Holdout: A Novel

by Jeffrey Kluger

  The story was solid and the substance of the quote was reliable, but the three sources took pains to say that while they absolutely heard what they said they heard, they couldn’t vouch for every single word. It was an odd hedge since their stories matched perfectly but so did their qualifiers. For the better part of two hours, the firestorm over the president’s reversal played out online and on the cable channels. White House staffers insisted that his comments had been taken out of context, while the September 18 Coalition went into full-throated rage at a man whose word could not be trusted to hold for even a single morning.

  It was then that things got worse—much, much worse—for the president and his supporters. Because it was then that the busboy who had surreptitiously propped his smartphone on a coffee cart near the presidential table and had set it to record voice and video throughout the dessert released his clip to Mother Jones magazine, which promptly shared it with the world. And it was then too that the reason for the original sources’ hedging became clear.

  Many TV stations bleeped the relevant word in the astounding clip, but rudimentary lipreading made it clear what the president had said. Even that wasn’t necessary on the internet, where the clip circulated unedited and was shared tens of millions of times.

  The New York Times did edit the video in its online coverage but explained in the accompanying story that instead of the word “girl” in the term “space girl,” the president had “used a single-syllable, four-letter vulgarity that refers to a part of the female anatomy.”

  Other mainstream news outlets used a decorous asterisk in place of the word’s single vowel; still others published the word in its full and florid form. The New York Daily News trumped them all with the headline on its website and later in its morning edition, which screamed: “P. Calls Walli a C!” The paper’s editorial page said it would “leave it to readers to decide if P should stand for ‘president’ or for a single-syllable, five-letter vulgarity that refers to a part of the male anatomy.” The White House tried to put out the fire, first saying the clip might be a forgery, then conceding it was real but dismissing it as “just gym talk.”

  For about an hour after the news broke, Beckwith herself knew nothing about either the president’s reversal or his choice of language. Both Houston and Moscow had been unusually silent in that hour—a silence that, under the circumstances, made her suspicious. So she opened her laptop, and the first thing she saw was the Daily News headline, mostly because no fewer than 15,000 people had forwarded it to her Twitter feed.

  Even in zero-g, with no gravity to pull on a jaw whose muscles had suddenly stopped working, her mouth fell open. She quick-scanned from site to site, confirming what the first headline had unmistakably told her, her jaw then snapping shut and clenching. She watched the busboy’s clip three times to satisfy herself that it was absolutely impossible that the president had somehow been misunderstood.

  Almost dizzy with fury, Beckwith punched open the line to Moscow, reached the person on the communications console, and demanded to talk to Zhirov. When he had been fetched, she again spoke with no preamble.

  “Vasily,” she said, “cancel my ride.”

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  September 10

  Zhirov had no intention of keeping Walli Beckwith’s Soyuz on the ground. The plan had been to launch it, and that plan would be followed on schedule—never mind the dirty-mouthed American president. But the morning the rocket rolled out to the launchpad did not begin as Zhirov would have liked.

  He watched the train carrying the fifteen-story machine emerge from its hangar, the Soyuz lying flat on an open railcar like a captured deer, its bottom end—its magnificent twenty engines—facing forward. Traveling just a few miles an hour, it would take close to two hours to reach the pad. During an ordinary rollout, Zhirov would watch the train travel only its first few hundred yards and then would light out for the pad at a brisk run that took him along a road near the tracks—his legs carrying him faster than the train was creeping. He would cross the tracks about half a mile from the launchpad, speed-run the rest of the way, and arrive before the rocket did. It was a rollout routine he’d followed many times, one that afforded him a chance for some predawn exercise but still ensured that he would be present to observe the rocket as it was stood up straight—its nose rising from the horizontal, up to forty-five degrees, then to a full ninety-degree vertical. Once the Soyuz was upright, it would be enclosed in its scaffold-like gantry in preparation for launch.

  This morning, however, Zhirov stayed an extra fifteen minutes near the hangar to ensure that all was going well and only then set out. He enjoyed his run far less than he usually did, having badly underdressed for the weather, and was relieved when he reached the railroad crossing to find Gennady Bazanov on the other side of the track, standing outside a government car. For a rocket as important as this one, the director of flight operations himself would be present, and he and Zhirov had agreed that they would meet at this spot and drive the rest of the way to the pad together. The tailpipe of the car puffed white smoke in the frigid air—a promise of the warmth that would be found inside.

  Just as Zhirov raised his hand to hail Bazanov, however, two security guards stepped forward. Both were young, both were armed, and both had dressed far more warmly than he had, having stood their post for hours so far. Both also instantly saw who Zhirov was, and he registered the flash of both recognition and respect he had long since grown accustomed to seeing.

  “I’m sorry, Colonel,” one of them said, “but the dog has already walked.”

  “He never walks this soon,” Zhirov protested.

  “No, sir,” the guard said. “The dog was on time; he is always on time.”

