Amerithrax (29 page)

The U.S. Surgeon General David Satcher admitted “we were wrong” not to respond more aggressively to tainted mail. “Some of us thought we were bioterrorism experts,” Satcher said. “We have learned how little we knew.” On October 27, 2001, more anthrax contamination was discov- ered in a House mailroom. Senators, in a closed meeting, decided to stay open as proof that while Congress could be contaminated, it couldn’t be intimidated. The move infuri- ated the House. And while a letter they only suspected ex- isted had not been found, no one else had grown sick. Or so authorities thought.

People were dying of anthrax from an unknown source. There were rumors of a government coverup. Doctors were boning up on anthrax and stockpiling vaccine. There was a nationwide panic. The President was telling people to go about their everyday lives, but at the same time be ready for an attack. Hazmat-suited medical teams were striding through quarantined buildings like extraterrestrials. Unbe- lievably, this had all happened before.

The worst anthrax outbreak had happened not in the United States, but in the former Soviet Union. It involved aerosolized anthrax such as that which killed Bob Stevens. Dr. Alibek spoke of an outbreak in 1979 in the big city of

Sverdlovsk, when ninety-six victims were stricken with in- halational anthrax. Experts were still studying the epidemic, which was shrouded in government secrecy. U.S. figures estimated a thousand fatalities. Alibek thought the figure was closer to 105 deaths. “What is certain,” he said, “is that it was the worst single outbreak of inhalational anthrax on record.”

In the heart of a thriving metropolis, the Russian army had been secretly manufacturing one of the most deadly strains of anthrax. Afterward, the anthrax powder developed in their doomed city would travel a tortuous route around the world. Was this where Amerithrax had gotten his deadly powder?

The worst anthrax epidemic in a modern industrial nation had been called a “biological Chernobyl” (after a 1986 ex- plosion at the Ukrainian nuclear plant). It showed what could happen in such a disaster in America, a cautionary tale of the dangers of secret and illegal science.

The Leahy letter had last been seen flying in the direction of the State Department mailroom that had sickened David Hose and which fed three U.S. embassies. Spores spread internationally to the U.S. embassies in Vilnius, Lithuania, and in Pakistan. On their path to the Capitol, the letters to the senators had cross-contaminated letters to another for- eign embassy. That embassy was in Yekaterinburg, Russia, which had only recently reverted to its old White Russian pre-Revolutionary name. Back in April 1979, the city had been called Sverdlovsk.

Irony of ironies, that the missing anthrax letter should have been flitting along the mail route to Sverdlovsk, the site of the greatest biological weapons accident in recorded history. Sverdlovsk offered a cautionary tale for America. Whether it would be the nation’s fate remained to be seen. It was an abject tale of horror beyond horror.

“Then something woke you. What woke you up? Did you dream? What was it?”

“I woke up and heard the lambs screaming. I woke up in the dark and the lambs were scream- ing.”

—
The Silence of the Lambs

BEFORE
bleating lambs grew silent in villages south of Sverdlovsk, a cloud hung over this churchless city of a mil- lion. The city was perched in the eastern foothills of the Ural Mountains 880 miles east of Moscow. From its highest bluff, Sverdlovsk peered down upon the Iset River. Rich deposits of manganese, nickel, chromium, bauxite, and coal studded the surrounding hills.

Walking along wide boulevards just before sunset on Fri- day, March 30, 1979, you would have passed dusky wooden houses that gave way to the towering shapes of office build- ings and multistory apartments. Materials for road building and construction jammed the streets. A fine dust, rising from ditches, lifted on the southeasterly evening breeze and dusted your tracks. Following the wind through the center city, you would have come to towering universities and riv- erside parks and, at last, the outskirts. On the way you would have spied a hundred indications marking the city as a So- viet industrial treasure—machine factories, ceramics plants, ironworks, lumber mills, and railways—especially railways. All but 13 percent of Sverdlovsk’s income flowed from mil-

itary production. The industrious citizens built tanks, nuclear rockets, and other armaments. Some of their endeavors were shrouded in secrecy—even from themselves.

Strolling the broad streets of the southwest section you finally would have been brought to shadowed Compound

19. Originally, the complex had been outside the city, but urban sprawl had encircled it. An ornate ironwork gate (opened and closed electronically) guarded the entrance. Be- yond the gate, ten-foot-high, double barbed-wire fences de- fended a secret inner zone of high-security labs. Within stood huge fermenter vats and drying devices. Towering structures bristled with vents and smokestacks. Refrigerator units, concrete storage bunkers, and special rail lines crowded the interior. Not even the head of the local KGB knew that bustling Compound 19 was the Fifteenth Direc- torate’s primary biological arms production facility.

