Gravity Read online

  THE AUTOPSY

  SIXTEEN

  Gordon Obie walked into the video conference room prepared for bloody battle, but none of the officials sitting around the table suspected the depth of his rage. And no wonder; Obie was wearing his usual poker face, and he didn’t say a word as he took his place at the table, next to a tearful and puffy-eyed Public Affairs Officer Gretchen Liu. Everyone looked shell-shocked. They didn’t even notice Gordon’s entrance.

  Also at the table was NASA administrator Leroy Cornell, JSC director Ken Blankenship, and a half dozen senior NASA officials, all of them grimly staring at the two video display screens. On the first screen was a Colonel Lawrence Harrison from USAMRIID, speaking from the Army base in Fort Detrick, Maryland. On the second monitor was a solemn, dark-haired man in civilian clothes, identified as “Jared Profitt, White House Security Council.” He did not look like a bureaucrat. With his mournful eyes and his gaunt, almost ascetic features, he looked like a medieval monk, unwillingly transported into a modern age of suits and ties.

  Blankenship was talking, his comments directed at Colonel Harrison. “Not only did your soldiers prevent my people from doing their jobs, they threatened them at gunpoint. One of our flight surgeons was assaulted—knocked to the ground with a rifle butt. We have three dozen witnesses—”

  “Dr. McCallum broke through our security cordon. He refused to halt as ordered,” Colonel Harrison responded. “We had a hot zone to protect.”

  “So now the U.S. Army is prepared to attack, even shoot, civilians?”

  “Ken, let’s try to look at it from USAMRIID’s point of view,” said Cornell, placing a calming hand on Blankenship’s arm. The diplomat’s touch, thought Gordon with distaste. Cornell might be NASA’s spokesman at the White House and their best asset when it came to cajoling Congress for money, but many at NASA had never really trusted him. They could never trust any man who thought more like a politician than an engineer. “Protecting a hot zone is a valid reason to apply force,” said Cornell. “Dr. McCallum did breach the security line.”

  “And the results could have been disastrous,” said Harrison over the audio feed. “Our intelligence reports that Marburg virus may have been purposefully introduced to the space station. Marburg is a cousin of Ebola virus.”

  “How would it get aboard?” said Blankenship. “Every experimental protocol is reviewed for safety. Every lab animal is certified healthy. We don’t send up biohazards.”

  “That’s your agency line, of course. But you receive your experimental payloads from scientists all around the country. You may screen their protocols, but you can’t examine every bacteria or tissue culture as it arrives for launch. To keep biological materials alive, the payloads are loaded right onto the shuttle. What if one of those experiments was contaminated? Consider how easy it is to replace a harmless culture with a dangerous organism like Marburg.”

  “Are you saying this was a deliberate sabotage attempt on the station?” said Blankenship. “An act of bioterrorism?”

  “That’s precisely what I’m saying. Let me describe what happens to you if you are infected with this particular virus. First your muscles begin to ache and you have a fever. The ache is so severe, so agonizing, you can scarcely bear to be touched. An intramuscular injection makes you shriek in pain. Then your eyes turn red. Your belly begins to hurt, and you vomit, again and again. You begin to throw up blood. It comes up black at first, because of digestive processes. Then it comes faster and turns bright red, as rapid as a gushing pump. Your liver swells, cracks. Your kidneys fail. Your internal organs are being destroyed, turning to foul, black mush. And suddenly, disastrously, your blood pressure crashes. And you’re dead.” Harrison paused. “That’s what we may be dealing with, gentlemen.”

  “This is bullshit!” blurted Gordon Obie.

  Everyone at the table stared at him in astonishment. The Sphinx had spoken. On the rare occasions Obie did say anything at a meeting, it was usually in a monotone, his words used to convey data and information, not emotion. This outburst had shocked them all.

  “May I ask who just spoke?” asked Colonel Harrison.

  “I’m Gordon Obie, director of Flight Crew Operations.”

  “Oh. The astronauts’ top dog.”

  “You could call me that.”

  “And why is this bullshit?”

  “I don’t believe this is Marburg virus. I don’t know what it is, but I do know you’re not telling us the truth.”

