Holdout: A Novel

by Jeffrey Kluger

  It occurred to her that there was something she very much wanted to do, even if she knew she shouldn’t—even if she’d have to ask for help from Moscow and it would likely not be forthcoming. But she’d spent the better part of the past three weeks doing things she shouldn’t do and why should now be any different? She opened the communications line.

  “Moscow, station,” she called.

  She was met with silence.

  “Moscow, station,” she repeated.

  Still no one answered. She was about to call again when the line cracked to life.

  “Copy, station,” came the response.

  Beckwith closed her eyes and drew a grateful breath. It was Zhirov, taking over the Capcom duties in the half-functioning Mission Control. Had Wally Schirra himself radioed back from the grave, she could not have been happier.

  “Vasily,” she said more casually than she felt, “I’m glad you’re there this evening.”

  “I am always here in the evening,” he said. He was trying to be cold, brusque, but he achieved just the opposite. He sounded warm, relieved to hear from her. They both knew it. Neither one of them said it.

  “Have you decided to come home?”

  Have you decided to come home? Just like that. It so captured Zhirov.

  “Vasily,” Beckwith said. “You know I can’t do that.”

  “You can do that. You have made your point. Your followers will forgive you and your government will listen now.”

  “It’s more than my followers, and my government won’t listen.”

  Zhirov said nothing, and the air-to-ground link hissed and crackled. Beckwith dropped her head in her hands and rubbed her eyes. They stung from lack of sleep, and she stank from nervous energy and need of a wash. She was wrung out.

  “Vasily,” she said at last, “I’ve got a headache.”

  “Take some medicine.”

  “I need some Russian medicine. Ours doesn’t work as well.”

  “Walli . . .” Zhirov said reproachfully. “That’s the wrong medicine.”

  Among astronauts and cosmonauts, “headache medicine” was alcohol. Officially, there was not a drop aboard the space station, and on the American segment, the prohibition was honored. On the Russian segment, there was official practice and there was actual practice, and Progress supply vehicles routinely came aloft with at least a little unauthorized cargo—brandy and cognac mostly, repackaged in plastic bottles with squeeze-activated nozzles, tucked between authorized bundles of food and supplies. The ranking Russian on any mission would stash the liquor in an undisclosed place to ensure that no one had access to it unless all of the station’s work was done for the day and all of its systems were secured. On the ground or not, Zhirov was that Russian.

  “Vasily,” Beckwith persisted, “it’s a very bad headache.”

  Zhirov sighed. “All right, Walli, go to the Zvezda.”

  Beckwith kicked off a wall and shot from the Zarya to the Zvezda. Zhirov instructed her where to look—in an orange storage box on the top level of a bookshelf-like structure, next to a picture of Yuri Gagarin that had been taped to the bulkhead. She swam over to the shelf and opened the box. There were three squeeze bottles, containing brandy, cognac, and vodka. Labels had been taped to the front of each container, identifying the type and brand name of each spirit. Beckwith grabbed the vodka and frowned. It was Russian.

  “The medicine,” she said. “You used to have Polish.”

  “We used to have Poland,” Zhirov answered.

  Beckwith laughed. She transferred some of the vodka to a drinking pouch stored in a pocket at a workstation the cosmonauts used as a makeshift dining area. She took a long swallow and let the power of the drink—medicine indeed—seep into her. She would allow herself only a bit, but it would be a soothing bit. Zhirov let her have her moment.

  “I cannot answer if you radio down again,” he said at last. “Not unless there is a problem or you are ready to come home.”

  “I understand that, Vasily.”

  “Bud’ úmnoy, Walli,” Zhirov said, as he had three weeks earlier, before leaving the station. Be smart.

  “I will,” Beckwith answered.

  “Moscow out,” Zhirov said.

  The line cut, and Beckwith floated where she was, listening to the dead hiss coming across the communications line, which was all she would hear from an indifferent Moscow from now on. She took one more swallow of the vodka.