There was something familiar about the secret city of Compound 19, and no wonder. During an August 1945 sweep of Manchuria, the Soviet army had captured Japan’s infamous Unit 731 germ factory. Stockpiled there were frag- mentation bombs loaded with nine hundred pounds of an- thrax. Unit 731 had experimented with dysentery, cholera, plague, and anthrax on U.S., British, and Commonwealth POWs. The Japanese air force had scattered millions of bu- bonic plague–carrying fleas over Chinese cites, triggering mini-epidemics and seven hundred deaths. After the war, the

1. shielded Unit 731 from war crimes prosecution in exchange for germ warfare documents. The Soviets had no need. They already had them, along with blueprints that by 1949 allowed them to construct an exact copy.
   

   By 1979, Sverdlovsk’s anthrax plant operated twenty- four hours a day to produce the most powerful strain ever known. But the powdered anthrax spores floating in Com- pound 19’s filtered air were a strain different from any that had ever existed before. In 1953, at the Soviet Union’s Mi- crobiology Research Institute at Kirov (Russia’s four leading military labs were Zagorsk [Sergiyev Posad], Kirov, Sverd- lovsk, and Strizhi), a defective reactor accidentally spilled live liquid anthrax spores into the city’s sewer. Army work- ers disinfected the sewers, but an unknown quantity spread
   

   to sewer rats. Rodents do not die from the infection, though they can carry it. The bacteriological facility performed reg- ular disinfections after that, yet the disease continued to thrive underground.
   

   Three years later, Vladimir Sizov, Kirov’s senior- scientist army researcher, suggested a team descend into the sewers to discover if anthrax was carried by the rats hiding in the drains. The filthy maze of tunnels was an ideal en- vironment for the survival of Norway or black rats, a heavy, energetic breed. One of the rodents captured in the sewers had developed a new strain, far more virulent than the orig- inal escaped spores. More rat catchers dropped down and trapped the infected offspring of the rats. They brought them to the surface to be killed and dissected. As Sizov had sus- pected, the rats had incubated a naturally selected form of new anthrax. Strain 836, as he called the unusually tough and lethal spore, having survived years in the darkness and putridness of the sewers, had mutated into super anthrax. The army immediately ordered Sizov to cultivate Strain 836 for installation in SS-18s targeted on Western cities. Sizov sent Strain 836 to Compound 19.
   

   THREE
   shifts of vaccinated military technicians in gas masks and protective rubber suits separated fermented an- thrax cultures from their liquid base. Carefully, they dehy- drated them in dryers until they had been converted into cakes. When the bacteria are dried, they form tiny protective anthrax spores that can be converted into beige- or cafe au lait–colored powder. These cakes were carried on an internal conveyor belt and dropped into rotating steel pulverizer drums, crushers in sealed units filled with steel balls. The grinding balls were specific to the size of spores needed. The cascading balls milled the cakes into a fine, airborne powder, which exited the base of the drums to be packed into sealed containers. Afterward the drum and container exteriors were decontaminated with high-pressure hoses and heavily chlorinated water.
   

   Pressure gauges were constantly monitored as experi- ments were carried out in hermetically sealed rooms. Inside
   

   an aerosol chamber two to three cubic meters in size (large enough for two monkeys), technicians conducted vaccine experiments. They “challenged” animals with a spray of five millimeters of an anthrax suspension containing five billion spores. Before venting the contaminated aerosols through special filtered channels, the air from the chambers under- went two disinfecting processes. But two washes of hydro- gen peroxide (at 30 percent strength) do not obliterate anthrax spores.
   

   Thus, the still-contaminated air was funneled through Pe- trionov filters of special synthetic fiber. Each filter, twenty- four inches in diameter and nearly four inches thick, was surrounded by a metal rim that clamped over an exhaust pipe. All that stood between the outside world and Strain 836, the most virulent strain of anthrax ever made, were two round filters. Technicians changed them once a week, but this Friday evening something went wrong.
   

   After each shift the huge drying machines were briefly shut down for routine maintenance checks. During a checkup at the anthrax production unit, two workers re- moved the primary filter to the exhaust system attached to the drying and milling equipment. They discovered a blocked air filter. Although the filter was to be exchanged with a new one immediately, it was not. Heedlessly, the crew chief neglected to have the filter replaced, but scribbled a note for his supervisor before going home: “Filter clogged so I’ve removed it. Replacement necessary.” Lt. Col. Nikolai Chernyshov, supervisor of the afternoon shift that day, in a hurry to get home, should also have recorded information about the defective filter in the logbook for the next shift, but did not.
   

