“C.j.!” he shouted through his helmet. “IT’S PETER JAHRLING. IT’S REAL, AND IT’S EBOLA.”
“Naw!” C.J. replied.
“YEAH.”
“Ebola? It’s gotta be a contamination,” C.J. said.
“NO, IT ISN’T A CONTAMINATION.”
“Could you have gotten the samples mixed up?”
“YEAH, I KNOW—MY FIRST THOUGHT WAS THAT SOMEBODY HAD SWITCHED THE SAMPLES. BUT THEY WEREN’T SWITCHED, C.J.—BECAUSE I DID THE TEST TWICE.”
“Twice?”
“EBOLA ZAIRE BOTH TIMES. I’VE GOT THE RESULTS RIGHT HERE. I CAN PASS THEM TO YOU. TAKE A LOOK FOR YOURSELF.”
“I’m coming down there,” C.J. said. He hung up the phone and hurried downstairs to Jahrling’s hot lab.
Jahrling, meanwhile, picked up a sheet of waterproof paper on which he had written the results of his tests. He slid the paper into a tank full of EnviroChem. The tank went through the wall to a Level 0 corridor outside the hot zone. The tank worked on the same principle as a sliding cash drawer in a teller’s window. You could pass an object from the hot zone through a tank into the normal world. It would be disinfected on its way through the tank.
C.J. stood at a thick glass window on the other side, looking in at Jahrling. They waited for several minutes while the chemicals penetrated the paper and sterilized it. Then C.J. opened the tank from his side and removed the paper, dripping with chemicals, and held it in his hands. He motioned to Jahrling through the window: Go back to the phone.
Jahrling shuffled back to the emergency telephone and waited for it to ring. It rang, and there was C.J.‘s voice on the line: “Get out of there, and let’s go see the commander!”
It was time to move this thing up the chain of command.
Jahrling deconned out through the air lock, got dressed in his street clothes, and hurried to C.J. Peters’s office, and they both went to the office of the commander of USAMRIID, a colonel named David Huxsoll. They brushed past his secretary—told her it was an emergency—and sat down at a conference table in his office.
“Guess what?” C.J. said. “It looks like we’ve found a filovirus in a bunch of monkeys outside Washington. We’ve recovered what we think is Ebola.”
Colonel David Huxsoll was an expert in biohazards, and this was the sort of situation he thought the Institute was prepared to handle. Within minutes, he telephoned Major General Philip K. Russell, MD, who was the commander of the United States Army Medical Research and Development Command, which has authority over USAMRIID, and had set up a meeting in Russell’s office in another building at Fort Detrick.
Huxsoll and C.J. Peters spent a few moments talking about who else should be brought in. They hit upon Lieutenant Colonel Nancy Jaax, the Institute’s chief of pathology. She could identify the signs of Ebola in a monkey. Huxsoll picked up his phone. “Nancy, it’s David Huxsoll. Can you get over to Phil Russell’s office right now? It’s damned important.”
“It was a dark November evening, and the base was beginning to quiet down for the night. At the moment of sundown that day, there was no sun visible, only a dying of the light behind clouds that flowed off Catoctin Mountain. Jaax met Jahrling and the two colonels on their way across the parade ground beside the Institute. A detail of marching soldiers stopped before the flagpole. The group of people from the Institute also stopped. From a loudspeaker came a roar of a cannon and then the bugle music of “Retreat,” cracklish and cheap-sounding in the air, and the soldiers lowered the flag while the officers came to attention and saluted. C.J. Peters felt both embarrassed and oddly moved.
“Retreat” ended, and the soldiers folded up the flag, and the Institute people continued on their way.
General Russell’s office occupied a corner of a low-slung Second World War barracks that had been recently plastered with stucco into a hopeless effort to make it look new. It had a view of the legs of Fort Detrick’s water tower. Consequently, the general never opened his curtains. The visitors sat on a couch and hairs, and the general settled behind his desk. He was a medical doctor who had hunted viruses in Southeast Asia. He was in his late fifties, a tall man with hair thinning on top and gray at the temples, lined cheeks, a long jaw, pale blue eyes that gave him a look of intensity, and a booming, deep voice.
C.J. Peters handed the general a folder containing the photographs of the life form in the monkey house.
General Russell stared, “Holy shit,” he said. He drew a breath. “Man. That’s filovirus. Who the hell took this picture?” He flipped to the next one.
“These were done by my microscopist, Tom Geisbert,” Jahrling said. “It could be Ebola. The tests are showing positive for Ebola Zair.”
C.J. then gave an overview of the situation, telling the general about the monkeys in Reston, and finishing with these words: “I’d say we have a major pucker factor about the virus in those monkeys.”
“Well, how certain are you that it’s Ebola?” General Russell asked. “I’m wondering if this could be Marburg.”
Jahrling explained why he didn’t think it was Marburg. He had done his test twice, he said, and both times the samples were positive to the Mayinga strain of Ebola Zaire. As he spoke to the general, he was very careful to say that test did not in itself prove that the virus was Ebola Zaire. It showed only that is was closely related to Ebola Zaire. It might be Ebola, or it might be something else—something new and different.
C.J. said, “We have to be very concerned and very puckered if it is of the same ilk as Ebola.”
They had to be very puckered, Russell agreed. “We have a natural emergency on our hands,” he said. “This is an infectious threat of major consequences.” He remarked that this type of virus had never been seen before in the United States, and it was right outside Washington. “What the hell are we going to do about it?” he said. Then he asked them if there was any evidence that the virus could travel through air. That was a crucial question.
There was evidence, horrifying but incomplete, that Ebola could travel through the air. Nancy Jaax described the incident in which her two healthy monkeys had died of presumably airborne Ebola in the weeks after the bloody-glove incident, in 1983. There was more evidence, and she described that, too. In 1986, Gene Johnson had infected monkeys with Ebola and Marburg by letting them breathe it into their lungs, and she had been the pathologist for that experiment. All of the monkeys exposed to airborne virus had died except for one monkey, which managed to survive Marburg. The virus, therefore, could infect the lungs on contact. Furthermore, the lethal dose was fairly smalclass="underline" as small as five hundred infectious virus particles. That many particles of airborne Ebola could easily hatch out of a single cell. A tiny amount of airborne Ebola could nuke a building full of people if it got into the airconditioning system. The stuff could be like plutonium. The stuff could be worse than plutonium because it could replicate.
C.J. said, “We know it’s infectious by air, but we don’t know how infectious.”
Russell turned to Jaax and asked, “Has this been published? Did you publish it?”
“No, sir,” she said.
He glared at her. She could see him thinking, Well, Jaax, why the hell hasn’t it been published?
There were plenty of reasons, but she didn’t feel like giving them just now. She believed that Gene Johnson, her collaborator, had difficulty writing papers. And, well, they just had not gotten around to publishing it, that was all. It happens. People sometimes just don’t get around to publishing papers.
Hearing the discussion, Peter Jahrling chose not to mention to the general that he might have sniffed just a little bit of it. Anyway, he hadn’t sniffed it, he had only whiffed it. He had kind of like waved his hand over it, just to bring the scent to his nose. He hadn’t inhaled it. He hadn’t like jammed the flask up in his nostril and snorted it or anything like that. Yet he had a feeling he knew what the general might do if he found out about it—the general would erupt in enough profanity to lift Jahrling off his feet and drop him into the Slammer.