how he was doing. He started making noise the moment he perceived that the cats were being fed. He wanted some attention, too.
“Mom! Mom!” Herky hung upside down and laughed like a maniac, and cried, “Bad bird! Bad bird!” She took him out of his cage and stroked him on the head. He moved onto her shoulder and she preened his feathers.
Upstairs in the bedroom, she found the children asleep next to Jerry. She picked up Jaime and carried her into her own bedroom and tucked her into bed. Jerry picked up Jason and carried him to his bed—he was getting too big for Nancy to haul around.
Nancy settled into bed with Jerry. She said to him, “I have a gut feeling they’re not going to be able to contain the virus in that one room.” She told him she was worried that it could be spreading into other rooms through the air. That virus was just so damned infective she didn’t see how it would stay in one room. Something that Gene Johnson had once said to her came into her mind: “We don’t really know what Ebola has done in the past, and we don’t know what it might do in the future.”
Then Jerry broke the news to her about her father. Nancy was beginning to feel extremely guilty about not going home to be with him as he lay dying. She felt the tug of her last obligation to him. She wondered if she should bag this monkey thing and fly to Kansas. But she felt that it was her duty to go through with the operation. She decided to take a chance that her father would live awhile longer.
PART THREE
Smashdown
INSERTION
December 1, Friday
The alarm went off at four-thirty. Jerry Jaax got up, shaved, brushed his teeth, threw on clothes, and was out of there. The teams were going to wear civilian clothes. No one wanted to attract attention. Soldiers in uniform and camouflage, putting on space suits… it could set off a panic.
It was five o’clock by the time he arrived at the Institute. There was no sign of dawn in the sky. A crowd of people had already gathered by a loading dock on the side of the building, under floodlights. There had been a hard freeze during the night, and their breath steamed in the air. Gene Johnson, the Ajax of this biological war, paced back and forth across the loading dock among a pile of camouflaged military trunks—his stockpile of gear from Kitum Cave. The trunks contained field space suits, battery packs, rubber gloves, surgical scrub suits, syringes, needles, drugs, dissection tools, flashlights, one or two human surgery packs, blunt scissors, sample bags, plastic bottles, pickling preservatives, biohazard bags marked with red flowers, and hand-pumped garden sprayers for spraying beach on space suits and objects that needed to be decontaminated. Holding a cup of coffee in his fist, Gene grinned at the soldiers and rumbled, “Don’t touch my trunks.”
A white unmarked supply van showed up. Gene loaded his trunks into the van by himself and set off for Reston. He was the first wave.
By now, copies of The Washington Post were hitting driveways all over the region. It contained a front-page story about the monkey house:
One of the deadliest known human viruses has turned up for the first time in the United States, in a shipment of monkeys imported from the Philippines by a research laboratory in Reston.
A task force of top-level of yesterday devising a detailed program to trace the path of the rare Ebola virus and who might have been exposed to it. That includes interviews with the four or five laboratory workers who cared for the animals, which have since been destroyed as a precaution, and any other people who were near the monkeys.
Federal and state health officials played down the possibility that any people had contracted the virus, which has a 50 to 90 percent mortality rate and can be highly contagious to those coming into direct contact with its victims. There is no known vaccine. “There’s always a level of concern, but I don’t think anybody’s panicked,” said Col. C.J. Peters, a physician and expert on the virus.
C.J. knew that if people learned what this virus could do, there would be traffic jams heading out of Reston, with mothers screaming at television cameras, “Where are my children?” When he talked to the Washington Post reporters, he was careful not to discuss the more dramatic aspects of the operation. (“I thought it would not be a good idea to talk about space suits,” he explained to me much later.) He was careful not to use scary military terms such as amplification, lethal chain of transmission, crash and bleed, or major pucker factor. A military biohazard operation was about to go down in a suburb of Washington, and he sure as hell didn’t want the Post to find out about it.
Half of this biocontainment operation was going to be news containment. C.J. Peter’s comments to The Washington Post were designed to create an impression the situation was under control, safe, and not all that interesting. C.J. was understating the gravity of the situation. But he could be very smooth when he wanted, and he used his friendliest voice with the reporters, assuring them over the telephone that there really was no problem, just kind of a routine technical situation. Somehow the reporters concluded that the sick monkeys had been “destroyed as a precaution” when in fact the nightmare, and the reason for troops, was that the animals hadn’t been destroyed.
As to whether the operation was safe, the only way to know was to try it. Peters felt that the larger danger could come from sitting back and watching the virus burn through the monkeys. There were five hundred monkeys inside that building. That was about three tons of monkey meat—a biological nuclear reactor having a core meltdown. As the core of monkeys burned, the agent would amplify itself tremendously.
C.J. arrived at the loading dock of the Institute at five o’clock in the morning. He would accompany the group down to the monkey house to see Jerry’s team inserted, and then he would drive back to the Institute to deal with the news media and government agencies.
At six-thirty, he gave an order to move out, and the column of vehicles left Fort Detrick’s main gate and headed south, toward the Potomac River. It consisted of a line of ordinary automobiles—the officer’s family cars, with the officers inside wearing civilian clothes, looking like commuters. The line of cars followed behind two unmarked military vehicles. One was a snow-white ambulance and the other was a supply van. It was an unmarked Level 4 biocontainment ambulance. Inside it there were an Army medical-evacuation team and a biocontainment pod known as a bubble stretcher. This was a combat medical stretcher enclosed by a biocontainment bubble made of clear plastic. If someone was bitten by a monkey, he would go into the bubble, and from there he would be transferred to the Slammer, and perhaps from there he would go to the Submarine, the Level 4 morgue. The supply van was a white unmarked refrigerator truck. This was to hold dead monkeys and tubes of blood.
There was not a uniform in the group, although a few members of ambulance team wore camouflage fatigues. The caravan crossed the Potomac River at Point of Rocks and hit Leesburg Pike just as rush hour began. The traffic became bumper to bumper, and the officers began to get frustrated. It took them two hours to reach the monkey house, contending the whole way with ill-tempered commuters. Finally the column turned into the office park, which by that time was filling up with workers. The supply van and the ambulance were driven along the side of the monkey house, up onto a lawn, and were parked behind the building, to get them out of sight. The back of the building presented a brick face, some narrow windows, and a glass door. The door was the insertion point. They
