As a wildlife veterinarian, he would have been fascinated by all of this—but from a greater distance.
“They’re nearly blind,” Remy Engonga assured him. The Gabonese native was a pathologist with CIRMF, the International Centre for Medical Research. The facility in southeast Gabon was instrumental in evaluating emerging diseases in West Africa. “Make some noise and that little bull will shy away.”
“Little?” Frank asked, his voice muffled by a paper mask.
“Oui. Up top, our crocodiles are many times larger.”
Frank shook his head. This one’s large enough. Still, he took the pathologist at his word about the creature being blind. He unhooked an aluminum water bottle from his hip and banged it against the karstic-stone wall and bellowed loudly. The bull croc continued to stare, unimpressed. Then finally it shrugged its bulk around and casually swam away, vanishing into the darkness.
With the way unblocked, the pair of men continued onward. In such an alien environment, Frank felt like an astronaut exploring a hostile planet, especially covered from head to toe in protective gear. He wore a MicroGuard coverall with a hood, the pant legs tucked into waterproof waders. His eyes were protected by plastic goggles, and a mask filtered both the ammonia-thick air and the clouds of gnats and midges whisking all about.
They finally left the stream and slogged through wet mud, which was mostly bat guano. The roof hung with hordes of the winged denizens, more spun and danced through the air, occasionally dive-bombing the trespassers. It was all this accumulated guano that had eventually bleached the crocodile’s scales to their unique orange hue. In turn, the crocodiles, isolated in total darkness, feasted on those same bats, along with a few cave crabs, crickets, and algae.
“How far until the traps?” Frank called back to Remy.
“Nearly there. Up at the next bottleneck. I thought it was the best place to put up the netting.”
Remy and a few of his team from CIRMF had been kind enough to set traps the day before. Frank wanted to collect test samples from each of the species of bats harboring here: the African fruit bat, the giant roundleaf, and a handful of others. It was bats like these that were natural reservoirs for Ebola and Marburg. Frank hoped to catalog the breadth of other viruses carried by the denizens in this cave, searching for any pathogens that could become the next great pandemic.
He had been in Africa for half a year, traveling throughout the Congo and coastal West Africa. So far, he had collected over fifteen thousand samples.
As he headed toward the traps, he again felt an overwhelming amazement at being here. It was a strange path, from a Black foster kid living on Chicago’s South Side to a wildlife veterinarian in a cavern system in Gabon. His love of the natural world had come about from his attempt to escape the freeze of Chicago winters and the swelter of its humid summers. Seeking shelter off the streets, he often found himself drawn to the Lincoln Park or Brookfield Zoos, even the Shedd Aquarium. He would spend hours reading and memorizing the information placards, dreaming of all the mysterious corners of the world described therein. It had all seemed so foreign to a Black boy huddled in a coat two sizes too large and a pair of ragged Jordans.
And look where I am now . . .
His aptitude in science and math had eventually caught the interest of a JROTC recruiter in high school—that and maybe his six-foot-four frame. He had fared well enough with the group that a glowing letter of recommendation earned him a full-ride at a community college, then he was awarded a Health Professionals Scholarship with the army that paid for his tuition at the University of Illinois College of Veterinary Medicine. Upon accepting the scholarship, he had been immediately commissioned as a second lieutenant, which had made his adopted parents nearly burst with pride.
While he had never known his biological mother and father—and never cared to after they had dumped him into the system—he was one of the lucky ones. He ran through three sets of foster families, some neglectful, others simply overwrought with the best of intentions. Then the Whitakers had taken him in, eventually adopting him. It was their loving anchor that had steadied a bitter youth, one who had been growing ever wilder, drifting further toward the streets and away from a society that had already rejected him.
When he eventually graduated from vet school—which involved additional weeks of active-duty training—he was promptly promoted to the rank of captain. He had some pre-assignment training after that, and an additional seven years of service were required of him. Those years put him into the thick of the Iraq war, where he worked on a Public Health masters and did hands-on field work with zoonotic diseases. But the war had also left him disillusioned, both with the state of the world and humanity in general.
After he returned to the States, he had tried a stint at USAMRID, the Army’s biomedical research facility, but he had only lasted another year. He eventually left the service and was hired by the Smithsonian Global Health Program, a nonprofit that searched for emerging viral threats. He put together a grant to come to Africa, to catalog as much of the virosphere as possible, searching for what a fellow colleague called dangerous viral dark matter hidden in lost corners of the world.
“Looks like we have plenty of volunteers for your work,” Remy commented as he came abreast of Frank, drawing back his attention.
The pathologist pointed to a mesh screen across a narrowing in the tunnel. Dark shapes hung there, tangled in the netting, like a swath of furry black fruit. The net across the passage had caught over two dozen bats of varying sizes. Several squirmed as they approached.
“Calm down, little ones,” Frank reassured them. “We don’t mean you any harm.”
Once at the trap, Frank shed his backpack and knelt down. He quickly prepared a syringe with a sedative cocktail of acepromazine and butorphanol. He then donned a pair of thick rubberized gloves. He did not want to risk a bite. Syringe in hand, he started at the top and worked his way down the spread of netted bats. He eyeballed the dosages to match the sizes of the specimens, administering no more than a drop each. By the time he reached the bottom of the net, the topmost bats were already slipping into a stupor.
“Help me loosen the net?” Frank asked Remy.
Working together, they unhooked the trap and reopened the passageway. Several bats took advantage and dashed past overhead. With the netting and slumbering specimens sprawled across the cave floor, Frank returned to his pack and gathered his collection gear.
Time to get to work.
6:28 P.M.
Frank knelt amidst the orderly sprawl of sealed swabs, needles, and tiny glass pipettes. Sweat dripped down his forehead and stung his eyes, which were already burning from all of the ammonia-steaming guano.
Maybe I should’ve brought a respirator.
He worked as quickly as he could without risking contaminating his samples. He held the limp form of a great roundleaf bat, Hipposideros gigas. Remy helped him spread a wing for a blood draw. He also had a pair of swabs ready to collect samples from the bat’s oropharyngeal and rectal cavities.
Frank studied the delicate creature as he worked. The bell-shaped ears were a soft velvet. Its nostrils were tiny fans of tissue. The membrane of its leathery wings was so thin that the light of Remy’s helmet lamp shone through them.