  It was at that moment, for the third terrible time in her long stay in space, that the piercing cry of the emergency Klaxon sounded everywhere in the station.

  * * *

  • • •

  The western camp just inside Brazil was an utterly miserable place—and Sonia Bravo-Beckwith was determined to get there as fast as she could. If you watched the news only on Bobo-deCorte’s preferred state-controlled station, which plenty of Brazilians did, the four camps looked nothing short of lovely. And the fact was, they were—provided you didn’t look too closely.

  All of the camps were actually two camps: There was the sprawling mass of tents and lean-tos, smoky open stoves and non-flush latrines—an ugly expanse in which tens and tens of thousands of people were crammed. Then too there was a smaller, public-facing showpiece camp. It was these camps that the visiting dignitaries, journalists, and TV crews were shown—and they were quite a thing to see.

  There were children playing soccer on the freshly lined grass field and others in the movie tent watching American cartoons. There were art classes for adults and pop-up libraries with books in English, Portuguese, and Spanish, as well as computer lessons for anyone who was interested because in the era of the Consolidation, the tribes would be absorbed into modern society, making their contribution to the larger continental enterprise and leaving the wild at last. There were, too, the food tents serving fresh vegetables and rich native stews and the snack carts with their sliced mango and fried plantains.

  The simple wraps and other clothes the tribes typically wore had been taken from them, and Western clothes—shorts and T-shirts with counterfeit logos and misspelled brand names—had been given to them instead. There was a New York Yankees shirt with a New York Mets logo and “York” spelled “Yorq.” There was a Star Wars shirt with Star Trek characters and a Sesame Street shirt with Bert and Ernie labeled “Ben and Eddie.” The new clothing, the government explained, was the first part of the tribes’ “assimilation.” Counterfeit branding or not, from the look of things, the people were assimilating well indeed.

  “Paradise!” ran the headline on the front page of the state-affiliated newspaper in Brasilia.

  “Theresienstadt Novo”—New Theresienstadt—answered the opposition newspaper. The headline was a deliberately searing one, a reference to the ghetto and work camp the Nazis established in what is now the Czech Republic during World War II, which was similarly prettified into nothing short of a spa town for a Red Cross visit in 1944 before returning to its actual purpose of either working internees to death or shipping them farther east to concentration camps in Poland.

  It was the Red Cross, UNICEF, SSA, and other health workers who saw the truth—though they had no way of proving it. Before they even came within sight of the camps, Consolidation soldiers conducted body searches and confiscated smartphones, cameras, and anything else that could capture a telltale image of what was taking place inside. On a handful of occasions, they pulled doctors aside for strip searches, when a metal detector was triggered by an artificial knee or a permanent bone pin—despite the doctors’ pleas for decency and promises that the implants were the reason the detector sounded. The searches were conducted in the open, in full view of the guards and other health workers—the latter of whom looked away out of respect.

  Still, nothing could stop the health workers from whispering about what they saw to the press, and they did—reporting the poor food, the running s
ewage, and the diseases, especially cholera, that were the true face of the camps. Argentina and Chile, both opposed to Bobo-deCorte’s rule, threatened to fly military surveillance planes over the camps to see what the conditions were inside, and activists in Bolivia and Paraguay made their own attempts to reveal the truth, trying to fly drones over the camps. Consolidation officers had anticipated that, however, and deployed marksmen to shoot the drones out of the sky before they even reached the camps’ airspace.

  Finally Bobo-deCorte declared that if the outsiders didn’t stop trying to look in, he would have no choice but to have the camps covered—roofing them over with massive canvas tarps that would trap both jungle heat and body heat, turning them into filthy sweat lodges for the people forced to remain there. Deployment of the tarps actually got started in the western and southern camps before Argentina, Chile, and the activists promised to call off their actions. Much of the world thus still believed the prettified pictures of the showpiece camps more than the warnings from the medical and human rights communities.

