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

He went off by himself and walked along the beach. He was thinking about the monkeys,
thinking about what he had seen recently at Pine Bluff, Arkansas, at the Biological Directorate
X-201 plant, thinking about who he was. But Littleberry had work to do, people to worry
about. He stayed up all night, maintaining radio contact with the Navy crews on board the
tugboats. The tugboats were pulling barges full of monkeys.
The monkey barges with their tugboats were stationed at intervals downwind. The monkeys
were rhesus monkeys housed in metal cages. Some of the cages sat on the decks of the
barges; some of them were in closed rooms in the holds of the barges. The scientists were
interested in knowing if closing yourself in a room might provide some protection against a
biological weapon drifting in the open air.
Littleberry stayed by a radio set in the command center on the island. 'Tugboat Charlie.
Come in. This is Littleberry. How are you guys doing? Y'all hanging in there?'
Fifty miles downwind, at the far end of the test zone, a tugboat captain was standing at
the wheel of his boat. He was wearing a heavy rubber space suit with an Army gas mask that
was equipped with special biological filters, HEPA filters. HEPA stands for high-efficiency p
article arrestor. A HEPA filter will trap a virus or a bacterial particle before it can get into the
lungs.
'We're dying of the heat here,' the captain said. 'The heat's gonna kill us before the bugs
do.'
'Copy, I hear you. Wind direction is south-southwest. Holding steady at eight knots.
They're going to call you in as soon as possible,' Littleberry said. He was watching the
weather reports coming from the ships stationed around the test zone. Judging from the
speed of the wind, he could guess where the wave of hot agent was as it moved southwest
with the trades.
It was a soft night in the South Pacific, and a pod of sperm whales played in the forbidden
zone. One of the techs on the last tugboat was sure he had seen white jets in the moonlight,
whales rising and blowing. The waves flashed with phosphorescence as they slopped against
the hull of the monkey barge. The men inside the rubber suits were drenched with sweat, and
they worried constantly about getting a rip, a crack in their masks. The tugboat's engines
rumbled gently, pulling the monkey barge, keeping the boat on location. The captain could
hear the monkeys hooting and calling. The animals were nervous. Something was up.
Something bad. The humans were doing experiments again. It was enough to make any
monkey a nervous wreck.
On the tugboat's deck, two Army technicians in space suits were tending the bubbler and
the blood clock. The bubbler was sucking air through a glass tank full of oil. The oil would
collect particles that were in the air. The blood clock was a rotating dish that held a circular
slab of blood agar. Agar is a jelly on which bacteria grow easily. Blood agar has blood mixed
into it, and it has a dark red color. Biological weapons often grow better in the presence of
blood.
The blood clock turned slowly, moving the blood jelly past a slit exposed to the open air. As
particles of hot agent touched the jelly, they would bind to it and begin taking nutrients out
of the blood, and they would multiply, forming streaks and spots. Later, the face of the blood
clock would show the rise and fall of hot agent in the air.
The Army techs had to shout to each other to be heard through their space suits. 'I hear
Nixon's gonna use this shit in Vietnam,' one of them yelled, his voice muffled by his mask.
'Yeah, they're probably thinking about it,' the other tech shouted back.
'Think what a laydown would do to the Ho Chi Minh Trail. If you did a few line laydowns
from north to south, you know, right along the trail?'
'Shit. Half the North Vietnamese Army would just disappear. They'd melt away in the jungle.
Nobody would know what happened.'