   When the nightshift manager came on duty, he studied the log, saw nothing unusual, and gave the command for the next shift to start up again. A technician in the anthrax drying plant, unaware that the exhaust no longer had a filter, commenced the anthrax production cycle. During the post- experiment phase, a smoky fine dust containing microscopic anthrax spores and chemical additives erupted through the exhaust pipes and into the crisp night air.
   

   A plume the color of dark mustard unfurled silently in
   

   the sky. It dissolved as it glided down and became pinkish, then invisible as it vanished like steam. The weapons-grade anthrax spores were blown unseen by the night wind in a southerly direction from Compound 19. Between 1:00 and 4:00 a.m. human victims in Sverdlovsk were exposed to a lethal emission of aerosolized anthrax. A flock of pigeons flew through the cloud unscathed. The earth dusted. The cloud rose higher. How many aerosol spores had been re- leased? How much would it take to kill?
   

   The smallest estimate of what could have been released was two to four milligrams: invisible but still considerable— billions of spores. The estimated amount of the actual re- lease was seventy kilograms, an amount that could seriously infect tens of thousands of square miles. A release of fifty kilograms of anthrax over an urban area of five million peo- ple would result in 250,000 deaths. Even as little as a gram of aerosolized anthrax, with its trillion spores, could have caused the Sverdlovsk outbreak, according to experts at Dugway Proving Grounds in Utah. The Defense Department settled on ten kilograms as the figure. The release could have been 150 times higher.
   

   The accidental release continued for several hours before a worker noticed the missing filter. At once the shift super- visor shut the machines down. A new filter was installed, but by then it was too late. Several pounds of deadly powder had been pumped through an air duct. Though an unseen shadow hung over Sverdlovsk, no one from Compound 19 alerted city officials. No one notified the Moscow Ministry of Defense headquarters of an accidental aerosol anthrax emission.
   

   The wind increased, steady and unbroken by gusts. In late March 1979, wind direction in Sverdlovsk was variable. This Friday night the direction was dead southeast. The first causalties were walking and talking only a few hundred yards downwind of Compound 19. Odorless anthrax aerosol settled over nearby Compound 32, a self-contained military garrison balanced on the southern edge of the secret anthrax processing plant.
   

   Compound 32 had been built in the 1960s to shelter a couple thousand troops and their families. The accidental
   

   emission hit the military personnel from 19 hard and troops at 32 harder. They were soldiers who happened to be near open windows, in the streets or catching a drink at a bar. Anthrax was the “burning wind of plague” that begins Ho- mer’s
   Iliad
   : “but soldiers, too, soon felt transfixing pain and pyres burned night and day.”
   

   An auxiliary worker, Dmitryevich Nikolaev, took a deep breath. He would be dead in ten days. The slaughtering ma- chine ran on, cold-blooded and impersonal. Within a week nearly all of those who breathed in the night air would be dead. “And each had an individuality of his own, a will of his own, a hope and heart’s desire.. .” They had done noth- ing to deserve the plume’s icy touch.
   

   Beyond Compound 32’s barracks and apartments stretched a blue-collar neighborhood: homes, schools, fac- tories, shops, and residences. They comprised the Chkalov- skiy
   rayon
   (district), the southern tip of Sverdlovsk. Old and older, male and female, but three-quarters of the victims were men. The median age was forty-two. But why were nearly all middle-aged men fatally infected? The oldest, Ni- kolaev, was a sixty-year-old grandfather; the youngest, a woman, just twenty-four.
   

   Was the contagion selective in some way? Of course, some of the men were already susceptible. Some had prob- lems with their immune systems or suffered from asbestosis, siderosis, or tuberculosis. Some were heavy smokers. Fifteen harbored spores in their lungs for three or more weeks be- fore falling ill. There were no children among the epidemic’s victims. Few children played outside so late on a Friday night and their stronger immune systems protected them.
   

   The cloud drifted further southward, the densest area of spores forming a shape like a baseball bat, a discernible band of infections marking the map of Chkalovskiy. The clubbed end hung over the hinterlands. Beyond lay a ceram- ics plant, peaceful farmland, the lambs, and their unsus- pecting owners. The bat shape widened to a triangle, its point at Compound 19 and its base a half-mile wide. Wedge- shaped, it traveled southeast over Chkalovskiy at an average rate of about fifteen kilometers per hour.
   

   Death passed over roughly seven thousand people within
   

   its boundaries. Spores fell on a large block of five-story apartment buildings on the boulevard bordering Chkalovskiy
   rayon.
   Two residents there were infected—“Fate waited in their path or theirs in Fate’s.” Another unlucky twenty were working near the military facility or the ceramics factory to the southeast. An additional twenty-six were home or work- ing in local industries within the same area.
   