  The instant after Sonia shouted her discovery of the boy in the western camp with the wonderful telltale scratches, she slammed her laptop shut, tucked it under her arm, and began sprinting through the camp and calling out for Mia and Raymond. Mia appeared at the opening of the darkened pediatrics building, wearing only a long T-shirt and underwear, her hair mussed and her expression unfocused. Sonia had clearly awakened her. Raymond, who had not yet gone to sleep, appeared from the communications building, where he spent more and more of his time so that he could be on hand to keep the whole underpowered, stapled-together network running. Sonia came to a stop in front of Mia, and Raymond hurried over to join them.

  “I found him!” Sonia shouted excitedly.

  “The boy?” Mia asked, still cloudy with sleep.

  “The boy?” Raymond echoed as he reached them both.

  “Oli, yes,” Sonia said.

  “Oli, sorry,” Raymond responded.

  Sonia opened her computer and scanned the screen, looking for the one-line listing on the roster. She found it.

  “Right here!” she said, pointing to it. “Boy, Guarani, under ten, and this.” She pointed to the comment under “Saúde.” Raymond tried to read it aloud.

  “Mui . . . muitos,” he began.

  “Many scratches,” Mia finished for him. “Sonia,” she said, “that’s not a lot to go on.”

  “Who else could it be?” Sonia demanded.

  “A lot of people,” Mia said. “There are thousands of Guarani, hundreds of boys, and Oli’s just five. Do you know how many more children there could be between that and ten?”

  “What about the scratches?”

  “It’s the jungle,” Mia said. “I have scratches, you have scratches. And the children certainly have scratches.”

  “No,” Sonia said emphatically. “This is him. I know it’s him.”

  “If it is, then at least you know he’s safe,” Raymond ventured.

  “Not in that camp he isn’t,” Sonia said. “You’ve heard the stories.” She turned to face Mia. “I’m getting him out,” she declared. “I’m getting him out, but first I’m getting in.”

  “What do you mean, ‘getting in’?” Mia asked.

  Sonia stopped and smiled inwardly. She had promised herself she would make the bastards pay—the bastards who had killed Annie, who had killed Oli’s family. And now she could—and she would.

  “I’m getting into that camp and I’m getting out, with Oli and with video of what’s really going on in there.”

  “Can’t be done,” Raymond said. “You’ve heard what they do with doctors they even think are carrying phones.”

  “I’m not going in as a doctor,” Sonia said. “Raymond, give me your shirt.”

  “What?” he asked.

  “Your shirt, off with it. Give it to me,” Sonia said.

  Raymond, perplexed, did as he was told, stripping off the Baylor University T-shirt he wore most days and handing it to Sonia. He was skinny but broad-shouldered, and the T-shirt was an extra-large. Sonia put it on, and it hung hugely and loosely around her. Then she undid her bun, unbraided her hair, and shook it loose around her. Finally she leaned down, gathered some dirt from the ground, and—in an unknowing impersonation of Bobo-deCorte applying road dust before a rally—streaked it across her face.

  “I’m going in as a Guarani refugee,” she said. “And I know how to get there.”

  She looked toward the opening in the wall surrounding the complex, then beyond it to the grounds outside where the guards stood and where the helicopters were parked. She would go where she needed to go.

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  The alarm that was screaming inside the International Space Station made itself known in different places and in different ways. Within the station, it was inescapable and everywhere. It knifed through the hearing of the one human and surely the five rodents on board in a way that both inflamed and insulted, and it was designed to do just that.

  Beckwith shot from the Zvezda, toward the Node 1 module, where she saw the same red light flashing at her that she had seen once before—the cursed atmosphere light. She smashed her hand down in the direction of the round, plunger-like kill switch to silence the alarm, missed, and came down on the corner of the console instead, stabbing the meat at the base of her palm. She drew in a pained hiss of air and grabbed at her wounded hand with her good one, but not before she saw the first red pearls of blood appear. The Klaxon screamed on.

