veloped symptoms, everything would have changed.
He’d have moved back into the patient compartment.
The crew would have notified Homeland Security and
the State Department. The plane would have disap-
peared off radar, like a military flight.
When Phoenix Air dropped LaRochelle off at the
isolation unit at the University of Nebraska, he was
still healthy. He remained in the unit, which had a
stationary bike and a treadmill and was surprisingly
comfortable, until the 21-day stopwatch ran out. God
or the vaccine or something even bigger intervened.
He never got sick. A month and a half later he and
his family were back in Nyankunde, taking turns at
the hospital so their children wouldn’t be left alone if
something happened again.
As for the woman who had come through with
Ebola: It was almost miraculous, LaRochelle said. Al-
though she died, she hadn’t infected anyone.
The Current Fight“This is black ops, Ebola World, whatever you wanna
call it,” Dent says, indicating a trio of warehouses,
bare and tan, on the grounds of the Cartersville
airport. Weeds poke out of an asphalt runway. There
are no signs. Inside one of the warehouses sits a
mock-up of the ABCS, right in the middle of the floor.
This hangar is where the system would undergo a
22-hour post-use “decon,” short for decontamina-
tion, after use. Among other procedures, it would be
bombarded with a 200-degree Fahrenheit, 35 percent
hydrogen-peroxide solution, then collapsed, put in a
special truck, and driven to a federal incinerator in
Central Florida.
While the fight against the current Ebola outbreak
in the Congo has been hampered by violence, interna-
tional health organizations hope that experimental
vaccines will prevent it from spreading as widely as
the last epidemic. But they’re ready for the situation
to deteriorate anyway. Governments are not fond of
being unprepared for the same thing twice. In 2014,
Paul Allen, of Microsoft fame, decided he wanted to
put some of his fortune to use combating Ebola. He
asked the Department of State what he could do to
help, which is how he, together with Phoenix Air and
a research company called MRI Global, came to build
the Containerized Biocontainment System (CBCS).
If the ABCS is a rubber raincoat, the CBCS is a
submarine, down to 400-pound airtight doors that
separate the clean, gray, and biohazard sections. The
size of a semi-truck trailer, it has its own power and
medical oxygen, and can be loaded onto a Boeing
B-747/400 and shipped out of Atlanta’s Hartsfield-
Jackson International Airport within 24 hours. The
CBCS solves a major problem Phoenix Air faced dur-
ing the 2014 epidemic, which was that they could only
pick up one patient at a time, every three days, poten-
tially dooming anyone left behind to wait for a later
flight. The CBCS can transport four extremely sick,
extremely contagious people, along with six medical
staff, simultaneously.
Here’s how the CBCS would work: Let’s say a bat
with SARS bit a gorilla with Ebola and then the go-
rilla rolled in a patch of that ineradicable Candida
auris fungus that’s currently infiltrating U.S. hospi-
tals. Twenty doctors somewhere far away from medi-
cal infrastructure have come down with the resulting
(medically impossible) super-plague. They will die if
they aren’t airlifted out at once. Using a combination
of Phoenix Air’s multiple Gulfstream aircraft and the
CBCS units, the U.S. government could transport all
20 of the doctors to isolation units in Atlanta; Oma-
ha, Nebraska; Bethesda, Maryland; and New York
City—about 10 two-person treatment centers across
the country, plus others in Europe. Other doctors,
who were skittish about traveling to the epicenter
to help, would see the effort to extract their contem-
poraries and be reassured. Presumably, the interna-
tional medical system would hold.
If they ever need the CBCS, the U.S. Department of
State will make phone call to Phoenix Air and request
it. A local trucking company will come in, hitch up
the custom trailer that sits under the unit, and drive
it to Hartsfield-Jackson, where it will be loaded on a
Kalitta Air 747 cargo jet. Mike Flueckiger and Vance
Ferebee and the rest of the medical cowboys will go
again to save the saviors. And the media will return to
Cartersville, wondering what in the heck these local
boys have gotten up to this time.THE HOSPITAL AND
THE AMBULANCES THAT
WOULD TRANSPORT
BRANTLY THERE HAD
PRACTICED WHAT WOULD
HAPPEN IF PHOENIX
AIR LANDED WITH A
HIGHLY INFECTIOUS
PATIENT. THEY JUST
HADN’T COUNTED ON
IT BEING EBOLA.
@PopularMechanics _ July/August 2019 91