Holdout: A Novel

by Jeffrey Kluger

  “It’s eighty-five words, Beckwith,” her first-year roommate had said to her. “Remember it and then forget it.”

  But that was the point—the sublime leanness of the eighty-five words. The code had the fat-free simplicity of a haiku. Its meaning was clear, its rules direct, but there was a certain modest poetry to it all the same: Midshipmen would do what was right, stand up for principle, “tell the truth and ensure that the truth is known”—the second “truth” a lyric force-multiplier for the first. The eighty-five words ticked off the relevant virtues with such declarative power that to Beckwith they felt less like moral goals than laws of science.

  Now, with or without the red line, she knew that since she had chosen to stay at her post, she must also tend to her post. The schedule uploaded to the tablets every morning might have included all of the experiments and other scientific work that the crew would have to perform, but not the business of routine maintenance—which was simply an understood part of the space station workday. Air filters needed to be cleared, pumps needed to be recycled, coolant systems needed to be checked. Then too there were the five mice in the five small cages in the American Destiny lab that needed to be cared for lest they languish or die.

  Beckwith loved the mice. There had been six at first, but one had not survived the transition to zero-g. She had wrapped its small body in gauze, sealed it in a plastic sample bag, and stowed it in one of the lab freezers. Had the uncrewed Progress cargo vehicle docked as planned, it would have been unloaded first, then repacked with station trash and sent on an incineration plunge through the atmosphere. Beckwith had planned to tuck the mouse inside too—affording it the dignity of a decent cremation and allowing the single ounce of organic chemicals that had been all there was to its body to return to Earth.

  The other five mice adapted to weightlessness better. Some preferred to cling to the floor of the cage since that was what constituted down when they were on Earth. Others clung anywhere at all, as long as they could stay in one place.

  And one loved to fly. He was a male—Beckwith had worked with them all long enough to tell the difference—and he would spend a fair share of every day climbing up one wall of his cage, kicking off to the opposite one, and furiously pedaling his feet in what looked to Beckwith like an attempt to pick up speed. She named the mouse Bolt. This morning, after making herself a breakfast of rehydrated eggs, a pouch of hot coffee, and one of cold juice, she started on her maintenance chores, which took just over two hours, saving the mice for last. When she had gotten them fed and changed their water, she turned to Bolt and did one thing she’d never done before: She opened the top of his cage to let him fly free.

  Beckwith had no doubt what the little creature would do when offered the chance of escape, and he did just that—kicking off a side of the cage and shooting straight for the opening. In the vast space of the lab module, he had nothing within reach to stop his forward trajectory and he began his usual pedaling motion, this time backwards, as if to slow himself down. Beckwith raised an open hand in front of him and his nose bumped gently against her palm. She slowly moved her hand away and he hung motionless in space, looking left and right, up and down. Beckwith then gently tapped him on his rump, sending him drifting forward in the direction of the lab module’s small porthole. The window was on the bottom side of the station and was at that moment filled with the sight of the eastern edge of the Mediterranean Sea. Beckwith stopped Bolt’s motion again, and then the two of them looked down at the planet.

  “Beautiful, isn’t it?” she said.

  The mouse did not respond.

  “It’s the Mediterranean,” she added.

  The mouse did not respond.

  A moment later, both of them jumped as a voice from the ground cut through the silence.

  “Station, Houston.”

  “Copy,” Beckwith said, sounding cross at the interruption.

  “Please stand by at 2100 hours station time for an audio conference with Washington.”

  That would be 9:00 p.m. station time and 5:00 p.m. Washington time, but at the moment, it was barely 11:45 in the morning aboard the station, or 7:45 a.m. on the East Coast of the United States.

  “That’s still more than nine hours away, Houston.”

  “Yes, but Washington requested that you be informed now.”

  “Why?”

  “To organize your thoughts,” the Capcom responded. “That’s how it was put—‘to organize her thoughts.’” Before Beckwith could ask, the Capcom spared her the trouble. “They didn’t say any more than that.”

