Villagers stood around the hut, but they wouldn’t go inside. He heard sounds of human agony. A dark doorway led inside. He couldn’t see into the hunt, but he know that Ebola was in there. He rummaged in his backpack and found his flashlight, but it was dead, and he realized that he had forgotten to bring batteries. He asked the crowd if anyone had a light, and someone brought him a lantern. Holding the lantern in front of him, he entered the hut.
He would never forget the sight. The first thing he saw was a number of red eyes staring at him. The air inside the hut reeked of blood. People lay on straw mats on the floor. some were having convulsion—the final phase, as death sets in—their bodies rigid and jerking, their eyes rolled up into the head, blood streaming out of the nose and flooding from the rectum. Others had gone into termina comas, and were motionless and bleeding out. The hut was a hot zone.
He opened his backpack and fished out rubber gloves, a paper gown, a paper surgical mask, and paper boots to cover his shoes, to keep them from becoming wet with blood. After he had dressed himself, he laid out his blood tubes and syringes on a mat. Then he began drawing blood from people. He worked all night in the hut on his knees, collecting blood samples and taking care of the patients as best he could.
Sometime during the night, he was drawing blood from an old woman. Suddenly she jerked and thrashed, having a seizure. Here arm lashed around, and the bloody needle cam out of her arm and jabbed into his thumb. Uh, oh, he thought. That would be enough to do it. The agent had entered his bloodstream. At dawn, he gathered up his tubes of blood serum and ran to the airplane and handed the samples to the pilots. The question was what to do with himself, now that he had been pricked with a bloody needle. That was a massive exposure to Ebola virus. He probably had three to four days before he broke with Ebola. Should he leave Sudan now, get himself to a hospital? He had to make a decision—whether to leave with the pilots or stay with the virus. It seemed obvious that the pilots would not come back later to pick him up. If he planned to leave and medical help for himself, the time to do it was now. There was an additional factor. He was a physician, and those people in the hut were his patients.
He returned to the village. He thought he might be infected with Ebola virus, but he wanted to get more samples, and he figured that if he developed a headache, he could radio for help, and perhaps a plane would come and get him. He rested that day in a hut, and gave himself a transfusion of two bags of blood serum that supposedly contained antibodies that might protect him from Ebola virus—he had carried the bags with him, chilled on ice, and now he hoped they would save his life. That night he could not sleep, thinking about the needle jabbing his thumb, thinking about the agent beginning its massive replication in his bloodstream. He drank half a bottle of scotch whisky to put himself to sleep.
He worked with Ebola patients for the next four days inside the hut, and still he did not have a headache. Meanwhile, he watched the old lady like a hawk to see what happened to her. On the fourth day, to his surprise, the old lady recovered. She had not had Ebola. She had probably been suffering from malaria. She had not been having an Ebola seizure but, rather, had been shivering from a fever. He had walked away from a firing squad.
Now, at the meeting at Fort Detrick, Joe McCormick of the C.D.C. was convinced that Ebola virus does not travel easily, especially not through the air. He had not become sick, even though he had breathed the air inside an Ebola-ridden hut for days and nights on end. He felt strongly that Ebola is a disease that is not easy to catch. Therefore, in his view, it was not as dangerous as perhaps the Army people believed.
Dan Dalgard asked a question of the assembled experts. He said, “How soon after we give you samples can you tell us whether they have virus in them?”
C.J. Peters replied, “It may take a week. This is all we know.”
Joe McCormick spoke up. Wait a minute, he said—he had a new, fast probe test for Ebola virus that would work in twelve hours. He argued that the C.D.C. should have the virus and the samples.
C.J. Peters turned and stared at McCormick. C.J. was furious. He didn’t believe McCormick had any quick test for Ebola. He thought it was Joe McCormick blowing smoke, trying to get his hands on the virus. He thought it was a poker bluff in a high-stakes game for control of the virus. It was a delicate situation, because how could he say in front of all these state health officials, “Joe, I just don’t believe you?” He raised his voice and said, “An ongoing epidemic is not the time to try to field-test a new technique.” He argued that Fort Detrick was closer to the outbreak than was the C.D.C., in Atlanta, and therefore it was appropriate for the Army to have the samples and try to isolate the virus. What he did not say—no reason to rub it in—was that seven dead monkeys were at that very moment being examined by Nancy Jaax. Even as they argued, she was exploring the monkeys. What’s more, the Army was growing the virus in cultures. Possession is nine tenths of the law, and the Army had the meat and the agent.
Fred Murphy, the other C.D.C. man, was sitting next to McCormick. He began to realize that the C.D.C. was not in a good position to argue the matter. He leaned over and whispered, “Joe! Calm you jets. Stifle it, Joe. We’re outnumbered here.”
General Philip Russell had been sitting back, watching the argument, saying nothing. Now he stepped in. In a calm but almost deafeningly loud voice he suggested that they work out a compromise. He suggested that they split the management of the outbreak.
A compromise seemed to be the best solution. The general and Fred Murphy quickly worked out the deal, while McCormick and Peters stared at each other with little to say. It was agreed that the C.D.C. would manage the human-health aspects of the outbreak and would direct the car of any human patients. The Army would handle the monkeys and the monkey house, which was the nest of the outbreak.
THE MISSION
1630 Hours, Wednesday
Colonel C. J. Peters now felt that he had permission to get the action under way. As soon as the meeting broke up, he began to line up his ducks. the first thing he needed was field officer who could lead a team of soldiers and civilians into the monkey house. He needed to form a military-action unit.
He had already decided who was going to lead the mission. It was going to be Colonel Jerry Jaax, Nancy’s husband. Jerry had never worn a space suit, but he was the chief of the veterinary division at the Institute, and he understood monkeys. His people, both soldiers and civilians, were certainly going to be needed. No one else had the training to handle monkeys.
He found Jerry in his office, staring out the window and chewing on a rubber band. C.J. said, “Jerry, I believe we have a situation down in Reston.” A situation. Code for a hot agent. “It looks like we’re going to have to go down and take those monkeys out, and we’re going to do it in Biosafety Level 4 conditions.” He asked Jerry to assemble teams of soldiers and civilian employees to be ready to move out with space suits in twenty-four hours.
Jerry walked over to Gene Johnson’s office and told him that he’d been put in charge of the mission. The office was a mess. He wondered how Gene, as large a man as he was, could even fit himself in among the stacks of paper.
Jerry and Gene immediately began to plan a biohazard operation. There had been a general decision to take out one room of monkeys, and see how that worked, see how things went—see if the virus was spreading. They set up their priorities.
Priority One—Safety of the human population.
Priority Two—Euthanasia of the animals with a minimum of suffering.
Priority Three—Gathering of scientific samples. Purpose: to identify the strain and determine how it travels.
Gene felt that if the team did its job properly, the human population of Washington would be safe. He put on his glasses and hunched over and fished through his papers, his beard crushed on his chest. He knew already that
