Holdout: A Novel

by Jeffrey Kluger

  Within minutes, the headline “BECKWITH SAVES STATION” or some variation of it had flashed on televisions and websites around the world. The president saw it, the attorney general saw it, the people in the Mercado hospital in Bolivia saw it. Sonia, who dropped into a chair surrounded by hospital workers and cried with relief, saw it. Beckwith, however, saw none of it. She stripped off her sodden union suit, washed up as best she could, pulled her dry work clothes back on, and slid into a sleep pod in the Zarya module. She did not move for the next nine hours.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  September 15

  If Sonia was going to make it to Oli, she’d have to rely on the pilot with the missing ear. She had met him shortly after she arrived at the Mercado hospital and respected him straightaway. His name was Jo—without the e, as she could see on the name tag on his jacket. It took a while before Sonia got a look at Jo full-on and learned his economically spelled name. He was the pilot of the helicopter that had evacuated her from the burning Guarani camp, and for most of the flight to the Mercado hospital, she’d seen only the back of his head. On the right side, a patch of hair was missing—perhaps four inches across—as was the bottom half of the adjacent ear. The scar that remained, especially on the scalp, had the shiny, waxy look of a burn.

  Sonia never got a chance to talk to him when she tumbled out of the helicopter at the end of the flight, so early on her second day in the camp, she’d gone looking for him, wandering out to the area beyond the wall where the helicopters were parked and the pilots idled between missions. She came up behind them as casually as she could, looking for the man with the telltale scarring. When she found him, smoking a cigarette near his helicopter, she circled around to the front of him, noticing as she did that he had a patch on the shoulder of his jacket that read “Operation Enduring Freedom.” It was the official name—the marketing name—of the American war in Afghanistan, the same one in which her tía-mama had flown.

  “I wanted to thank you,” she said.

  He exhaled a long stream of smoke, but turned his head far to the right to spare her the cloud, which Sonia took as a sign of good manners.

  “For what?” he asked.

  “For getting us out of the fire.”

  “Just my job, sugar,” he said. “Fly the machine and land it safe.” Sonia smiled—and took no offense at the “sugar.” It seemed in keeping with the cigarette. And with the scar.

  “You’re Navy, right?” Sonia asked. “Not Air Force?”

  She had flown with Beckwith on numerous occasions—often in sports planes and twice in helicopters—and always noticed an almost mechanical crispness in the way she worked the stick. If Sonia stared at it too long, the hand looked unsettlingly robotic, like it didn’t belong to a human at all. She asked about it once and Beckwith simply explained that it was “the Navy way—no wasted movement.” Sonia saw the same mechanical crispness in Jo’s wrist too.

  “Yes, ma’am,” he said. “Two tours in Afghanistan. It got me this, since I noticed you looking,” he added, gesturing to his injury. “Antiaircraft. Bailed out but left a piece of me behind.”

  “I’m sorry,” Sonia said—about both the injury and the unseemliness of having stared at it so obviously.

  “Others got it worse.”

  Sonia nodded with sympathy. “My mama flew in that war,” she said.

  “I thought she was your aunt.”

  “She is, but sort of my mama too,” Sonia answered before realizing that she had never identified herself to the man. “How did you know who I am?”

  “People talk,” he answered. “You’re famous here.”

  “It’s my mama who’s famous.”

  “Close enough for you to catch a piece of it,” he said. “She’s making a lot of noise up there.”

  “I think that’s the idea,” Sonia said.

  “If I were her commander, I’d have her in irons,” Jo said; Sonia frowned. “But if she were my commander, I’d follow her into hell.”

  Now Sonia smiled. “I suspect she’d agree with both sides of that,” she said.

  After that initial conversation, Sonia would make it a point to visit Jo at least once a day, sometimes just to talk, sometimes to fetch him a plate of hot food from the kitchen instead of the cold sandwiches and shrink-wrapped field rations that the pilots ate when they were on duty and awaiting orders to fly. Those flights came a lot in the days following the attack on the Mercado hospital. It was impossible to predict exactly when the helicopters would be dispatched, but there seemed to be a certain metabolic rhythm to it. The jungle would spike a fever as an attack was launched, a fire was lit, and a tribal group was driven off.

  It typically took a few hours after that for the surviving tribespeople to be chased toward the four resettlement camps, often with other helicopters—the kind that were painted black with the meaningless flag and the wasplike buzz—flying low over them, herding them toward choke point roads cut in the jungle that would further lead them toward whichever camp was closest to the fire. It was only then that word would go out to the Mercado hospital and the other SSA field units that sick or burned or otherwise injured people had arrived at one of the camps and that medical aid was needed as quickly as it could be dispatched.

  Both Sonia and Raymond volunteered repeatedly to ride along on the flights, but they were turned down summarily. There was only so much room aboard the helicopters, and there were too many fully certified field doctors available to justify wasting a spot on anyone with just four years of medical school. On one occasion Sonia appealed to Jo directly, asking him to let her hop aboard at least when he flew to the western camp, adding that she was looking for the small boy who had been with her when she arrived.

