Richard Preston - The Hot Zone

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THE HOT ZONE

Richard Preston

Random House

ISBN 0-679-43094-6

This book describes events between 1967 and 1993. The incubation period

of the viruses in this book is less than twenty-four days. No one who

suffered from any of the viruses or who was in contact with anyone

suffering from them can catch or spread the viruses outside of the

incubation period. None of the living people referred to in this book

suffer from a contagious disease. The viruses cannot survive

independently for more than ten days unless the viruses are preserved and

frozen with special procedures and laboratory equipment. Thus none of the

locations in Reston or the Washington, D.C. area described in this book is

infective or dangerous.

The second angel poured his bowl into the sea, and it became like the

blood of a dead man.

-APOCALYPSE

PART ONE

THE SHADOW OF MOUNT ELGON

SOMETHING IN THE FOREST

1980 NEW YEAR'S DAY

CHARLES MONET was a loner. He was a Frenchman who lived by himself in a

little wooden bungalow on the private lands of Nzoia Sugar Factory, a

plantation in western Kenya what spread along the Nzoia River within sight

of Mount Elgon, a huge, solitary extinct volcano that rises to a height of

fourteen thousand feet near the edge of the Rift Valley. Monet's history

is a little obscure. As with so many expatriates who end up in Africa, it

is not clear what brought him there. Perhaps he had been in some kind of

trouble in France, or perhaps he had been drawn to Kenya by the beauty of

the country. He was an amateur naturalist, fond of birds and animals but

not of humanity in general. He was fifty-six years old, of medium height

and medium build, with smooth, straight brown hair, a good-looking man.

It seems that his only close friends were women who lived in towns around

the mountain, yet even they could not recall much about him for the

doctors who investigated his death. His job was to take care of the sugar

factory's water-pumping machinery, which drew water from the Nzoia River

and delivered it to many miles of sugar-cane fields. They say that he

spent most of his day inside the pump house by the river, as if it pleased

him to watch and listen to machines doing their work.

So often in a case like this, it's hard to pin down the details. The

doctors remember the clinical signs, because no one who has seen the

effects of a Biosafety Level 4 hot agent on a human being can ever forget

them, but the effects pile up, one after the other, until they obliterate

the person beneath them. The case of Charles Monet emerges in a cold

geometry of clinical fact mixed with flashes of horror so brilliant and

disturbing that we draw back and blink, as if we are staring into a

discolored alien sun.

Monet came into the country in the summer of 1979, around the time

that human immunodeficiency virus, or HIV, which causes AIDS, made a final

breakout from the rain forest of central Africa and began its long burn

through the human race. AIDS had already fallen like a shadow over the

population, although no one yet knew it existed. It had been spreading

quietly along the Kinshasa Highway, a transcontinental road that wanders

across Africa from east to west and passes along the shores of Lake

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Victoria within sight of Mount Elgon. HIV is a highly lethal but not very

infective Biosafety Level 2 agent. It does not travel easily from person

to person, and it does not travel through the air. You don't need to wear

a biological suit while handling blood infected with HIV.

Monet worked hard in the pump house during the week, and on his

weekends and holidays he would visit forested areas near the sugar

factory. He would bring food with him, and he would scatter it around and

watch while birds and animals ate it. He could sit in perfect stillness

while he observed an animal. People who knew him recalled that he was

affectionate with wild monkeys, that he had a special way with them. They

said that he would sit holding a piece of food while a monkey approached

him, and the animal would eat from his hand.

On the evenings, he kept to himself in his bungalow. He had a

housekeeper, a woman named Johnnie, who cleaned up and prepared his meals.

He was teaching himself how to identify African birds. A colony of

weaverbirds lived in a tree near his house, and he spent time watching

them build and maintain their baglike nests. They say that one day near

Christmas he carried a sick bird into his house, where it died, perhaps in

his hands. The bird may have been a weaverbird--no one knows--and it may

have died of a Level 4 virus--no one knows. He also had a friendship with

a crow. It was a pied crow, a black-and-white bird that people in Africa

sometimes make into a pet. This crow was a friendly, intelligent bird

that liked to peek on the roof of Monet's bungalow and watch his comings

and goings. When the crow was hungry, it would land on the veranda and

walk indoors, and Monet would feed it scraps of food from his table.

