James Tabor - The Deep Zone

It was a trip most people would have dreaded, but what Barnard dreaded more were the seemingly endless periods between his all-too-infrequent visits to the BSL-4 labs. He had never stopped feeling the pull of the labs, especially the Fours, where the deadliest pathogens lived. There was nothing on earth like being in a lab with those things. Lion tamers might feel something akin to it, he’d once reflected, but even that would be less intense. You could see lions. And train them. You could not see or train monsters like Ebola Zaire… or ACE.

He passed through the first air lock and security point, then went to the clothing-and-supply station to pick up a fresh blue lab gown, shoe covers, rubber gloves, and a Level 3 biosafety respirator.

BARDA, like all facilities working with dangerous pathogens, was divided into containment levels. The first, uppermost level, where he now donned his lab attire, contained no dangerous laboratories or research facilities. It was mostly for screening and administration; even laboratories working with the most exotic microbes needed some help from a bureaucracy.

There were only two points of ingress and egress, one of which Barnard had come through today and on the earlier visit with Hallie. In a different elevator, Barnard descended past BARDA Levels 2 and 3 to the lowest, hottest, most tightly restricted area: Biosafety Level 4. Walking toward his final transition point, he felt familiar reactions. His respiration and pulse increased, his spatial awareness became more acute, his eyes and ears more vigilant.

Coming down here always made him think of Winston Churchill’s famous statement that nothing focused the mind more wonderfully than being shot at without effect. His own experience in Vietnam had shown that to be true—up to a point. Churchill had spent a few weeks being shot at, Barnard twenty-six months. At first, the exhilaration made it almost easy, but before long it soured into toxic despair.

At the end of his first tour, he had no intention of going back in-country. Stateside it would be, his body in one piece still and his mind, if not in one piece, at least not fragmented beyond reassembly. He spent a few days out-processing in Saigon, sleeping on clean sheets and drinking good Scotch and eating rare steaks with fresh green salads before heading back to the United States. He got sated on red meat by the second day, but the fresh vegetables, crisp lettuce, succulent tomatoes, crunchy carrots—of these he simply could not seem to devour enough. Nor the Scotch. On the third day, he slept late, showered for half an hour, ate a fine breakfast of bacon and five eggs and real toast. By the afternoon, he was sitting at the bar in Saigon’s InterContinental Hotel savoring his third double Chivas, neat.

Lined up at the bar on both sides of him were contractors with bodies like sides of beef and plump rear-echelon types who looked like sausages stuffed into their tailored uniforms. Many of the REMFs were with beautiful whores reeking of imitation Chanel No. 5. It was not yet three P.M. but sounded like late on New Year’s Eve, all of them drinking and howling and backslapping.

There was a long mirror behind the bar, cracked but still hanging, and he looked at himself in his clean uniform with its edged creases, deeply tanned, emaciated, hollow-eyed and yellow-toothed. At the beginning of his tour he had worn a size 18 collar—big football neck—but now his neck was scrawny, sprouting out of the uniform shirt collar like a straw in a glass. Except for the whores, he was the only underweight person in the bar.

He was surrounded by piggy faces and grinning mouths and jiggling bodies, bartenders shouting and the whores laughing, their voices so high it sounded like screaming, and he suddenly thought he would puke up the Chivas Regal right there on the bar top. His vision misted and it was hard not to draw the .45 Colt—worn against regulations here but the hell with them, he never went anywhere unarmed anymore—and start putting red holes in the white faces.

He got himself out of the hotel and to the nearest corner before he did puke. Passersby kept right on going without giving him a second glance. Puking-drunk Americans were as common as Saigon’s notorious cat-sized rats then.

The next day, sick but sober, he went to see the DEROS officer and indicated his desire to sign up for another tour in-country. The plump major stared at him for a long time from behind an opulent mahogany desk he had commandeered from a Saigon pol.

“Are you drunk, Brainard?”