  The line fell silent and Beckwith and Bolt turned back to the window, but for Beckwith the mood was broken. The mouse continued to watch as the Mediterranean Sea slid by below.

  * * *

  • • •

  Within an hour of arriving in the Mercado field hospital in eastern Bolivia on the night of the fire, three days before Beckwith commandeered the space station, Sonia Peanut kicked a wall and broke a toe. She had already been hobbling on her two twisted ankles, and now a new blaze of pain shot through the small bones of her right foot. She was rearing back for a second kick when a nurse got hold of her and wrestled her under something close to control.

  “Those bastards!” Sonia spat, looking in the general direction of the entire nation of Brazil.

  The nurse agreed that they were bastards.

  “I’ll make them pay!” Sonia added.

  The nurse agreed that Sonia surely would.

  Sonia was unappeased, kicking wildly at nothing at all, and another nurse appeared and convinced her that perhaps a half milligram of a little tablet that looked like Xanax or Valium or some kind of benzodiazepine would make her feel better. Sonia refused, but the nurses pressed, and as much to make them go away as anything else she agreed to swallow it. The minimal dose of the mild pill hit her empty stomach and small frame almost immediately, and her mood changed from a molten rage to an exhausted grief. She dropped into a chair with her face in her hands, rocking and sobbing, and the two nurses looked at each other, wondering if the little pill had really been a good idea, then deciding that it probably was because the new girl at least had quieted down and wasn’t breaking any more bones. They removed her shoe and taped her toes. The girl barely noticed, lost in her sorrow.

  The helicopter ride from the Guarani lands across the Bolivian border and to the eastern edge of the Mercado National Park had taken close to two hours—and they had been grueling hours. The hospital was a designated SSA safe zone—close enough to the violence in Brazil to make it possible to get back and forth more or less easily, but located on the other side of an international boundary line, which provided legal if not always actual protection. There were seven patients from the clinic hospital aboard the two helicopters—three with tuberculosis, three with pneumonia, and one with an unknown infection that had nearly killed him twice. None of them should have been moved, all of them required constant attention, and at least a few had likely lost family members who had come to the clinic to visit them that evening and become caught in the fire before they could escape. There had been twelve patients in the clinic beds before the blaze reached the wooden building. The five not aboard the helicopters had probably died as well.

  Sonia checked her phone every ten minutes during the flight. On nights like tonight, the SSA posted casualty lists quickly, the better to keep scarce doctors from searching for survivors where there were none to find, freeing them up to get to the places where they could do some good. The camp had burned fast, but the list was coming slowly, and Sonia felt her head go light and her stomach turn over as she concluded—rightly, she was convinced—that it was simply taking longer to find and identify all of the bodies. The fire had surely been intended not just for the SSA hospital but also for the nearby Guarani tribal lands, which meant a great many people would have lost their homeland and at least a few could have lost their lives. S
he glanced about for a bucket in case she needed to vomit and found one just behind the pilots’ seats; the mere fact that it was there helped her collect herself. She spent the rest of the flight comforting Oli, who alternately sobbed and stared blankly forward.

  Before he and Sonia set out for the campfire site that night, Oli’s father had left the tribal village to visit his mother—Oli’s grandmother—in the clinic hospital half a kilometer distant. She had been the last in the tribal group to have contracted the chicken pox infection that was stubbornly hanging on in the jungle, and had been having a hard time shaking it. Both Sonia and Oli knew that his grandmother and father had probably been in the building when the fire broke out. They had no way of knowing if either one of them had escaped.

  When they at last arrived at the Mercado hospital in Bolivia, it was to a storm of activity. There had been three other fires in three other tribal reserves in the southern jungle that night, and five other SSA helicopters had already arrived and were unloading patients and doctors. Sonia hopped down from the helicopter with Oli in her arms and badly underestimated how far the distance was to the ground. That plus the extra forty-five pounds that was the boy caused her to hit with a thud, and her ankles twisted yet again.

  “Motherfucker!” she barked.

  The shout startled Oli and also drew the attention of a guard who trotted over with his gun slung over his shoulder. He asked Sonia her name and she told him; he asked Oli’s name and she gave him that too, the full and formal Kauan.