  Colonel Harrison’s face froze into a rigid mask. He said nothing.

  It was Jared Profitt who spoke. His voice sounded exactly as Gordon had expected, thin and reedy. He was not a bully like Harrison, but a man who preferred to appeal to one’s intellect and reason. “I understand your frustration, Mr. Obie,” Profitt said. “There’s so much we’re unable to tell you because of security concerns. But Marburg is not something we can be careless about.”

  “If you already know it’s Marburg, then why are you excluding our flight surgeons from the autopsy? Are you afraid we’ll learn the truth?”

  “Gordon,” Cornell said quietly, “why don’t we discuss this in private?”

  Gordon ignored him and said to the screen, “What disease are we really talking about? An infection? A toxin? Something loaded on board the shuttle in a military payload, perhaps?”

  There was a silence. Then Harrison blustered, “There’s that NASA paranoia! Your agency likes to blame the military for everything that goes wrong.”

  “Why do you refuse to allow my flight surgeon into the autopsy?”

  “Are we speaking of Dr. McCallum?” asked Profitt.

  “Yes. McCallum has training in aviation trauma and pathology. He is a flight surgeon as well as a former member of the astronaut corps. The fact you refuse to let him or any of our doctors view the autopsies makes me wonder what you don’t want NASA to see.”

  Colonel Harrison glanced sideways, as though to look at someone else in the room. When he gazed back at the camera, his face was flushed and angry. “This is absurd. You people just crashed the shuttle! You screw up the landing, kill your own crew, and then you point an accusing finger at the U.S. Army?”

  “The entire astronaut corps is up in arms about this,” said Gordon. “We want to know what really happened to our colleagues. We insist you allow one of our doctors to view the bodies.”

  Leroy Cornell again tried to intercede. “Gordon, you can’t make unreasonable demands like this,” he said quietly. “They know what they’re doing.”

  “So do I.”

  “I’m going to ask you to back down now.”

  Gordon looked Cornell in the eye. Cornell was NASA’s representative to the White House, NASA’s voice in Congress. Opposing him was career suicide.

  He did it anyway. “I speak for the astronauts,” he said. “My people.” He turned to the video screen, his gaze fixed on the stony face of Colonel Harrison. “And we’re not above taking our concerns to the press. We don’t consider this move lightly—exposing confidential NASA matters. The astronaut corps has always been discreet. But if we’re forced to, we will demand a public inquiry.”

  Gretchen Liu’s jaw dropped. “Gordon,” she whispered, “what the hell are you doing?”

  “What I have to do.”

  The silence at the table stretched to a full minute.

  Then, to everyone’s astonishment, Ken Blankenship said, “I side with our astronauts.”

  “So do I,” said another voice.

  “Me too—”

  “—and me.”

  Gordon looked around the table at his colleagues. Most of these people were engineers and operational managers whose names seldom turned up in the press. More often than not, they were in conflict with the astronauts, whom they considered flyboys with big egos. The astronauts got all the glory, but these men and women, who performed the unseen and unglamorous jobs that made spaceflight a reality, were the heart and soul of NASA. And they were now united behind Gordon.

&nb
sp; Leroy Cornell looked stricken, the leader abandoned by his own troops. He was a proud man, and this was a humiliatingly public blow. He cleared his throat and slowly squared his shoulders. Then he faced the video image of Colonel Harrison. “I have no choice but to support my astronauts as well,” he said. “I insist that one of our flight surgeons be allowed to view the autopsies.”

  Colonel Harrison said nothing. It was Jared Profitt who made the final decision—Jared Profitt who was obviously the real man in charge. He turned to confer with someone standing offscreen. Then he looked at the camera and nodded.

  Both screens went blank. The video conference had ended.

  “Well, you certainly thumbed your nose at the U.S. Army,” said Gretchen. “Did you see how pissed-off Harrison looked?”

  No, thought Gordon, remembering Colonel Harrison’s expression just before the image went blank. That wasn’t anger I saw on his face. It was fear.