He walked to work every morning through the cane fields, a journey of

two miles. That Christmas season, the workers had been burning the

fields, and so the fields were scorched and black. To the north across

the charred landscape, twenty-five miles away, he could see Mount Elgon.

The mountain displayed a constantly changing face of weather and shadow,

rain and sun, a spectacle of African light. At dawn, Mount Elgon appeared

as a slumped pile of gray ridges receding into haze, culminating in a

summit with two peaks, which are opposed lips of the eroded cone. As the

sun came up, the mountain turned silvery green, the color of the Mount

Elgon rain forest, and as the day progressed clouds appeared and hid the

mountain from view. Late in the afternoon, near sunset, the clouds

thickened and boiled up into an anvil thunderhead that flickered with

silent lightning. The bottom of the cloud was the color of charcoal, and

the top of the cloud feathered out against the upper air and glowed a dull

orange, illuminated by the setting sun, and above the cloud the sky was

deep blue and gleamed with a few tropical stars.

He had a number of women friends who lived in the town of Eldoret, to

the southeast of the mountain, where the people are poor and live in

shacks made of boards and metal. He gave money to his women friends, and

they, in return, were happy to love him. When his Christmas vacation

arrived, he formed a plan to go camping on Mount Elgon, and he invited one

of the women from Eldoret to accompany him. No one seems to remember her

name.

Monet and his friend drove in a Land Rover up the long, straight

red-dirt road that leads to Endebess Bluff, a prominent cliff on the

eastern side the volcano. The road was volcanic dust, as red as dried

blood. They climbed onto the lower skirts of the volcano and went through

cornfields and coffee plantations, which gave way to grazing land, and the

road passed old, half-ruined English colonial farms hidden behind lines of

blue-gum trees. The air grew cool as they went higher, and crested eagles

flapped out of cedar trees. Not many tourists visit Mount Elgon, so Monet

and his friend were probably the only vehicle on the road, although there

would have been crowds of people walking on foot, villagers who cultivate

small farms on the lower slopes of the mountain. They approached the

frayed outer edge of the Mount Elgon rain forest, passing by fingers and

islands of trees, and they passed the Mount Elgon Lodge, an English inn

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built in the earlier part of century, now falling into disrepair, its

walls cracked and its paint peeling off in the sun and rain.

Mount Elgon straddles the border between Uganda and Kenya and is not

far from Sudan. The mountain is a biological island of rain forest in the

center of Africa, an isolated world rising above dry plains, fifty miles

across, blanketed with trees, bamboo, and alpine moor. It is a knob in

the backbone of central Africa. The volcano grew up seven to ten million

years ago, producing fierce eruptions and explosions of ash, which

repeatedly wiped out the forests that grew on its slopes, until it

attained a tremendous height. Before Mount Elgon was eroded down, it may

have been the highest mountain in Africa, higher than Kilmanjaro is today.

It is still the widest. When the sun rises, it throws the shadow of

Mount Elgon westward and deep into Uganda, and when the sun sets, the

shadow reaches eastward across Kenya. Within the shadow of Mount Elgon

lie villages and cities inhabited by various tribal groups, including the

Elgon Masai, a pastoral people who came from the north and settled around

the mountain some centuries ago, and who raise cattle. The lower slopes

of the mountain are washed with gentle rains, and the air remains cool and

fresh all year, and the volcanic soil produces rich crops of corn. The

villages form a ring of human settlement around the volcano, and the ring

is steadily closing around the forest on its slopes, a noose that is

tangling the wild habitat of the mountain. The forest is being cleared

away, the trees are being cut down for firewood or to make room for

grazing land, and the elephant are vanishing.

A small part of Mount Elgon is a national park. Monet and his friend

stopped at the park gate to pay their entrance fees. A monkey or perhaps

a baboon--no one seems to remember--used to hang out around the gate,

looking for handouts, and Monet enticed the animal to sit on his shoulder

by offering it a banana. His friend laughed, but they stayed perfectly

still while the animal ate. They drove a short way up the mountain and

pitched their tent in a clearing of moist green grass that sloped down to

a stream. The stream gurgled out of the rain forest, and it was a strange

color, milky with volcanic dust. The grass was kept short by Cape buffalo

grazing it, and was spotted with their dung.