  “Can’t do it,” Jo answered. “I’m sorry about the boy, but I can’t take any four-year plebes, and especially not you.”

  “Why not me?”

  “You’re strictly no-fly, sugar—on a list all your own.”

  “What?” Sonia snapped.

  “Orders from SSA brass,” he said. “You’re an international incident just waiting to happen. Your auntie’s making trouble in space, Washington’s pissed off at her, Russia’s pissed off at Washington for flying her in the first place, France is pissed off at everyone, and you’re a part of it, like it or not. Even El Bobo’s afraid of something happening to you. Nobody wants any part of that hair ball.”

  Jo shrugged a helpless shrug and Sonia spun and stormed back to the hospital, but she kept a close watch on the camp communications system all the same. Every time an attack happened, it would be through that network that word would first come that doctors were needed stat. For days after Jo’s refusal to let Sonia fly, the calls had always come from the northern, southern, or eastern camps. Then, finally, late in the afternoon on September 15, an attack hit again, and this time the communications system flashed with the word that the call was to the west. Sonia sprinted out from the communications building, and Raymond, understanding exactly what she was up to, took off after her. They passed through the opening in the wall, into the noisy whirlwind of the helicopters spinning to life, and made straight for Jo.

  “Take me!” Sonia demanded.

  “No!” he shouted over the motor roar. He looked at Raymond. “Take her back!” he ordered.

  “It’s not up to me,” Raymond said.

  “It’s not up to him!” Sonia echoed.

  “Girl . . .” Jo began to say, when all at once there was a crash to his right as a dolly that was loading medicine and equipment onto the helicopter tipped and spilled its contents. Jo turned toward the sound, and Sonia took advantage of the moment, vaulting catlike from the ground into the crew portion of the helicopter, joining the three doctors and the copilot who were already there. Raymond followed her. Jo spun back, fixed them with a glare, and thumbed them both out. Sonia stood, arms folded, and shook her head no. Raymond mirrored h
er. At that point, the helipad commander on the ground waved his right arm in a circling motion over his head and shouted out to all five helicopters, “Go, go, go!”

  Jo looked at him, then flashed his glance back to Sonia and Raymond.

  “Out! Now!” he ordered them. They did not budge.

  “Go! Now!” the commander shouted at Jo, who hesitated. “I said now!” the commander repeated.

  Jo spat at the ground, jumped aboard the helicopter, and pointed a finger at Sonia. “We’re gonna talk, girl!” he said, then turned to Raymond. “You too, son!”

  Then he climbed into his seat and gunned the engine, and the helicopter hoisted its bulk off the ground and wheeled toward the distant western camp.

  * * *

  • • •

  Even four days after Walli Beckwith risked her life to save the world’s only space station, that world could not quit talking about her. No one had an accurate count just yet of the exact number of people who had watched the spacewalk, but the networks were boasting that they put up something in the vicinity of Super Bowl numbers—and that didn’t include the tens of millions who watched online.

  The nation’s newspapers uniformly hailed Beckwith a hero; almost uniformly their editorial pages also argued that while she had clearly done wrong in remaining in space when ordered to come home, all—or at least some—of that should be forgiven now. The Daily News actually went with that headline: “ALL IS FORGIVEN,” once again in two-hundred-point type. The New York Times made the same point, more clinically, in the analysis it ran with its lead piece: “Legal Authorities Discuss Amnesty for Astronaut.”

  There was, too, the unfolding news about the masses converging on Washington—with the anticipated crowd now exceeding 2.7 million for the September 18 vote. More quietly, there were the reports leaking out of Washington that the Department of Defense now sensed the ground shifting sufficiently on Capitol Hill—especially after Beckwith’s heroic spacewalk—that the president might actually lose the congressional vote by a veto-proof margin. Even members of the president’s own party were beginning to fear that the public would not stand for a protracted, yearlong battle through the federal court system if the White House sought to pursue one—so if Congress demanded intervention, the military would have to be ready to mobilize immediately.

  Already the Pentagon was reviewing plans for the kind of action that would be required in a jungle conflict in which hostiles and innocents would be hopelessly commingled. A mosh pit like that would require both air power to cut off roads and destroy weapons and equipment depots, and boots on the ground to separate soldiers from tribespeople. Word had gotten out that Army paratroopers from the 82nd Airborne Division at Fort Bragg, in North Carolina, and the Screaming Eagles at Fort Campbell, in Kentucky, were mobilizing to provide that ground presence.

  Airborne surveillance sorties and tactical strikes when troop movements were spotted would be needed too, which would require an aircraft carrier to be in position. The USS Eisenhower—Beckwith’s old ship—had been in port for retrofitting at the Naval Air Station in Pensacola, Florida, and had been scheduled to redeploy to the Indian Ocean on September 10, but was instead still at anchor, due to “ongoing maintenance issues,” according to a Department of Defense release. It was just the kind of vague explanation that no one in Washington was likely to believe. Florida was a handy place to store a carrier that might suddenly need to shift to the waters off the coast of Brazil.

