"Preston, Richard - The Hot Zone" - читать интересную книгу автора (Preston Richard)

THE HOT ZONE

Richard Preston
Random House
ISBN 0-679-43094-6

This book describes events between 1967 and 1993. The incubation period
of the viruses in this book is less than twenty-four days. No one who
suffered from any of the viruses or who was in contact with anyone
suffering from them can catch or spread the viruses outside of the
incubation period. None of the living people referred to in this book
suffer from a contagious disease. The viruses cannot survive
independently for more than ten days unless the viruses are preserved and
frozen with special procedures and laboratory equipment. Thus none of the
locations in Reston or the Washington, D.C. area described in this book is
infective or dangerous.

The second angel poured his bowl into the sea, and it became like the
blood of a dead man.
-APOCALYPSE


PART ONE
THE SHADOW OF MOUNT ELGON

SOMETHING IN THE FOREST

1980 NEW YEAR'S DAY

CHARLES MONET was a loner. He was a Frenchman who lived by himself in a
little wooden bungalow on the private lands of Nzoia Sugar Factory, a
plantation in western Kenya what spread along the Nzoia River within sight
of Mount Elgon, a huge, solitary extinct volcano that rises to a height of
fourteen thousand feet near the edge of the Rift Valley. Monet's history
is a little obscure. As with so many expatriates who end up in Africa, it
is not clear what brought him there. Perhaps he had been in some kind of
trouble in France, or perhaps he had been drawn to Kenya by the beauty of
the country. He was an amateur naturalist, fond of birds and animals but
not of humanity in general. He was fifty-six years old, of medium height
and medium build, with smooth, straight brown hair, a good-looking man.
It seems that his only close friends were women who lived in towns around
the mountain, yet even they could not recall much about him for the
doctors who investigated his death. His job was to take care of the sugar
factory's water-pumping machinery, which drew water from the Nzoia River
and delivered it to many miles of sugar-cane fields. They say that he
spent most of his day inside the pump house by the river, as if it pleased
him to watch and listen to machines doing their work.
So often in a case like this, it's hard to pin down the details. The
doctors remember the clinical signs, because no one who has seen the
effects of a Biosafety Level 4 hot agent on a human being can ever forget