The Elgon forest towered around their campsite, a web of gnarled

African olive trees hung with moss and creepers and dotted with a black

olive that is poisonous to humans. They heard a scuffle of monkeys

feeding in the trees, a hum of insects, an occasional low huh-huh call of

a monkey. They were colobus monkeys, and sometimes one would come down

from a tree and scuttle across the meadow near the tent, watching them

with alert, intelligent eyes. Flocks of olive pigeons burst from the

trees on swift downward slants, flying at terrific speed, which is their

strategy to escape from harrier hawks that can dive on them and rip them

apart on the wing. There were camphor trees and teaks and African cedars

and red stinkwood trees, and here and there a dark green cloud of leaves

mushroomed above the forest canopy. These were the crowns of podocarpus

trees, or podos, the largest trees in Africa, nearly as large as

California sequoias. Thousands of elephants lived on the mountain then,

and they could be heard moving through forest, making cracking sounds as

they peeled bark and broke limbs from trees.

In the afternoon, it would have rained, as it usually does on Mount

Elgon, and so Monet and his friend would have stayed in their tent, and

perhaps they made love while a thunderstorm hammered the canvas. It grew

dark; the rain tapered off. They built a fire and cooked a meal. It was

New Year's Eve. Perhaps they celebrated, drinking champagne. The clouds

would have cleared off in a few hours, as they usually do, and the volcano

would have emerged as a black shadow under the Milky Way. Perhaps Monet

stood on the grass at the stroke of midnight and looked at the stars--neck

bent backward, unsteady on his feet from the champagne.

On New Year's morning, sometime after breakfast--a cold morning, air

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temperature in the forties, the grass wet and cold--they drove up the

mountain along a muddy track and parked in a small valley below Kitum

Cave. They bushwhacked up the valley, following elephant trails that

meandered besides a little stream that ran through stands of olive trees

and grassy meadows. They kept an eye out for Cape buffalo, a dangerous

animal to encounter in the forest. The cave opened at the head of the

valley, and the stream cascaded over its mouth. The elephant trails

joined at the entrance and headed inside. Monet and his friend spent the

whole of New Year's Day there. It probably rained, and so they would have

sat in the entrance for hours while the little stream poured down in a

veil. Looking across the valley, they watched for elephants, and they saw

rock hyraxes--furry animals the size of groundhogs--running up and down

the boulders near the mouth of the cave.

Herds of elephants go inside Kitum Cave at night to obtain minerals

and salts. On the plains, it is easy for elephants to find salt in

hardpans and dry water holes, but in the rain forest salt is precious

thing. The cave is large enough to hold as many as seventy elephant at a

time. They spend the night inside the cave, dozing on their feet or

mining the rock with their tusks. They pry and gouge rocks off the walls,

and chew them to fragments between their teeth, and swallow the broken

bits of rock. Elephant dung around the cave is full of crumbled rock.

Monet and his friend had a flashlight, and they walked back into the

cave to see where it went. The mouth of the cave is huge--fifty-five

yards wide--and it opens out even wider beyond the entrance. They crossed

a platform covered with powdery dry elephant dung, their feet kicking up

puffs of dust as they advanced. The light grew dim, and the floor of the

cave rose upward in a series of shelves coated with green slime. The

slime was bat guano, digested vegetable matter that had been excreted by a

colony of fruit bats on the ceiling.

Bats whirred out of holes and flicked through their flashlight beams,

dodging around their heads, making high-pitched cries. Their flashlights

disturbed the bats, and more bats woke up. Hundreds of bat eyes, like red

jewels, looked down on them from the ceiling of the cave. Waves of bat

sound rippled across the ceiling and echoed back and forth, a dry, squeaky

sound, like many small doors being opened on dry hinges. Then they saw

the most wonderful thing about Kitum Cave. The cave is petrified rain

forest. Mineralized logs stuck out of the walls and ceiling. They were

trunks of rain-forest trees turned to stone--teaks, podo trees,

evergreens. An eruption of Mount Elgon about seven million years ago had

buried the rain forest in ash, and the logs had been tranformed into opal

and chert. The logs were surrounded by crystals, white needles of

minerals that had grown out of the rock. The crystals were as sharp as

hypodermic syringes, and they glittered in the beams of the flashlights.

Monet and his friend wandered through the cave, shining their lights

on the petrified rain forest. Did he run his hands over the stone trees

and prick his finger on a crystal? They found petrified bones of ancient

hippos and ancestors of elephants. There were spiders hanging in webs

among the logs. The spiders were eating moths and insects.

