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animals, in turn, were being jammed together in cages, exposed to one another, passing viruses back and forth. Furthermore, different species of monkeys were mixed together. It was a perfect setup for an outbreak of a virus that could jump species. It was also a natural laboratory for rapid virus evolution, and possibly it led to the creation of HIV . Did HIV crash into the human race as a result of the monkey trade? Did AIDS come from an island in Lake Victoria? A hot island? Who knows. When you begin probing into the origins of AIDS and Marburg, the light fails and things go dark, but you sense hidden connections. Both viruses seem part of a pattern.
    When he learned what Marburg virus does to human beings, Dr. David Silverstein persuaded the Kenyan health authorities to shut down Nairobi Hospital. For a week, patients who arrived at the doors were turned away, while sixty-seven people were quarantined inside the hospital, mostly medical staff. They included the doctor who had done the autopsy on Monet, nurses who had attended Monet or Dr. Musoke, the surgeons who had operatedon Musoke, and aides and technicians who had handled any secretions from either Monet or Musoke. It turned out that a large part of the hospital’s staff had had direct contact with either Monet or Musoke or with blood samples and fluids that came from the two patients. The surgeons who had operated on Musoke, remembering only too well that they had been “up to the elbows in blood,” sweated in quarantine for two weeks while they wondered if they were going to break with Marburg. A single human virus bomb had walked into the hospital’s waiting room and exploded there, and the event had put the hospital out of business. Charles Monet had been an Exocet missile that struck the hospital below the water line.
    Dr. Shem Musoke survived his encounter with a hot agent. Ten days after he fell sick, the doctors noticed a change for the better. Instead of merely lying in bed in a passive state, he became disoriented and angry and refused to take medicine. One day, a nurse was trying to turn him over in bed, and he waved his fist at her and cried, “I have a stick, and I will beat you.” It was around that time that he began to get better, and after many days his fever subsided and his eyes cleared; his mind and personality came back, and he recovered slowly but completely. Today he is one of the leading physicians at Nairobi Hospital, where he practices as a member of David Silverstein’s group. One day I interviewed him, and he said to me that he has almost no memory of the weeks he was infected with Marburg. “I only remember bitsand pieces,” he said. “I remember having major confusion. I remember, before my surgery, that I walked out of my room with my IV drip hanging out of me. I remember the nurses just turning me and turning me in bed. I don’t remember much of the pain. The only pain I can talk about is the muscle ache and the lower-back ache. And I remember him throwing up on me.” Nobody else at the hospital developed a proven case of Marburg-virus disease.
    When a virus is trying, so to speak, to crash into the human species, the warning sign may be a spattering of breaks at different times and places. These are microbreaks. What had happened at Nairobi Hospital was an isolated emergence, a microbreak of a rain-forest virus with unknown potential to start an explosive chain of lethal transmission in the human race.
    Tubes of Dr. Musoke’s blood went to laboratories around the world so that they could have samples of living Marburg for their collections of life forms. The Marburg in his blood had come from Charles Monet’s black vomit and perhaps originally from Kitum Cave. Today this particular strain of Marburg virus is known as the Musoke strain. Some of it ended up in glass vials in freezers owned by the United States Army, where it was kept immortal in a zoo of hot agents.

A WOMAN
AND A SOLDIER
1983 SEPTEMBER 25, 1800