Holdout: A Novel

by Jeffrey Kluger

  His eyes were wide, his nostrils flared. An instant later she noticed the thing that had caught his attention—the sulfur, pine, and magnesium smells were gone, overwhelmed by the industrial scent of diesel on the air. It was followed immediately by the loud sound of crushing and cracking underbrush. Then a hot, bright white light slashed across the clearing.

  “Run, Oli!” Sonia shouted, shaking out the match.

  Oli didn’t need to be told, having already jumped up and bolted for the jungle cover. Sonia tore off after him, caught up to him in half a dozen strides, snatched him up, and sprinted forward. She tore through thickets and vaulted exposed tree roots as best she could, catching her left foot on one, tumbling forward, just barely maintaining her balance and twisting her ankle in the process. She cried out in pain; Oli cried out in fear.

  “Hang on!” Sonia shouted.

  The sound of crashing and crunching grew louder, angrier, as if entire trees were being ripped from the soil. The stink of diesel was now everywhere—and so too were the blinding white lights, coming from all directions, washing out Sonia’s vision like the midday sun. She plowed ahead blindly, caught her other foot, tumbled forward again, and twisted that ankle too, and Oli cried out once more.

  “I have you!” she screamed.

  It was too far a run to the Guarani village, and even if it had been closer, that was the last place Sonia and the boy would be safe. If the crashing and crunching and bright lights and diesel stink were descending on this part of the jungle, they’d likely be closing in on the village too. Instead, Sonia sped straight on, heading toward the SSA camp—offering the safety of the staff as well as of local guards hired for their protection. There were jeeps and trucks too, along with a pair of helicopters that could slip through an opening in the jungle canopy if they flew straight up for 150 feet before peeling away.

  Whether there would be enough time for an escape by any of those means suddenly seemed uncertain, however, because now Sonia smelled something worse than the diesel: the smell of burning wood, and not dry wood, not firewood, but the fresh greenwood of living trees. The white light from the huge machines closing in was replaced by a dimmer but hotter yellow of fire, just as the phosphorous and magnesium light had given way to the match light little more than a minute before. Sonia could hear the blaze crackling and see its light rising all around her.

  She and Oli burst at last into the clearing of the SSA camp—a cluster of tents and storage sheds and a clapboard hospital clinic. She detected the same fear here that she and the boy were feeling, but it was contained, channeled, disciplined by the drills they had all run again and again. Equipment was being thrown into trucks; staffers were climbing into jeeps and ambulances. Four pilots had leapt into the two helicopters and had already started the engines, the huge machines adding their own stink of diesel to the air and their whipping blades adding their own noise and a swirling wind. Voices were calling out everywhere in the same mix of English, Guarani, French, and Portuguese that Sonia and Oli used.

  The Guarani patients who had been occupying the beds in the SSA clinic were being carried into the helicopters, and leading that part of the evacuation was Sonia Annie.

  “Annie!” Sonia shouted, running to her. The noise of the helicopter blades drowned her voice and she tried again. “Annie!” she called.

  That time her call did carry, and Annie looked at her and waved her away.

  “Get back, get back!” she shouted, pointing Sonia to one of the helicopters. “Get on! You have the boy!”

  “You need help!” Sonia shouted, trying to break Oli’s death grip on her so she could get him aboard the helicopter, but unable to loosen it without hurting him. Nonetheless, she continued running toward the clinic building and Annie screamed out—her eyes blazing furiously.

  “Don’t!” Annie ordered. “Go!”

  She pointed a commanding finger at the helicopter and then a warning one at the clinic, and Sonia could see that its jungle-facing side had caught some embers and was beginning to blaze. There was the smell of burning pine again—the fire feeding on the wooden planks from which the clinic was built, with the convection caused by the rising heat and the wash of the blades feeding it fresh oxygen. There were more patients and staffers inside, and Annie and two other medics plunged in to help them.

  “No!” Sonia screamed. “No, no, no!”

  She made one last attempt to break for the clinic, but now one of the guards grabbed her around the waist and hoisted her off the ground. He was at least a foot taller than she—a full Annie foot—and far stronger.

  Sonia kicked and cursed, but it availed her nothing as the man tossed her and Oli—literally, bodily—into the open side of one of the helicopters and slammed its door shut. He banged twice on the side, and the machine lifted itself off the ground and rose quickly through the canopy. Sonia lunged toward the window and looked down in time to see the clinic building—and the people inside, and the entire SSA camp—being consumed by flames.

  She let out a wail—a terrible soul-sick sound—and collapsed to the floor. Oli jumped atop her, sobbing, and she tried to gather him in.

  At that moment, she felt her phone—which rarely rang in the jungle, but did when it was within reach of a satellite antenna, which the helicopter surely had—vibrating insistently in her pocket. She groped for it, pulled it out, nearly dropped it, then caught it and jabbed a finger at the screen.

  Through the earpiece, she could hear a long hiss, a distinctive hiss—exceedingly distant, practically alien, a hiss from far above her. Finally a voice cut through.