  The bodies had not been taken to USAMRIID headquarters in Fort Detrick, Maryland, as Jack had expected. They’d been transported barely sixty miles away from the White Sands landing strip to a windowless concrete-block building, much like the dozens of other anonymous government buildings that had sprung up in that dry desert valley. But this one had a distinguishing feature: a series of ventilation pipes jutting up from the roofline. Barbed wire bristled atop the perimeter fence. As they drove through the military checkpoint, Jack heard the hum of high-voltage wires.

  Flanked by his armed escort, Jack approached the front entrance—the only entrance, he realized. On the door was a chillingly familiar symbol: the bright red biohazard blossom. What is this facility doing in the middle of nowhere? he wondered. Then he scanned the featureless horizon, and his question was answered. The building was here precisely because it was in the middle of nowhere.

  He was escorted through the door and into a series of stark corridors heading deeper into the heart of the building. He saw men and women in Army uniforms, others in lab coats. All lighting was artificial, and the faces appeared bluish and sickly.

  The guards stopped outside a door labeled “Men’s Lockers.”

  “Go in,” he was told. “Follow the written instructions to the letter. Then go through the next door. They’re waiting for you.”

  Jack entered the room. Inside were lockers, a laundry cart containing various sizes of green surgical scrub suits, a shelf with paper caps, a sink, and a mirror. A list of instructions was posted on the wall, starting with “Remove ALL street clothes, including underwear.”

  He took off his clothes, left them in an unsecured locker, and dressed in a scrub suit. Then he pushed through the next door, again labeled with the universal biohazard symbol, into an ultraviolet-lit room. There he paused, wondering what to do next.

  A voice over the intercom said, “There’s a shelf of socks beside you. Put on a pair and walk through the door.”

  He did.

  A woman in a scrub suit was waiting for him in the next room. She was brusque, unsmiling, as she told him to don sterile gloves. Then she angrily ripped off strips of tape and sealed his sleeves and pant cuffs. The Army may have resigned themselves to Jack’s visit, but they weren’t going to make it a friendly one. She slipped an audio headset over his head, then gave him a “Snoopy” hat, like a swimming cap, to hold the equipment in place.

  “Now suit up,” she barked.

  Time for the space suit. This one was blue, with the gloves already attached. As his hostile assistant lowered the hood over his head, Jack felt a dart of anxiety about the woman. In her anger, she could sabotage the process, see to it that he wasn’t completely sealed off from contamination.

  She closed the seal on his chest, hooked him up to a wall hose, and he felt the whoosh of air blow into his suit. It was too late now to worry about what could go wrong. He was ready to cross into the hot area.

  The woman unplugged his hose and pointed to the next door.

  He stepped through, into the air lock. The door slammed shut behind him. A man in a space suit was waiting for him. He did not speak, but gestured to Jack to follow him through the far door.

  They stepped through and walked down a hallway to the autopsy room.

  Inside was a stainless steel table with a body on it, still sealed in its bag. Two men in space suits were already standing on either side of the body. One of the men was Dr. Roman. He turned and saw Jack.

  “Don’t touch anything. Don’t interfere. You’re only here to observe, Dr. McCallum, so stay the hell out of our way.”

  Nice welcome.

  The space-suited escort plugged a wall hose into Jack’s suit, and once again air hissed into his helmet. If not for the audio headset, he’d be unable to hear anything the other three men said.

  Dr. Roman and his two associates opened the body bag.

  Jack felt his breath catch, his throat constrict. The corpse was Jill Hewitt’s. Her helmet had been removed, but she was still wearing the orange launch-and-entry suit, embroidered with her name. Even without that identification, he would have known it was Jill, because of her hair. It was a silky chestnut, cut in a bob and streaked with the first hints of gray. Her face was strangely intact. Her eyes were half open. Both sclerae were a bright and shocking red.

  Roman and his colleagues unzipped the LES and stripped the corpse. The fabric was fire-retardant, too tough to cut through. They had to peel it off. They worked efficiently, their comments matter-of-fact and without even a hint of emotion. When they had removed her clothing, she looked like a broken doll. Both her hands were deformed by fractures, reduced to masses of crushed bone. Her legs, too, were broken and akilter, the shins bent at impossible angles. The tips of two broken ribs penetrated her chest wall, and black bruises marked the strap lines of her seat restraint.

