The Cobra Event (2 page)

Part Two

1969

Forbidden Zone

JOHNSTON ATOLL

LOOKING INTO HISTORY
is like shining a flashlight into a cave. You can’t see the whole cave, but as you play the flashlight around, a hidden shape is revealed.

ONE EVENING
late in July 1969, a thousand miles southwest of Hawaii, the waters of the Pacific Ocean had calmed to a liquefaction of blue. A moderate swell rocked the deck of a fishing boat that was heading slowly across the prevailing wind, and the boat’s radio masts and weather sensors swung gently. The sun had descended to a hands-breadth above the horizon. Mare’s-tail clouds fingered in veils across the sky, but you could see the moon, a gibbous moon, as pale as a spirit. Somewhere on that sphere the Americans had been walking.

Captain Gennadi Yevlikov held his binoculars on the moon, wondering which of its dark areas was the Sea of Tranquility, but he couldn’t remember. Then he focused on the horizon toward the north. He could not see Johnston Atoll, but he knew it was there, and that the Americans were there, too.

All around Yevlikov on the deck, the scientific men from the Ministry of Health hurried to put out petri dishes and to set up their bubblers and glassware. They moved among equipment racks, intense, disquieted, trying not to break anything. Fishing nets, unused and in perfect condition, hung from winches above them.

A sailor standing near the bow shouted, and Yevlikov turned and saw that the man was pointing to the north, in the direction of the atoll. Yevlikov looked with his naked eyes, then snapped up his binoculars. He saw a tiny brown dot on the horizon, above the water. It was not moving. There was no sound. For a moment he thought the dot must be a seabird.

It was not moving. But it grew larger.

Then he saw the wings. They were greenish brown.

It was an American Phantom jet with Marine Corps coloration. The reason it seemed not to be moving was that it was heading straight for the fishing boat. It was perhaps a hundred meters off the water. It gave no sound, which meant that it was traveling at supersonic speed. Yevlikov saw a pop-flash around the tail: the pilot had just fired his afterburner. The Phantom, already traveling close to Mach 1, was still accelerating toward the boat. It came lower, skimming the surface of the sea. They saw a V-shaped shock wave tearing up the water behind the Phantom. There was total silence.

“
Down!
” Yevlikov shouted.

With a thudding of bodies, everyone hurled himself to the deck. They stabbed their fingers into their ears and opened their mouths wide.

They all did this, except for one scientist from the Ministry of Health, a thin man wearing spectacles. He stood by an assembly of laboratory glassware, his mouth hanging open, his eyes fixed on the incoming Phantom like a man before a firing squad.

The Phantom went over the Russian trawler going Mach 1.4. It passed exactly ten feet above the boat’s fore-deck, flicking by in silence.

An instant later, the sonic boom blew over them like a bomb. Yevlikov felt his body bounce on the deck. The breath was knocked from his lungs. Every window and port, every gauge, the petri dishes, all of the laboratory glassware, everything made of glass exploded, and Yevlikov felt glass showering over his back. The air was filled with falling glass and the roar of the departing Phantom, its afterburner glowing as it climbed to get off the water. Two more trailing sonic booms passed over the boat, echoes of the Phantom’s passage.

The Ministry of Health scientist was left standing in a heap of glass. His eyeglasses had cracked. He touched one finger to his ear. His finger came away with blood on it. His eardrum had broken.

Yevlikov stood up. “Clean up, please.”

“Captain! There’s another one out there!”

“What’s he doing?”

The second Marine Corps Phantom was flying easily, almost languidly, turning at an angle to the boat. There was a playful quality in its movements that seemed incredibly dangerous.

One of the sailors muttered, “American
gavnuki
.” Shitheads.

Now the Phantom’s wings tipped, and it banked, and it began to close with the Russian trawler. This time, they heard the Phantom coming. It was traveling slower than the speed of sound.

There was a clattering noise mixed with a slushy sound of bodies moving through broken glass as the crew and scientists fell to the deck. This time Yevlikov remained standing. I will not bow to these people again, he said to himself.

