Holdout: A Novel

by Jeffrey Kluger

  “Sick?” Star asked.

  “Crazy, a lunatic,” Bazanov said. Psikh, sumasshédshaya. Never mind the decorousness.

  “Not that our medical teams detected, no,” Star answered. “Dr. Boysen?” he asked, directing his question to Charlene Boysen, the space agency’s lead flight surgeon. She was in Houston, he was in Washington, but he inclined his head at precisely the proper angle so that his image on the screen was looking directly at her. Star might not know much about astronautics, but he had participated in enough cattle-industry conference calls to know how to play the proper cameras and make the proper eye contact. Boysen was prepared and had Beckwith’s medical file in front of her.

  “There is nothing in our records that indicates any psychological imbalance,” she said. “Lieutenant Commander Beckwith performed exceptionally well during her five years of aircraft carrier duty and on both of her previous spaceflights. She had performed equally well on this flight too.”

  “Until this morning,” Bazanov said dourly.

  “Until this morning,” Boysen conceded.

  “Perhaps then she needed a man,” Bazanov said.

  “I beg your pardon?” Boysen answered, not pleasantly.

  “I beg your pardon,” Star echoed, but much more congenially, even inquisitively. He flashed another well-placed glance—this one more of caution—directly at the flight surgeon.

  “We have our submarine rule,” Bazanov said with a shrug. “You do not.”

  Star was appeased. The old Soviets never put a naval officer in command of a nuclear submarine unless he was married and, preferably, had children. A man with so much military authority, in control of an invisible vessel with unimaginable destructive power, could easily go rogue. Best he had a family at home that would suffer for his mistake. The Russians continued to apply the rule to all naval commanders and to their cosmonauts too; the Americans never had. Beckwith was not married, had never been married, and had no children, as her NASA biography clearly would have revealed to the Russians.

  “Mr. Director,” Star said, “NASA has flown unmarried astronauts for years without a problem. We flew them to the moon in fact.”

  The mention of the moon was tactical. Americans went there; the Russians didn’t. In the right circumstances it paid to remind them of that.

  “And you have flown many married astronauts too,” Bazanov mused, almost as if he were puzzling out a problem.

  “Yes . . .” Star said.

  “Which kind of astronaut stole the spacecraft?”

  Star frowned. Bazanov smiled. He glanced down at a sheaf of papers in front of him.

  “The question, of course, is why Lieutenant Commander Belka ‘Walli’ Beckwith did what she did this morning,” Bazanov said. He read Beckwith’s full name and title from the top sheet of paper—including her proper first name. It was a Kabuki signal that he was working from an official dossier on Beckwith that Russian intelligence had, in just the past hour, made available to him.

  “We do not know her reasons,” Star admitted. “As I said, the space agency and other government officials are investigating it even as we speak.”

  Bazanov said nothing for a moment and glanced back at his papers. He turned to the second page and then looked back up.

  “Is it this business of the Consolidation, do you think?” he said.

  “It has nothing to do with the Consolidation,” Star said immediately.

  “Our research shows she has been outspoken on this issue. She mentioned it in speeches and in interviews and to you as well, Mr. Administrator.”

  Star was struck. Beckwith had indeed spoken to him about the Consolidation, but the conversation had been a private one. Still, in the world of spycraft, both sides had ways of knowing things they had no business knowing, and this was just one more example of that dark art. Star sidestepped the matter.

  “People all around the world have been outspoken on this issue,” he answered.

  “People all around the world did not have a space station at their disposal,” Bazanov said.

  He turned his hands palms up as if out of ideas. Star said nothing for a second or two, but in that brief silence he said more than he wanted to say.

  * * *

  • • •

  It was quieter than it ought to have been aboard Walli Beckwith’s space station. The pumps and fans and whirring computers were audible in the background as they always were—the soundtrack of the station that never fell silent. But the other sounds—the bumping of human occupants, the chatter among them—were entirely gone. That was to be expected. What Beckwith hadn’t anticipated was a similar, near-total silence from the ground. Nobody, it seemed, wanted to talk to her.

  There was little inquiry from Houston into the state of her ear, no confirmation from Moscow of Zhirov’s and Lebedev’s safe landing—though if they had had a problem, she knew the ground would have told her. Beckwith could understand the ground’s pique, but outlaw or not, she was an injured astronaut completely alone aboard a damaged ship. Both the cable and broadcast networks were surely reporting the story by now, along with NASA TV, which streamed mostly on its website and dared not go dark today. With so many people following the mission, a little buck-up banter between the astronaut and the ground would be good for appearances. But both Houston and Moscow were maintaining a chilly distance, breaking the silence only when mission rules absolutely demanded it.

  “Comm check, station,” the capsule communicator, or Capcom, in Houston called, obeying a mission rule that required regular voice confirmation at least once an hour. The link was firm and the line was clear.

  “Reading you five-by,” Beckwith responded.

  “Crew status, please.”

  “Crew is stable,” Beckwith said. She rolled her eyes at the formality of the question, but she echoed the third-person construction anyway.

  “Copy,” was the only reply. Beckwith knew the voice as well as she’d ever known any voice in her life, but something was off about it today—its flatness, its tonelessness.