He looked at the clock: just past eleven A.M.

“Barnard, sir. No, sir. Not anymore.”

“Drugs?”

“No, sir.”

The man lit a cigar, offered one to Barnard, who declined with roiling gut. “You’re a college grad?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Where’d you go?”

“University of Virginia, sir.”

“ROTC?”

“Yes, sir.”

“What do you want to do? Back in the world?”

“I’m not sure, sir.”

“Not a military career, though?”

“No way in hell, sir. No disrespect.”

The major sat forward, his belly straining the buttons of his shirt, poked his cigar toward Barnard, and said angrily, “Then why in the hell do you want to go back in there? You don’t need to get your ticket punched for promotion. What are you thinking?”

Barnard understood the man’s outburst, didn’t take it personally—the rear-echelon major being made to feel bad.

“Don’t be an idiot, Brainard. You don’t have to go back.”

He was just twenty-three then and knew that he didn’t know many things. But this one he did. He could not go home while men he knew and cared about were still back there. His men. He might escape a death now by going home, but it would be a bad trade: good death with his men here for bad death at the end of a Smith & Wesson or rope back home.

“Yes, I do.” Barnard looked out the office’s floor-to-ceiling windows. He could not see the mountains or his men from here, but he could feel them. It was like standing waist-deep in an undertow.

“Sir.”

Earlier in his career at the CDC, he had spent years in BSL-3 and BSL-4 laboratories dealing with the microbial world’s worst demons, group A strep, Yersinia pestis , anthrax, Ebola-Z, and others. As time went on and he was promoted out of the labs, he understood that with his experience he could better serve as a supervisor and, later, a director. But he was never entirely free of the same kind of guilt he’d felt that day in Saigon. It was as though he were attached to Four with a long elastic cord that stretched but never let go and relaxed only when he was back in there with his people and the demons.

He went to a small but spotless locker room with stainless steel walls and ceiling. He stripped naked and hung his clothes and the blue lab gown in a locker. He put his rings and watch on the locker’s shelf. Then he walked through a door into a shower room and scrubbed himself under 120-degree water with Biodyne disinfectant until, after five full minutes, a timer went off. In the next room he toweled dry and put on sterile green surgical scrubs, including plastic booties and latex gloves. He went through another heavy, stainless steel bulkhead with airtight seals that locked automatically. No two could be open at the same time. The next space was the “weeya,” the work and interaction area, a place just outside the suit room, where researchers could sit down and rest, make notes, converse about what went on deeper in. It was deserted now. Then through another airlock into the suit room, where the blue BSL-4 suits hung, like huge blue cadavers, from heavy hooks in the ceiling.

Barnard’s name was printed in black letters across the upper back of his Chemturion 3530, as if it were a football uniform. He lifted the bulky, ten-pound suit from its hook, then pulled open the heavy plastic zipper that ran diagonally from its left shoulder down to its right thigh. He stepped into the legs one at a time, got his feet into the attached yellow rubber boots, hitched the suit up, pushed his left arm in and then his right. He drew the zipper head up to its closure point on his left shoulder, folded over the zipper cover, and secured it with Velcro tabs. The clear plastic hood hung down his back. He pulled it up over his head and closed the zipper that ran 180 degrees, left to right, where the hood bottom joined the suit body. He pushed a switch on a control box attached to the suit’s left hip and waited while the Chem-Air PLSS unit inflated the suit around him. As long as the air pressure in the suit remained higher than the ambient pressure outside, pathogens could not infiltrate even if the suit was breached. The battery-powered Chem-Air also supplied him with quadruple-HEPA-filtered breathing air from a yellow Accurex ultra-high-pressure bottle that contained 20 cubic feet of compressed air at a pressure of 5,500 psi. The bottle was about the size and shape of a thermos and weighed four pounds. This would be Barnard’s air source until he was inside the lab itself, where he would connect an air hose to a fitting on the right shoulder of his suit.