Then there was the additional frightening possibility that this virus near Washington was not Ebola Zaire. That it was something else. Another hot strain from the rain forest. An unknown emerger. And who could say how it moved or what it could do to humans? General Russell began to think out loud. “We could be in for a hellacious event,” he said. “Given that we have an agent with a potential to cause severe human disease, and given that it appears to be uncontrolled in the monkey house, what do we do? We need to do the right thing, and we need to do it fast. How big is this sucker? And are people going to die?” He turned to Colonel C.J. Peters and asked, “So what are our option here?”
C.J. had been thinking about this already. There are three ways to stop a virus—vaccines, drugs and biocontainment. For Ebola, there was only one way to stop it. There was no vaccine for Ebola. There was no drug treatment for Ebola. That left only biocontainment.
But how to achieve biocontainment? That was tricky. As far as C.J. could see, there were only two options. The first option was to seal off the monkey colony and watch the monkey die—and also keep a close watch on the people who had handled the monkeys and possibly put them into quarantine as well. The second option was to go into the building and sterilize the whole place. Kill the monkeys—give them lethal injections—burn their carcasses, and drench the entire building with chemicals and fumes—a major biohazard operation.
General Russell listened and sad, “So option one is to cut the monkeys off from the rest of the world and let the virus run its course in them. And option two is to wipe them out. There aren’t any more options.”
Everyone agreed that there were no other options.
Nancy Jaax was thinking. It may be in the monkey house now, but it ain’t going to stay there very damn long. She had never seen a monkey survive Ebola. And Ebola is a species jumper. All of those monkeys were going to die, and they were going to die in a way that was almost unimaginable. Very few people on earth had seen Ebola do its work on a primate, but she knew exactly what it could do. She did not see how the virus could be contained unless the monkey house was set up for quarantine with an independently filtered air supply. She said, “How ethical is it to let these animals go a long time before they die? And how do we assure the safety of people in the meantime? I’ve watched these guys die of Ebola, and it’s not a fun way to go—they’re sick, sick, sick animals.” She said that she wanted to go into the monkey house to look at the monkeys. “The lesions are easy to miss unless you know what you are looking for,” she said, “and then it’s as plain as the nose on you face.”
She also wanted to go there to look at pieces of tissue under a microscope. She wanted to look for crystalloids, or “inclusion bodies” Bricks. If she could find them in the monkey meat, that would be another confirmation that the monkeys were hot.
Meanwhile, there was the larger question of politics. Should the Army become involved? The Army has a mission, which is to defend the country against military threats. Was this virus a military threat? The sense of the meeting ran like this: military threat or not, if we are going to stop this agent, we’ve got to throw everything at it that we’ve got.
That would create a small political problem. Actually it would create a large political problem. The problem had to do with the Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta, Georgia. The C.D.C. is the federal agency that deals with emerging diseases. It has a mandate from Congress to control human disease. This is the C.D.C.‘s lawful job. The Army does not exactly have a mandate to flight viruses on American soil. Yet the Army has the capability and the expertise to do it. Everyone in the room could see that a confrontation might boil up with the C.D.C. if the Army decided to move in on the monkey house. There were people at C.D.C. who could be jealous of their turf. “The Army doesn’t have the statutory responsibility to take care of this situation,” General Russell pointed out, “but the Army has the capability. The C.D.C. doesn’t have the capability. We have the muscle but not the authority. The C.D.C. has the authority but not the muscle. And there’s going to be a pissing contest.”
In the opinion of General Russell, this was a job for soldiers operating under a chain of command. There would be a need for people trained in biohazard work. They would have to be young, without families, willing to risk their lives. They would have to know each other and be able to work in teams. They had to be ready to die.
In fact, the Army had never before organized a major field operation against a hot virus. The whole thing would have to be put together from scratch.
Obviously there were legal questions here. Lawyers were going to have to be consulted. Was this legal? Could the Army simply put together a biohazard SWAT team and move in on the monkey house? General Russell was afraid the Army’s lawyers would tell him that it could not, and should not, be done, so he answered the legal doubts with these words: “A policy of moving out and doing it, an asking forgiveness afterward, is much better than a policy of asking permission and having it denied. You never ask a lawyer for permission to do something. We are going to do the needful, and the lawyers are going to tell us why it’s legal.”
By this time, the people in the room were shouting and interrupting one another. General Russell, still thinking out loud, boomed, “So the next question is, Who the fuck is going to pay for it?” Before anyone had a chance to speak, he answered the question himself. “I’ll get the money. I’ll beat it out of somebody.”
More shouting.
The general’s voice rose above the noise. “This is a big one coming, so let’s not screw it up, fellas,” he said. “Let’s write the right game plan and then execute it.” In the Army, an important job is called a mission, and a mission is always carried out by a team, and every team has a leader. “We have to agree on who is going to be in charge of this operation,” the general continued. “C.J. Peters has got this action here. He’s in charge of the operation. He’s the designated team leader. Okay? Everybody agreed on that?
Everybody agreed.
“C.J., what we need is a meeting,” the general said. “Tomorrow we’re going to have a meeting. We have to call everybody.”
He looked at the clock on the wall. It was five-thirty, rush hour. People were leaving work, and monkeys were dying in Reston, and the virus was on the move. “We’ve got to pull the chain on this whole thing,” the general said. “We’ll have to inform everybody simultaneously, as soon as possible. I want to start with Fred Murphy at the C.D.C. I don’t want him to be sandbagged by this.”
Frederick A. Murphy was one of the original discovers of Ebola virus, the wizard with an electron microscope who had first photographed the virus and whose work had hung in art museums. He was an old friend of General Russell’s. He was also an important official at C.D.C., the director of the National Center for Infectious Diseases.
Russells put his hand on the telephone on his desk. He stared around the room. “One last time: are you sure you’ve got what you think you’ve got? Because I’m gonna to make this phone call. If you don’t have a filovirus, we will look like real assholes.”
Around the room, one by one, they told him they were convinced it was a thread virus.
“All right. Then I’m satisfied we’ve got it.”