parked the supply van up close to the door.
At the edge of the lawn, behind the building, there was a line of underbrush and trees sloping down a hillside. Beyond that, there was a playground next to a day-care center. They could hear shouts of children in the air, and when they looked through the underbrush, they could see bundled-up four-years-olds swinging on swings and racing around a playhouse. The operation would be carried out near children.
Jerry Jaax studied a map of the building. He and Gene Johnson had decided to have all the team members put on their space suits inside the building rather than out on the lawn so that if any television crews arrived there would be nothing to film. The men went through the insertion door and found themselves in an empty storage room. It was the staging room. They could hear faint cries of monkeys beyond a cinder-block wall. There was no sign of any human being in the monkey house.
Jerry Jaax was going to be the first man in, the point man. He had decided to take with him one of his officers, Captain Mark Haines, a former Green Berets’ scuba-diving school. He had jumped out of airplanes at night into the open sea, wearing scuba gear. (“I’ll tell you one thing,” Haines once said to me. “I don’t do scuba diving as a civilian. The majority of my diving has been in the Middle East.”) Captain Haines was not a man who would get claustrophobia and go into a panic in a space suit. Furthermore, Captain Haines was a veterinarian. He understood monkeys.
Jaax and Haines climbed into the supply van and pulled a plastic sheet across the van’s back door for privacy, and stripped naked, shivering in the cold. They put on surgical scrub suits and then walked across the lawn, opened the glass door, and went into the storage room, the staging area, where an Army support team—the ambulance team, led by a captain named Elizabeth Hill—helped them into their space suits. Jerry knew nothing about field biological suits, and neither did Captain Haines.
The suits were orange Racal suits, designed for field use with airborne biological agents, and they were the same type of suit that had been used in Kitum Cave—in fact, some of them had come back from Africa in Gene Johnson’s trunks. The suit has a clear, soft plastic bubble for a helmet. The suit is pressurized. Air pressure is supplied by an electric motor that sucks air from outside and passes it through virus filters and then injects it into the suit. This keeps the suit under positive pressure, so that any airborne virus particles will have a hard time flowing into it. A Racal suit performs the same job as a heavy-duty Chemturion space suit. It protects the entire body from a hot agent, surrounds the body with superfiltered air. Army people generally don’t refer to Racals as space suits. They call them Racals or field biological suits; but they are, in fact, biological space suits.
Jaax and Haines put on rubber gloves, and the support team taped the gloves to the sleeves of the suits while they held their arms out straight. On their feet, they wore sneakers, and over the sneakers they pulled bright yellow rubber boots. The support team taped the boots to the legs of the suits to make an airtight seal above the ankle.
Jerry was terribly keyed up. In the past he had lectured Nancy on the dangers of working with Ebola in a space suit, and now he as leading a team into an Ebola hell. At the moment, he didn’t care what happened to himself, personally. He was expendable, and he knew it. Perhaps he could forget about John for a while in there. He switched on his electric blower, and his suit puffed up around him. It didn’t feel too bad, but it made him sweat profusely. The door was straight ahead. He held the map of the monkey house in his hand and nodded to Captain Haines. Haines was ready. Jerry opened the door, and they stepped inside. The sound of the monkeys became louder. They were standing in a windowless, lightless, cinder-block corridor that had doors had either end: this was the makeshift air lock, the gray zone. The rule inside the air lock was that the two doors, the far door and the near door, could never be open at the same time. This was to prevent a backflow of contaminated air from coming into the staging room. The door closed behind them, and the corridor went dark. It went pitch-dark. Aw, son of bitch. We forgot to bring flashlights. Too late now. They proceeded forward, feeling their way down the walls to the door at the far end.
Nancy Jaax woke up her children at seven-thirty. She had to shake Jason, as always, to get him out of bed. It didn’t work, so she turned one of the dogs loose on him. He hit the bed flying and climbed all over Jason.
She put on sweatpants and a sweat shirt and went downstairs to the kitchen and flipped on the radio and turned it to a rock-and-roll station and popped a Diet Coke. The music fired up the parrot. Herky began to scream along with John Cougar Mellencamp. Parrots really respond to electric guitar, she thought.
