Chapter 31. Ground Zero
The body of Cedric Murphy created a small problem. Michigan Water Patrol Officers had shot him in the neck and arm. Because his body was in Day Seven of the disease, his blood was highly contagious. None of the Water Patrol Officers was going to dive down into the blood-drenched water and pull up his bloody remains, thereby exposing themselves to the virus.
One hundred and twenty five miles away, near Traverse City, Michigan, is a series of gigantic sand dunes rising above Lake Michigan called the Sleeping Bear Dunes. There is one particular sand dune in the Sleeping Bear Park which is a mountain of sand, descending hundreds of feet below to the Lake at a steep angle of over sixty degrees. It was on this sand dune where one of the Navy Seals teams was training today. The Seals, landing on the beach in a gray rubber raft, dove out and stormed the beach with guns on their backs, and then humped up the huge sand dune like mountain goats. When they reached the top, they were thoroughly exhausted. Their leader was about to tell the men to run down the dune and do the drill again when he got the call from the General. His men were wanted. A chopper lifted the Seal team out and they were flown three hours away to the tiny harbor town of St. Ignace. Wearing specially fitted water suits with triple-sealed gloves, the Seals dove for Cedric Murphy's body. When they had successfully extricated the body and dumped it on shore, HAZMAT teams from USAMRIID burned it to ashes right on the shore. Then dozens of gallons of bleach and solvents used by petroleum companies for cleaning up oil spills were dumped into the water, with the hope of killing whatever lingering virus might be lurking in the waters off shore. Subsequent testing of the water at multiple points a week later by the C.D.C. and Michigan Department of Natural Resources would show no virus. Now all they had to do was figure out what to tell Cedric Murphy's mother, who was waiting in the St. Ignace coroner's office for an update.
Watongwe Village, five miles south of Kasiha, Tanzania.
When the Jeep rolled up to the town, the three scientists and the CIA agent jumped out to survey the scene. There were about twenty small Watongwe huts set in a semicircle around what appeared to be a central meeting place for the villagers. What all four men noticed immediately was the silence. It was quiet as a grave here. There were no villagers to be seen. There was no smoke coming from any of the huts. Like the fish house owner's hut, the flies were buzzing everywhere.
"Guys, I don't like the looks of this," said Roessler.
"I don't either," said Jendel. "Jimmy, you should wait in the Jeep. We are going to suit up."
"Fine by me, Doc. Knock yourself out."
The four researchers donned their orange space suits and began walking through the village. They knocked on the door of the first hut and heard nothing coming from within. Tsung, wanting to redeem himself from the morning, was the first man in. He had to control his nausea when he entered the room. There were three bodies in the cots. All three were dead, with a blank stare of ruby-red eyes. Vermin had begun to eat the flesh off the bones. The other two scientists walked in, and all three nodded to each other with grim expressions. Their trips to the other huts were the same--dead bodies ravaged by disease in each one. In the last hut, the one closest to the forest, they found no bodies. As they walked into the room, they heard a blood-curdling scream only ten feet away coming from underneath a table. An elderly woman stood up and began screaming at them in Swahili. It was obvious that she was frightened by the men in the orange suits. Suddenly, she grabbed a kitchen knife and pointed it menacingly at the scientists.
All three scientists stood frozen. Setting aside the possibility that she could stab them all to death, if she even nicked their suits with that knife they could all be dead.
Roessler held up his hands in the air, showing he had no weapon.
"No! Friend!"
She did not understand them and held the knife out again.
"Jacob and Murielle," said Jendel in a very calm voice. "I want you to very slowly back up towards the door. Roger, you need to do the same. Very slowly. We are going to walk out of here, and show her we mean no harm." Roessler and Winston backed up as they were told, and opened the door of the hut. Roessler went out first, then Winston, then Jendel. The woman took two more defiant steps forward towards Captain Tsung. All Tsung could see was that knife. He quickly tried to back up, but he tripped going through the threshold, falling down in his suit. With dirt covering his orange RACAL suit, Tsung jumped up in a panic, and shot off like an Olympic runner to the Jeep. When he got to the Jeep, Roessler and Jendel were right behind him. Tsung took off his helmet.
"Is my suit cut? Oh my God, is my suit cut?"
Pond looked his suit over from all angles. "It looks intact to me, Roger, I think you are fine. What happened? You guys see a ghost?"
Tsung was as animated as ever now. "Everyone is dead from the virus. But there was an older woman who was alive in the last hut. She came at us with a knife, and almost cut us. We did not know how to speak with her."
"Let me try and help," said Agent Pond. Pond took out a bullhorn from the back of the Jeep. In Swahili, he made the following announcement:
"We are not going to hurt you. We are here to help you. Please come out of your house. It is safe. The men in the orange suits are wearing those so that they do not get sick like everyone else in the village. Please come out."
After thirty seconds, the door on the last hut slowly opened and the woman peeked her head out. This time, she had no knife.
"Agent Pond, you need to immediately get at least a scrub mask and rubber gloves on. We will stand between her and you."
Jimmy Pond spoke into the bullhorn again. "Come to the Jeep please. We need to check your blood to make sure you are not sick."
