"Richard Preston - The Cobra Event" - читать интересную книгу автора (Preston Richard)

 The doctors took some of the animals away and killed them and opened them up to see
what was going on inside them. Littleberry himself opened up many monkeys. He was most
impressed with the fact that the animals looked fairly healthy inside. But if you tested a dead
monkey's blood, you found that it was radiantly hot with Utah. This scared him. Later he
would write in a classified report: 'Well-trained physicians might not recognize the signs of
infection by a military weapon in a patient, especially if it is a mixed combination. Physicians
should be warned that the effects of a weaponized organism on the human body may be
very different from natural disease caused by the same organism.'
Then Littleberry began to see that the monkeys from the farthest barge were dying at the
same rate as the monkeys in the barge nearest the release line. The hot agent was just as
strong and deadly fifty miles downwind. After fifty miles of drift, the killing power of Utah had
not diminished. This was completely unlike a chemical weapon. Sarin and Tabun, chemical
nerve gases, lose killing power rapidly as they spread out. Utah was alive. Utah stayed alive.
Utah needed to find blood. It needed to find a host. If it could find a host, it would make
copies of itself explosively inside the host.
The tests had rendered an area of the Pacific Ocean larger than Los Angeles as hot as hell,
in a biological sense. The scientists never found out how far the agent spread during that
test, only that it went beyond the test area and kept going. It passed over the last barge and
moved on through the night, undiminished in strength. It did not kill any fish or marine
organisms, because they don't have lungs. If any sperm whales crashed and died, no one
noticed.
Captain Yevlikov and his crew survived, all but the shocked man from the Ministry of
Health, who had refused to wear a mask; his lungs shriveled; and they buried him at sea. The
Utah grew up in little spots and colonies on the Soviet petri dishes. They froze some samples
and carried them back to Vladivostok. It is believed that the frozen samples of Utah were
flown by jet transport to a closed military facility known as the Institute of Applied
Microbiology at Obolensk, south of Moscow, where the weapon was analyzed and Russian
scientists began growing it in their laboratories. This may be how Russia obtained the
American weaponsgrade strain of Utah for its own arsenal of strategic life forms. Captain
Gennadi Yevlikov was given a medal for bravery and service to his country.
The rising sun over the Pacific Ocean on the morning following the test began to neutralize
the Utah, killing its genetic material. Eventually it biodegraded, and no trace of it remained in
the sea or in the air. It was totally gone, and all that was left was knowledge.




Invisible History (I.)
The Roosevelt Room,
The White House, November 25, 1969

President Richard Nixon's prepared statement was very brief, and he took no questions from
the press. Sticking to the text, he said that the United States was renouncing the first use of
chemical weapons. Then he went on to what was clearly the more important subject to him:
biological weapons. 'Second, biological warfare, which is commonly called germ warfare -- ' He
shook the word germ with Nixonian emphasis, as if he shuddered to his jowls at the thought
of germs. 'Germ warfare: this has massive, unpredictable, and potentially uncontrollable
consequences. It may produce global epidemics and profoundly affect the health of future
generations.'
He said that after consulting with experts he had decided that the United States of