I—PERMAFROST

On September 24, 1918, three days after setting sail from Norway’s northern coast, the Forsete arrived in Longyearbyen, a tiny mining town on one of the Norwegian islands north of the Arctic Circle. It was the last ship of the year, before ice made the Arctic fjords impassable, and it carried among its passengers a number of fishermen and farmers going north for the winter to earn extra money in Longyearbyen’s coal mines. During the voyage, however, the ship had been hit with an outbreak of flu. Upon landing, many of the passengers had to be taken to the local hospital, and over the next two weeks seven of them died. They were buried side by side in the local cemetery, their graves marked by six white crosses and one headstone:

Ole Kristoffersen

February 1, 1896–October 1, 1918 Magnus Gabrielsen

May 10, 1890–October 2, 1918 Hans Hansen

September 14, 1891–October 3, 1918 Tormod Albrigtsen

February 2, 1899–October 3, 1918 Johan Bjerk

July 3, 1892–October 4, 1918 William Henry Richardsen

April 7, 1893–October 4, 1918 Kristian Hansen

March 10, 1890–October 7, 1918

The Longyearbyen cemetery is at the base of a steep hill, just beyond the town limits. If you look up from the cemetery, you can see the gray wooden skeleton of the coal mine that used to burrow into the side of the hill, and if you look to your left you can see the icy fringes of a glacier. Farther down the mountain are a shallow stream, a broad shale plain, and then, half a mile or so across the valley, Longyearbyen itself: a small cluster of red-roofed, brightly painted frame buildings. There are no trees, because Longyearbyen is many miles above the tree line, and from almost anywhere in the valley the cemetery is in plain view. Each grave site is slightly elevated and surrounded by rocks, and there are well-worn pathways among the rows of crosses. A chain-link fence rings the periphery. When I was there in late August, the ground had been warmed by the Arctic summer sun and was soft and spongy, carpeted with orange and red and white lichen. In the last row I found the miners’ graves—seven deaths separated by six days.

It is possible to go to almost any cemetery in the world and find a similar cluster of graves from the fall of 1918. Between September and November of that year, as the First World War came to an end, an extraordinarily lethal strain of influenza swept the globe, killing between twenty million and forty million people. More Americans died of the flu over the next few months than were killed during the First World War, the Second World War, the Korean War, and the Vietnam War combined. The Spanish flu, as it came to be known, reached every continent and virtually every country on the map, going wherever ships sailed or cars or trucks or trains travelled, killing so many so quickly that some cities were forced to convert streetcars into hearses, and others buried their dead in mass graves, because they ran out of coffins. Of all those millions of graves, though, the seven in Longyearbyen stand apart. There, less than eight hundred miles from the North Pole, the ground beneath the lichen is hard-frozen permafrost. The bodies of the seven miners may well be intact, cryogenically preserved in the tundra, and, if so, the flu virus they caught on board the Forsete—the deadliest virus that the world has ever known—may still be down there with them.

At the beginning of next month, a scientific team led by the Canadian geographer Kirsty Duncan will fly to Longyearbyen and set up a workstation in the church graveyard. The team will map the site, and then scan it with ground-penetrating radar, passing what looks like a small black vacuum cleaner over the tundra to see how deep the bodies are buried. If the radar shows that they are below the active layer of the permafrost—that is, below the layer that thaws each summer—the team will return next fall with enough medical equipment and gear to outfit a small morgue. The site will be prepared with tarpaulins and duckboards. Pavement breakers—electric jackhammers—will be used to break up the tundra, and the chunks of earth will be scooped out with a shovel. As the excavation gets close to the coffins, the diggers will don biohazard spacesuits, and a dome or a tent will be erected over the operation.

