While an army wearing the proper protective gear would be immune, a rather simple breathing apparatus with a filter, mistakes would always happen, and pictures of our troops bleeding out and dying horrible deaths playing on twenty-four-hour news outlets would be disastrous.
Unsuspecting armies, on the other hand, would be devastated. Untreated anthrax in its respiratory form was almost eighty percent fatal, if he remembered the data on woolsorter’s correctly. He made a mental note to call up all files they had on woolsorter’s later to see what their data bank had on it.
“Bingo,” Blackie said, rocking back in his swivel chair. A formality lay before him, getting an agent for USAMRIID code-named Paco to the quarantine perimeter set up by the Mexican Army around Tlateloco so Janus could hand over the all-important sample.
Within hours it would be at Fort Detrick under microscopes… if nothing went wrong.
He picked up a phone and auto-dialed Paco, glancing at the clock. He didn’t care if Paco did not wish to be awakened this early. Paco had to be on the next flight to Mexico City, then to Tlateloco, to arrive by three o’clock.
Arturo Vela, code-named Paco, answered with a sleepy voice, “Hello?”
“This is Blackie. Get your Mexican ass out of bed and on the next plane to Mexico City. Use the federale credentials and uniform we gave you last year. You’ll be in and out before anybody is the wiser.
“You’re picking up a container from Janus at a quarantine command post outside a place called Tlateloco, a couple of hundred miles south of Mexico City.”
Paco yawned and asked, “And how am I to get from Mexico City to this village in the jungle?”
“I don’t give a shit how you get there… hell, rent a helicopter if you have to. Just get it back here as soon as possible.”
Blackie hesitated, and then he said, “Oh, and Janus says to watch this motherfucker. It’s really hot. Thirty dead in less than a week. CDC Wildfire is there, under Mason Williams. He and the other bug-chasers concur. They are calling it a mutant respiratory anthrax. Be real fuckin’ careful how you handle it.”
“Do you know what time it is, Colonel? I don’t know if I can get to the airport in time to catch a flight to Mexico City that will get me there in time to do all this.”
“I know what time I can have your court-martial scheduled for if you aren’t on the next plane to Mexico.”
Paco sighed and said wearily. “Yes, Colonel, I understand.”
“I hope you do, Paco, ’cause a bullet to the brain is a lot easier than a court-martial if you fail me!”
After he hung up on Paco, Blackie sat thinking for a minute. Paco wasn’t the sharpest tack in the box, he thought. Perhaps he’d better begin to arrange some insurance in case the stupid Mexican failed in his mission.
Blackie took out a key and opened the safe built into his desk. He took out a black book and opened it. There was a list of names of dishonorably discharged Navy SEALs and Army Rangers who he occasionally hired to do acquisitions from out of the country.
They were the meanest sons of bitches he’d ever worked with and had never failed him in all the years he’d been doing this dirty work.
He began to dial his encrypted phone. Might as well give them a heads-up in case he needed them later.
As he dialed, he made a mental note to have Lieutenant Collins get the BL4 lab up and running and ready for the specimens Janus was sending. He sure as hell didn’t want to take a chance on letting a bug this hot escape their laboratory facilities into the Maryland countryside.
Chapter 14
Dawn broke suddenly in the tropical jungle. One minute the sky was pitch black, the next a brilliant orange sun was burning morning mist away, raising temperatures. Mason came instantly awake in the dorm, a room at the end of the Cytotec BL4 in which the team members slept on small cots lined up adjacent to one another.
He rubbed his eyes, which were crusty and bloodshot after four hours of sleep. He’d made Shirley and Jakes go to bed at two a.m., fearing fatigue would cause an accident with these virulent samples and perhaps inadvertent infection of one of the team with a proven deadly pathogen.
He rolled on his cot, noting that Jakes was still snoring softly and everyone else in the dorm was also still asleep. He arose quietly, making as little noise as possible. His people had worked for almost twenty-four straight hours since their arrival in Mexico and he felt they deserved their rest.
After morning coffee jolted his system awake, he suited up in his Racal and entered the lab. The lab was the one place in the Cytotec where absolute isolation procedures were practiced.
Prior to retiring the night before, Shirley had started cultures of the hot-bug in both blood agar and nutrient mediums, as well as chocolate agar and other more exotic mixtures. Several slides were set up for fluorescent antibody staining and DNA probes and polymerase chain reaction tests and even the much more complicated ELISA test.
The specimens had been “cooking” for four hours and should be ready in about five hours. Meanwhile, Mason intended to try specific toxin and antigen tests and a monoclonal antibody experiment to see if the bacteria had a capsule.
Before collapsing into his cot the previous night, Mason pulled down a reference book on microbiology and refreshed his memory about how the anthrax bacillus was supposed to react to these tests. Today, he would determine if the organism in tissues from the archaeology students was really anthrax or merely a closely related imposter.
He had been working for three hours mixing reagents, staining slides, inoculating tissues into growth mediums, and putting drops of heavily contaminated serum in a flame spectrometer to try to identify specific chemicals in the bacteria when a loud knock on the glass of the lab door caught his attention.
Jakes and Shirley pointed to the Racals in the adjacent room and raised their eyebrows in question. Mason stepped to a wall intercom and thumbed its transmit button. “No, I’m doing okay for now. Why don’t you guys have your breakfast, then suit up the others and Dr. Sullivan and form a search party. There’s one student still unaccounted for and I’d like to find him so we can send Lauren back to the States; also I want you to keep an eye out for the Indio boy Lauren and I saw yesterday. I still feel he might be the key to this entire mystery.”
He started to turn away and then had another thought. “And could you take a look at Dr. Matos and see how he’s doing this morning? I checked on him briefly when I got up but he was sleeping and I didn’t want to wake him. He looked pretty ragged earlier and his temp was still elevated.”
The two doctors nodded and moved off, Shirley rubbing her eyes while yawning. Mason watched them leave, worrying he was pushing everyone too hard, but he knew he had no choice. The first twenty-four to forty-eight hours of a Wildfire intervention were critical to the success of a mission. The disease had to be identified and local authorities, both medical and civil, needed to be apprised of whatever quarantine and medical precautions should be implemented. So very much to do, and so little time, he thought.
Leaning over the counter, Mason peered down at the culture plates, lined up in order of importance. Several petri dishes were growing small grayish-white bacterial colonies. On the blood agar, it was too soon to tell if colonies were nonhemolytic as anthrax was.
He broke open a box of commercial test strips and laid them on the counter. As soon as the cultures had grown enough, he would do sequential biochemical tests on the bacteria, as well as searches for presence or absence of a capsule, lack of motility, catalase positivity, lysis by gamma bacteriophage, penicillin susceptibility, and aerobic endospore production.