The train came to a grumbling halt and as a door
was pushed open, two heavily swaddled and muffled shapes climbed down onto the
frozen ground and stand for a while beside the track. It is dark and it is about
05.20 local time. There is a dusting of white powdery snow on the flat and
compressed earth around them. Incongruously, a mobile phone beeps out to
announce the receipt of a text message and, not far away, a large dog is
trotting towards them with ambiguous intent.
The woman, for the anoraked and scarved figure
on the left nearest the train is a woman, rummages in her pocket with her
gloved hands as she tries to recover the phone. Her partner watches the dog as
it approaches them and recalls the words from the guide book that tell him that
in Mongolia, all the dogs are man eaters and that even the great Ghenghis Khan
feared them. This dog was large, about the size of a small pony. One eye
reflected back light. The other was missing.
“Bea...” her partner said cautiously, “I think
we should get back up into the train.”
He hadn't realised how dry his mouth was because
the words came out strangely: a mix of half strangled vowels and broken
consonant sounds. He nudged her arm with his to gain her attention.
“Bea!”
A muffled response was returned. It was
unintelligible as it stood but to make the point further, the train let out a
hiss and started to move away with a series of grinding squeals as cold metal
protested against cold metal. The dog let out a yelp and veered to its right
away from the sound, tail between legs and its hind quarters crouched slightly
and at the same time a voice called out.
“Tatvai moril”
He seemed to appear from nowhere. A young man of
about five foot in height was walking towards them with his hand held out
before him. He wore no gloves and in the darkness his skin seemed to glow with
an oily luminescence.
“Tatvai moril.”
He was almost upon them. The train had gathered
up sufficient momentum and was now drawing away fast leaving a trail of liquid
that fell from the underside of the carriages and froze on the ground below.
“Baavgay!” This appeared to be addressed to the
dog for it responded with a reluctant if not petulant bark and slunk over to
where the young man had now come to a halt in front of the two outsiders. Close
up the dog looked vaguely like a small bear and it stank.
“Welcome,” the young man said now in English as
he pumped the gloved hand of the other man vigorously. “I have car” He added. “I
have name. Khenbish . You call me Ken”
“Constantin,” the shrouded man said in reply,
“Contantinidis.”
“Dr. Constantinedis!” exclaimed the young man
who had all this time kept hold of the man’s hand and continued to shake it.
“No, that is my wife.” The man said quietly.
Ken stopped pumping his hand and turned to the
woman who had hitherto been ignored.
“Doctor...”
“Tavtai moril, Khenbish.” She said quietly.
“Tavtai moril” Ken replied, courteously.
As the last carriage of the train finally passed
them and clattered off into the dark, its one small red light flickering back
at them like a bloodshot version of
Baavgay’s one eye. In its wake the dust devils and powdered snow ,
plastic cups, bags and other detritus of humanity bowled along enthusiastically
in the direction that the train had now
gone. Bea watched quietly for a while and wondered how on earth such rubbish
could collect out here on the edge of
nowhere. “I’m lovin it!” proclaimed one paper cup as it bowled along the tracks
with the ubiquitous and familiar yellow “m” turning over and over as it went.
Now that the train had gone, she could see a
battered old car parked casually on the other side of the tracks. The engine
was still running and the rear doors and the trunk were open. There was no road
that she could see, just a flat expanse of compacted earth running off into the
darkness.
“Please,” called the young man, “let’s get into
my car.”
He paused as if for some reply but neither of
the outsiders spoke and so he added more words to the mix.
“Dr. Constantinedis, I’ll take your pack.”
“No you will not,” Bea replied, “and you will
call me, Bea. My husband is Conn.”
She stepped across the track and walked towards
the car. Without waiting, she slipped the pack from her shoulders and swung it
onto the back seat of the vehicle. She then straightened up and stretched her aching
muscles. It was a heavy pack and she had only carried it from the train to the
car. Some of the planned activities were going to prove a little demanding, she
feared.
Ken barked a command to Baavgay and the dog
slunk off to the other side of the vehicle, offering the woman some distance as
it swung around the front of the car in a wide arc. It then sat and waited at
the front door on the passengers’ side. It was going to be a fragrant journey
if that creature was going to accompany them. At least, thought Bea, it wasn’t
going to be hot and that would hopefully minimise the stench.
She could hear the two men heading towards her
now and they were discussing the route that Ken had described across the Gobi.
Conn seemed to be fairly relaxed about it and that reassured her. He asked a
couple of questions but Ken gave fairly straightforward answers and it seemed to satisfy him. Something odd
about sound in that place caught her out and she jumped when her husband’s hand
came down gently on her shoulder.
“You all right, love?” He had felt the movement
and was concerned.