  “¿Es su hijo?” he asked in Spanish. Is he your son?

  “No,” Sonia answered truthfully.

  “Entonces dámelo.” Then give him to me, the man said.

  Sonia didn’t quite follow his Spanish, especially over the roar of the helicopter blades, and neither did Oli, but they both understood when he reached for the boy and tried to grab him from her arms. He immediately began to wail and thrash, and Sonia clutched him tight.

  “Take your hands off him!” she screamed.

  “Si no es suyo . . .” he began to explain. If he isn’t yours . . .

  “Take your hands off him!” Sonia repeated.

  At that moment, from about ten yards away, Sonia heard someone shouting, “Stop, stop, stop!” She turned, and a woman she faintly recognized from the first time she was here—seven months ago, at the beginning of her rotation when she had arrived for orientation—was sprinting toward them. She was a third-year resident—or maybe a second—and she was training in surgery. Her name was Myra—or maybe Mia. The woman came skidding to a stop in front of them and looked squarely at the guard.

  “She’s right; don’t touch the boy,” she said. “He’s my son.”

  Sonia looked at her wide-eyed. “He is not your—” But Myra or Mia cut her off.

  “He’s my son,” she repeated emphatically, looking fixedly at Sonia, who was too stunned to respond. “Or,” the woman named Myra or Mia went on, “he’s hers.” She pointed to a doctor hurrying by and shouted out to her.

  “Gisele!” she called. “Is this your son?” She inclined her head to Oli. The woman smiled.

  “Yes. I’m glad he made it.” Then she hurried off.

  Mia or Myra then looked squarely at Sonia and spoke very deliberately. “Are you sure this boy is not yours too?” Sonia knew what answer she was supposed to give, though she had no idea why she was supposed to give it. But she did so all the same.

  “No, I’m not sure,” she said. “Actually, he is my son.”

  Mia or Myra then turned to the guard and spoke in high-speed Spanish that left Sonia entirely behind. The guard looked piqued, then confused, then just plain exhausted.

  “¡Pues, bueno!” he snapped, not sounding as if he thought anything was bueno at all. He stalked off with a parting glare at Sonia, who was utterly flummoxed.

  “It’s fine now,” the other woman said.

  “What just happened?”

  “Children who come in without family are separated and processed individually. If an adult does claim to be the parent but doesn’t have the proper documents—and no one here does—the detaining guard must take an affidavit. That lasts two hours. If there are two people making a claim, it’s two more hours—and so on.” She shrugged. “He’s supposed to be off duty in fifteen minutes.”

  Sonia smiled a deeply grateful smile. “Thank you,” was all she could say, and then added a tentative, “Myra.”

  “Mia,” the woman said. Sonia nodded an apology and tried to take a step forward, but her right ankle gave way and she bent and grabbed it in pain. “Steady,” Mia said, taking her elbow and standing her back up. “Let’s go inside.”

  As they made their halting way forward, Sonia could at last look around, and was startled at the scale of what she saw. When she had been here before, the Mercado field hospital was already big—an enclosed compound with a dozen patient tents, one free-standing clinic, and one surgical building. Now it had at least quadrupled in size, stretching across an area that was the equivalent of two football fields. Sonia counted nine buildings, with a tenth under construction, and could only guess at the number of tents. Electrical cables snaked across the grounds, leading to innumerable generators; sanitation trucks, pumping in fresh water and pumping out waste, were parked at various spots outside the perimeter.

  The boundaries of the camp had changed too. The first time Sonia was here, they had been marked by nothing more than stakes and wire forming a makeshift fence. Now that had been replaced by a cinder-block wall perhaps seven feet high, completely surrounding the nearly two acres of land with only one opening big enough for people and small vehicles to pass through. The temporary camp was becoming very much a permanent one.

  “When did all this happen?” Sonia asked, gesturing generally at the entire complex.

  “Just after the Consolidation began,” Mia responded. “It was . . . necessary.” Sonia nodded tightly.