  “Fuck!” she exclaimed, punched down on the plunger again, this time with both hands balled together, and shut off the hideous racket. Then she shook out her injured hand in an involuntary effort to manage the pain and instead succeeded only in scattering a little constellation of blood droplets in all directions. She sprang back to her sleep pod to fetch a bandage before she bloodied up the station air completely.

  Hundreds of miles below, the problem that set off the Klaxon was making itself known in a similarly insistent, if not nearly as jarring, way, flashing in a semaphore of emergency lights on multiple consoles in both Houston and Moscow. It was in Houston that the alarm was received first and responded to first, as an atmosphere alert began to blink at the flight director’s station, as well as at the stations of the Capcom, the flight surgeon, and the electrical, environmental, and consumables manager—or EECOM.

  “We got atmosphere here,” the EECOM controller announced into his headset.

  “Copy your atmosphere,” the flight director answered. At the moment, the flight director on-shift was Glynn Hampton, a three-decade veteran of NASA who had been occupying the center seat in Mission Control since the early days of the shuttle program.

  “Copy here too,” answered the Capcom.

  “Bring her online,” Hampton ordered.

  “Station, Houston,” the Capcom called. There was no answer. “Station, Houston,” he repeated, but still nothing.

  “Watch for the ammonia,” the flight surgeon, Charlene Boysen, called.

  “I’m not getting that,” the EECOM answered, then immediately reversed himself. “Reading it now.”

  “Call her again,” Hampton ordered

  “Station!” the Capcom announced more emphatically. “Respond if you read.”

  High overhead, Beckwith did read, but Houston would have to keep. She had done a hurried, sloppy job of bandaging her hand, leaving paper wrappers and adhesive backings floating everywhere, and she still had to grab a towel to wad around her hand where the blood continued to seep.

  She kicked off a bulkhead, fired herself as fast as she could toward the Destiny module, once again gathered the mice up, and this time shoved the cages into a large beta-cloth storage bag so as to spare herself the clumsy business of trying to herd them all as they floated free. Then she doubled back to her sleep pod and pulled out her Naval Academy hoodie and her Houston Astro
s sweatshirt. She and the mice then sped to the Russian segment, where she slammed the hatch behind her and sealed it shut. If it jammed from the cold, she’d deal with that later. She struggled into both shirts—her breath condensing again—and reached for the nearest hand mic. The other, ambient microphones had been shut off in the power-down.

  “Houston, station,” she said, and then added, “Moscow, station.”

  The Capcom in Houston answered first. “Reading you, Walli. Status please.”

  She recognized the voice—sort of. It belonged to an eager young astronaut whose name she could not for the life of her remember at the moment—something French, she was sure. She knew the timing of the rotations at the Capcom station, though, and knew that the current shift was almost up. Jasper would be coming on next, and she could picture him in the back of the auditorium, rocking on the balls of his feet and waiting to seize the console—especially now that there was a problem to solve. But at the moment she was happy even for the voice of the nameless rookie.

  “Sheltering in place in the Zvezda,” Beckwith answered.

  “Good. Stay there.”

  “Copy that. I’m assuming ammonia,” she said.

  Lagrange, she suddenly remembered. He was something-or-other Lagrange.

  “EECOM thinks it’s ammonia, yeah,” Lagrange answered.

  “No false alarm this time?”

  “Doesn’t look like that. Still checking.”

  At that moment, the EECOM cut back into the Mission Control communications loop, which the controllers could hear but Beckwith couldn’t. He had been consulting with his technical team and had nothing good to share.

  “Flight, EECOM,” he said.

  “Go, EECOM,” Hampton answered.

  “Confirming breach in pump on P6, inside the IFHX. Consistent with ammonia. This one’s no false alarm.”