The woman walked hesitantly over to the Jeep and looked at the strange men in the orange suits. Dr. Bjorn Jendel took out a syringe, at which point the elderly woman backed away violently, afraid of his intentions.
"No," said Pond in Swahili. "It is safe. He just wants to take some blood to see if you are sick. It will not hurt."
The woman returned again and stuck out her arm. She had had a shot once before. Jendel took some blood into the syringe, being incredibly careful not to spill blood on himself or to puncture the suit with the hypodermic. Jendel placed the blood into the field test tubes. While they waited for the test results, Pond, from a safe distance, questioned the woman.
"How did this happen?"
"The boys got us all sick," said the woman in Swahili. "The boys are evil."
"What boys?"
"Dogo and Akili. They went to the mountain and their Mother said that they got bitten by bats. Then everybody got sick and died."
"How did you survive?"
"I did not get near the boys. I stayed in my hut. I talked to no one. The boys are evil."
"Where are the boys now?"
"Joseph and Elvis took the boys to the hospital. They had a truck."
“Who are Joseph and Elvis?”
“Joseph is the father. Elvis is the uncle.”
"What hospital did they go to?"
"Kigoma."
"Which hospital in Kigoma?"
"Kigoma. Hospital."
"Are you the only survivor?"
"Yes. Do I need to go to the hospital?"
"We will know in a few minutes. Where is the boys' mother?"
"Hospital. Kigoma."
"Has anyone from the village gone anywhere else?"
The woman looked confused. "We had no truck. Joseph has the truck. Kigoma. Hospital. We had no truck. We stayed."
They continued to question the woman for another ten minutes, asking her every question they could think of. No, she did not know where the bat came from. She did not know of any caves. She did not know which boy was bitten. She did not know their ages, just that they were small and evil. No, the boys and their parents never came back. No, Elvis never came back.
When the questioning was complete, Jendel pulled out the results from the field lab test. It appeared that this woman was not infected.
"You are not sick," said Pond.
"Ohhhh?" said the woman, smiling a broad grin. She seemed relieved.
"Come on, we will take you to Kasiha where you will be safe." The men drove the woman into town and dropped her off with a friend. Then they drove back to the small village and burned the village to the ground.
As they drove toward Kigoma, Agent Jimmy Pond pulled out a powerful satellite phone and called his contact at the airbase. From there, the pilot relayed the call overseas to Washington, D.C. where Pond was later connected to the President of the United States and her Homeland Security Director.
"Agent Pond, what is the situation in Tanzania?" asked the Homeland Security Director.
"Director, this is Agent Pond. We have tracked the source of this virus to two small African boys, named Dogo and Akili. Those are the first names. We have no last names. They apparently got bitten by a bat and contracted the disease. We believe they are the first victims. They lived in a small Watongwe village five miles south of Kasiha, Tanzania, on the western side of the country. Their whole village, with the exception of one woman, was wiped out. The old woman gave us an account of what happened. The boys' father and uncle, named Joseph and Elvis--we have no last names yet-- worked on the docks in Kasiha as fishermen. Sometimes, the boys would work with them at the docks. We believe the boys, their father or their uncle somehow infected some fish. Maybe they bled on them; maybe they vomited on them; maybe they breathed on them; we don't know. But the fish were taken to a restaurant in Ujiji, a short distance away. The restaurant was owned by an Ujiji man, one Sunny Temoha, proprietor and sole employee of the Ujiji Fish House. He also contracted the disease and died. According to a man in town, the proprietor did not serve the fish raw, but cooked it. I do not know how the virus was not wiped out during the cooking process, but somehow, the virus remained active. The Monahans, the chimp researchers, ate at the fish house and ate the infected fish from Kasiha. Then they carried the disease back to the United States. Meanwhile, the two boys, their parents, and their uncle went to a hospital in Kigoma. That is where we are heading now."
"So at this point, it definitely does not look like terrorism?" asked the President.
"I think we can confidently say at this point, Madame President, that this is not related to terrorism," said Pond.
"What did you do with the dead bodies?" asked the Director.
"We burned them all. I have conducted a number of interviews in Ujiji and Kisoha, and we have not found any victims other than what I have told you. But we do not know what we will find in Kigoma."
"What about this bat?" asked the President. "Is there any way to figure out where the bat came from? What if it infects other people?"
"We believe the boys went cave exploring. That is how other strains of Ebola first were realized--from contact with cave bats. I doubt that others would be exposed unless they too went cave exploring in the same cave and were bitten by the same type of bat," said Roessler.
"If we were to find this group of bats, could we use them to make an antidote or a vaccine?" asked the President.
"Yes, that is certainly theoretically possible," said Jendel, joining the call. "But it is highly unlikely. For example, we know that an Egyptian fruit bat in Kitum Cave in Kenya is probably the source of the Marburg virus, and we have had researchers in that cave for years now and we have never found the bat with Marburg. So I think that is going to be a little bit like looking for a needle in a haystack, Madame President."
"OK, good work, Agent Pond, Dr. Jendel, Dr. Winston, Mr Roessler, and Captain Tsung. Please keep us informed the minute you find out what is going on in Kigoma."
"Yes, Madame President, we will."
Agent Pond hung up the satellite phone, and the four men and one woman buckled up for the ride to Kigoma.