Victor Canning: The Doomsday Carrier (UK 1976)

From the Publisher:
Charlie, a laboratory chimpanzee at a Ministry of Defence biological research station, is incubating a devastating plague bacillus. He escapes and becomes an innocent time bomb wandering during high summer amid the idyllic Wessex countryside.

After twenty-one days he is due to become infective and a population of millions will be at hideous risk. The authorities discreetly mount a full-scale search but - even as doomsday draws closer and closer - for fear of the political and international consequences they hesitate to reveal the sordid truth.

Victor Canning brings all his mastery of the suspense story and his deep knowledge of the ways of the English countryside and of the human heart to this searching novel about a threat to our survival.

Victor Canning: The Doomsday Carrier. Heinemann, ISBN: 0434107905 (January, 1976), 212 p., £3.50.