  “Sonia!” it said, equal parts a command and a plea.

  “Mama!” Sonia answered.

  CHAPTER THREE

  August 21

  No one in Moscow Mission Control cared for the sight of Walli Beckwith’s face in the moments after she announced her intention not to return to Earth. She had made a wreck of what had started out as a reasonably routine day, and she would likely make a wreck of a lot more days to come. It was almost too much to ask for the controllers to have to endure a picture of her face, four or five times as big as life, gazing down at them from the giant control screen at the front of the room.

  It was certainly a nice enough picture: Her dark hair was cropped short as she always wore it in space. Her smile was the one the NASA press office liked to describe as “winning,” even after she pointed out to them that the male astronauts were never expected to have any particular kind of smile as long as they could manage at least a simulation of one for the camera. Either way, it really was a singularly infectious smile—one that looked as if she were barely holding back a laugh that any moment was going to slip the traces and break free. At any other time, it would be a pleasant thing to see, but today the smile was entirely wrong for the mood in the room. Still, the picture was part of the protocol, and the protocol would be followed no matter what.

  Ever since the Soviet Union fell and the Russian Federation rose, Roscosmos had done its best to follow NASA’s practice of courting the attention of the media, and Moscow Mission Control was helpful in that effort. The big auditorium looked less like a technological nerve center than a grand concert hall—its walls and consoles paneled in dark wood, with plush red theater seats installed in a balcony, affording a view of the complete sweep of the floor below.

  In the Soviet era, those seats were reserved for party officials; these days the seats were principally used by the press and the families of the cosmonauts, who would visit the control center for launchings and landings and important events like the docking of a Progress vehicle.

  As long as the reporters would be there, Roscosmos didn’t want to lose the chance to advertise its work, so while the middle two quadrants of the viewing screen were always filled with a map of the Earth, the orbital track of the station, and streams of relevant data, the left quadrant would be taken up by a photo of the current crew, posi
ng in their spacesuits without their helmets. The right-hand quadrant would list all of the experiments that were taking place aboard the station, highlighting the promise the work held for the betterment of humankind.

  Today, the right-hand quadrant, where the experiments were listed, was still fine, but the moment Vasily Zhirov and Yulian Lebedev evacuated the station and the American girl took control, the crew picture became awkward. You could hardly display a three-person crew when two of them were injured and on the way home and only a mutineer remained behind.

  “Take that down!” the flight director barked as he stood at his console in the center of the room, pointing at the picture.

  Immediately, the left quadrant of the screen went black and the flight director sat down, mollified. A moment later, a much calmer voice filled the controllers’ headsets.

  “Put it back up,” the voice said, from an observer’s console at the back of the room. “The girl only.”

  No one in the control center needed to turn around to know that the speaker was Gennady Bazanov, the director of flight operations. Bazanov’s age was a mystery. He had joined Roscosmos as a young man in 1961, the same year Yuri Gagarin became the first person in space. Some said he was a high school student at the time, the son of a party apparatchik, serving as an errand boy while hoping to study engineering. Some said he was actually a freshly graduated engineer. The difference meant he was now anywhere from his late seventies to his mid-eighties. Either way, he was still here today, neither looking nor acting whatever his age was. If Bazanov gave an order, it would be obeyed.

  Inside of a minute, the crew picture reappeared, this time reframed to show Beckwith only. The image of her was even bigger now, expanded to fill the screen; Zhirov’s shoulder was still visible to her right. Her smile was as it had been before.

  “It stays,” said Bazanov, “until she comes home.”

  There was an audible grumbling among several of the controllers. Bazanov frowned and keyed open his mic again.

  “Boys and girls,” he began. Long ago he would address what were then the all-male controllers as “comrades.” By the time the Soviet Union fell and that honorific no longer applied, he was already among the oldest people in the control room and there were just as many women at the consoles as there were men. So he changed his form of address to something that would stress his near-paternal seniority.

  “Boys and girls, we are flying a mission today, nothing more. We will ensure that any cosmonaut or astronaut under our care returns to the Earth safely. Is that understood?”

  The controllers craned around, looked at him, and gave him a respectful nod. He nodded in return, then switched to a channel that connected only with ranking Roscosmos officials and the three most senior NASA flight supervisors, all of them seated in the back of the room. When he spoke, he did so far more crisply.

  “Join me in the teleconference room,” he said. “We will speak to the Americans.” He said no more, rose, and exited, and the other officials followed.

  * * *

  • • •

  In Mission Control in Houston, the mood was little better than it was in Moscow. As in Russia, several members of the space agency brass had gathered in the control center to observe the docking, and as in Russia, many more arrived the moment the morning’s crises began to unfold. But unlike the Russian officials, the Americans in the control room were not free to leave.

  There had never been a set of developments quite like today’s in the long history of NASA. There had been emergencies and mission aborts but never an act of rank criminality. To the flight director on duty, dramatic circumstances called for dramatic steps. As soon as Beckwith seized the station, he made a call that in quiet moments, when he was all by himself and could let his imagination wander, he’d often dreamed of making.

