The Hot Zone (29 page)

She cut a bagel for herself, and brought along an apple, and ate them in the car on the way to Reston. By the time she arrived at the monkey house, Jerry had already suited up and gone inside.

The staging room was crowded, warm, loud, confused. The experts on the use of space suits were giving advice to team members as they suited up. Nancy herself had never worn a Racal field suit, but the principles are the same as with a
heavy-duty Chemturion. The main principle is that the interior of the space suit is a cocoon housing the normal world, which you bring with you into the hot area. If there were a break in the suit, the normal world would vanish, merging with the hot world, and you would be exposed. She spoke to the soldiers as they suited up. “Your suits are under pressure,” she said. “If you get a rip in your suit, you have to tape it shut right away or you’ll lose your pressure, and contaminated air could flow inside the suit.” She held up a roll of brown sticky tape. “Before I go in, I wrap extra tape around my ankle, like this.” She demonstrated how to do it: she wound the roll around her ankle several times, the way you tape up a sprained ankle. “You can tear off a length of tape from your ankle and use it to patch a hole in your suit,” she said. “A hundred chancy things can happen to rip your suit.”

She told them about Ebola in monkeys. “If these monkeys are infected with Ebola, then they are so full of virus that a bite from one of them would be a devastating exposure,” she said. “Animals that are clinically ill with Ebola shed a
lot
of virus. Monkeys move real quick. A bite would be a death warrant. Be exquisitely careful. Know where your hands and body are at all times. If you get blood on your suit, stop what you are doing and clean it off right away. Don’t let blood stay on your gloves. Rinse them off right away. With bloody gloves, you can’t see a hole in the glove. Also, one other thing. You really don’t want to
drink a lot of coffee or liquids before going in. You will be in your space suit for a long time.”

The batteries that pressurized the suit had a life span of six hours. People would have to leave the hot area and be deconned out before their batteries failed, or they would be in trouble.

Jerry Jaax and Captain Mark Haines felt their way down the dark corridor, toward the door that led into the hot zone. They opened it and found themselves standing at the junction of two corridors, bathed in a cacophony of monkey cries. The air-handling equipment still wasn’t working, and the temperature in the place seemed as if it was above ninety degrees. Jerry’s head bubble fogged up. He pushed the bubble against his face to rub the moisture off the faceplate, and now he could see. The walls were gray cinder block, and the floor was painted concrete.

Just then, he noticed a blur of motion on his left, and he turned and saw two Hazleton workers walking toward him. They weren’t supposed to be in here! The area was supposed to be sealed off, but they had come in by another route that led through a storeroom. They wore respirators, but nothing covered their eyes. When they saw the two men in space suits, they froze, speechless. Jerry could not see their mouths, but he could see their eyes, wide with astonishment. It was as if they had suddenly discovered that they were standing on the moon.

Jerry didn’t know what to say. Finally he said, “WHICH WAY TO ROOM H?”—shouting to be heard over his blowers.

The workers led him down the corridor to the infected room. It was at the far end of the hall. Then they retreated to the front of the building and found Dan Dalgard, who had been sitting in an office, waiting for the Army to come in. He showed up at Room H moments later, wearing a respirator, to find out what was going on. Jerry looked at him as if he was insane. It was as if you went to a meeting with someone and the person showed up naked.

Dalgard was not happy with the space suits. Apparently he had not realized how the Army would be outfitted. He gave them a tour of Room H, feeling exceptionally nervous. “Looks like we have some sick monkeys in here,” he said. Some of the monkeys went berserk when they saw the space suits. They spun in circles in their cages or cowered in the corners. Others stared at the humans with fixed expressions on their faces.

“You see the clinical signs,” Dalgard said, pointing to a monkey. “I feel pretty confident I can tell when a monkey is getting sick. They get a little bit depressed, they go off their feed, and in a day or two they are dead.”

Jerry wanted to look at all the monkeys in the monkey house. He and Captain Haines went back out into the corridor and went from room to room through the entire building. They found other monkeys that seemed depressed, with the same
glazed expression on their faces. Jaax and Haines, both of whom knew a lot about monkeys, didn’t like the feel of this whole building. Something lived in here other than monkeys and people.