“Just tired, that’s all. Twenty-two hours on a
train heading out into oblivion is not my idea of fun. The cold and the early
morning don’t make for relaxation and the prospect of several days in the close
company of that dog don’t inspire me. Let’s just leave it at that, my dear,
shall we?”
She smiled, but he could see that she was weary
and somehow she looked older than her twenty-eight years. Inside the hood of
the anorak he could see that warm pale skin, those bright dark eyes and that
beautiful mouth that, right now, he really wanted to kiss.
“Come come, my friends, let’s leave this place.”
Ken’s voice broke into his thoughts and brought him back into the dark and the
cold from the warmth of a hotel room in Beijing. He helped his wife into the
car and closed the door after her and then crossed to the other side of the
vehicle to wrestle with his own pack under the baleful eye of Baavgay, before
climbing into the car himself.
Ken saw to the dog and it climbed up into the
passenger seat in the front where it filled the complete space with its
bear-like form and its unholy stink. The young man seemed oblivious to the
smell but was eager to get away from the crossing now that the train had gone.
He appeared to relax as he closed the trunk and slipped into the driver’s seat,
shutting the old door firmly after him.
“Now we go!” he said grinning over his shoulder
at them. “Tomorrow night we sleep in luxury.”
The car stalled as soon as he put it into gear
but after a few half hearted attempts to start up, he had the thing in motion
and was swinging away from the railway track and out into the broad expanse of
flat terrain before them.
As he drove away Khenbish watched the movement
back at the crossing in his rear mirror. There were shapes moving about there, where
none had been before. To his keen eyes,
there were four of them: one was sniffing on the ground where the woman had
been standing. The others were hunting around in the debris that littered the
area.
“Tarbagan.” He whispered quietly under his
breath unaware that the man seated behind him had a few words in Mongolian and
that one of these was the word for the ‘marmot’, though to Conn the connection
with the plague carrying rodents was obscure in the context of a car and a
frozen railway crossing in the south west of the Gobi Desert. It wasn’t worth the conversation however and
a more pressing need was the fact that Ken had turned up the heating and the
stink of dog was fast becoming intolerable.
There were two text messages on Bea’s phone. The
first one that she read was from her father checking that she was all right. It
was, as always written in perfect English without abbreviation or
textualisation and it finished with ‘love daddy’. She thought of him sitting in
bed in the early hours of a late English summer as he tapped out the words
carefully and slowly. She suppressed the urge to reply at once just in case she
lost signal. It was pretty remarkable that she had any at all and she wanted to
check the other message first.
The second message was from Henrik back in
Oxford and had been sent about three hours ago. As she read it her father was
forgotten.
They had managed to establish proliferation of the virus in three of the assays : Sooties, rats and the WC. Henrik’s feeble
attempt at English humour did not mask the seriousness of the last two letters
of the text. WC was the West China cohort of human samples. These had been
taken from students at the Shenyang Pharmaceutical University where in 2006,
there had been an outbreak of hemorrhagic fever that had been attributed to the
hantavirus SEOV or Seoul Virus. The rats, technically the brown Norweigan rat
were an obvious choice and there were no surprises there. The Sooty Mangabeys
were a bit of a wild card. Believed to be involved in the origins of the HIV-2
virus, it had seemed worth looking at the ability of the creatures to become
infected with a disease that humans had caught already. Bea hadn’t really expected
any success with these ( if success could be
called the right word).
Bea started to tap out a response consisting of
a series of questions (in her view) although to Henrik, when he finally
received the text, they would read as a series of increasingly agitated demands
for information. As she got into the message, Bea decided that it was worth a
phone call rather than text, even if it was around 02.00 in the UK
right now. She checked for signal and predictably it was gone. A nois partway
between a squeak and a muffled expletive escaped from her lips.
Conn, who had been dozing lightly, looked up.
“Everything all right?” he asked.
“No signal!” was all that Bea could manage.
“Well no, I’m not surprised really. We’re on the
edge of the Desert. It’s the middle of nowhere!” He chuckled to himself as
though he had just made a joke and nodded off once more.
“No signal, Dr. Bea.” Ken called back from the front. “No signal
here. Come back in about,” he looked at his watch, “about four hours if we make
good time.”
Bea’s frustration went into overdrive and she
started to hammer out a series of messages that would go when the signal
returned.
Dr. Constantinedis had good reason to be agitated.
Quite apart from the dog and the stifling heat from the old car’s heater and
the prospect of several hours and days travelling in this style, the cryptic
note from Henrik had confirmed a worry that had been growing on her mind as
they made the tortuous train journey from Beijing.
