The Hot Zone (30 page)

Dalgard wanted to take Frantig’s temperature, but nobody could find a thermometer that hadn’t been used rectally on monkeys. He sent Bill Volt to a drugstore to buy one. When he returned, they discovered that Frantig had a fever of a hundred and one. Bill Volt hovered in the room, almost shaking with fear. Volt was not doing well—“almost spastic in his terror,” Dalgard would later recall, but it wasn’t any different from the way Dalgard felt.

Milton Frantig remained the calmest person in the room. Unlike Dalgard and Volt, he did not seem afraid. He was a devout Christian, comfortable with telling people that he had been saved. If the Lord saw fit to take him home with a monkey disease, he was ready. He prayed a little, remembering his favorite passages in the Bible, and his dry heaves subsided. Soon he was resting quietly on the couch and said he felt a little better.

“I want you to stay where you are,” Dalgard
said to him. “Don’t leave the building.” He got into his car and drove as fast as he could to the Hazleton Washington offices on Leesburg Pike. The drive didn’t take long, and by the time he got there, he had made up his mind: the monkey facility had to be evacuated. Immediately.

There had been four workers employed in the building, and two of them were now going to be in the hospital. One man had heart problems, and now the other had a fever with vomiting. From what Dalgard knew about Ebola virus, either of these illnesses could be signs of infection. They had shopped at malls and visited friends and eaten in restaurants. Dalgard thought they were probably having sexual intercourse with their wives. He didn’t even want to think about the consequences.

When he arrived at Hazleton Washington, he went directly to the office of the general manager. He intended to brief him about the situation and get his approval to evacuate the monkey house. “We’ve got two guys who are sick,” Dalgard said to him. He began to describe what had happened, and he started crying. He couldn’t control it. He broke down and wept. Trying to pull himself together, he said, “I recommend that—the entire operation—be shut down—as soon as possible. My recommendation is—we close it down and turn it over to the Army. We’ve had this god-damned disease since October, we haven’t gotten injured, and all of a sudden we’ve got two guys sick, one in the hospital, one who’s going there. I kept on thinking that if there was a real human
risk, we would have seen something by now. We’ve played with fire for too long.”

The general manager sympathized with Dalgard and agreed with him that the monkey facility ought to be evacuated and shut down. Then, holding back his tears, Dalgard hurried to his own office, where he found a group of officials from the C.D.C. waiting for him. He felt as if the pressure would never let up. The C.D.C. people had arrived at Hazleton to begin surveillance of all employees who had been exposed to the virus. Dalgard told them what had just happened at the monkey house, that a man had gone down with vomiting. He said, “I have recommended that the facility be evacuated. I feel that the building and the monkeys should be turned over to the people from
USAMRIID
, who have the equipment and personnel to handle it safely.”

The C.D.C. people listened and did not disagree.

Then there was the question of what to do with Milton Frantig, who was still lying on the couch at the monkey house under orders from Dalgard not to move. Since the C.D.C. was in charge of the human aspects of the outbreak, the C.D.C. was in charge of Frantig—and the C.D.C. wanted him taken to Fairfax Hospital, inside the Washington Beltway.

It was now nine-twenty in the morning. Dalgard sat in his office and sweated it out, managing the crisis by telephone. He called C. J. Peters at Fort Detrick and told him that he had a monkey
caretaker who was sick. In his dry, calm voice, now without any hint that he had recently been weeping, he said to Peters, “You have permission to consider the facility and all the animals to be the responsibility of
USAMRIID
.”

Colonel C. J. Peters was shocked to hear that a man had gone down, but he was a little distrustful of the phrase “the responsibility of
USAMRIID
.” It implied that if anything went wrong and people died, the Army could be held responsible and could be sued. He wanted to take control of the building and sterilize it, but he didn’t want lawsuits. So he said to Dalgard that the safety of his people and the safety of the general public were the most important things to him but that he would have to clear this with his command. He said he would get back to Dalgard as soon as possible.

