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

'We could say it was a plague.'
'And it was.'
They both laughed.
Downwind, the Russian trawler moved along the edge of the forbidden zone. Most of the
glassware had been broken, but a few petri dishes full of blood jelly sat in the racks, open to
the air. Captain Yevlikov steered right on, wearing his green rubber suit, looking through the
eyeholes and sweating like a man in a mine. He couldn't see any U.S. Navy vessels, and he
kept his radar turned off, but he knew there was a fleet of steel shadows out there. Logistics
and transport. Surveillance. Perimeter safety. Air support. Come daylight, he was going to
have more trouble, and he knew it.


The activity around Johnston Atoll in 1969 was officially a 'joint naval exercise,' but that
was a cover for the fact that what was going on were hot field trials for the strategic use of
biological weapons over large areas of territory. The trials had been gradually increasing in
scope since 1964. At the peak of the trials there were enough ships involved to make up the
fifth-largest navy in the world. This was as large a fleet as the naval forces used in the air
tests of hydrogen bombs in the Pacific Ocean during the 1950s -- a fact not lost on the
Russians. Captain Yevlikov threaded his little vessel along the outskirts of a formidable naval
force, wondering if he would get out alive.
The wave of bioparticles -- the bio-aerosol -- moved all night. It passed the monkey
barges one by one, and later it passed over the Russian trawler. At four o'clock in the
morning, the order came to bring the last barge home. All the monkeys had breathed the
particles by then. The last tugboat's engines roared, and the crew drove the boat at full
speed for the atoll. They wanted to get out of there in the worst way.
The monkeys were placed in cages in the monkey labs on Johnston Atoll. During the next
three days, Mark Littleberry and the other scientists saw the effects of the hot agent called
the Utah cocktail.
Half of the monkeys became sick and died. They coughed and coughed with Utah until their
lungs burned up, but no moisture came out. The other half of the monkeys lived, and remained
healthy. They were fine. No problems.
The infected monkeys always died. Once a monkey showed any signs of Utah, the animal
was doomed. Not a single monkey became sick and recovered. In other words, the
case-fatality rate for Utah in untreated primates was 100 percent. As to whether a primate
became infected or not, it seemed to be random chance. Those animals that got one or two
particles of Utah lodged in their lungs ended up dead. Those animals that got no particles in
their lungs, or those animals that, for some reason, were able to resist one or two particles of
Utah in the lungs, were fine. There was no such thing as a mild case of Utah.
This is typical of biological weapons. It is essentially impossible to completely exterminate a
population with a biological weapon. On the other hand, it is quite easy to crash a population,
reducing it by half or more in a few days.
The animals that had been in closed rooms belowdecks experienced the same death rate as
the animals in the open air. Being in a closed room did not help. A bio-aerosol behaves like a
gas. Bioparticles are not like nuclear fallout, which falls out, hence its name. The particles of a
bioweapon are light and fluffy. Organic. They float in the air. They dance through the smallest
cracks. You can't hide from a living hot agent in the air.
Day after day, Mark Littleberry walked along the monkey cages, looking in at the sick
animals. They were hunched over, lethargic, broken. Some were deranged: the Utah had gone
to the brain. The animals wheezed and coughed, but nothing came up, or they were curled up
in the fetal position, having crashed and died.