Robin Cook - Vector

“I don’t have any family in the old country,” Yuri said, a bit too quickly. “I’m very much alone.” He knew he wasn’t being entirely honest. He had a maternal grandmother, a few aunts and uncles, and a collection of cousins in Ekaterinburg, as Sverdlovsk was now called. He also had an overweight wife in Brighton Beach.

“I’m sorry,” the woman said. Her face clouded in sympathy. “I cannot imagine having no family. Perhaps over the holidays you’d like to come to us.”

“Thank you,” Yuri said. “It’s very kind but I’m okay...” He intended to elaborate but found himself surprisingly choked up. Reluctantly his mind pulled him back to 1979, the fateful year he lost both his mother and his brother. In particular, he thought about April 2nd.

The day started like every other workday with the raucous alarm pulling Yuri from the depths of sleep. At five A.M. it was as black as midnight, since Sverdlovsk was at about the same latitude as Sitka, Alaska. Winter had loosened its grip on the city, but spring had yet to arrive. The apartment wasn’t below freezing as it had been on February mornings and even into March, but it was cold just the same. Yuri dressed in the darkness without waking Nadya or Yegor, both of whom did not need to get up until seven. Nadya still worked at the ceramics factory. Yegor was in his last year of school and scheduled to finish that June.

After a quick, cold breakfast of stale bread and cheese in the deserted communal kitchen, Yuri set off in the darkness for the pharmaceutical plant. He’d been working there for only two years following the completion of his college training. Yet it had been a long enough period for him to know that the factory was not what it seemed. Yuri was not doing microbiological cultures for vaccine production as he’d been hired to do. Although some vaccines were being produced in the outer ring of the factory, Yuri worked in the larger, inner part. The vaccine work was a KGB cover for the real mission. The Sverdlovsk pharmaceutical facility was actually part of Biopreparat, the massive Soviet bioweapons program. Yuri was a single cog in a work force of fifty-five thousand spread among institutions throughout the Soviet Union.

The factory was benignly called Compound 19. At the gate Yuri had to stop and present his identification card. Yuri knew the man in the gatehouse was KGB. Yuri stamped his feet against the predawn cold as he waited. There were no words. None were needed. The man nodded, handed back the card, and Yuri entered.

Yuri was one of the first members of the day shift to arrive. The facility ran twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. It fell to Yuri, a junior employee, and a few of his equivalent-level colleagues to do the required menial cleaning of the inner biocontainment core. The regular janitorial staff were not allowed into the area.

In the changing room Yuri nodded to his lockermate, Alexis. It was too early for conversation, especially since no one had had their morning tea or coffee. Silently they and two other peers donned their red biocontainment suits and switched on their ventilators. They didn’t even bother to look at each other through their clear plastic face masks as they checked themselves.

Fully encapsulated the group waited outside the pressure door until it automatically opened. No one tried to communicate as the pressure dropped in the entrance chamber. When the inner door opened, they went silently to their assigned stations. They moved slowly in the cumbersome suits, walking rather stiff-legged and appearing more like futuristic robots than people.

The monotonous commencement of shifts was a carefully choreographed routine that did not change from week to week or month to month. And that particular morning of April 2, 1979, seemed like any other morning. But it wasn’t. A potential problem existed unknown to the four young men trudging off to their work stations. No one had the slightest premonition of the disaster that was about to occur.

The Sverdlovsk facility dealt primarily with two types of microbes: Bacillus anthracis and Clostridium botulinum . The weaponized forms of these bacteria were spores of the former and crystallized toxin from the latter. The mission of the factory was to produce as much of both as possible.

When Yuri had first started working at Compound 19, he’d been rotated through various work stations to familiarize him with the operation of the entire plant. After the first month’s rotation he’d been assigned to the anthrax department. For the two years he’d worked at the factory, he’d been in the processing section of the plant. It was here that the liquid cultures coming from the giant fermenters were dried into cakes, and the cakes were then ground into a powder that was almost pure anthrax spores. Yuri’s specific job was monitoring the pulverizers.

The pulverizers were rotating steel drums containing steel balls. Careful testing with live animals in another part of the facility had determined that the deadliest and most efficacious size of the powder’s particles was five microns. To achieve this size the pulverizers were rotated at a specific speed with specific-sized steel balls and for a predetermined period of time.

Normal operating procedure had the pulverizers inactivated during the night for routine maintenance. The shutdown was done by the supervisor of the evening shift. There was no equivalent shutdown of the dryers, which continued to function in order to produce a large supply of the light tan-colored cakes for the day shift to process. It took longer to dry the cakes than to grind them.

As he always did, Yuri began the day by hosing down the area around the pulverizers with high-pressure, heavily chlorinated water. Although the crushers were sealed units, tiny bits of the powder invariably escaped, especially if the unit had been opened for maintenance. Since a microscopic amount could kill a man, daily cleaning was mandatory even though no one approached the machinery without biocontainment suits.

Initially, Yuri had been terrified at the concept of working in an environment of such a deadly agent. But over the months he’d gradually adapted. On that particular morning of April 2nd it didn’t even occur to him to be concerned. Yuri was like Ivan Denisovich in Solzhenitsyn’s novel, demonstrating once again that humans have an inordinate ability to adapt.

After his cleaning duties were complete, Yuri turned a large hand crank to pull in the hose. The effort brought beads of perspiration to his forehead. Any degree of exertion turned the impervious biocontainment suit into a mobile sauna bath.

Once the cleaning apparatus was stored, Yuri went into the control room and closed the door. Insulated glass separated the control room from the pulverizer. When the unit went on line, the noise was deafening, jarring, and generally annoying.

Yuri sat in front of the main control panel, and scanned the settings and the dials. All was in order for the start-up. He then turned to the logbook while his mind began eagerly to anticipate the nine A.M. morning break. It was one of Yuri’s favorite times of day, even though it was only a half hour. He could almost taste the fresh coffee and bread.

With his gloved finger Yuri traced across the columns of figures to make sure that the pulverizers had worked smoothly during the last shift they’d operated. All seemed to be in order until he came to the column containing the readings for the negative air pressure inside the unit. As his eye traced across the page he noticed that the pressure had slowly risen as the shift progressed. He wasn’t concerned, because the rise was small and the readings had stayed within acceptable limits.

Yuri glanced down to the bottom of the page where the shift supervisor summarized the shift’s events. The slight rise in pressure was duly noted with the notation that maintenance had been informed. Below that entry was another by maintenance. The time was listed as two A.M. It said simply that the unit had been checked and the cause of the slight rise in pressure had been discovered and had been rectified.