   The plume closed on a ceramics plant less than a mile away from Compound 19. It drifted along dusty Poldnevaya Street. The tall smokestack of the pipe factory stood in the direct path of the spore cloud. The cloud touched a huge gated complex of buildings with paths leading from one to the other—the ceramics factory. For decades the factory had made industrial pipes, bathroom fixtures, dishes, teapots, and tiles. Its tile shop fired four types of clay, including green clay aged by microbial action. A conveyor belt propelled wet ceramic squares into a furnace. Behind the tile facility lay the boiler room. To the left of the entrance and west of the tile room stood a three-story, block-long building.
   

   A huge, rundown structure with gaping holes in its walls hugged the northeast edge of the plant—the pipe shop. Its cavernous interior was filled with engines, kilns, troughs, catwalks, gantries, and mazes of machinery. Pipes and con- duits ran every way. On the top level, rows of high, large windows faced northwest in the direction of Compound 19. Warm air, heated by the ovens below, rose. The upper air was smoky in spite of a draft and several broken windows. The overheated air rolled like a wave as it met incoming current carrying the fatal spores. They drifted through the gaping windows of the overheated factory and were trapped. Because of the inversion layer, some of the spores stayed aloft for a considerable time. Eventually, though, they drifted down on the pipe shop workers below. Now the time of disaster had come; the men would not survive another week. Unaware of jeopardy, factory workers inhaled lethal gusts of air. Speridon Viktorovich Zakharov, forty-four, was
   

   one of those.
   

   In other parts of the factory, more employees were be- coming mortally infected. Maintenance men driving trucks drove right into the invisible plume. Spores were inhaled by
   

   a man who drove an electric car inside the factory. A pipe fitter, a pipe welder, and a clay mixer were dead and did not know it. Officer Vladimir Sannikov, innocently trapped in a lethal swath of air, enjoyed a late snack at the cafeteria adjacent to the loading platform.
   

   Ten of 150 workers would die—almost a 7 percent fa- tality rate. Even an unimaginably small quantity posed a substantial threat. The inhalation of eight thousand spores is required to fatally infect half of an exposed population.
   

   Across the street from the ceramics plant, a man was finishing a new family bathhouse. The cloud did not touch him. Near the ceramics factory, Anna Petrovna Komina, a strong-featured woman with dark hair and deep-set eyes, sat in her home on Ulitsa Lyapustina. The house numbers on her street were not in order, but the invisible plume did not become lost. Anna lived in a small cottage with a muddy yard and a small gate, but the rods and threads did not open the gate. They had no need. There were two pigs in the backyard, but they were untouched. There were several steps, but the bacteria walked up them as if paying a visit. The plume did not wipe its shoes on the doormat as is the local custom.
   

   Silently the “burning wind of plague” entered a little par- lor with day beds. A small French door led to another room with a table, four chairs, and a breakfront with china behind glass. Anna neither smoked nor drank nor suffered from serious illness, but now the time of disaster had come; the fifty-four-year-old woman would not survive another week. Like puffs of cannon smoke the cloud traversed the Chkalovskiy district, forced southward by the March wind. It would travel many miles before disseminating. As it dis- persed, a less concentrated cloud of spores drifted invisibly over six small villages further south in Syserskiy
   rayon
   , in- fecting livestock with its silent hiss. Animals began to sicken
   

   in Abramovo, the village farthest southeast of Sverdlovsk. The next morning, Mrs. Lomovtsev, an Abramovo vil-
   

   lage resident, awoke and left her tin roof cottage. Since the ground was snowless, she led her single sheep around back to graze in the large field behind her house. The sheep was still healthy in the evening, though a little muddy. On Sun-
   

   day morning, the first day of April, it was dead. After she buried the carcass at the town dump, Mrs. Lomovtsev heard that her neighbors, the Krutikovs, had also lost a sheep. They butchered it and ate pies from its meat. Yet, no one in the family fell sick, possibly because the meat was well cooked.
   

   All weekend Sverdlovsk emergency rooms at Hospitals 20 and 24 were filled with patients suffering headaches, diz- ziness, chills, and fevers. Most were sent home by doctors who mistook the initial symptoms of anthrax as flu. On Sun- day evening, another neighbor of the Lomovtsevs, Yuriy Kostarov, lost a white ram. Its whiteness had altered to a leaden blue; its legs were sticking in the air. Mrs. Kostarov had sheared the ram before it fell sick and stored its white wool in a can. The local vet told the Abramovo villagers the disease might be anthrax and had the Lomovtsevs’ sheep dug up and burned.