Killer Virus Is On The Loose -- What Makes `Cobra Event' So Terrifying Is That It Could Happen

------------------------------------------- "The Cobra Event" by Richard Preston Random House, $25.95 -------------------------------------------

Whether he's writing fact or fiction, Richard Preston knows how to tell a good story. "The Hot Zone," his 1994 bestseller about deadly natural viruses emerging from the world's tropical rain forests, practically made Ebola a household word. Though a work of nonfiction, "The Hot Zone" read like a hothouse-grown medical thriller. As a work of journalism, it was both enlightening and frightening.

Now Preston has written a blockbuster novel that takes his virus research into the world of "black" biotechnology, germ warfare and counterterrorism. "The Cobra Event" is as much a page-turner as anything you'll encounter from Crichton or Clancy - and ultimately is more terrifying, because it skirts so much closer to reality.

Dr. Alice Austin, a young pathologist with the Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta, is sent to New York City to investigate a strange death from a mysterious new disease. A teenage girl has died in a horrifying manner, including seizures, hemorrhaging and self-cannibalization, all described in graphic, gruesome detail.

As others begin dying in a similar fashion, Austin's investigation proves that the deaths are the work of a terrorist using a biological weapon. These first few deaths, we eventually learn, are only initial human trials in a much larger plan to "thin" the world's population by a few billion souls.

Tracking the killer

Inevitably, Austin's discovery precipitates a secret crisis within the medical and law-enforcement communities. She is drafted onto a team of military, medical and FBI experts who must track the killer and head off catastrophe.

This team does "hot" work with the most dangerous viruses known to humankind, some of which make Ebola look like the common cold. Working in spacesuits out of a portable biocontainment lab secretly deployed to Governor's Island in New York harbor, they isolate the biological agent while another part of the team tracks the killer - a convincingly creepy character who calls himself Archimedes.

The historical Archimedes was the third-century B.C. Greek mathematician and inventor who described the principle of the lever and the fulcrum and who said, "Give me a place to stand, and I will move the earth." The fictional, present-day Archimedes wants to save the planet from the ravages perpetrated upon it by the human race, and his lever is a tiny, genetically engineered killer virus.

Close to reality

Two other principals are a pair of United Nations weapons inspectors. The few scenes of their exploits in Iraq give readers dramatic context for the work of the real-life U.N. inspection team, and highlight the importance of that work. Preston's solid investigative skills and gift for describing complex processes add true-life context to the tale, underscoring the most frightening possibilities of biological research.

Though scientists and politicians seem to want to ignore it, Preston said in a recent interview, the danger is very real. His research shines a bright light on the potential dangers posed by the breakup of the Soviet Union and the loss of control over its scattered germ-warfare research facilities - as well as the U.N.'s ongoing difficulties in assessing the chemical and biological threat in Iraq.

In fact, whole chapters of the novel are, Preston said, "essentially straight nonfiction reporting."

The scariest part of this very scary book may be not in the novel itself, but a few lines that appear in Preston's foreword: While doing research for the book at the FBI Academy in Quantico, Va., he overheard an instructor, a scientist lecturing on biological weapons, speaking to a class of agents-in-training about the potential for biological terrorism in the U.S.

"You will be dealing with this during your careers," the scientist declared.

Finale is fiction, luckily

"The Cobra Event" is written in the same dramatic style and authoritative tone that made "The Hot Zone" so compelling. In the beginning, it's easy to forget that this is only a novel; luckily, the finale is pure fiction: a slam-bang SWAT-style operation is dramatized to the limit.

I say "luckily" because when you finally turn out the lights in the wee hours, you can tell yourself that it's purely make-believe. At least for now.

Some might argue that sensational novels only play on the public's fears of technology and contribute to the general sense of pessimism attending the waning moments of the 20th century. But problems are never solved in ignorance, and if "The Cobra Event" - though "merely" a work of fiction - helps focus attention on a very real danger, then Preston has performed a valuable service.

S.A. Stolnack is a Seattle writer and critic.