  “That really you, Jasper?” she asked.

  “Affirmative, station,” came the clipped response.

  Jasper was Lee Jasper, an astronaut who entered NASA in the class directly after Beckwith’s and was easily as agreeable a man as had ever been to space. He was deeply proud of his Southern heritage, and when someone would ask him where he was born, he’d simply say, “South, Deep South. Go to the toe of Louisiana and keep going.”

  The answer made no sense, both since that would put his birthplace in the Gulf of Mexico and because a simple check of his NASA bio showed he was really born in Greensboro, North Carolina—in the northern part of what wasn’t even the southern Carolina. But Jasper was so pleasant a fellow that nobody ever thought to question his harmless Dixie fib.

  He and Beckwith had met at the Paris Air Show when they were both flying military jets—she for the Navy, he for the Air Force. They had drinks on their first date, dinner on their second, and wound up sleeping together on their third through eleventh. Jasper was equal parts gentleman and wild man in bed, which was what Beckwith looked for in a man. The key was how that man balanced those two qualities—and Jasper balanced beautifully.

  Both Beckwith and Jasper, however, were eyeballing careers in space, and she worried that would be harder if she were entangled with anyone—especially another flier. So shortly before applying to NASA, she broke off the relationship.

  “It’s the job, Jasper,” was all she could offer by way of explanation.

  At the time, Beckwith was assigned to the USS Dwight D. Eisenhower, and Jasper, his pride stung, decided that was the real reason the romance had ended. “Nobody ever got hot thinking about Ike,” he’d say to Beckwith in the years to follow. “If you’da been assigned to the Yorktown, we’d have three kids and a house by now.”

  Jasper got married, got
his house, and got two of those kids, but after eight years, the marriage busted up. “It’s the job, Walli,” he explained when he told her what had happened.

  The two of them had remained fast friends ever since. Jasper typically addressed Beckwith as “Walli Bee,” seeming to feel that if everyone else called her by her one Walli nickname, he needed a warmer, longer one of his own invention. Beckwith called him by his surname in response, simply because it so seemed to capture him. Today there was none of his genial nature in evidence. He was a by-the-book pilot, and, friendship or not, he couldn’t overlook the fact that there was nothing by-the-book about what Beckwith had done.

  “Flight surgeon instructs you to report any problems if they develop,” he said now.

  “Copy that,” Beckwith answered. She groped for something else to say, but Jasper spared her the effort.

  “Houston out,” he said. If they’d been talking on the phone, he’d have slammed down the receiver.

  Beckwith floated in place for a moment, feeling extraordinarily alone—which made sense—and uncertain of herself as well, which she typically wasn’t. Absently, she ran her right thumb over the inside of her left wrist, just underneath her watchband, which made her feel a bit better. That spot on that wrist was part of the reason she was here today at all.

  Throughout her childhood, Beckwith had never objected to her real name, Belka. She didn’t object even when she learned that it had been borrowed from a dog—something she was told just after she turned four. The fact that the eponymous Belka was a girl dog made it easier to take. Beckwith shrugged it off when she was in third grade and her classmates inevitably—and, to her way of thinking, belatedly—took to calling her “Belcha.” It was a variation on her name she’d come up with years before, and she found it clever; she’d been waiting for the other children to tumble to it too.

  But what Beckwith especially liked about her name was that her parents meant it as the highest possible tribute. They had met in the early 1960s when they were both finishing their doctorate degrees in engineering at Caltech—her father one of 107 men in the program and her mother the sole woman. Their goal had been to land jobs at NASA and Caltech’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, working to build unmanned spacecraft that would fly to the moon and the planets. They were both hired fast.

  Like so many other Americans, they had fallen hard for space a few years earlier, when the Soviet Union launched Sputnik, the first satellite. But unlike most Americans, who loathed and feared the Soviets, the Drs. Beckwith openly admired the Russian space program’s combination of ingenuity and pragmatism, and the extraordinary machines those twin qualities produced.

  Russian missiles and spacecraft were so simple, so plug-ugly, so heedless of aesthetics and so mindful of function, that they came back around to being a strange kind of gorgeous. Let the Americans exhaust themselves building their ships out of lightweight, thin-walled metal that held together only because of some magic of welding and stress-point science. The Russians would be just as happy to hollow out a giant cannonball, put a chair and a man and a few controls inside, and fire it all off on top of the biggest missile they could dream up. That was the kind of solid engineering that transcended the vulgarity of politics.

  When the Beckwiths’ daughter was born, in the mid-1970s, after the Americans had won the race to the moon, they wanted to give her a name that would honor the Russian way. Valentina, the first name of the first Russian spacewoman, would have been too provocative in an era in which the Cold War was still hot. But there were always the Russian dogs, which flew to space before the people.

  Russian space dogs were like Russian spacecraft—mongrels, with not a shred of pedigree, but with toughness to burn. And they had irresistible names: Laika and Strelka and Belka and Mushka and Damka and Bobik and more. They were all females too, both because they were more tractable than males and because it was easier to design space diapers for them. The Beckwiths chose the name Belka for their daughter, liking the way the first name paired up with the last name, giving the whole affair a nice alliterative bounce.