They came to a gentle rise, where the main chamber widened to more

than a hundred yards across--wider than the length of a football field.

They found a crevice and shined their lights down to the bottom. There

was something strange down there--a mass of gray and brownish material.

It was the mummified corpses of baby elephants. When elephants walk

through the cave at night, they navigate by their sense of touch, probing

the floor ahead of them with the tips of their trunks. The babies

sometimes fall into the crevice.

Monet and his friend continued deeper into the cave, descending a

slope, until they came to a pillar that seemed to support the roof. The

pillar was scored with hatch marks and grooves, the marks of elephant

tusks. If the elephants continued to dig away at the base of the pillar,

it might eventually collapse, bringing down the roof of Kitum Cave with

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it. At the back of the cave, they found another pillar. This one was

broken. Over it hung a velvety mass of bats, which had fouled the pillar

with black guano--a different kind of guano from the green slime near the

mouth of the cave. These bats were insect eaters, and the guano was an

ooze of digested insects. Did Monet put his hand in the ooze?

Monet's friend dropped out of sight for several years after that trip

to Mount Elgon. Then, unexpectedly, she surfaced in a bar in Mombasa,

where she was working as a prostitute. A Kenyan doctor who had

investigated the Monet case happened to be drinking a beer in the bar, and

he struck up an idle conversation with her and mentioned Monet's name. He

was stunned when she said, "I know about that. I come from western Kenya.

I was the woman with Charles Monet." He didn't believe her, but she told

him the story in enough detail that he became convinced she was telling

the truth. She vanished after that meeting in the bar, lost in the

warrens of Mombasa, and by now she has probably died of AIDS.

Charles Monet returned to his job at the pump house at the sugar

factory. He walked to work each day across the burned cane fields, no

doubt admiring the view of Mount Elgon, and when the mountain was buried

in clouds, perhaps he could still feel its pull, like the gravity of an

invisible planet. Meanwhile, something was making copies of itself inside

Monet. A life form had acquired Charles Monet as a host, and it was

replicating.

THE HEADACHE BEGINS, typically, on the seventh day after exposure to the

agent. On the seventh day after his New Year's visit to Kitum

Cave--January 8, 1980--Monet felt a throbbing pain behind his eyeballs.

He decided to stay home from work and went to bed in his bungalow. The

headache grew worse. His eyeballs ached, and then his temples began to

ache, the pain seeming to circle around inside his head. It would not go

away with aspirin, and then he got a severe backache. His housekeeper,

Johnnie, was still on her Christmas vacation, and he had recently hired a

temporary housekeeper. She tried to take care of him, but she really did

not know what to do. Then, on the third day after his headache started,

he became nauseated, spiked a fever, and began to vomit. His vomiting

grew intense and turned into dry heaves. At the same time, he became

strangely passive. His face lost all appearance of life and set itself

into an expressionless mask, with the eyeballs fixed, paralytic, and

staring. The eyelids were slightly droopy, which gave him a peculiar

appearance, as if his eyes were popping out of his head and half-closed at

the same time. The eyeballs themselves seemed almost frozen in their

sockets, and they turned bright red. The skin of his face turned

yellowish, with brilliant starlike red speckles. He began to look like a

zombie. His appearance frightened the temporary housekeeper. She didn't

understand the transformation in this man. His personality changed. He

became sullen, resentful, angry, and his memory seemed to be blown away.

He was not delirious. He could answer questions, although he didn't seem

to know exactly where he was.

When Monet failed to show up for work, his colleagues began to wonder

about him, and eventually they went to his bungalow to see if he was all

right. The black-and-white crow sat on the roof and watched them as they

went inside. They looked at Monet and decided that he needed to get to a

hospital. Since he was very unwell and no longer able to drive a car, one

of his co-workers drove him to a private hospital in the city of Kisumu,

on the shore of Lake Victoria. The doctors at the hospital examined

Monet, and could not come up with any explanation for what he might have

some kind of bacterial infection, they gave him injections of antibiotics,

but the antibiotics had no effect on his illness.

The doctors thought he should go to Nairobi Hospital, which is the

best private hospital in East Africa. The telephone system hardly worked,

and it did not seem worth the effort to call any doctors to tell them that

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