To minimize the possibility of infection, the bodies will be left where they are, in their coffins, and autopsies will be performed in the ground. If the clothes on the corpses are frozen to the skin or tightly matted, someone on the team might run a hair dryer over the material to loosen it up—but only briefly. “If the bodies are thawed out and this material is taken out, it will melt, and then there is always the chance of the spread of microdroplets,” Peter Lewin, one of the team members, told me. Lewin is a pediatrician at Toronto’s Hospital for Sick Children who doubles as a medical archeologist, and he has earned international renown for his pioneering cat scans of Egyptian mummies. (He helped determine that Ramses V died of smallpox.) “Say you’re doing an autopsy”—he gestured to indicate a body spread out on the desk in front of him—“if it melts, there may be a mucousy, secondary blood product—some type of liquid exudation. The liquid seeping out of that material may suddenly, by mistake, be aerosolized and someone inhales it. You just don’t want to take any chances.”

From the ad-hoc morgue in the Longyearbyen cemetery, the samples will be flown to a BSL-4 facility—4 is the highest level of biological containment—either in England or at the United States Army’s infectious-disease research facility, at Fort Detrick, Maryland. There’s a small possibility that what scientists will find is a live virus—a virus that, once thawed, could be as deadly and infectious as it was in 1918. If they don’t, the hope is that they’ll at least be able to recover the virus’s genetic footprint—what scientists call RNA residue. Samples of the virus will then be sent to laboratories around the world. Its genetic code will be sequenced and compared with every major sample of the flu virus on file in the world’s virological centers.

This task has a certain urgency. Scientists know that global outbreaks of deadly influenza go back at least four hundred years, and that there have been two more since 1918—the Asian flu, of 1957, which killed seventy thousand Americans, and the Hong Kong flu, which killed thirty-three thousand during the winter of 1968-69. With luck, we’ll be able to anticipate the next Spanish flu before it does much damage. The problem is that we’re not really sure what to look for. No one kept a sample of the virus in 1918, because the flu virus wasn’t isolated until fifteen years later. And, because influenza mutates so rapidly, there’s almost nothing to be learned about the peculiarities of the 1918 virus from looking at the influenzas in circulation today. The only way to find out about the 1918 virus is to find the 1918 virus.

“We’ve designed core-biopsy-removal equipment to take core samples,” Peter Lewin said. “You drill into the body, because it’s solid. It’s a technique taken from forestry. You use what’s called a hole-saw tube.” He drew a diagram on the back of a file folder, outlining a long, hollow cylinder, with circular, screwlike grooves on its outside, a serrated edge on its tip, and a T-shaped handle at its other end. “It’s about nine inches long, about a quarter inch in diameter,” he went on, explaining that as the tube is twisted into a body it will collect a long cross-sectional sample of tissue. “We’ll probably take four core samples of the lung”—he pointed at the upper and lower chambers of his left and right lung—“one of the brain, one of the trachea, perhaps two of the bowel and liver.”

Lewin was raised in Egypt, where his father was a British military officer—two of Lewin’s schoolmates were Adnan Khashoggi and the future King Hussein—and he has the unflappable, genteel air of a nineteenth-century colonial explorer. He ticked off the details of the exhumation in Longyearbyen as if he were reciting a grocery list. “We’re doing some practice runs on frozen material—basically, on frozen pigs—to see if this thing works. We were initially going to use a drill. But the drill goes so fast that it heats the tissue up, and, of course, we don’t want that. So why not just slowly twist it in?” He rotated his hand. “They use hole saws on trees to get core samples of rings. They’re very useful. But no one has ever used them here. I mean”—he laughed—“how often do you do core samples of frozen bodies?”

II—THE SECOND WAVE

The first known case of Spanish flu was reported on March 4, 1918, at Camp Funston, in Kansas. By April, it had spread to most cities in America and had reached Europe, following the trail of the hundreds of thousands of American soldiers who crossed the Atlantic that spring for the closing offensives of the First World War. The spring wave was serious but not disastrous, and by midsummer it had subsided. A month or so later, however, the Spanish flu resurfaced. It was the same virus in the sense that if you’d got the flu in the spring you were resistant to it in the fall. But somehow over the summer it had mutated. Now it was a killer.