Then they talked about the sick man, and C. J. learned that he was being taken to Fairfax Hospital. That disturbed him greatly. He felt that it should be assumed that the guy was breaking with Ebola—and do you really want to bring a guy like that into a community hospital? Look at what Ebola had done in hospitals in Africa. Ebola could shut down a hospital; it could amplify itself in a hospital. C. J. thought the man belonged in the Slammer at the Institute.

As soon as he got off the line with Dalgard, C. J. Peters telephoned Joe McCormick, who was in charge of the C.D.C. effort, to try to persuade him to let the Army put the man in the Slammer.
He said to McCormick something like, “I know you have this idea that a surgical mask and gown are all you need to handle an Ebola patient, but I think you need to use a higher level of containment,” and he offered to pick up the sick man in an Army ambulance—put him in an Army biocontainment pod—and carry the pod to the Army’s facilities at the Institute. Put him in the Slammer.

C. J. Peters recalls that McCormick said to him something like, “I want the guy at Fairfax Hospital.” C. J. replied, “All right. I believe
this
, Joe, and you believe
that
, and we don’t agree. Regardless—what is going to happen to the medical personnel at Fairfax Hospital or to you, Joe, if Ebola virus gets into that hospital?”

McCormick would not budge on his decision: he had been face-to-face with Ebola in Africa and he hadn’t gotten sick. He had worked for days inside a mud hut that was smeared with Ebola blood, on his knees among people who were crashing and bleeding out. You didn’t need a space suit to handle an Ebola patient. They could be handled by skilled nurses in a good hospital. The guy was going to Fairfax Hospital. C. J. Peters, in spite of his strong dislike for McCormick, found himself admiring him for making strong decisions in a very difficult situation.

At this moment, a television-news van arrived at the monkey house from Channel 4 in Washington. The workers peered through curtains at the van,
and when the reporter came to the door and pushed the buzzer, no one answered. Dalgard had made it clear to them that no one was to talk to the media. Just then, an ambulance from Fairfax Hospital arrived to take Frantig away. Channel 4’s timing could not have been better. The news team turned on their lights and started filming the action. The door of the monkey house swung open and Milton Frantig stumbled out, still wearing his Tyvek suit, looking embarrassed. He walked over to the ambulance, the medical team opened the back doors of the vehicle, and Frantig climbed in by himself and lay down on the gurney. They slammed the doors and took off with Channel 4 following them. A few minutes later, the ambulance and Channel 4 pulled into Fairfax Hospital. Frantig was put in an isolation room, with access restricted to doctors and nurses wearing rubber gloves, gowns, and surgical masks. He said he felt better. He prayed to the Lord and watched a little television.

Back at the monkey house, the situation had become unbearable for the remaining workers. They had seen people in space suits, they had seen their colleague puking in the grass, they had seen Channel 4 chasing the ambulance. They left the building in a real hurry, locking it after themselves.

There were four hundred and fifty monkeys alive in the building, and their hoots and cries sounded in the empty hallways. It was eleven o’clock in the morning. A snow flurry came and
went. The weather was turning colder. In the monkey house, the air-handling equipment had failed for good. The air temperature in the building had soared beyond ninety degrees, and the place had turned steamy, odorous, alive with monkey calls. The animals were hungry now, because they had not been fed their morning biscuits. Here and there, in rooms all over the building, some of the animals stared from glazed eyes in masklike faces, and some of them had blood running from their orifices. It landed on metal trays under their cages … 
ping, ping, ping
.

Dan Dalgard felt he was losing control of everything. He set up a conference call with all the senior managers in his company and informed them of the situation—two employees were down, and the second man could be breaking with Ebola—and he told the managers that he had offered to turn the monkey house over to the Army. They approved his action, but they said they wanted the oral agreement with the Army to be put in writing. Furthermore, they wanted the Army to agree to take legal responsibility for the building.

Dalgard then called C. J. Peters and asked that the Army assume responsibility for any liability that would arise after the Army took over. C. J. flatly rejected that proposal. He saw a need for clarity, speed, and no lawyers. He felt that the outbreak had ballooned to the point where a decision had to be made. Dalgard agreed to fax him a simple letter turning the monkey house over to the Army. They worked up some language, and C. J. carried the letter by hand to the office of General
Philip Russell. He and the general pored over the letter, but they did not choose to show it to any Army lawyers. Russell said, “We have to convince the lawyers of the path of righteousness.” They signed the letter, faxed it back to Dalgard, and the monkey house fell into the hands of the Army.