  Jack felt his breaths coming too fast, and he had to quell his rising horror. He had witnessed many autopsies, on bodies in much worse shape. He had seen aviators burned into little more than charred twigs, skulls exploded from the pressure of cooking brains. He had seen a corpse whose face had been sliced off from walking into a chopper’s tail rotor. He had seen a Navy pilot’s spine broken in half and folded backward from ejecting through a closed canopy.

  This was far, far worse because he knew the deceased. He remembered her as a living, breathing woman. His horror was mingled with rage, because these three men viewed Jill’s exposed body with such cold dispassion. She was a slab of meat on the table, nothing more. They ignored her injuries, her grotesquely fractured limbs. The cause of death was only of secondary concern to them. They were more interested in the microbiological hitchhiker harbored within her corpse.

  Roman began his Y incision. In one hand he gripped a scalpel; the other hand was safely encased in a steel-mesh glove. One slash ran from the right shoulder, diagonally through the breast, to the xiphoid process. Another diagonal slash ran from the left shoulder and met the first slash at the xiphoid. The incision continued straight down the abdomen, with a small jag around the umbilicus, ending near the pubic bone. He cut through the ribs, freeing the sternum. The bony shield was lifted to reveal the chest cavity.

  The cause of death was immediately apparent.

  When a plane crashes, or an automobile slams into a wall, or a despondent lover makes a suicide leap from a ten-story building, the same forces of deceleration apply. A human body traveling at great speed is abruptly brought to a halt. The impact itself can shatter ribs and send missiles of bone shards into vital organs. It can fracture vertebrae, rupture spinal cords, crush skulls against dashboards or instrument panels. But even when pilots are fully strapped in and helmeted, even when no part of their body makes contact with the aircraft, the force of deceleration alone can be fatal, because although the torso may be restrained, the internal organs are not. The heart and lungs and great vessels are suspended inside the chest by only tissue attachments. When the torso comes to an abrupt halt, the heart continues to swing forward like a pendulum, moving with such force it shears tissues and
rips open the aorta. Blood explodes into the mediastinum and pleural cavity.

  Jill Hewitt’s chest was a lake of blood.

  Roman suctioned it out, then frowned at the heart and lungs. “I can’t see where she bled out,” he said.

  “Why don’t we remove the entire block?” said his assistant. “We’d have better visibility.”

  “The tear is most likely in the ascending aorta,” said Jack. “Sixty-five percent of the time, it’s located just above the aortic valve.”

  Roman glanced at him in annoyance. Up till then, he’d managed to ignore Jack; now he resented this intrusive comment. Without a word, he positioned his scalpel to sever the great vessels.

  “I advise examining the heart in situ first,” said Jack. “Before you cut.”

  “How and where she bled out is not my primary concern,” Roman retorted.

  They don’t really care what killed her, thought Jack. All they want to know is what organism might be growing, multi-plying, inside her.

  Roman sliced through the trachea, esophagus, and great vessels, then removed the heart and lungs in one block. The lungs were covered with hemorrhages. Traumatic or infectious? Jack didn’t know. Next Roman examined the abdominal organs. The small bowel, like the lungs, was splotchy with mucosal hemorrhages. He removed it and set the glistening coils of intestines in a bowl. He resected the stomach, pancreas, and liver. All would be sectioned and examined microscopically. All tissue would be cultured for bacteria and viruses.

  The body was now missing almost all its internal organs. Jill Hewitt, Navy pilot, triathlete, lover of J&B scotch and high-stakes poker and Jim Carrey movies, was now nothing but a hollow shell.

  Roman straightened, looking vaguely relieved. So far, the autopsy had revealed nothing unexpected. If there was gross evidence of Marburg virus, Jack did not see it.

  Roman circled behind the corpse, to the head.

  This was the part Jack dreaded. He had to force himself to watch as Roman sliced the scalp, his incision running across the top of the crown, from ear to ear. He peeled the scalp forward and folded the flap over the face, a fringe of chestnut hair flopping down over her chin. With a rongeur, they cracked the skull. No saws, no flying bone dust, could be allowed in a Level 4 autopsy. They pried off the cap of bone.