  Beckwith was reading all of this news on multiple sites this morning, but it took her a long time to get through any of the stories. The blue-white light of the tablet all at once seemed to fatigue her vision, and, more troubling, she was suffering from a persistent headache that had begun more than twelve hours ago. It had grown from a low and stubborn pulse last night to something sharper and more insistent this morning.

  For the first time since she’d been aboard the space station, she had to admit she’d begun to feel claustrophobic. The IFHX had been repaired, and she had stopped the ammonia leak before complete saturation of the American segment would have made it permanently uninhabitable. But that half of the station was still contaminated and would remain off-limits until the air in the modules could be put through the flushing and repressurizing cycle at least two or three times, a procedure that could be conducted only when no one was aboard. Beckwith was thus still restricted to the Russian modules, where she had remained in lockdown for the four days since her spacewalk, a confinement that was beginning to wear on her.

  In Mission Control, Charlene Boysen, the flight surgeon, noticed the change in Beckwith’s mood and worried that stray ammonia might somehow have fouled the circulation system on the Russian side as well and was starting to have its poisonous way with her.

  “How’s your breathing, Walli?” she asked when she radioed up for one of her twice-daily medical checks. Since the ammonia leak, the flight director had permitted an exception to the rule that all communications go through the Capcom. This was a doctor-patient exchange and he would allow it.

  “Fine,” Beckwith answered. “Clear; no shortness.”

  “Any forgetfulness?”

  “No.”

  “Nausea?”

  “No.”

  “Headaches?”

  “Negative. Again,” Beckwith answered.

  But that last, of course, was a lie. She knew she should mention the headache to Boysen and she almost did, but she decided against it. She wasn’t coming home until after the march in Washington and the congressional vote on the intervention no matter what. All she would do by bringing a medical problem up now would be to invite a lot of questions. Besides, she figured, it would be the rare person who could go through what she’d gone through over the past few weeks and not come away with at least some symptoms of stress.

  But it was getting harder for Beckwith to tell herself that stress could cause a headache like this—and reading only made the pain worse, especially reading on an illuminated computer screen. Even with the brightness of the screen dimmed, Beckwith still found she had to stop reading and close her eyes every few minutes, lest her head begin to throb and her vision begin to double slightly.

  She decided to busy herself another way. The stories she had read in The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal and on the major cable sites had reported on regular surveys of lawmakers on Capitol Hill and had identified thirteen representatives and eight senators from moderate states or districts who were openly opposed to intervention but were feeling the heat in town halls and constituent calls to change their minds. Beckwith could make things hotter for them still. Shaking off her pain as best she could, she logged onto the House and Senate websites, where contact information for all of the Capitol Hill offices was listed. An email from space could easily go overlooked in a lawmaker’s overloaded inbox. A phone call, with the signature hiss and delay of a transmission from space, and Beckwith’s voice—which was by now familiar to anyone who had watched her initial broadcast to Earth or was following the air-to-ground feed on the NASA site and the cable channels—would get some attention. So Beckwith began calling, starting with the eight senators who had been mentioned in the Times and elsewhere.

  All of the conversations went more or less the same way. Beckwith would identify herself when the phone was answered and the receptionist would ask, “You’re the astronaut?”

  “I am,” Beckwith would reply.

  “You’re in space now?”

  “I am. So might the senator be available?”

  “I’m sorry, ma’am,” the receptionist would say. “He isn’t. I can tell him you called. Can he, um, call you back?”

  “No, that’s not possible,” Beckwith would say. “But tell him I’ll call again.”

  “Can you just . . . do that?”

  “Absolutely,” Beckwith would answer. “Government’s dime.”

  Beckwith made good on t
hat promise. It took her little more than an hour to phone all eight senators’ offices—and get nowhere at all with any of them. She called them all back in the next hour, with no greater luck, and then a third time in the third hour. She posted updates of her telephone campaign on her website and Twitter feed, naming all of the senators, listing their phone numbers and email addresses, and ending all of the posts with the hashtag #TakeMyCall. Each of her tweets was retweeted hundreds of thousands of times, always with a second hashtag: #TakeWalli’sCall.

  Finally Garry Oro, the senior senator from Arizona, did take the call. He was a loyal member of the president’s party and had already declared himself immovably opposed to intervening in the Amazon. But he had also broken with his party on occasion in the past and rather liked his maverick rep. The cable news channels had been staked out in the hallway outside his Washington office since early morning. Answering the phone the next time Beckwith called—and releasing a press statement announcing that he had done so—might help take the media pot off the boil.

  “You’re making my life miserable, you know,” he said to Beckwith after he at last allowed her call to be patched through to him and they had exchanged hellos.

  “I’m trying to do just that,” she said. “But I’ll stop if you’ll change your vote and persuade some of your friends to do the same.”

  Oro laughed. “I can’t do that, but I admire your persistence.”

  “Thank you.”

  “You’re Navy, of course.”

  “Yes, sir, I am,” Beckwith said.

  “So am I,” Oro answered. “Officer, but not Annapolis like you. ROTC.”

  “A commission is a commission, sir.”

  “That’s kind of you to say.”

  “Senator Oro,” Beckwith said, “you know this Consolidation business is wrong.”