  “Go to battle short,” he barked, with precisely the tone of command he’d practiced in his head. He nearly smiled at the sound of it.

  “Battle short” was an order given during the old Apollo program, when a spacecraft was about to disappear behind the moon for the first time or, more dramatically, to land on the moon. The lives of the astronauts depended on the exercise being conducted with exquisite precision, so the doors to the control room would be locked until the procedure had been completed. What’s more, all of the circuit breakers that powered the control center would be frozen in their on position. There would be no blown fuses, no flipped circuits to black out the control room at the worst possible moment.

  But while battle short was familiar to the old Apollo teams, it was entirely alien to the modern-day controllers, and the flight director’s call was met not with quick compliance but with confusion.

  “Uh, say again, flight?” several controllers asked more or less at once.

  “Battle short,” he repeated unhelpfully, then gave up and spelled it out. “Lock it up. Doors and breakers.”

  With that, the memory of the Mission Control security team was jogged. The room was locked, and for a while it all seemed new and bracing, until it started to seem silly, not to mention uncomfortable. The building’s restrooms were located outside of Mission Control proper, and while back in the Apollo days you usually knew when the critical maneuvers were coming and could take care of matters before the battle short was called, this morning it had come as a complete surprise.

  After a while there was a lot of fidgeting going on at the consoles, and it came as something of a reprieve when Moscow called, asking for a teleconference. That would require that the NASA brass be freed from the lockdown—and everyone else too.

  “All clear,” the flight director announced with disappointment in his voice. “Release doors and breakers.”

  The senior officials half walked, half ran from Mission Control, made whatever comfort stops they needed, and then gathered one floor above in the teleconference room, where the main screen was already receiving a test signal from Moscow. A second, smaller screen was receiving a feed from Washington, where the NASA administrator, Joe Star, would be joining the conference from the agency’s headquarters.

  Star was new to the job, appointed just a year and a half before, when the incoming president had been inaugurated. He had no background in astronautics or aeronautics. He had, instead, made his reputation and fortune in the cattle and meatpacking industry, and he had a keen eye for business—the kind of eye the new president thought the space agency needed. Plus, he was a generous donor to the party, and the president leaned on him hard to accept the NASA posting. Plus, there was that name.

  “You’re going to be an astronaut one day,” his friends and relatives had said and said and said again when he was growing up. Then, when it became clear his career was not going in that direction at all, the refrain had changed. “You should run NASA one day,” they’d say. And now he did.

  The officials in Houston arrived in the room and took their seats, and the screens flickered to life. From Moscow, the scene was of a similar conference table, with Bazanov at the head, Roscosmos officials occupying most of the seats closest to him, and the three ranking NASA observers seated the farthest away. In Washington, Star sat alone at a conference table. He did not care for the look of things—Bazanov flanked by his team, while he sat by himself. He did not care for the unspoken imbalance in space power either.

  The Americans may have led the construction of the space station, but at the moment, the Russians’ Soyuz was the only way to get there and back. Just recently two private companies—the aerospace giant Arcadia, based in Seattle, and the upstart CelestiX, out of Los Angeles—had begun flying crews to and from the station. But Arcadia had been grounded for months by a labor dispute and CelestiX had just suffered an explosion of a rocket on the launchpad—an accident that cost no lives but ate a $1.8 billion Saudi Arabian Mars probe. The company was certainly not going to be permitted to fly crew until it sorted out the cause of the accident. The Russians thus
had the whip hand as the only ride in town—and the only way to fetch Walli Beckwith home.

  Star began the teleconference the way international protocol demanded he begin it, with an apology on behalf of his country. But straight from the gate he bungled it.

  “I would like to open by saying to our Soviet friends—” He caught himself and stopped. “To our Russian friends . . .”

  Even before the Russian translation of what Star had said was complete, there was no missing the problematic word. Bazanov visibly winced. So too did Lance Copper, the head of the NASA team in Moscow.

  Star pressed on. “We deeply apologize for the behavior of our astronaut. We do not know why she took the actions she did this morning. We are looking into it, questioning her friends, her family, her colleagues. And we will be talking to her.”

  Bazanov stayed silent, listening to the translation and at the end simply nodding—a bit too regally for Star’s liking, but never mind.

  “Her behavior is perhaps criminal?” Bazanov asked, in English.

  That surprised Star. It was entirely true that Beckwith had probably broken a whole raft of international laws, but opening with a diplomatic club like that seemed excessive. Bazanov, however, had grown up in the old system, and showing the club first was the way business was conducted. Once you’d done that, you could put it away since the room now knew you had it at hand. He went on more amiably.

  “But it’s much too early to talk about punishment, and with a bit of good fortune we never need to discuss it,” he said, now speaking in Russian. “Is the girl . . . sick?” That was how the American translator repeated it, but Bazanov had actually chosen the word “nezdoróvaya,” which was the somewhat softer-sounding Russian for “unwell.”