Holdout: A Novel

by Jeffrey Kluger

  All that was left after that were the Japanese—who were still stewing over their Kibo, which to their way of thinking had been sullied by the mere presence of a person committing a criminal act on what amounted to Japanese soil. But the Japanese, like the rest of the space station partners, also recognized Beckwith’s global following. In the end, Tokyo back-channeled a message through NASA and Jerry Ullage that Beckwith should consider herself unwelcome in Japan for the next five years, and if she ever did show up after that should behave like any other anonymous tourist. If she accepted that, they’d let the matter drop. It was a deal she snapped up readily.

  So it was that after three weeks, when she had largely recovered from the infection that nearly killed her, Lieutenant Commander Walli Beckwith returned to the United States to face justice in the only country in the world that still had a legal beef with her. She left Russia with nothing more than a clean Roscosmos jumpsuit, a few toiletries, and the four surviving mice—which had come from the United States like her and, as far as the Russians were concerned, should return with her.

  As Connie Polk had told the president, Beckwith would face military, not civilian justice, and it would be up to the Navy to determine the charges. She faced a general court-martial—the most severe form of court-martial—and the charges were two: failure to obey a command and general misconduct. Both were deadly serious.

  Beckwith’s trial was brief—which was all it could be. She was candid about what she’d done, and almost every moment of the crimes she committed had played out publicly, across all forms of media, so her intent to disobey an order could not be denied. The prosecutor presented the Navy’s case briskly, and with Beckwith effectively conceding the arguments and the evidence, her court-appointed attorney had little to do but plead for a lenient sentence.

  The court granted it. She was sentenced to six months of confinement at the San Diego Naval Base, where she would be restricted to quarters after dark but would otherwise have the freedom to wander about the grounds. She would be discharged from the Navy, which, as the court knew, was a form of capital punishment for any Annapolis graduate and would wound her deeply. But the discharge would be honorable, meaning she could keep her rank, benefits, pension, and pride. The terms of her confinement also allowed her to receive visitors.

  Jasper was in training for a mission and could manage to fly out to San Diego only once a month, but he kept that schedule faithfully. On the third of those visits he admitted—in his fine, honest, Southern-honey way—that if it had been up to him, he’d have been there every day. Beckwith knew that before he said it—and welcomed it. Her career in government service was now surely over, and with that came a whole new kind of liberating weightlessness.

  “Jasper,” she said on the last of his visits. “How about I take you to an Astros game when we both get back to Houston?”

  “Walli Bee,” he answered. “I’d like that just fine.”

  Sonia visited as often as she could—but it was less often than she’d have liked. She was airlifted straight from the Mercado camp back to the Baylor University Medical Center, where she underwent three more operations on her shattered arm. The small Guarani boy who had left South America with her—a child listed formally on documents under the name Kauan but addressed informally by everyone but immigration clerks as Oli—was another matter entirely.

  The boy had to thread an exceedingly narrow immigration needle to be allowed on US soil, but the SSA had made itself adept at doing that threading, having long since learned the medical exemptions and exceptions of dozens of countries that could help get nonnationals across international borders. Oli easily hit a happy trifecta—minor child, refugee of violence, and suffering from an illness that could be treated only in the nation in which sanctuary was being sought. In his case, the illness was trauma and the prescribed treatment was the care of a child psychologist and the reliable presence of his only human object of safety and attachment—Dr. Sonia Bravo-Beckwith. The immigration court granted temporary residency in the pediatric wing of the Baylor hospital, with regular classwork and exercises in peer-group play and socialization.

  The American press took a consuming interest in the boy’s ultimate dispensation. There was opposition to his remaining in the United States, divided equally among nationalist groups resistant to immigration in nearly all its forms, and indigenous peoples activist groups, who condemned the “cultural elitism” that would allow a child who had been born in the jungle and rightly belonged in the jungle to be claimed instead as an exotic bauble in the custody of an American medical institution instead of a family of origin. That, of course, overlooked the unhandy facts that the boy’s family of origin was dead and the jungle idyll in which he had been raised had been reduced to dead char—and that he seemed to be thriving in the care of the hospital.

  What’s more, Dr. Bravo-Beckwith had already made clear her plans to file for formal adoption, and her tía-mama, who, yes, was a criminal serving time in military confinement, but was also an international hero, announced her own plans to sell her home in Houston and move even closer to Sonia’s so that she could help raise the boy. During school vacations, they also hoped to take him to a little community in Mesa, Arizona, to visit a pair of old engineers who, after a fashion, could be the boy’s great-grandparents and could teach him how to build model spacecraft and tell him about the real ones they had designed that even now were still speeding out across the solar system.

