CONSTRUCT
Ground Zero
A man moved along the platform, unnoticed. He had entered from the east stairwell and stepped down to await the 11:19 AirTrain to JFK. His hands were clammy and nervous as he sat down, placing his briefcase on his lap. He looked sick. He had been up most of the night, he thought. But he knew he couldn't be tired today. Not today. He felt his heart begin to beat harder and he sweated profusely. The seats next to him were the only empty ones in the carriage.
The noises around him seemed unrecognizable. He slowly felt himself drifting in and out of consciousness. There was a sharp pain in his neck, and the sweat on his back felt cold. He thought he’d have more time, he thought to himself.
Suddenly the platform came into view and the train pulled up at the station. Some teenagers noticed a man push through the doors and lose his balance. They mocked him as he pulled himself up and made his way swiftly up the stairs to the check-in desks.
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Timothy Zeliscak was a middle aged man, but he felt young. As a boy his brothers would tease him about his weight and so he had worked hard in the gym and was proud of his physique. He enjoyed wrestling and won many trophies in the sport, but had to stop when he dislocated his shoulder while training. He’d had to work with a physiotherapist for 8 months and became to understand how his arm worked, and what it looked like inside. She had showed him pictures of cells and these fascinated him. He had wanted to know more.
Zeliscak became a somewhat memorable student at Rijeka Medical School, a school of medicine in what was then a part of old Yugoslavia. His paper on gene replication was later published in the Journal of Molecular Biology in 1973. He soon found he was making a name for himself in the international scientific community. At this point in Zeliscak’s life, he was largely unfamiliar with the term “black biology”.
In April 1976 Zeliscak went to work with the Ruđer Bošković Institute (IRB) in Zagreb. He was appointed as part of a team researching the vaccinia virus. The vaccinia virus is a practically harmless pox virus which can replicate in humans. Once infected, it attacks the immune system of its host and multiplies at an alarming rate. Vaccinia is a popular choice for researchers in privately-funded labs, largely because of its availability. It is also closely related to the smallpox virus, hence why vaccinia was used to create the world’s dwindling supply of smallpox vaccine.
Zeliscak never had cared for viruses. There had been an outbreak of variola major, the severe form of smallpox, in his country as a boy. He was too young to remember but the epidemic deprived him an uncle and gave horrible scars to those who survived it. He remembered his family were given vaccinations to prevent the disease from spreading.
As a part of the research, Zeliscak and his team began to decode the DNA of vaccinia. Up close, a DNA molecule looks like a spiral staircase with each rung representing a ‘letter’ of information. The letters combine to make the ‘code of life’ for that specific organism. It is this code which tells the virus how to overpower the human immune system, and multiply in our cells. Zeliscak had never cared for viruses, but this was molecular biology at its purest and he was a true scientist. He soon came to understand and respect viruses, and he developed a strong sense of urgency to rid them from the planet.
Infection
The Federal Aviation Administration’s (FAA) offices were scattered around the country. Like any government agency, files needed to be mirrored elsewhere for security purposes. One of these locations was the Security and Hazardous Materials Division of the FAA, in Oklahoma City.
Friday the 10th May was much like any other day at FAA Security. A few employees were scattered around a small office surrounded by important looking doors, a few of which were closed shut. A phone rang, and an intern answered. The flurry of information she was receiving was too much for her, and her face made this clear. She passed the phone to a supervisor, a man named Ted Hambling. Ted immediately took the call and thanked the caller as he took down the most important message to pass on that day.
Ted Hambling had worked as a security specialist for the FAA since 1999, when they recruited him from the FBI’s Hazardous Materials Response Unit (HMRU) in Quantico, Virginia. He was used to seeing and dealing with all kinds of infectious agents in his day. In fact his FAA colleagues would often joke that he was a kind of spy, with a propensity for being in the right place at the right time. He would simply say, “I’ve worked some big cases, yes, but an outbreak is never the right place, and always the wrong time.”
Hambling wore a sleeveless brown cardigan and shiny, rimmed glasses. He looked like a man who’d spent half of his life in a lab. To some extent this was true; his research had helped the American biotechnology industry to develop a drug for use with treatment for Lesch-Nyhan Syndrome, a terrible genetic disorder which causes its sufferers to cannibalise themselves. The drug was still in testing and hadn’t yet gained FDA approval, but was widely considered to do so.
The call had come from a China Airlines representative at John F. Kennedy Airport. A plane had been grounded at Terminal 3 following the suspicious death of a man on board. Nobody had wanted to remove the body as it appeared infectious, although none of the passengers had known quite what to think. The FAA were duly notified.
