A loose monkey—this was what Jerry had feared the most. They can leap long distances. He had been bitten by monkeys himself, and he knew what that felt like. Those teeth went in deep.
They looked into the room through the window in the door. The whole room had exploded in activity, monkeys whirling in their cages and shaking them violently, giving off high, excited whoops. There were about a hundred screaming monkeys in that room. But where was the loose monkey? They couldn’t see it.
They found a catching net, a pole with a baglike net at the end. They opened the door and edged into the room.
The events that followed have a dreamlike quality in people’s memories, and the memories are contradictory. Specialist Rhonda Williams has a clear memory that the monkey escaped from the room. She says she was sitting on a chair when it happened, that she heard a lot of shouting and suddenly the animal appeared and ran under her feet. She froze in terror, and then burst out laughing—nervous, near-hysterical laughter. The animal was a small, determined male, and he was not going to let these people get near him with a net.
Jerry Jaax insists that the monkey never got out of the room. It is possible that the monkey ran under Specialist Williams’s feet and then was chased back into the room again.
The loose monkey was very frightened and the soldiers were very frightened. He stayed in the room for a while, running back and forth across the cages. The other monkeys apparently grew angry at this and bit at the monkey’s toes. The monkey’s feet began to bleed, and pretty soon it had tracked blood all over the room. Jerry got on the radio and reported that a monkey was loose and bleeding. Gene Johnson told him to do whatever had to be done. How about shooting the monkey? Bring in a handgun, like an Army .45. Jerry didn’t like that idea. Looking into the room, he noticed that the loose monkey was spending most of its time hiding behind the cages. If you tried to shoot the monkey, you’d be firing into the cages, and the bullet could hit a cage or a wall and might ricochet inside the room. Getting a gunshot wound in this building might be fatal. He decided that the safest procedure would be to go into the room and capture the monkey with the net. He took Sergeant Amen with him.
As they entered the room, they could not see the monkey. Jerry proceeded forward slowly, holding the net up, ready to swipe it at the monkey. But where was it? He could not see very well. His faceplate was covered with sweat, and the light was dim in the room. He might as well have been swimming underwater. He edged slowly forward, keeping his body away from the cages on either side, which were filled with hysterical, screaming, leaping, bar-rattling monkeys. The sound of monkeys raising hell was deafening. He was afraid of being bitten by a monkey if he came too close to a cage. So he stayed in the middle of the room as he went forward, while Sergeant Amen followed him, holding a syringe full of drugs on a pole.
“BE CAREFUL, SERGEANT,” he said. “DON’T GET BITTEN. STAY BACK FROM THE CAGES.”
He edged his way from cage to cage, looking into each one, trying to see through it toward the shadowy wall behind. Suddenly he saw a flicker of movement out of the corner of his eye, and he turned with the net, and the monkey went soaring through the air over him, making a twelve-foot jump from one side of the room to the other.
“GET HIM! HE’S OVER HERE!” he said. He waved the net, slammed it around over the cages, but the monkey was gone.
He walked through the room again, slowly. The monkey leaped across the room, a huge, tail-swing leap. This animal was airborne whenever it moved. Jerry waved his net and missed. “SON OF A BITCH!” he shouted. The monkey was too fast for him. He would spend ten or fifteen minutes searching the room, squinting past the cages. If he found the monkey, the monkey would leap to the order side of the room. It was a small monkey, built for life in the trees. He thought. This environment favors the monkey over us. We don’t have the tools to handle this situation. We are not in control here—we are along for the ride.
Outside the building, Colonel C.J. Peters stopped by to observe the operation. He was dressed in Levi’s and a sweater, along with sandals and socks, even thought it was a cold day. With his sandals and mustache, he appeared to be a sixties type or some sort of a low-grade employee, may be a janitor. He noticed a stranger hanging around the front of the building. Who was it? Then the man started to come around the side of the building. He was obviously after something, and he was getting too close to the action. C.J. hurried forward and stopped the man and asked him what he was doing.
He was a reporter from The Washington Post. “What’s happening around here?” he asked C.J.
“Well—aw—nothing much is happening,” C.J. replied. He was suddenly very glad he had not worn his colonel’s uniform today—for once, his bad habits had paid off. He did not encourage the reporter to come around to the side of the building and have a look in through the window. The reporter left shortly afterward, having seen and heard nothing of interest. The Washington Post suspected that something funny was happening at the monkey house but the reporters and editors who worked on the story couldn’t quite get to the bottom of it.
“This monkey knows nets,” Jerry shouted to the sergeant. The monkey was not going to let himself be caught by some fool of a human wearing a plastic bag. They decided to leave him in the room overnight. Meanwhile, the surviving monkeys were becoming increasingly agitated. The teams killed most of the monkeys this day, working straight through until after dark. Some of the soldiers began to complain that they were not being given enough responsibility, and so Jerry let them take over more of the hazardous work from the officers. He assigned Specialist Rhonda Williams to duty at the euthanasia table with Major Nate Powell. The major had a drugged monkey on the table, holding its arms behind its back in case it woke up, while Rhonda uncapped a syringe and gave the monkey a heart stick-plunged the needle into the chest between the ribs, aiming for the heart. She pushed the plunger, sending a load of drugs into the heart, which killed the monkey instantly. She pulled the needle out, and a lot of blood squirted out of the puncture wound. That was a good sign; it meant she had punctured the heart. If she got blood on her gloves, she rinsed them in a pan of bleach, and if she got blood on her space suit, she wiped it down with a sponge soaked in bleach.
It was awful when she missed the heart. She pushed the plunger, the poison flooded the animals’s chest around the heart, and the monkey jumped. It doubled up, its eyes moved, and it seemed to struggle. This was only a death reflex, but she gasped and her own heart jumped.
Then Colonel Jaax put her to work at the bleed table with Captain Haines, and presently she began drawing blood from unconscious monkeys. She inserted a needle into the animals’ leg vein and drew the blood. Their eyes were open. She didn’t like that. She felt they were staring at her.
She was bleeding a monkey when suddenly she thought its eyes moved, and it seemed to be trying to sit up. It was awake. It looked at her in a daze and reached out and grabbed her by the hand, the one that was holding the syringe. The monkey was very strong. The needle came out of its thigh, and blood spurted out. Then the animal started pulling her hand towards its mouth! It was trying to bit her hand! She screamed: “GRAB HIM, SOMEBODY, PLEASE! HE’S GETTING UP!” Captain Haines caught the monkey’s arms and pinned it to the table, shouting, “WE HAVE ONE THAT’S AWAKE! NEED KETAMINE!”
The needle, in coming out of the monkey, had cut the monkey’s leg vein. Immediately a ball of blood the size of a baseball formed in the monkey’s leg. It just got bigger and bigger, the blood pouring under the skin, and Rhonda almost burst into tears. She pressed her hands on the blood ball to stop the internal bleeding. Through her gloves, she could feel the blood swelling. A ball of Ebola blood.