Hi-Tech Hijack Read Online Free Page A

think much of it until the final year of my BSc studies when we had to write a paper on viruses and were told to choose a virus we hadn’t covered in class. I came across some mention of the Ebola and thought of that movie I saw. I started searching the libraries and the web, but found very little material on the subject, which was extremely frustrating. Eventually I managed to contact the World Health Organization and find some more research that had been done by the NIH in Bethesda, Maryland.”
    “And was what you found anything like that doomsday weapon from the movie?”
    “Not exactly. American reports mentioned some unsubstantiated rumors about attempts that did not succeed to use the Ebola as a biological weapon. They made note of a strong Soviet involvement in the Congo state and said the Russians probably had some knowledge in this area.”
    “What’s to stop someone from dropping these microbes from a plane over a densely populated area and killing massive amounts of people?” asked Amit.
    “Fortunately this virus is parasitic, which means it’s unable to survive without a live tissue mediator, not even for a few minutes. It simply dries up and dies immediately. So if you tried to drop it from the air, it would be dead before it hit the ground.”
    “So what you watched in that movie can’t happen in reality.”
    “Not unless someone develops some durable mutation. The Ebola isn’t uniform. There are several types of the virus, and not all have been fully researched. It is supposedly unable to spread, yet the Sudan fever, the Ivory Coast fever, and the Uganda fever were all found thousands of miles from Ebola’s known habitat in the Ebola valley.”
    “Where was the disease first discovered?”
    “I don’t think we’ll ever know for sure when the epidemic struck first, since it never spread across the jungle in northeast Congo. It wasn’t until westerners came across or were affected by it that it first began to leak out. The heart of it was apparently around a monastery in a little town called Yambuku.”
    “And that’s what intrigues you? Where the demon hides between attacks?”
    “What interests me most is that there’s a strand of the virus—called Ebola Reston—that doesn’t harm people. On the contrary, it renders people immune to the vicious Congolese Ebola.”
    “How can you differentiate between the good virus and the bad one?”
    “The ‘good’ virus originates in the Philippines and other places in southeast Asia, not Africa.”
    “So all you need is to find the right combination of the two to immunize the most vulnerable areas?” asked Amit.
    “Correct, but I’m thinking one step ahead. I believe this virus’s parasitic attributes could be used to destroy cancerous cells.”
    “I could never think of that,” said Amit; he was impressed. “The big question then is does the virus know it can do that.” He smiled.
    “Well, I’ll teach it,” said Eddie, smiling back at him. But then he immediately turned serious and said, “I just feel it can be done.”
    “And you want us to get to Kinshasa and from there to Yambuku in the Ebola valley?”
    “That’s the plan. Although I still don’t know how we’re going to do that. The distance between Kinshasa and Yambuku is more than six hundred miles, and the roads are not great. We’ll have to look into flights as well, although the idea of a trip alongside the Congo River really appeals to me.”
    “Check us out, a real modern-day Stanley and Livingstone.”
    “Not quite. We’re not going to be the first to venture into these places like they were.”
    “Well in any case, I’m with you as long as you remember what we agreed—Kilimanjaro first, Congo second.”
    “I remember, Amit. We each have our obsessions.”
    And what an obsession it is , Amit thought to himself. Eddie’s whole life changed when he lost his brother to cancer after their African trip. The trauma of being so helpless in facing that horrific