around in his space suit the whole time.
First he put droplets of cells from the monkey culture onto glass slides, and let them dry, and treated them with chemicals. Then he put drops of the blood serum on the slides. They would glow in the presence of target virus.
Now it was time to look. This had to be done in total darkness, because the glow would be faint. He shuffled over to a storage closet, and went inside it, and closed the door behind him. A microscope sat on a table in the closet, and there was a chair, and from the wall hung an air hose. He plugged the hose into his space suit and put the slides into the microscope. Then he turned out the lights. He felt around in the darkness for the chair, and sat down. This was not a fun place to be if you happened to have a touch of claustrophobia—sitting in a pitch-black Level 4 closet while wearing a space suit. Peter Jahrling had made his peace with suffocation and darkness a long time ago. He waited for a minute to give his eye time to adapt to the dark, and the little sparkles of light in his eyes as they adjusted to the darkness eventually faded away, while cool, dry air roared around his face and whiffled the hair on his forehead. Then he looked through the binocular eyepieces of the microscope. He wore his eyeglasses inside his space suit, and that made it particularly difficult to see. He pressed the faceplate against his nose and squinted. He moved his face from side to side. His nose left a greasy streak inside his faceplate. He twisted his helmet unit it was turned nearly sideways. Finally he saw through the eyepieces.
Two circles drifted into his sight, and he focused his eyes, bringing the circles together. He was looking down into vast terrain. He saw cells dimly outlined in a faint glow. It was like flying over a country at night, over thinly populated lands. It was normal to see a faint glow. He was looking for a bright glow. He was looking for a city.
He scanned the slides with his eyes, back and forth, back and forth, moving across the microscopic world, looking for a telltale greenish glow.
The Musoke did not glow.
The Boniface glowed weakly.
To his horror, the Mayinga glowed brightly.
He jerked his head back. Aw, no! He adjusted his helmet and looked again. The Mayinga blood serum was still glowing. The dead woman’s blood was reacting to the virus in the monkey house. He got an ugly feeling in the pit of his stomach. Those monkeys didn’t have Marburg. They had Ebola. Those animals were dying of Ebola Zaire. His stomach lurched and turned over, and he sat frozen in the dark closet, with only the sound of his air and the thud of his heart.
CHAIN OF COMMAND
1600 Hours, Tuesday
This can’t be Ebola Zaire, Peter Jahrling thought. Somebody must have switched the samples by accident. He looked again. Yeah, the Mayinga blood serum was definitely glowing. It meant he and Tom could be infected with Ebola Zaire, which kills nine out of ten victims. He decided that he had made a mistake in his experiment. He must have accidentally switched around his samples or gotten something mixed up.
He decided to do the test again. He turned on the lights in the closet and scuffled out into his lab, this time keeping careful track of his vials, bottles, and slides to make sure that nothing got mixed up. Then he carried the new samples back into the closet and turned out the lights and looked again into the his microscope.
Once again, the Mayinga blood glowed.
So maybe it really was Ebola Zaire or something closely related to it—the dead woman’s blood “knew” this virus, and reacted to it. Good thing this ain’t Marburg—well, guess what, it ain’t Marburg. This is the honker from Zaire, or maybe its twin sister. Ebola had never seen outside Africa. What was it doing near Washington? How in the hell had it gotten here? What would it do? He thought, I’m onto something really hot.
He was wearing his space suit, but he didn’t want to take the time to decon out through the air lock. There was an emergency telephone on the wall in his lab. He disconnected his air hose to extinguish the roar of air so that he could hear through the receiver, and he punched C.J. Peters’ phone number.
“C.j.!” he shouted through his helmet. “IT’S PETER JAHRLING. IT’S REAL, AND IT’S EBOLA.”
“Naw!” C.J. replied.
“YEAH.”
“Ebola? It’s gotta be a contamination,” C.J. said.
“NO, IT ISN’T A CONTAMINATION.”
“Could you have gotten the samples mixed up?”
“YEAH, I KNOW—MY FIRST THOUGHT WAS THAT SOMEBODY HAD SWITCHED THE SAMPLES. BUT THEY WEREN’T SWITCHED, C.J.—BECAUSE I DID THE TEST TWICE.”
“Twice?”
“EBOLA ZAIRE BOTH TIMES. I’VE GOT THE RESULTS RIGHT HERE. I CAN PASS THEM TO YOU. TAKE A LOOK FOR YOURSELF.”
“I’m coming down there,” C.J. said. He hung up the phone and hurried downstairs to Jahrling’s hot lab.
Jahrling, meanwhile, picked up a sheet of waterproof paper on which he had written the results of his tests. He slid the paper into a tank full of EnviroChem. The tank went through the wall to a Level 0 corridor outside the hot zone. The tank worked on the same principle as a sliding cash drawer in a teller’s window. You could pass an object from the hot zone through a tank into the normal world. It would be disinfected on its way through the tank.
C.J. stood at a thick glass window on the other side, looking in at Jahrling. They waited for several minutes while the chemicals penetrated the paper and sterilized it. Then C.J. opened the tank from his side and removed the paper, dripping with chemicals, and held it in his hands. He motioned to Jahrling through the window: Go back to the phone.
Jahrling shuffled back to the emergency telephone and waited for it to ring. It rang, and there was C.J.‘s voice on the line: “Get out of there, and let’s go see the commander!”
It was time to move this thing up the chain of command.
Jahrling deconned out through the air lock, got dressed in his street clothes, and hurried to C.J. Peters’s office, and they both went to the office of the commander of USAMRIID, a colonel named David Huxsoll. They brushed past his secretary—told her it was an emergency—and sat down at a conference table in his office.
“Guess what?” C.J. said. “It looks like we’ve found a filovirus in a bunch of monkeys outside Washington. We’ve recovered what we think is Ebola.”
Colonel David Huxsoll was an expert in biohazards, and this was the sort of situation he thought the Institute was prepared to handle. Within minutes, he telephoned Major General Philip K. Russell, MD, who was the commander of the United States Army Medical Research and Development Command, which has authority over USAMRIID, and had set up a meeting in Russell’s office in another building at Fort Detrick.
Huxsoll and C.J. Peters spent a few moments talking about who else should be brought in. They hit upon Lieutenant Colonel Nancy Jaax, the Institute’s chief of pathology. She could identify the signs of Ebola in a monkey. Huxsoll picked up his phone. “Nancy, it’s David Huxsoll. Can you get over to Phil Russell’s office right now? It’s damned important.”
“It was a dark November evening, and the base was beginning to quiet down for the night. At the moment of sundown that day, there was no sun visible, only a dying of the light behind clouds that flowed off Catoctin Mountain. Jaax met Jahrling and the two colonels on their way across the parade ground beside the Institute. A detail of marching soldiers stopped before the flagpole. The group of people from the Institute also stopped. From a loudspeaker came a roar of a cannon and then the bugle music of “Retreat,” cracklish and cheap-sounding in the air, and the soldiers lowered the flag while the officers came to attention and saluted. C.J. Peters felt both embarrassed and oddly moved.
“Retreat” ended, and the soldiers folded up the flag, and the Institute people continued on their way.