Nancy Jaax got ready to go inside. She changed into a scrub suit in the van, ran across the lawn, and entered the staging area. The support team helped her suit up. She gathered several boxes of syringes and went in with Captain Steven Denny. They walked down the air-lock corridor and came to the far door. She opened the door and found herself in the long corridor. It was empty. Everyone was down the hall in Room H. Jerry thought his wife looked like the Pillsbury dough boy. Her suit was too large for her, and it billowed around her when she walked.

Nancy noticed mucus and slime on the noses of some of the monkeys. That scared her, because it seemed so much like the flu or a cold, when it wasn’t. Dan Dalgard, wearing a respirator and a jumpsuit, selected four sick monkeys for sacrifice, the ones he thought looked the sickest. He reached into the cages and gave the monkeys their shots. When they crumpled and fell asleep, he gave them a second round of shots, and that stopped their hearts.

The room was jammed with people in space suits. They kept coming in in pairs, and they milled around with nothing to do. One of them was Sergeant Curtis Klages. He turned to someone
and said, “WELL, THIS IS A BIG CHARLIE FOXTROT.” That’s code for C.F., which means “cluster fuck.” A Charlie Foxtrot is an Army operation that winds up in confusion, with people bumping into one another and demanding to know what’s going on.

Nancy happened to glance at the sergeant, checking his suit instinctively, and she saw that he had a tear across his hip. She touched the sergeant’s arm and pointed. She reached down to her ankle, where she kept her extra tape, and taped the hole for him.

She removed the four dead monkeys from their cages, holding them by the backs of the arms, and loaded them into plastic biohazard bags. She carried the bags to the entry door, where someone had left a garden sprayer full of Clorox bleach along with more bags. She double-bagged the monkeys, spraying each bag with bleach, and then she loaded the bags into cardboard biohazard containers—hatboxes—and sprayed them to decon them. Finally she loaded each hatbox into a third plastic bag and sprayed it. She pounded on the door. “IT’S NANCY JAAX. I’M COMING OUT.” The door was opened by a sergeant standing on the other side, a member of the decon team. He was wearing a Racal suit, and he had a pump sprayer filled with bleach. She went into the air lock, pushing the hatboxes ahead of her.

In the darkness and in the whine of their blowers, he shouted to her, “STAND WITH YOUR ARMS OUT, AND TURN AROUND
SLOWLY.” He sprayed her for five minutes, until the air lock stank of bleach. It felt wonderfully cool, but the smell leaked through her filters and made her throat sting. He also sprayed the bags. Then he opened the door to the staging area, and she blinked at the light and came out, pushing the bags ahead of her.

The support team peeled off her suit. She was drenched with sweat. Her scrubs were soaked. Now it was freezing cold. She ran across the lawn and changed into her civilian clothes in the back of the van.

Meanwhile, people loaded the bags into boxes, and loaded the boxes into the refrigerator truck, and Nancy and a driver headed off for Fort Detrick. She wanted to get those monkeys into Level 4 and opened up as fast as possible.

Jerry Jaax counted sixty-five animals in the room, after the four that Nancy had removed. Gene Johnson had brought a special injector back from Africa. Jerry used this device to give shots to the monkeys. It was a pole that had a socket on one end. You fitted a syringe into the socket, and you slid the pole into the cage and gave the monkey a shot. You also needed a tool to pin the monkey down, because monkeys don’t like needles coming at them. They used a mop handle with a soft U-shaped pad on the end. Captain Haines held the mop handle against the monkey to immobilize it, and Jerry ran the pole into the cage and hit the
monkey’s thigh with a double dose of ketamine, a general anesthetic. They went through, the room from cage to cage, hitting all the monkeys with the drug. Pretty soon the monkeys began to collapse in their cages. Once a monkey was down, Jerry gave it a shot of a sedative called Rompun, which put it into a deep sleep.

When all the monkeys were down and asleep, they set up a couple of stainless-steel tables, and then, one monkey at a time, they took blood samples from the unconscious monkeys and gave them a third injection, this time of a lethal drug called T-61, which is a euthanasia agent. After a monkey was clinically dead, it was opened up by Captain Steve Denny. He took samples of liver and spleen, using scissors, and dropped the samples into plastic bottles. They bagged the dead monkeys, loaded them into hatboxes, and piled the hatboxes along the corridor. Dan Dalgard, meanwhile, left the room and remained in an office at the front of the building for the rest of the day.