The incoming Phantom cocked its wings slightly as the pilot made fine adjustments to his aim. He was targeting the boat.

He won’t open, Yevlikov said to himself.

The Phantom opened.

He saw the cannon tracers coming straight in. Whanging explosions tore through the bow where the shells hit, and white towers ripped the water. The Phantom floated by with a metallic whine, the pilot holding up his middle finger at them, and then there was a
whomp
and a flash as he kicked his afterburner in their faces, a gesture of contempt.

“
Razebi ego dushu!
” Yevlikov yelled. Fuck his soul.

The man from the Ministry of Health was kneeling now by his broken glassware, in complete paralysis. His eyeglasses were gone. Streams of blood were threading from both ears down his neck, and a wet stain had coursed down his trousers. They took him below, and Yevlikov set a course for the east, moving his trawler along the edge of the forbidden zone. “Try to find some dishes that aren’t broken,” he said to the scientists.

SEVENTY MILES NORTH
of Yevlikov’s boat, Lieutenant Commander Mark Littleberry, M.D., stood with his colleagues on the beach at Johnston Atoll, the monkey labs at their backs, the Pacific Ocean moving gently at their feet, a mild surf rushing and sliding over coral sand. The sun had touched the horizon. The mare’s tails of clouds feathered slowly, ice crystals moving in the upper air. The inversion had occurred. The winds had smoothed. The moon was rising. Conditions were perfect for a laydown.

“I feel sorry for those guys on the tugboats,” one of the scientists remarked.

“I feel even sorrier for the monkeys,” another scientist said.

Each person on the beach was holding a gas mask, in case the wind shifted unexpectedly.

“The men will be all right,” Littleberry said. Mark Littleberry was a medical doctor in the United States Navy, a tall, handsome African-American with a crewcut and gold-rimmed spectacles. He was a medical officer for the Johnston Atoll Field Trials, and he was regarded as brilliant by the other scientists in the program, but perhaps too ambitious, a man who seemed determined to rise high and do it at a young age. Littleberry had a degree from Harvard University and a medical degree from Tulane University. His Harvard degree did not make him very popular among the military people, but they listened to him because he knew the science. He had made valuable contributions toward explaining the exact ways in which the weapons they were testing entered the lungs, and he was bringing in crucial data from monkey dissections. But Mark Littleberry was becoming unhappy with his success. He had begun to ask himself what, exactly, he was doing.

“Here it comes,” someone said.

All heads turned to the left. They saw a Marine Corps Phantom flying low and straight, about two hundred meters above the water, traveling just under the speed of sound. It flew parallel to the beach, heading west toward the setting sun. It carried no stores underwing except for a small, strange-looking pod. They watched. In the evening light they saw it: something bleeding into the air from the wing pod. The wing pod was known as a dry line-source disseminator, and the way it worked was highly classified. What was coming out of the pod was a living weapon in the form of a dry powder.

It was a whitish haze that almost instantly dissipated and became invisible. The particles were very small, and they had been treated with a special plastic to make them last longer in the air. They were between one micron and five microns across, the ideal size for a weaponized bioparticle. It is the size particle that can be inhaled deep into the human lung, a particle that will stick naturally to the membrane of the lung. To get an idea of the size of such a particle, you can think of it this way: about fifty particles lined up in a row would span the thickness of a human hair. One or two such particles trapped in the lung, if they are a weapon, can cause a fatal infection that kills in three days. Particles this small do not fall out of the air. They stay aloft. You can’t smell them, you can’t see them, you don’t know they are there until you start to get sick. Not even rain can wash them out of the sky—they don’t get caught by raindrops. Rain actually improves the effectiveness of a bioweapon in the air, because rain clouds block sunlight. Bio-aerosols don’t do well in sunlight. It destroys their genetic material and kills them. Biological laydowns are best done at night.

The jet shrank and seemed to vanish into the disc of the sun, leaving a departing rumble. It was doing a streakout across the Pacific Ocean. The streakout line was fifty miles long.

“Beautiful,” someone said.

“Incredible.”

The talk among the watchers grew technical.

“What’s the dissemination rate?”