The children sat at the kitchen table, eating instant oatmeal. She told them that she would be working late, so they would be on their own at suppertime. She looked in the freezer and found a stew. It would do fine for kids. They could defrost it in the microwave. She watched from the kitchen window as they walked down the driveway to the bottom of the hill to wait for the school bus… “This work is not for a married female. You are either going to neglect your work or neglect your family” were the words of a superior officer long ago.
She cut a bagel for herself, and brought along an apple, and ate them in the car on the way to Reston. By the time she arrived at the monkey house, Jerry had already suited up and gone inside. The staging room was crowded, warm, loud, confused. The experts on the use of space suits were giving advice to team members as they suited up. Nancy herself had never worn a Racal field suit, but the principles are the same as with a heavy-duty Chemturion. The main principle is that the interior of the space suit is a cocoon housing the normal world, which you bring with you into the hot area. If there were a break in the suit, the normal world would vanish, merging with the hot world, and you would be exposed. She spoke to the soldiers as they suited up. “Your suits are under pressure,” she said. “If you get a rip in your suit, you have to tape it shut right away, or you’ll lose your pressure, and contaminated air could flow inside the suit.” She held up a roll of brown sticky tape. “Before I go in, I wrap extra tape around my ankle, like this.” She demonstrated how to do it: she wound the roll around her ankle several times, the way you tape up a sprained ankle. “You can tear off a length of tape from you ankle and use it to patch a hole in your suit,” she said. “A hundred chancy things can happen to rip your suit.”
She told them about Ebola in monkeys. “If these monkey are infected with Ebola, then they are so full of virus that a bit from one of them would be a devastating exposure,” she said. “Animals that are clinically ill with Ebola shed a lot of virus. Monkeys move real quick. A bite would be a death warrant. Be exquisitely careful. Know where your hands and body are at all the times. If you get blood on your suit, stop what you are doing and clean it off right away. Don’t let blood stay on your gloves. Rinse them off right away. With bloody gloves, you can’t see a hole in the glove. Also, one other thing. You really don’t want to drink a lot of coffee or liquids before going in. You will be in your space suit for a long time.”
The batteries that pressurized the suit had a life span of six hours. People would have to leave the hot area and be deconned out before their batteries failed, or they would be in trouble.
Jerry Jaax and Captain Mark Haines felt their way down the dark corridor, toward the door that led into the hot zone. They opened it and found themselves standing at the junction of two corridors, bathed in a cacophony of monkey cries. The air-handling equipment still wasn’t working, and the temperature in the place seemed as if it was above ninety degrees. Jerry’s head bubble fogged up. He pushed the bubble against his face to rub the moisture off the faceplate, and now he could see. The walls were gray cinder block, and the floor was painted concrete.
Just then, he noticed a blur of motion on his left, and he turned and saw two Hazleton workers walking towards him. They weren’t supposed to be in here! The area was supposed to be sealed off, but they had come in by another route that led through a storeroom. They wore respirators, but nothing covered their eyes. When they saw the two men in space suits, they froze, speechless. Jerry could not see their mouths, but he could see their eyes, wide with astonishment. It was as if they had suddenly discovered that they were standing on the moon.
Jerry didn’t know what to say. Finally he said, “WHICH WAY TO ROOM H?”—shouting to be heard over his blowers.
The workers led him down the corridor to the infected room. It was at the far end of the hall. Then they retreated to the front of the building and found Dan Dalgard, who had been sitting in an office, waiting for the Army to come in. He showed up at Room H moments later, wearing a respirator, to find out what was going on. Jerry looked at him as if he was insane. It was as if you went to a meeting with someone, and the person showed up naked.
Dalgard was not happy with the space suits. Apparently he had not realized how the Army would be outfitted. Dalgard gave them a tour of Room H, feeling exceptionally nervous. “Looks like we have some sick monkeys in here,” he said. Some of the monkeys went berserk when they saw the space suits. They spun in circles in their cages or cowered in the corners. Others stared at the humans with fixed expressions on their faces.