  So Belka Beckwith sallied into the world, grew a bouncing confidence to go with her bouncing name, and took to engineering just like her parents had. She, however, decided to study at the Naval Academy and earn her military commission along with her diploma.

  Beckwith thrived at Annapolis, graduating second in a class of 1,964 students—behind only a perfectly humorless grind of a midshipman who was promptly assigned the nickname Tube, for no other reason than it seemed ignoble and was certain to annoy him. Despite her best efforts, Beckwith could find nothing remotely interesting about Tube save for something about his breakfast, which every single day for every one of the four years they were at school included two slices of white toast, which he would, on alternating days, eat with either apricot jam, butter, or cream cheese—or sometimes entirely dry. It took Beckwith until late in her first year to notice the pattern and until early in her fourth to make sense of it.

  “Tube!” she exclaimed one morning at breakfast, slapping her hand on the table and startling the other midshipmen. “It’s alphabetical: apricot, butter, cream cheese, dry! You’re alphabetizing your toast!”

  Tube turned to her expressionlessly. “Yes,” he said, and then turned away.

  Upon graduation, Beckwith and Tube both applied to fly jets, and both were assigned to the Naval Air Station in Pensacola, Florida, for training. Tube washed out, and the last Beckwith heard, he had wound up in a policy-making office at the Pentagon. Beckwith, by contrast, certified in pretty much every jet she decided to try—and she tried an awful lot of them. She spent the next five years happily flying off the Eisenhower, attaining the rank of lieutenant commander in the process. Eventually, when NASA was accepting candidates for a new class of astronauts, she applied and was accepted.

  In Beckwith’s new role, she wanted a new name, one she’d been considering for a while. That name would be Walli, and if anyone didn’t recognize straightaway why, that person didn’t actually deserve an explanation.

  The name, of course, was a tip of the hat to Wally Schirra; Schirra was one of the original seven astronauts and, to Beckwith’s thinking, the best of the seven—the best of the five-hundred-some people who had ever gone to space for that matter. It was Schirra who flew ninety combat missions over Korea in an F-84 Thunderjet—a plane so slow and leaden that it needed nearly two miles of runway before it could hoist its bulk into the sky. The other pilots called it the “Ground-Loving Whore,” but it was Wally’s whore and he adored it. Half the reason he flew so many missions was just so he could ride the thing as hard as he could and feel it ride him right back. That was the way Beckwith decided to fly her bad-boy jets, for exactly the same reason.

  Schirra’s innate feel for flying machines was what gave him the piloting mettle to command all three of NASA’s first generation of spacecraft—the one-man Mercury, the two-man Gemini, and the three-man Apollo—making him the only astronaut to hit for that cycle.

  On his final mission, in command of Apollo 7, he led what amounted to nothing short of a cosmic mutiny, tearing up the overly complicated flight plan that had been written by the NASA ground pounders and running the show his own way. He was in command of a brand-new spacecraft and would not risk the safety of his crew conducting a lot of unnecessary science when the purpose of the mission was simply to make sure the ship was fit to fly.

  By every single measure of military and space program protocol, Schirra was wrong. But he was right by the more important pilot’s code of making the correct call for his vessel and his men.

  It was that certainty that Beckwith most admired in Schirra. During her Navy days and her first flight in space, aboard the shuttle, she carried along a small white laminated card reading “WWWD”—What Would Wally Do? After Schirra’s death, in 2007, she tossed the card away and had the letters tattooed on the inside of her left wrist. On all of her spa
ceflights, the question the initials asked was always somewhere in her mind. If she could answer it when the situation called for it, she guessed she’d get along just fine. This morning, she hoped, she’d answered it right.

  In the silence filling the station, Beckwith busied herself undoing the partial power-down she and Zhirov had executed before the Soyuz set sail. She drifted from module to module, opening hatches, turning on lights and fans, like a vacationer returning home from a long trip. She did not even bother checking her food supplies. There was enough aboard to sustain six crew members for a minimum of ten months, and that was assuming they all ate three full meals a day. Beckwith was a light eater in space, and most of the food had a shelf life of pretty much forever. The station was similarly oversupplied with oxygen, which, with one person aboard, was similarly being underused. And most of the water on the American segment was reclaimed and recycled and for practical purposes never ran out. Beckwith could live here for years and years.

  The ground, she knew, would be able to monitor all of her power-up procedures on Mission Control’s environmental consoles, and could even observe her using the video cameras arrayed throughout the ship if they chose. Small red lights on each camera would indicate when it was switched on. Beckwith looked up, and for now at least, she saw no red.

  When she was done with the power-up, she returned to her sleep pod to see if the storm she’d created on the ground was truly bad enough to earn the affable Jasper’s ire. The sleep pods in the American segment were enclosures about the size of a phone booth with accordion doors and a cocoon-like sleeping bag tethered to a wall. Each pod had two laptop computers bungeed to the wall facing the sleeping bag. She logged onto one of the computers, opened up a browser, and prepared for the slow, dial-up-quality connection, which was the only thing possible from space to Earth. When she finally connected, her eyes widened.