“One gram per meter.”

“That’s all?”

“A gram per meter! Holy Christ! That’s
nothing
.” The jet was spraying only one kilogram of hot agent per kilometer of flight.

“If it was anthrax,” one of the scientists remarked, “they’d have to shovel it from a dump truck to have any effect on the monkeys.”

“There’s only about eighty kilos of agent in that pod.” Less than two hundred pounds.

“Yow. And he’s laying it for fifty miles.”

“What
is
the agent?”

“It’s the Utah cocktail. You didn’t hear me say that.” The identity of the material was classified.

“The Utah cocktail? That’s
Utah
he’s laying down? Man, a fifty-mile laydown.”

The streakout line was downwind of Johnston Atoll. The hot agent would drift away from the island. As the line of particles left by the jet moved along with the wind, it would sweep across a huge area of sea. The laydown worked along the same principle as a windshield wiper making a stroke across an area of window, except that the line of bioparticles moved straight across the sea, without turning.

“That could create, what—two thousand square miles of hot zone?” one of the scientists said.

“If the stuff works. It won’t work.”

“Two thousand square miles of hot zone with just two hundred pounds of agent. Jesus. That’s two ounces of weapon per square mile. That will never work.”

“That’s a laydown the size of Los Angeles!”

“I wonder what it’ll do to our Russian friends out there?”

“Poor saps.”

“Ask the doctor here what he thinks.”

“I think it’s going to work,” Mark Littleberry said.

He went off by himself and walked along the beach. He was thinking about the monkeys, thinking about what he had seen recently at Pine Bluff, Arkansas, at the Biological Directorate X-201 plant, thinking about who he was. But Littleberry had work to do, people to worry about. He stayed up all night, maintaining radio contact with the Navy crews on board the tugboats. The tugboats were pulling barges full of monkeys.

The monkey barges with their tugboats were stationed at intervals downwind. The monkeys were rhesus monkeys housed in metal cages. Some of the cages sat on the decks of the barges; some of them were in closed rooms in the holds of the barges. The scientists were interested in knowing if closing yourself in a room might provide some protection against a biological weapon drifting in the open air.

Littleberry stayed by a radio set in the command center on the island. “Tugboat Charlie. Come in. This is Littleberry. How are you guys doing? Y’all hanging in there?”

Fifty miles downwind, at the far end of the test zone, a tugboat captain was standing at the wheel of his boat. He was wearing a heavy rubber space suit with an Army gas mask that was equipped with special biological filters,
HEPA
filters.
HEPA
stands for
h
igh-
e
fficiency
p
article
a
rrestor. A
HEPA
filter will trap a virus or a bacterial particle before it can get into the lungs.

“We’re dying of the heat here,” the captain said. “The heat’s gonna kill us before the bugs do.”

“Copy, I hear you. Wind direction is south-southwest. Holding steady at eight knots. They’re going to call you in as soon as possible,” Littleberry said. He was watching the weather reports coming from the ships stationed around the test zone. Judging from the speed of the wind, he could guess where the wave of hot agent was as it moved southwest with the trades.

It was a soft night in the South Pacific, and a pod of sperm whales played in the forbidden zone. One of the techs on the last tugboat was sure he had seen white jets in the moonlight, whales rising and blowing. The waves flashed with phosphorescence as they slopped against the hull of the monkey barge. The men inside the rubber suits were drenched with sweat, and they worried constantly about getting a rip, a crack in their masks. The tugboat’s engines rumbled gently, pulling the monkey barge, keeping the boat on location. The captain could hear the monkeys hooting and calling. The animals were nervous. Something was up. Something bad. The humans were doing experiments again. It was enough to make any monkey a nervous wreck.

On the tugboat’s deck, two Army technicians in space suits were tending the bubbler and the blood clock. The bubbler was sucking air through a glass tank full of oil. The oil would collect particles that were in the air. The blood clock was a rotating dish that held a circular slab of blood agar. Agar is a jelly on which bacteria grow easily. Blood agar has blood mixed into it, and it has a dark red color. Biological weapons often grow better in the presence of blood.