  Zhirov slumped. The dog was the bomb-sniffing dog. On rollout days he would be brought to the crossing when the train was about fifteen minutes away, just as it appeared around a bend in the tracks, where its twenty lovely engine bells could be glimpsed in the distance. Once the dog had walked and the tracks were secured, nobody—not the commander of the Cosmodrome, not the chairman of the Duma, not the most accomplished cosmonaut in all the world—could cross until the train had passed. Zhirov glanced down the tracks and could see the rocket approaching.

  “Corporal,” he said, stressing the younger man’s very junior rank. “Look at me.” He spread his arms to display his inadequate dress. “Do you know the temperature?”

  “It is cold, sir. I’m sorry,” the soldier said. “But there is nothing I can do.”

  Bazanov, watching the exchange from a distance, jogged over while Zhirov hugged himself and jumped up and down in a largely ineffective effort to stay warm. The moment Bazanov neared the tracks, the guard turned to him and repeated the drill that was his sole mission here this morning.

  “I’m sorry, Mr. Director, but the dog has already walked.”

  “Corporal . . .” Bazanov began.

  “It’s no good, my friend,” Zhirov interrupted. “The soldiers are just doing their job.”

  “I will strangle that dog,” Bazanov said.

  “He’s just doing his job too,” Zhirov answered.

  Bazanov flashed a glare at the guards, trotted back to the car, opened the trunk, and pulled out an olive drab army blanket. He hurried back to the tracks and prepared to toss it across to Zhirov, but the lead guard stopped him.

  “I’m sorry, Mr. Director, but the dog has already walked,” he said unselfconsciously, as if it were the first time he’d spoken the words all day.

  “The dog was not sniffing for a blanket!” Bazanov snapped. “Blankets do not explode!”

  The corporal looked from the fuming Bazanov to the shivering Zhirov, then at last took the blanket and, with the assistance of the other guard, unfolded it, shook it out, and examined both sides of it. Satisfied that it would indeed not explode, he handed it across to Zhirov, who gratefully wrapped it around himself and waved Bazanov bac
k to his car where he could wait in the warmth.

  Not long after, the sleek orange-and-white Soyuz rumbled by. Zhirov watched it go with open admiration—the great Russian space machine, the speedy cosmic sports car. When the train had fully cleared the crossing and had moved to a safe distance, the guards lowered their guns, stood aside, and nodded apologetically to Zhirov. He nodded back and then, on reflection, offered them a crisp salute, which they received with broad smiles and smartly returned.

  Zhirov trotted across the track, hopped inside Bazanov’s car, and the two of them motored to the pad. When they arrived, they watched in silence as the rocket was slowly raised and began to be prepped for its upcoming journey.

  “I’ll be glad to see this one fly,” said Zhirov.

  Bazanov grunted. “It’s been given a foolish errand. I am not in the business of providing taxi service for misbehaving Americans.”

  “She will behave now, sir. She will get aboard and this will end soon.”

  “She already told you she would do no such thing,” Bazanov said.

  “She was angry. No one outside of Mission Control heard her say that. She will not have to explain herself if she boards the Soyuz and comes home, and I will see that she does.”

  “Perhaps you can. Either way, this will be her last chance.”

  “Sir?”

  “Moscow has had enough; I have had enough. If she does not come home, the Americans can solve this problem. There will be no more communications between Moscow and the station except in the event of an emergency. I will order a power-down in the Zvezda, the Zarya, the Poisk—all of the Russian modules. There will be air, but they will be dark and damp. And there will be no more resupply missions. She can live on what she has there and she can live there alone.”

  “The Americans will feed her.”

  “Then let them,” Bazanov said. “But they can’t go get her without a Soyuz rocket, and this one—” He jabbed his finger toward the elegant booster standing on the pad, the now-rising sun glinting orange off its side. “This one is the last one I send until astronaut Belka ‘Walli’ Beckwith is off my station.”

  Bazanov spoke the “Walli” with open contempt. Then he turned away, his face flushed.

  “I will bring her home, sir,” Zhirov promised.

  Bazanov said nothing, but put the car in gear, and the two of them drove away from the pad.

  * * *

  • • •

  It never occurred to anyone at the White House that a three-minute recording with an eight-second sentence that included a one-syllable vulgarity could eat a presidency alive, but no sooner did the recording of the president’s dinner-table remarks go wide than the great devouring began. Snap polls—equal parts unreliable and irresistible—were conducted by all of the broadcast networks and cable news channels, as well as by The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, and USA Today, and all but the pollsters at the friendly Journal saw at least five-point losses in the president’s popularity. Beckwith, whose popularity continued its perfectly Newtonian relationship with the president’s—moving in equal and opposite directions—saw her approval numbers bounce by the same amount.