Hambling was highly respected at the FAA. He was deputy-director of the Security and Hazardous Materials Division. He had worked with officials from USAMRIID, the United States Army Medical Research Institute for Infectious Diseases, in Fort Detrick, Maryland. It was due to this experience he was appointed at the FAA, and he was more familiar with infectious agents than anyone at the Administration.
He arrived at JFK with a carry kit of supplies. It held swab tubes, a sterile scalpel and most importantly his latex gloves and face mask. In the event of an outbreak of an infectious disease, the gloves would serve to protect him (hopefully) from infection. If the agent causing the disease was airborne, the mask would filter the air entering his mouth and nose. This would suffice for many known viral agents and bacteria. To carry some perspective however, a hot agent such as Ebola can only be handled in Biosafety Level-4 (BL-4) containment laboratories with negative air pressure, by staff wearing fully protective ‘space-suits’ with a filtered air supply. The truth was nobody knew what to expect when attending a call-out such as this, and the U.S. Government receives far more terror threats of a biological nature than most people realise. This hadn’t been officially recognised as a threat or anything related to terror, although Hambling knew the significance of the location and was both scared and excited as he rushed through the airport to Terminal 3.
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The mouth was held open with invisible force. A rash had enveloped the face and forearms and there was thick blood around the nasal cavities, which had hardened and become black. Hambling carefully cut open the shirt and saw that the rash had spread across the abdomen, and red spots had appeared around the pelvis. The same spots were visible on the face, and when he opened the mouth he saw large, dark pustules that had engulfed the inside of his mouth. It was clear to see why nobody had wanted to move the body.
Then he saw it - an inch-wide mark on his left arm. It looked black and crusty, as though it would fall off at any second. It was clear to Hambling that this was the site of an infection of some kind. He immediately ordered everyone off the plane, and stepped back into the departure lounge.
Hambling became worried, his face an expressionless cauldron of mixed emotion. He had seen this before, he said to himself. Whatever had caused this man to die could spread fast if not properly contained. He knew this, and felt comfort in the fact the plane was grounded. This plane was going nowhere.
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Fortunately the airline had acted fast, and all 110 passengers were accounted for. They were immediately quarantined under Section 361 of the Public Health Service Act, expressly authorised by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) of Atlanta, Georgia, who began sending teams of epidemiologists and virologists. Samples were to be flown back to the CDC for analysis in one of their pricey BL-4 labs.
By now the entire terminal had been blocked off and delayed travellers were watching on as streams of government agents rushed in: F.B.I, F.A.A and other, less familiar acronyms. The looks on some faces were stretched further with the arrival of local news teams, while others hardly noticed the extra bustle of the busiest airport system in the United States.
Hambling remembered something he had seen at a virology convention in France. A group of scientists from Zagreb, Croatia had been working with the DNA of dengue. Dengue hemorrhagic fever is a viral disease typical to the tropics of Central/South America and Africa, where the virus is transmitted by a species of mosquito that thrives there. Once infected with dengue, you would expect a fever and a rash, which in some cases would extend across the whole body. You would lose your appetite and feel dizzy and restless. In some cases the sufferer bleeds heavily from the nose and mouth. Dengue is a prevalent disease in many countries on Earth and is a concern, yet the mortality rate is generally quite low and many experts consider it treatable if caught early.
These men and women from Zagreb had discovered they were able to create a new strain of vaccinia which raised immunity to dengue by a substantial degree. Due to the current existence of dengue on our planet, unlike smallpox, scientists are able to conduct human trials of new drugs and vaccines on patients. This team of Croats, led by a microbiologist with a towering shape and a discerning eye for details, had claimed that by removing a single gene from the dengue fever virus and splicing it with vaccinia they were able to create, in effect, a workable vaccine for dengue.
Hambling saw signs of hemorrhagic fever in this patient: the red spots were blood vessels rupturing under the skin, the blood beneath his nose had not coagulated until after his death. A witness had reported seeing blood stream from his face as he boarded the plane. (It had actually been a fellow passenger who notified the attendant, but the man had died when the steward went to see him.)
He had worried this could be an outbreak of dengue, or worse Ebola Zaire, which kills 9 out of every 10 people it infects. The realisation had been followed instantly by swift exiting of the plane. He was scared for himself and for his family. At the same time, he knew an outbreak of an infectious hemorrhagic fever at one of the busiest airports in the world, in the heart of one of the busiest trans-global cities of the world, would not be good news for the human race.
“Dr. Hambling!” said a voice behind him.
He turned around to see a pale faced young F.B.I. agent, a woman. “Doctor – you are going to want to see this”, she said as she began to escort him down a long corridor to a makeshift quarantine zone beside Terminal 3.
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Contributor's Note
This is an work in progress, any comments will be much appreciated. This is a fictional account of a biological terror attack on New York City.
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