’s commanding officer when she had worked at USAMRIID, remembered her competence in a space suit and wanted to get her back. He felt she belonged at the Institute. He was eventually appointed head of pathology at Walter Reed Army Medical Center, and when that happened, his old job came open, the job of chief of pathology at the Institute. He urged the Army to appoint Nancy Jaax to the position, and the Army listened. They agreed that she ought to be doing hot biological work, and she got the job in the summer of 1989. At the same time, the Army appointed Jerry Jaax head of the veterinary division at the Institute. So the Jaax became important and rather powerful figures. Nancy went back to biological work in space suits. Jerry still didn’t like it, but he had learned to live with it.
With these promotions, the Jaax sold their house in Aberdeen and moved back to Thurmont, in August 1989. This time, Nancy told Jerry it was not going to be a Victorian. They bought a contemporary Cape house with dormer windows, with a lot of land around it, meadow and forest, where the dogs could run and the children could play. Their house stood on the lower slope of Catoctin Mountain, overlooking the town, above a sea of apple orchards. From their kitchen window, they could look into the distance over rolling farmland where armies had marched during the Civil War. Central Maryland stretched away to the horizon in folds and hollows, in bands of trees and rumpled field, studded by silos that marked the presence of family farms. High over the beautiful countryside, passenger jets crisscrossed the sky, leaving white contrails behind them.