  The president was left with no good options. He could apologize and recommit to the intervention deal he had offered Beckwith—which absolutely no one now trusted him to honor. Or he could brazen it out and concede that he had lied to her but argue that it was necessary in the interests of national security. That was the course he chose to take, and he decided on his own just how he would take it. During an already scheduled Chamber of Commerce speech that evening, he would apologize for his “dinner-table potty mouth,” and he would confess, abashedly, that his wife had instructed him to “put a dollar in the cuss jar every day for the rest of the year.”

  Then he would turn directly to the matter of the intervention. He would begin with more or less the same speech he’d given during the campaign, opposing America’s involvement in “elective wars in others’ lands.” He would then go on to “deplore the tragic displacement and loss of life in the Amazon” and promise that his administration would “continue to work with the nations of the world to bring the suffering to an end.” And then, pointedly, angrily, he would declare that the US government would “not have its choices made or its policies dictated by the playacting and sedition of a naval officer who had become nothing more than an outer space outlaw.” With that, he would look roughly skyward, point a scolding finger, and announce, “Never!”

  When he actually reached that part of the speech that evening, the partisan audience rose to its feet and cheered, and the clip ran throughout the day on cable channels and websites around the world.

  * * *

  • • •

  Raymond’s confidence in his finesse with computers and the information that they could gather from the relocation camps in Brazil proved well placed. Within two days of the attack on the Mercado hospital, he had the entire facility’s network up and operating, gathering information about impending attacks and the locations of new burnings, as well as processing the new arrivals who were already beginning to stagger into the Mercado camp, chased by the fires.

  Just as important was the business of tracking information about the growing population of refugees who were being herded into what were now four fully constructed internment camps, which stood in a cluster at the western border of Brazil and were identified by the four major compass points—norte, sul, leste, and oeste; north, south, east, and west. Bobo-deCorte wanted to keep what he continued to call “tribal relocation lands” as hidden from public eyes as possible, and when it came to the news media, he did a good job of limiting access. He allowed only friendly interviews and happy footage of native children playing together and native adults working on crafts and peacefully making their traditional meals, all of the videos directed and shot by a single, state-friendly TV station in Brasilia.

  The Brazilian president would have liked to leave it at that, but he knew that he also had no choice but to allow human rights groups, as well as medical teams from the SSA, UNICEF, the Red Cross, and the World Health Organization, to visit the camps and ensure the health of the internees. The fragile support he was receiving from friendly nations—Saudi Arabia, North Korea, Hungary, and a few others with similar strongman leaders—would evaporate quickly if the relocation camps began to look the slightest bit like death camps.

  With the help of the visiting health groups, the workers at all four camps kept a running census of the internees, identifying them by four metrics: gender, age, tribe, and health status. All of the information was made publicly available in order to help convince the world that the people in the camps were being well accounted for and well cared for. The well-accounted-for part was more or less true, except for one detail: While the names of all of the internees were taken and recorded, they were not released along with the other four descriptions. University scholars knew the most common familial names of the one million Amazon tribespeople, and also knew more or less what their distribution and numbers ought to be. If particular names stopped appearing in adequate numbers, it would be a sign of whole family groups dating back centuries being eliminated.

  For Sonia, Mia, and the other doctors in the Mercado camp, that lack of names presented a problem. SSA protocol dictated that the moment patients were taken in for care, the organization remained responsible for them until they were properly discharged. The raid on the camp had hardly represented such an orderly closing of the file on any of the cases, which meant that the doctors were obliged to track the patients’ whereabouts so they could continue providing treatment if it ever became possible. Under the current circumstances, SSA officials in Paris might have waived the rule, considering it impossible to abide by, but the SSA workers in the Mercado camp—having lost track of 1,243 souls—felt obliged to honor it as best they could, even without names to guide them.

 
Sonia and Mia led the effort, and from the moment Raymond established his computer network, they each commandeered a laptop and made it their responsibility to scour the lists from the four camps, looking for descriptions of people who might match any of the patients who had been at the Mercado hospital. Sonia did not even pretend that there was not one description of one Guarani boy she was looking for more closely than all of the other 1,242 people, even if the name Kauan—much less Oli—would never be attached to it.

  The reports from the four camps came in only spottily. The record keeping and reporting were best at the eastern camp, where lists were released at least twice a day, once at midday and once just after sundown. The north and south camps were next, always issuing a single reliable report, and always around noon. The western camp was a mess. At best there was a list every other day; it was always a short one—due not to the size of the camp, which was as big as all the others, but simply to poor head-counting. Often some of the data was missing—in one case, an internee’s gender, tribe, and health status would be released, but not age; in another, it would be age, health, and gender, but not tribe.

  Mia and Sonia would take a first pass at the lists and turn any descriptions of any people who seemed even faintly familiar over to another pair of doctors at two other computers who would cross-index them with the fastidiously kept Mercado database.

  “We’ve got a possible,” would come the call from the doctors with the databases whenever three out of four of the metrics matched.

  “We’ve got a likely,” was the call when there was a four-for-four match—since while four-for-four was good, there could certainly be more than just one, say, forty-something female Yanomami with low-grade malaria.