ambulance. They left the building in a real hurry, locking it after themselves.
There were four hundred and fifty monkeys alive in the building, and their hoots and cries sounded in the empty hallways. It was eleven o’clock in the morning. A snow flurry came and went. The weather was turning colder. In the monkey house, the air-handling equipment had failed for good. The air temperature in the building had soared beyond ninety degrees, and the place had turned steamy, odorous, alive with monkey calls. The animals were hungry now, because they had not been fed their morning biscuits. Here and there, in rooms all over the building, some of the animals stared from glazed eyes in masklike faces, and some of them had blood running from their orifices. It landed on metal trays under their cages… ping, ping, ping.
91-TANGOS
1030 Hours, Monday
The crisis was getting worse at Reston. Dan Dalgard felt he was losing control of everything. He set up a conference call with all the senior managers in his company and informed them of the situation—two employees were down, and the second man could be breaking with Ebola—and he told the managers that had offered to turn the monkey house over to the Army. They approved his action, but they said they wanted the oral agreement with the Army to be put in writing. Furthermore, they wanted the Army to agree to take legal responsibility for the building.
Dalgard then called C.J. Peters and asked that the Army assume responsibility for any liability that would arise after the Army took over. C.J. flatly rejected that proposal. He saw a need for clarity, speed, and no lawyers. He felt that the outbreak had ballooned to the point where a decision had to be made. Dalgard agreed to fax him a simple letter turning the monkey over to the Army. They worked up some language, and C.J. carried the letter by hand to the office of General Philip Russell. He and the general pored over the letter, but they did not choose to show it any Army lawyers. Russell said, “We have to convince the lawyers of the path of righteousness.” They signed the letter, faxed it back to Dalgard, and the monkey house fell into the hands of the Army.
Jerry Jaax would have to lead a much larger biohazard team back into the monkey house. The number of animals that needed to be dealt with was staggering. His troops were untested, and he himself had never been in combat. He didn’t know, couldn’t know, how he or his people would perform a chaotic situation involving intense fear of an unpleasant death.
Jerry was the commanding officer of the 91-Tangos at the Institute. The Army’s animal-care technicians are classified 91-T, which in Army jargon becomes 91-Tango. The younger 91-Tangos are eighteen years old and privates. While the ambulance was taking Milton Frantig to the hospital, Jerry called a meeting of his 91-Tangos and civilian staff in a conference room in the Institute. Although most of the soldiers were young and had very little or no experience in space suits, the civilians were old men, and some were Level 4 specialists who had worn Chemturions on a daily basis. The room was jammed, and people sat on the floor.
“The virus is Ebola or Ebola-like agent,” he said to them. “We are going to be handling large amount of blood. And we will be handling sharp instruments. We are going to use the disposable biocontainment suits.”
The room was silent while he spoke. He didn’t mention that a man was down, because he didn’t know about it—C.J. Peters hadn’t told him about that. For the time being, Peters was staying quiet about the development.
Jerry said to his people, “We are looking for volunteers. Is there anyone in this room who does not want to go? We can’t make you go.”
When no one backed out, Jerry looked around the room and picked his people: “Yep, he’s going. She’s going, and, yep, you’re going.” In the crowd, there was a sergeant named Swiderski, and Jerry decided that she could not go because she was pregnant. Ebola has particularly nasty effects on pregnant women.
No combat unit in the Army could handle this work. There would be no hazard pay, as there is in a war zone. The Army has a theory regarding biological space suits. The theory is that work inside a space suit is not hazardous, because you are wearing a space suit. Hell, if you handled hot agents without a space suit, that would be hazardous work. The privates would get their usual pay: seven dollars an hour. Jerry told them that they were not to discuss the operation with anyone, not even members of their families. “If you have any tendency to claustrophobia, consider it now,” he said. He told them to wear civilian clothes and to show up at the Institute’s loading dock at 0500 hours the next morning.
December 4-5, Monday-Tuesday
The soldiers didn’t sleep much that night, and neither did Gene Johnson. He was terrified for the “kids”, as he called them. He had fair share of scares with hot agents. Once in Zaire, he had stuck himself with a bloody needle while taking blood from a mouse. There was reason to believe the mouse was hot, and so they had airlifted him to the Institute and put him in the Slammer for thirty days. “That was not a fun trip,” as he put it. “They treated me as if I would die. They wouldn’t give me scissors to cut my beard because they thought I would be suicidal. And they locked me in at night.” At Kitum Cave, while wearing a space suit and dissecting animals, he had been nicked three times with bloody tools. Three times his space suit had been punctured and his skin broken and cut smeared with animal blood. He regarded himself as lucky not to have picked up Marburg or something else at Kitum Cave. Having had some close calls, he was deeply afraid of what had invaded the monkey house.
Johnson lived in a rambling house on the side of Catoctin Mountain. He sat in his study most of the night, thinking about procedures. Every movement of the body in a hot area has to be controlled and planned. He said to himself, Where’s this virus going to get you? It’s going to get you through the hands. The hands are the weak point. Above all, the hands must be under control.
He sat in an easy chair and held up one hand and studied it. Four fingers and an apposed thumb. Exactly like a monkey’s hand. Except that it was wired to a human mind. And it could be enclosed and shielded by technology. The thing that separated the human hand from Nature was the space suit.
He stood up and went through motions in the air with his hands. Now he was giving a monkey an injection. Now he was carrying the monkey to a table. He was putting the monkey on the table. He was in a hot zone. He was opening the monkey up, and now he was putting his hands into a bloody lake of amplified hot agent. His hands were covered with three layers of rubber and then smeared with blood and hot agent.
He paused and jotted notes on paper. Then he turned back to his imaginary hot zone. He inserted a pair of scissors into the money and clipped out part of the spleen. He handed it to someone. Where would that person be standing? Behind him? Now he imagined himself holding a needle in his hand. Okay, I have a needle in my hand. It’s lethal object. I’m holding it in my right hand if I’m right-handed. Therefore, my buddy should stand to my left, away from the needle. Now my buddy’s hands. What will my buddy’s hands be doing? What will everyone’s hands be doing? By early in the morning, he had written many pages of notes. It was a script for a biohazard operation.
Jeery Jaax left home at four o’clock in the morning, while Nancy was still asleep. He met Gene Johnson at the loading dock, where they went over Gene’s script. Jerry memorized it, and meanwhile the team members began to show up, soldiers in Jerry’s unit. Many of them arrived on foot, having walked over from their barracks. They stood around, waiting for their orders. It was pitch-dark, and only the floodlights illuminated the scene. Jerry had decided to use a buddy system inside the building, and he began deciding who would be paired with whom. On a piece of paper, he drew up a roster of buddies, and he wrote down the order of entry, the sequence in which they would be inserted into the building. He stood before them and read the roster, and they got into their vehicles—a white refrigerator truck, a couple of unmarked passenger vans, an unmarked pickup truck, the white ambulance containing the bubble stretcher, and a number of civilian cars—and headed for Reston. They became trapped in rush-hour traffic again, surrounded by half-asleep yuppies in suits who were sucking coffee from foam cups and listening to traffic reports and easy rock and roll.
