“Check it out,” Johnson replied.
Sergeant Klages lifted the lid. He found himself staring into the eyes of frozen monkeys. They were sitting in clear plastic bags. Their bodies streamed with blood icicles. They were monkeys from Room F, the original hot spot of the outbreak, some of monkeys that had been sacrificed by Dan Dalgard. He shut the lid and called Johnson on the radio:
“GENE, YOU’RE NOT GOING TO BELIEVE WHAT I’VE FOUND IN THIS FREEZER. I’VE GOT TEN OR FIFTEEN MONKEYS.”
“Aw, shit, Klages!”
“WHAT SHOULD I DO WITH THEM?”
“I don’t want any more problems with monkeys? No more samples! Decon them!”
“I ALSO FOUND SOME VIALS OF SEDATIVE.”
“Decon it, baby! You don’t know if any dirty needles have been stuck in those bottles. Everything comes out of this building! Everything comes out!”
Sergeant Klages and a civilian, Merhl Gibson, dragged the bags out of the freezer. They tried to cram the monkeys into the hatboxes but they didn’t fit. They were twisted into bizarre shapes. They left them in the hallway to thaw. The decon teams would deal with them tomorrow.
The 91-Tangos shuffled out through the air-lock corridor, two by two, numb and tired beyond feeling, soaked with sweat and continual fear. They had collected a total of thirty-five hundred clinical samples. They didn’t want to talk about the operation with each other or with their officers.
When the team members left Fort Detrick, they noticed that Gene Johnson was sitting on the grass under the tree in front of the building. He didn’t want talk to anyone, and they were afraid to talk to him. He looked terrible. His mind was a million miles away, in the devastated zone inside the building. He kept going over and over what the kids had done. If the guy has the needle in his right hand, you stand on his left. You pin the monkey’s arms behind so it can’t turn around and bite you. Did anyone cut a finger? So far, it looked as if all the kids had made it.
The decon team suited up immediately while the soldiers were coming out of the building. It was now after dark, but Gene Johnson feared Ebola so much that he did not want to let the building sit untouched overnight.
The decon team was led by Merhl Gibson. He put on a space suit and explored the building to get a sense of what needed to be done. The rooms and halls were bloodstained and stewn with medical packaging. Monkey biscuits lay everywhere and crunched underfoot. Monkey feces lay in loops on the floor and was squiggled in lines across the walls and printed in the shapes of small hands. He had a brush and a bucket of bleach, and he tried to scrub a wall.
Then he called Gene on the radio, “GENE, THE SHIT IN HERE IS LIKE CEMENT, IT WON’T COME OFF.”
“You do what’s best. Our orders are to clean this place up.”
“WE’LL TRY TO CHIP IT OFF,” Gibson sad.
The next day, they went to a hardware store and bought putty knives and steel spatulas, and the decon team went to work chipping the walls and floor. They almost suffocated from the heat inside their suits.
Milton Frantig, the man who had thrown up on the lawn, had now been kept in isolation at Fairfax Hospital for several days. He was feeling much better, his fever had vanished, he had not developed any nosebleeds, and he was getting restless. Apparently he did not have Ebola. At any rate, it did not show up in his blood tests. Apparently he had a mild case of flu. The C.D.C. eventually told him he could go home.
By day nineteen after the whiffing incident, when they hadn’t had any bloody noses, Peter Jahrling and Tom Geisbert began to regard themselves as definite survivors. The fact that Dan Dalgard and the monkey workers had so far shown no signs of breaking with Ebola also reassured them, although it was very puzzling. What on earth was going on with this virus? It killed monkeys like flies, they were dripping virus from every pore, yet no human being had crashed. If the virus wasn’t Ebola Zaire, what was it? And where had it come from? Jahrling believed that it must have come from Africa. After all, Nurse Mayinga’s blood reacted to it. Therefore, it must be closely related to Ebola Zaire. It was behaving like the fictional Andromeda strain. Just when we thought the world was coming to an end, the virus slipped away, and we survived.
The Centers for Disease Control focused its efforts on trying to trace the source of the virus, and the trail eventually led back to the Ferlite Farms monkey-storage facility near Manila. All of the Reston monkeys had come from there. The place was a way station on their trip from the forests of Mindanao to Washington. Investigators found that monkeys had been dying in large numbers there, too. But it looked as though no Philippine monkey workers had become sick either. If it was an African virus, what was it doing in the Philippines? And why weren’t monkey handlers dying? Yet the virus was able to destroy a monkey. Something very strange was going on here. Nature had seemed to be closing in on us for a kill, when she suddenly turned her face away and smiled. It was a Mona Lisa smile, the meaning of which no one could figure out.
December 18, Monday
The decon team scrubbed the building with bleach until they took the paint off the concrete floors, and still they kept scrubbing. When they were satisfied that all the building’s inside surfaces had been scoured, they move on to the final stage, the gas. The decon team taped the exterior doors, windows, and vents of the building with silver duct tape. They taped sheets of plastic over the exterior openings of the ventilation system. They made the building airtight. At various places inside the monkey house, they set out patches of paper saturated with spores of a harmless bacterium known as Bacillus Subtilis Niger will kill almost anything.
The decon team brought thirty-nine Sunbeam electric frying pans to the monkey house. Sunbeam electric frying pans are the Army’s tool of choice for a decon job. The team laid an electric cable along the floor throughout the building, strung with outlets, like a cord for Christmas-tree lights. At points along the cable, they plugged in the Sunbeam frying pans. They wired the cable to a master switch. Into each Sunbeam frying pan they dropped a handful of disinfecting crystals. The crystals were white and resembled salt. They dialed the pans to high. At 1800 hours on December 18, someone threw the master switch, and the Sunbeams began to cook. The crystals boiled away, releasing formaldehyde gas. Since the building’s doors, windows, and vents were taped shut, the gas had nowhere to go, and it stayed inside the building for three days. The gas penetrated the air ducts, soaked the offices, got into drawers in the desks, and got inside pencil sharpeners in the drawers. It infiltrated Xerox machines and worked its way inside personal computers and inside the cushions of chairs and fingered down into the floor drains until it touched pools of lingering bleach in the water traps. Finally the decon team, still wearing space suits, went back inside the building and collect the spore samples. The Sunbeam treatment had killed the Niger.
There is an old piece of wisdom in biohazard work that goes like this: you can never know when life is exterminated. Life will survive almost any blitz. Total, unequivocal sterilization is extremely difficult to achieve in practice and is almost impossible to verify afterward. However, a Sunbeam cookout that lasts for three days and exterminates all samples of Niger implies success. The monkey house had been sterilized. Ebola had met opposition. For a short while, until life could re-establish itself there, the Reston Primate Quarantine Unit was the only building in the world where nothing lived, nothing at all.
THE MOST DANGEROUS STRAIN
1990 January
The strain of Ebola virus that had erupted near Washington went into hiding somewhere in the rain forest. The cycling went on. The cycling must always go on if the virus is to maintain its existence. The Army, having
