Rhonda noticed that he had a strange look on his face.
“YOU HAVE A HOLE IN YOUR SUIT,” he said.
I knew this was going to happen, she thought.
“WHERE DID YOU GET IT?” he asked.
“I DON’T KNOW!”
He slapped a piece of tape over the hole. Then he washed the two soldiers down with bleach, spraying it all over them, and pounded on the door that led to the staging room. Someone opened it, and they went out. Immediately the support team opened their head bubbles and peeled off their suits. Their scrub suits, underneath, were soaked with sweat. They began to shiver.
“There’s a television-news van out front,” Gene said.
“I had a hole in my suit,” Rhonda said to him. “Did I get the virus?”
“No. You had enough pressure in your suit to protect you the whole time.” He hurried them outdoors. “Get into the van and lie down,” he said. “If anybody asked you any questions, keep you mouths shut.”
They couldn’t find their clothes in the van. They rolled themselves up in some overcoats to keep warm and lay down on the seats, out of sight.
The television crew parked their van near the front door of the monkey house, and the reporter began to poke around, followed by a cameraman. The reporter knocked on the front door and rang the buzzer—no answer. He peered in the front windows—the curtains were drawn, and he couldn’t see anything. Well, nothing was happening in there. This place was deserted. He and the cameraman didn’t notice the white vehicles parked behind the building, or if they noticed them it didn’t seem interesting. There was nothing going on here.
The television men returned to their van and sat in it for a while, hoping that someone would happen or that someone would show up so that they could get some sound bites for the evening news, but this was getting to be boring, it was an awfully cold day, and the light was fading. It did not occur to them to go around the side of the building and point their video camera toward a window. If they had done that, they would have gotten enough footage to fill the entire evening news, with something left over for CBS’s 60 minutes. They would have gotten footage of soldiers in space suits smeared with Ebola blood, engaged in the first major biohazard mission the world ever knew, and they would have gotten shots of biohazard buddies coming out into the staging area in pairs and being stripped of their suits by the supporting team. But the news crew didn’t walk around the building, and so far as I know, there is no video footage of the Reston action.
Meanwhile, the two women lay on their back in the van for many minutes. Suddenly the television crew left. Gene Johnson, poking his head around the corner of the building, reported that the coast was clear. The women got dressed and then hurried off to relieve themselves in the wooded area behind the building. That was where they found the needles—two used hypodermic syringes with needles attached to them. The needles were uncapped and bare, obviously used. It was impossible to tell how long they had been lying in the grass. Some of the safety people put on gloves and picked up the needles, and as they searched the area, they found more needles in the grass.
The last person to come out was Jerry Jaax. He emerged around six in the evening, having lost between five and ten pounds of weight. It was fluid loss from sweating, and his face was ashen. His hair, instead of look silver, looked white.
There was no food for the soldiers, and they were hungry and thirsty. The soldiers took a vote on where to eat, and it came out in favor of Taco Bell. Gene Johnson said to them, “Don’t tell anyone why are here. Don’t answer any question.”
The caravan started up, engines roaring in the cold, and headed for Taco Bell. The soldiers ordered soft tacos with many, many jumbo Cokes to replace the sweat they’d lost inside their space suits. They also ordered a vast number of cinnamon twists—everything to do—yeah, put it in boxes, and hurry, please. The employees were staring at them. The soldiers looked like soldiers, even in jeans and sweat shirts—the men were bulked up and hard-looking, with crew cuts and metal-framed military eyeglasses and a few zits from too much Army food, and the women looked as if they could do fifty push-ups and break down a weapon. A man came up to Sergeant Klages while he was waiting for his food and said, “Where were you doing over there? I saw those vans.” Sergeant Klages turned his back on the man without saying a word.
After midnight on the water bed in the master bedroom of Jaax house on the slopes of Catoctin Mountain, Nancy and Jerry Jaax caught up on the news while their daughter, Jaime, slept beside them. Jerry told her that the day’s operation had gone reasonably well and that no one had stuck himself or herself with a needle. He told her he hadn’t realized how lonely it is inside biohazard suit.
Nancy wrapped herself around him and rested her head against his neck in the way they had held each other since college. She thought he looked shrunken and thin. He was physically more exhausted than she had seen him in years. She picked up Jaime and carried her to bed, then returned and folded herself around her husband. They fell asleep holding each other.
A BAD DAY
December 6, Wednesday
For the past several days and nights, an Army scientist named Thomas Ksiazek had been working in his space suit in a Level 4 lab trying to develop a rapid test for Ebola virus in blood and tissue. He got the test to work. It was called a rapid Elisa test, and it was sensitive and easy to perform. He tested urine and blood samples from Milton Frantig, the man who had vomited on the lawn and who was now in an isolation room at Fairfax Hospital. Frantig came up clean. His urine and blood did not react to the Ebola test. It looked as if he had the flu. This was a mystery. Why weren’t those guys breaking with Ebola?
The weather warmed up and turned sunny, and the wind shifted around until it blew from the south. On the second day of the massive nuking—Wednesday—the Army caravan flowed with commuter traffic to Reston and deployed behind the monkey house. Things went more smoothly. By eight o’clock in the morning, the teams had begun their insertions. Gene Johnson brought a floodlight, and they set it up in the gray corridor.
Jerry Jaax went in first and fed the monkeys. He made his rounds with Sergeant Amen, checking each room, and here and there they found monkeys dead or in terminal shock. In a lounge, they found some chairs, and dragged them into a hallway and arranged them in a semicircle so that the soldiers could sit on them while they took their rest breaks and filled up syringes. As the day wore on, you could see exhausted soldiers and civilians in orange space suits, men and women, their head bubbles clouded with condensation, sitting on the chairs, in the hallway, loading syringes with T-61 and sorting boxes full of blood tubes. Some talked with each other by shouting, and others just stared at the walls.
At midmorning, Jerry Jaax was working in Room C. He decided to take a break to rest and check up on his people. He left the room in charge of Sergeants Amen and Klages while he went out into the hallway. Suddenly there was a commotion in Room C, and the monkeys in that room burst out in wild screeches. Jerry ran back to the room, where he found the sergeants outside the door, looking in, in a state of alarm.
“WHAT HAPPENED?”
“A MONKEY ESCAPED, SIR.”
“AW, SHIT!” Jaax roared.
The animal had bolted past Sergeant Amen as he opened the cage, and the sergeants had immediately run out of the room and shut the door behind them.