Wake Island

 

“Our little mid-Pacific sojourn may have taken an ominous turn.” Dr. Janis Fielding was in melodrama mode as she passed out copies of the spreadsheets she’d downloaded from counterparts aboard the RV Seascope. “This data just came in and I made copies for everyone. Take a few minutes to look it over and then I’ll want opinions from all disciplines.”

Tracey Davis scratched at a patch of skin that was starting to peel under the modest khaki safari shirt she’d tossed on over her bikini top and began to scan the rows of figures. Fielding was a bit of a drama queen but some of this stuff did look disturbing. Seated to her right, Woodrow Cheeley tossed his copy of the print-out on the table and sat back with his hands folded on his stomach. She elbowed him and pointed at the printed material.

“You under-whelmed or just don’t give a shit?”

He shrugged and popped the tab on a Diet Coke. “Not my thing. No data on birds. It’s all fish stuff, right?”

Tracey riffed quickly through the pages. There was nothing in the material relating to avian studies. Apparently, the scientists working at the more sophisticated labs on the ship had limited their studies to fish they’d harvested after leaving Wake. It didn’t take long to see the bottom line. The people manning the spectrographs and electron microscopes aboard the Seascope were drawing no definite conclusions as yet, but the evidence was pointing toward Clostridium botulinum. Tracey thought that couldn’t—or shouldn’t—be right but these early readouts looked convincing.

“You should have a feel for the figures by now.” Dr. Fielding returned to the conference table from a sideboard where she’d made herself a peanut butter and jelly sandwich. “Let’s just go around the table and get your takes on this. Chemistry?”

“Out of my wheelhouse.” Dr. Stanley Radicoff, the breezy research chemist from UC Berkley was slathering yellow mustard on the cold cuts he’d piled onto a flour tortilla. “Our bad boy doesn’t appear to be chemical in nature. Looks more like something you and Andrew should handle.” Radicoff nodded to his right where Dr. Andrew Merman, a microbiologist on loan to the team from MIT was poking around in a plastic bowl of Ramen. “That said, I can’t fault the discipline. It looks like they followed all the appropriate protocols and did the right tests.”

“Just not enough of them.” Merman slurped a spoonful of noodles and chewed for a moment as he ran a finger across a printed page. “We need a bunch more data and independent verification. What if our samples don’t yield similar results? It’s too early in the process to panic and put all this down to botulism. It doesn’t make sense anyway. You find botulinum in fish all the time but it doesn’t kill the host.”

Fielding punched up a screen on her laptop and studied it for a moment. “Unless someone somewhere is messing around with the genomes. There’s a report here that says the Soviets tried it out on some unpronounceable island in the Aral Sea in the early ’70s…”

 “C’mon, Jan,” Merman complained as he poked at his noodles. “What are you looking at? That testimony from Alibekov, the former Soviet bio-weapons guy? Read on. He says they were trying to splice the toxin gene onto other bacteria to come up with a contagious form of botulinum. They failed. It was way too hard.”

“That doesn’t mean someone isn’t out there giving it another try.” Dr. Kimiko Fukihara of the U.S. Army Medical Research Institute for Infectious Diseases had been convinced from the day she came aboard the RV Seascope that they were facing a serious threat. As an internal medicine specialist in infectious diseases and epidemiology, she’d studied any number of botulism outbreaks in her native Japan that were traced to seafood of one type or another. “You want to remember that botulinum toxin is the most poisonous substance we know of. You introduce it to a food source, and millions would die, especially if you could come up with a contagious form. I’m not saying that’s what we’re looking at here, but we shouldn’t write it off.”

Woody seemed a little more interested in the direction the conversation was taking. “That’s a fairly long stretch isn’t it, Kimiko? I seem to remember something in the literature about bad jalapeño peppers or something a couple of years ago…somewhere in the Southwest? Bunch of people got sick but nobody croaked.”

“Limited universe on that one, about sixty people give or take. And they were all treated with anti-toxin. We knew what we were dealing with and we dealt with it. This could be different.”

Tracey held up her hand and got the nod from Dr. Fielding. “As the resident fish guru, I think we need to go back to what Andy said earlier. Botulinum doesn’t kill the host. It kills people who eat the host. Or people who eat the host before heating it up to around one-eighty-five Fahrenheit anyway. I think we need to be taking a closer look at environmental issues. Could it be something in the habitat? Could fish in the flow we’re studying be picking up something in the water that stimulates growth of bacterial spores?”

Sarah Kellerman, the ocean science and atmospherics specialist from Woods Hole, shrugged and consulted her notebook. “There’s nothing unusual in local waters or in the algae-plankton world around Wake. I’m waiting for read-outs on samples the folks on Seascope are taking as they back-track along the counter-current flow. I’ll be able to give you a better opinion then but for right now, if there’s something in the water, it’s not in these particular waters. Could be something closer to the nexus – wherever that turns out to be. More when I get the data dumps.”

“That’s probably a dead-end,” Doctor Fielding said as she tapped at her laptop’s keyboard. “It says here no cases of waterborne botulism have ever been reported.”

“Don’t misinterpret that,” Dr. Fukihara warned. “That means the toxin doesn’t normally survive in water but it doesn’t mean it can’t…especially if some element of the genome has morphed or been altered. It’s not that far-fetched. Botulinum occurs in seven categories depending on the strain. We need to know more about what we’re dealing with here. Is this Type A, the kind of stuff they purify and use in botox injections, or is it one of the others, B through G?”

“We start on that early tomorrow morning. Let’s recap unless we’ve missed something.” Dr. Fielding cut a glance at Woodrow Cheeley who was casually checking his watch and wondering if he could talk Tracey Davis into an outrigger canoe trip across the Wake lagoon before the Drifters Reef opened for nightly business. “Woody, any input from the wonderful world of birds?”

“Nothing yet, mainly because I haven’t done any dissections, but it’s not hard to see the cause and effect. Fish carry toxin. Birds eat fish. If toxin is the sort that’s lethal to avians, birds die. I’ll clean that up for you starting tomorrow.”

“OK, tonight we take some more time to examine the data from Seascope. Cross-disciplines and confer as intellectual curiosity impels you.” Dr. Fielding ran a pencil down the check-list she’d prepared during the meeting. “We’ll take a reverse-research approach to this thing. First thing is to verify the data from Seascope. Are we really looking at Botulinum? If so, what strain? From there we can start to speculate on causes and pass the data on to Seascope and research assets back home.”

She snapped her leather file folder closed and swept her eyes over the Wake research team. “A couple of thoughts before I cut you all loose for the evening: Remember we’re doing basic research here; looking for information. I don’t want anyone going all Dr. House, MD on me. Just do your research and assemble the data. It’s way too early to engage in wild speculation about mutant genetic experiments or terrorist plots. And finally, remember what Kimiko said earlier. Botulinum is deadly stuff; serious poison and potentially lethal. Starting tomorrow, we work with specimens under strict haz-mat protocols, masks and gloves at all times. If you don’t know the drill, talk to Kimiko and she’ll get you snapped in on procedures. The stuff normally doesn’t penetrate intact skin but I want all of you to use extreme caution with any kind of sharps. Cuts, scrapes or open wounds of any kind, see Dr. Fukihara.”