Jerry Jaax would have to lead a much larger biohazard team back into the monkey house. The number of animals that needed to be dealt with was staggering. His troops were untested, and he himself had never been in combat. He didn’t know, couldn’t know, how he or his people would perform in a chaotic situation involving intense fear of an unpleasant death.

Jerry was the commanding officer of the 91-Tangos at the Institute. The Army’s animal-care technicians are classified 91-T, which in Army jargon becomes 91-Tango. The younger 91-Tangos are eighteen years old and are privates. While the ambulance was taking Milton Frantig to the hospital, Jerry called a meeting of his 91-Tangos and civilian staff in a conference room in the Institute. Although most of the soldiers were young and had very little or no experience in space suits, the civilians were older men, and some were Level 4 specialists who had worn Chemturions on a daily basis. The room was jammed, and people sat on the floor.

“The virus is Ebola or an Ebola-like agent,” he said to them. “We are going to be handling large amounts of blood. And we will be handling sharp
instruments. We are going to use the disposable biocontainment suits.”

The room was silent while he spoke. He didn’t mention that a man was down, because he didn’t know about it—C. J. Peters hadn’t told him about that. For the time being, Peters was staying quiet about that development.

Jerry said to his people, “We are looking for volunteers. Is there anyone in this room who
does not
want to go? We can’t make you go.”

When no one backed out, Jerry looked around the room and picked his people: “Yep, he’s going. She’s going, and, yep, you’re going.” In the crowd, there was a sergeant named Swiderski, and Jerry decided that she could not go because she was pregnant. Ebola has particularly nasty effects on pregnant women.

No combat unit in the Army could handle this work. There would be no hazard pay, as there is in a war zone. The Army has a theory regarding biological space suits. The theory is that work inside a space suit is not hazardous, because you are wearing a space suit. Hell, if you handled hot agents without a space suit, that would be hazardous work. The privates would get their usual pay: seven dollars an hour. Jerry told them that they were not to discuss the operation with anyone, not even members of their families. “If you have any tendency to claustrophobia, consider it now,” he said. He told them to wear civilian clothes and to show up at the Institute’s loading dock at 0500 hours the next morning.

The soldiers didn’t sleep much that night, and neither did Gene Johnson. He was terrified for the “kids,” as he called them. He had had his fair share of scares with hot agents. Once in Zaire, he had stuck himself with a bloody needle while taking blood from a mouse. There was reason to believe the mouse was hot with Lassa (a Level 4 agent), and so they had airlifted him to the Institute and put him in the Slammer for thirty days. “That was not a fun trip,” as he put it. “They treated me as if I would die. They wouldn’t give me scissors to cut my beard because they thought I would be suicidal. And they locked me in at night.” At Kitum Cave, while wearing a space suit and dissecting animals, he had been nicked three times with bloody tools. Three times his space suit had been punctured and his skin broken and the cut smeared with animal blood. He regarded himself as lucky not to have picked up Marburg or something else at Kitum Cave. Having had some close calls, he was deeply afraid of what had invaded the monkey house.

Johnson lived in a rambling house on the side of Catoctin Mountain. He sat in his study most of the night, thinking about procedures. Every movement of the body in a hot area has to be controlled and planned. He said to himself, Where’s this virus going to get you? It’s going to get you through the hands. The hands are the weak point. Above all, the hands must be under control.

He sat in an easy chair and held up one hand and studied it. Four fingers and an apposed thumb. Exactly like a monkey’s hand. Except that it was wired to a human brain. And it could be enclosed and shielded by technology. The thing that separated the human hand from Nature was the space suit.

He stood up and went through motions in the air with his hands. Now he was giving a monkey an injection. Now he was carrying the monkey to a table. He was putting the monkey on the table. He was in a hot zone. He was opening the monkey up, and now he was putting his hands into a bloody lake of amplified hot agent. His hands were covered with three layers of rubber and then smeared with blood and hot agent.