Her Oxford laboratory had been studying rodent borne
viruses for some years now and from collaborative work with other laboratories
in New Mexico and in Beijing, she believed that they were pretty close to
identifying a viable treatment that would leave the current supportive
treatments and mechanical dialysis normally indicated back in the stone age
where they belonged. However, that was before a young man had walked into the
hospital in Ulaanbataar in the spring of 2010 complaining of all the usual
flu-like symptoms : chills, fever, nausea, aches and the like. Within 48 hours of admission he had suffered
kidney failure and a couple of days later he was dead.
The cause
of death was determined as acute viral phneumonia and a hantavirus was first
suspected as the cause. Seoul virus was the most likely candidate on evidence of
geography and initial symptoms but a second camp favoured the less likely Sin
Nombre virus primarily because of the
subsequent cause of death. The problem with the second option was that
this was out of line both in geography and in the normal rodent that was responsible for its
transmission, given that this particular virus was prevalent in North and
Central America. However, Ulaanbataar boasted an airport and as such opened
itself out to the international world of pathogen exchange and so this
possibility could not be discounted. The debate however was for the most part
academic and medical because the young man could not be identified and so it
was not possible to trace his movements back to a possible source of infection.
The brown Norway rat (Rattus norvegicus) was suspected as the vector either
from the wild population or possibly from an infected laboratory animal (as may have been the case in Shenyang in 2006).
The debate was also short lived because within a week of the young man’s death,
three workers in the hospital in Ulaanbataar had developed symptoms of the
disease and before a month was out, the authorities had imposed an embargo of
news reporting from the area and all routes in and out of the city were closed.
Bea had heard of the outbreak within a week of
the first new death. A young doctor working in A & E at the hospital had
become ill with symptoms similar to the first death and preliminary findings
were emailed to her in Oxford by the Centre for Disease Control in Beijing. The
information wasn’t particularly helpful, not through any fault of the Chinese
but simply because there had not been enough time to undertake any significant
or meaningful level of research. Equally, there had been no background
information provided about either the new fatality or the original one. There could be any number of sources of
infection although at this stage it was believed that it was rodent borne.
A polite email back to the Chinese thanked them
for the information and asked to be kept up to date with any further
developments.
Those developments came in a few weeks later
when she was advised that several hundred people had now presented with the
symptoms and that there had been over a hundred fatalities so far. From the
facts and the picture forming it was becoming increasingly obvious that the
source of infection was not rodents and that something a little more sinister
was taking place.
Bea
stared out of the misted car window and watched the light from the east
spreading across the sky. They were heading north and she was in the right hand
seat with both large packs between her and her husband so she could see the sun
rise and he could not. However, from the gentle snoring sounds, he was fast
asleep anyway. The lights appearing on her side of the car were pretty
spectacular with reds and purples and yellows spreading across the ink stain
that was the retreating night sky as it seemed to head off to the west.
The car hit something and Ken brought the car to
a halt with some words of his own that were probably expletives in Mongolian.
The engine stalled once more and strangely, he seemed to be more concerned to
get it started up again rather than to get out and see what the obstruction
was. Conn was now awake and was asking what had happened but their guide paid
no attention to him.
“Shouldn’t we find out what we hit?” asked Bea
in a tone that was probably a bit sharper than she had intended. She needn’t
have worried though, because the man ignored her as well.
Ken fiddled urgently with the ignition and after
a few of those interminable rattling barks that old engines give off as their
drivers attempt to coax them into life, the thing gave a loud bang and coughed
itself back into action. Ken floored the accelerator with the clutch down and
the engine roared angrily in the fading darkness. Bea saw a number of small
animals run off as though from underneath the car, heading out in all
directions to a distance of about fifty metres where they stopped and turned
around to watch the car. They sat up on their haunches and Bea was sure that
she could hear them calling to each other. The sounds were instructions, she
was sure of it.
“Tarbagan!” said Ken, “ we hit a tarbagan.”
“A marmot?” queried Conn. “Like those back at
the crossing?”
“No, not those back at the crossing. They were
different creatures. These are...” he seemed to run out of words but before
either of the outsiders could say anything else he had leaned across and opened
the front passenger door carefully. He
issued a command to the dog and Baavgay leapt out into the desert. Ken had not
let go of the door even when the dog pushed against it as he got out of the car.
Once the animal was out, Ken pulled it shut and locked it.
“You should lock your doors.” He whispered.
“What on earth for?” asked Conn.
“Surely the little blighters can’t open the
doors...”
He paused before continuing, “...and even if
they could what harm are they to us?”
“Lock your door!” It was a command, not a
request.
“Do it Conn!”
This was Bea and she was frightened and as she whispered
the words she pushed the lock down on her own door.