By late afternoon, all the monkeys in Room H had been put to death. Behind the building, through the trees and down the hill, children ran in circles around their playhouse. Their shouts carried far in the December air. Their mothers and fathers arrived in cars and picked them up. The team exited from the hot zone in pairs, and stood around on the grass in their civilian clothes, looking pale, weak, and thoughtful. In the distance, floodlights began to light up the monuments and buildings of Washington. It was the Friday
evening at the end of the week following Thanksgiving, the start of a quiet weekend that precedes the Christmas season. The wind strengthened and blew paper cups and empty cigarette packs in eddies around the parking lots. In a hospital not far from there, Jarvis Purdy, the monkey worker who had had a heart attack, rested comfortably, his condition stable.

Back at the Institute, Nancy Jaax again stayed up until one o’clock in the morning, dissecting monkeys with her hot-zone buddy, Ron Trotter. When they had suited up and gone in, there had been five monkey carcasses waiting for them in the air lock.

This time, the signs of Ebola were obvious. Nancy saw what she described as “horrendous gut lesions” in some of the animals, caused by sloughing of the intestinal lining. That sloughing of the gut was a classic sign. The intestine was blitzed, completely full of uncoagulated, runny blood, and at the same time the monkey had had massive blood clotting in the intestinal muscles. The clotting had shut off blood circulation to the gut, and the cells in the gut subsequently died—that is, the intestines had died—and then the gut had filled up with blood. Dead intestine—this was the kind of thing you saw in a decayed carcass. In her words, “It looked like the animals had been dead for three or four days.” Yet they had been dead only for hours. Some of the monkeys were so
badly liquefied that she and Trotter didn’t even bother to do a necropsy, they just yanked samples of liver and spleen from the dead animal. Some of the monkeys that were dying in Room H had become essentially a heap of mush and bones in a skin bag, mixed with huge amounts of amplified virus.

Monday arrived cold and raw, with a rising wind that brought a smell of snow from a sky the color of plain carbon steel. In the shopping malls around Washington, Christmas lights had been hung. The parking lots were empty, but later in the day they would fill up with cars, and the malls would fill up with parents and children, and the children would line up to see Santa Clauses. Dan Dalgard drove to the primate building, one more commuter in a sea of morning traffic.

He turned into the parking lot. As he got closer to the building, he saw that a man was standing by the front door near the sweet-gum tree, wearing a white Tyvek jumpsuit. It was one of the monkey caretakers. Dalgard was furious. He had instructed them not to come out of the building wearing a mask or a protective suit. He jumped out of his car, slammed the door, and hurried across the parking lot. As he got closer, he recognized the man as someone who will be called Milton Frantig. Frantig was standing bent over
with his hands on his knees. He didn’t seem to notice Dalgard—he was staring at the grass. Suddenly Frantig’s body convulsed, and liquid spewed out of his mouth. He vomited again and again, and the sound of his retching carried across the parking lot.

As Dan Dalgard watched the man spill his stomach out onto the lawn, he felt, in his words, “scared shitless.” Now, perhaps for the first time, the absolute horror of the crisis at the primate building washed over him. Milton Frantig was doubled over, gasping and choking. When his vomiting subsided, Dalgard helped him to his feet, took him indoors, and made him lie down on a couch. Two employees were now sick—Jarvis Purdy was still in the hospital, recovering from a heart attack. Milton Frantig was fifty years old. He had a chronic, hacking cough, although he didn’t smoke. He had been working with monkeys and with Dalgard at Hazleton for more than twenty-five years. Dalgard knew the man well and liked him. Dalgard felt shaken, sick with fear and guilt. Maybe I should have evacuated the building last week. Did I put the interests of the monkeys ahead of the interests of the human beings?

Milton Frantig was pale and shaky, and felt faint. He developed the dry heaves. Dalgard found
a plastic bucket for him. Between heaves, interrupted by coughing spells, Frantig apologized for leaving the building while wearing a jump suit. He said he had just been putting on his respirator to go inside a monkey room when he began to feel sick to his stomach. Perhaps the bad smell in the building had nauseated him, because the monkey rooms weren’t being cleaned as regularly as usual. He could feel he was about to vomit, and he couldn’t find a bucket or anything to throw up into, and it was coming on so fast that he couldn’t get to the rest room, so he had run outdoors.