  The overall atmosphere within the walls was faintly bazaar-like, with people swarming everywhere, about a third of them fieldworkers and two-thirds forest people—refugees and patients. Sonia could loosely understand Guarani when she heard it spoken, as well as a scattering of Yanomami words, and that was it. But if she didn’t know all the other local languages, she could at least pick out some of their differences—in tones and inflections and distinctive glottal stops. There were at least three hundred tribes and three hundred languages across the more than one million people who lived in the jungle. They all seemed to be represented here.

  Sonia looked down at Oli to see if he was disturbed by all of the activity, but he had in fact—and at last—fallen asleep. She freed up one of her arms, held him tightly with the other, and reached into her pocket for her phone. The casualty list had still not posted. Mia saw and understood.

  “It’ll come,” she said.

  At last they reached a building with a sign that said, “Pédiatrie, Pediatrics, Pediatria.” There were two dozen beds inside, about twenty of which were filled. Some of the children were sleeping, some were simply staring, all were utterly silent. Oli breathed steadily and peacefully in Sonia’s arms.

  “May I take him?” Mia whispered.

  “Yes,” Sonia responded, matching Mia’s tone. She passed the boy off, and Mia noticed the crisscross of scratches on his arms and legs. She looked at Sonia questioningly. Sonia shrugged. “Normal for him,” she whispered with a weak laugh.

  Mia passed Oli to another doctor, who took him to an examining table, lightly swabbed his scratches, and took his vitals. Oli remained asleep, and Mia caught Sonia’s eye and nodded to one of the empty beds, a corner of its blanket already turned back, with a little pink plush toy next to the small pillow; it looked like a pig. The room was softly lit, and a fan in each of its corners kept it cool. Sonia smiled. Mia walked her to the door and pointed to the general infirmary building only about ten yards away.

  “G
et those ankles looked at. Can you make it on your own?” Mia asked.

  Sonia nodded. “Come get me when he wakes up,” she said.

  Mia agreed, and Sonia hobbled to the infirmary. As soon as she entered, a nurse saw her struggling and hurried over to help her, but at that moment, Sonia’s phone vibrated and she grabbed it with a shaking hand. It was the casualty list. She punched the icon on her screen, and the little color wheel spun and spun and spun some more as it slowly fetched the file. At last it opened.

  Fifteen people had died in the clinic tonight, ten of them Guarani, five of them doctors and staffers. Annie was among the dead. So was Oli’s grandmother. So was Oli’s father. The entire population of the Guarani village had been scattered into the jungle.

  It was then that Sonia kicked the wall and broke her toe, and it was then that the nurses gathered her in and gave her the pill and tended her foot. After all that was done—and after Sonia had rocked and cried—she reached for her phone one more time and pecked out an email, blinking at it through a blur of tears. Within four minutes of her sending it, the phone rang. She picked it up and once again heard the hiss from far, far away. When it cleared, the voice came through.

  “It’s Mama,” the voice said. “Talk to me.” And Sonia did.

  * * *

  • • •

  After that long call on her first night in the Mercado camp, Sonia slept little, curling up as best she could in a canvas chair next to Oli’s small bed and drifting in and out of a restless doze. Oli, on the other hand, slept the sleep of someone who had no capacity left to do anything but sleep—lying on his back, his left arm slung over the side of his little bed, his head mostly off his pillow. It was as if he had been dropped from the ceiling while sound asleep and simply maintained whatever position his loose limbs and lolling head had assumed on the bounce.

  When he at last woke up the next morning, the first thing he saw was Sonia in her chair, watching him closely. He shimmied over on the bed, making room for her. She climbed in beside him and held him. Then she got him up and showed him where the communal bathroom for the girls and boys was, but he wouldn’t go in without her. She brushed his teeth and washed his face, which he fought, and gave him breakfast, which he didn’t eat. Then she walked him outside, away from the constant noise and buzz of the pediatrics building, through the crowds swarming everywhere, past the seven-foot wall and toward a tiny grove of barrigona palms about thirty yards away—far enough for privacy, close enough that the hospital would be just a few seconds’ sprint away if trouble came from the jungle.