This is part I of a two-part story on the Spanish flu virus. Part II will be published on August 18.
In August 1997, the members of the village council of a small settlement in Alaska, called Brevig Mission, were faced with a peculiar request. A man named Johan Hultin wanted their permission to exhume a nearly 80-year-old mass grave. He claimed that he had done it before, 46 years earlier, and that he was back because his previous mission had failed.
The council gave him its blessing when its members heard what he was after. According to him, hidden beneath the frozen ground lay preserved the recipe to make the deadliest virus humankind had ever encountered.