  Since American courts decide most custody cases on the basis of what is in the best interests of the child and this particular child seemed quite pleased about all of these plans, there seemed little question about how the matter would be decided, and formal adoption was granted. The government case-workers did insist on monthly visits for at least the first year to ensure the boy was thriving and did ask his adoptive family if they couldn’t do something about all of the scratches the poor child always seemed to have.

  Sonia received her share of visitors beyond just Oli when she was recovering. Jo came to call once when he was back in the United States, hugging her with relief and worry when he saw the full scope of her injuries, then scolding her angrily for having put herself in such peril in the first place, then hugging her again.

  Raymond too visited‚ very often in fact, and always made a point to visit Oli as well, to the boy’s delight. But he preferred his time alone with Sonia and would often smuggle in some cold beers for their visit, which was strictly forbidden by hospital rules and which Sonia considered very brave—grading on the generous curve of Raymond’s modest courage. But she came too to appreciate the true courage he had shown in the blazing jungle, underneath the whipping blades of a helicopter, ensuring both her safety and Oli’s when they needed him.

  “I heard you carried me to and from the main camp after I was hurt,” she said one evening during one of his visits when they were alone in the hospital dayroom.

  “No other way to get you back and forth,” he said. “Besides,” he added, affecting a perfectly terrible Southern accent, “you don’t weigh nothin’.”

  Sonia laughed accommodatingly. “Thank you all the same,” she said.

  They fell into silence, and in that moment of awkwardness, Sonia took a swallow of her beer to boost her own courage.

  “Raymond,” she said, “I have something to ask you.”

  “What?” he responded.

  “Promise you won’t be insulted.”

  “It’s Raymond,” he said.

  “What?”

  “My last name. You’ve never known my last name.”

  “That’s your first name,” she said.

  “That too.”

  “You’re . . . Raymond Raymond?” she asked incredulously.

  “I prefer Ray Raymond, but most folks say the full name.”

  “How in the world did you wind up like that?”

  He shrugged. “My parents liked �
��Raymond.’”

  Sonia laughed. “Well, Raymond Raymond, I am so happy I know you.”

  Raymond blushed a deep pink.

  Walli Beckwith left the US Naval Base in San Diego six months to the day after she arrived and had no clear sense of what to do with herself. Unlike Zhirov and Lebedev, who had a home at Roscosmos—even if Lebedev would forever be grounded—she was washed up at NASA. She fielded offers to teach engineering at Rice University, San Jacinto College, and the University of Houston. She received no fewer than eleven offers to write a book about her experiences, and most of the deals promised to make her very, very rich. So did multiple offers to join the public speaking circuit. She took the Rice position and accepted one of the less-lucrative book deals because she liked the editor, who saw a little bit more arrogance and a little less heroism than most people did in Beckwith’s actions, which suited her fine because she saw things exactly the same way. She quickly set to work in both her new jobs.

  And whenever Beckwith had a chance—which usually turned out to be once a year or so—she would visit the scarred but recovering parts of the Amazon basin that she had previously seen only from space. Sometimes she would travel with Sonia, who now and then brought Raymond. Sometimes she would travel with Jasper. Oli remained fascinated by his homeland and his tribe and busied himself learning their traditions and ways—but only from a distance. He always declined to travel to the jungle with Beckwith, until one day, when he was nearly eleven, his curiosity over the land that had birthed him overcame his terror of what had happened to him there and he asked to go.

  For that trip, only Sonia, Beckwith, and the boy went, and at his insistence, they visited the scrubby stretch that had been the tribal land where he had grown up. The three of them found their way to the clearing where Sonia used to light fires to signal her tía-mama flying overhead.

  They gathered some wood, and they set it with kindling and wadded newspaper, and they lit it as Sonia had long ago taught Oli. Then they sat quietly and watched the flames until Oli’s eyes widened and he seemed struck by something in the flickering light.

  “It’s purple,” he whispered wonderingly.

  “Violet,” Sonia corrected. “Keep watching before it slips away.”

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Holdout is, of course, a work of fiction, but it has its roots sunk deep in the real world. The Amazon rain forest really is vanishing and the indigenous tribes who call the jungle home really are displaced and in profound jeopardy. The government of Brazil, as of this writing, really does appear to be indifferent to—or even hostile toward—addressing these profound wrongs.

  The science and engineering in the story are, as well, faithful to the truth, and are a result of extensive research into the Russian and American space programs, and the structure and operation of the International Space Station. In my reporting work for Time magazine and my research for this book, I have visited many of the places in which the action unfolds: the NASA headquarters in Washington, DC; the twin Mission Control centers in both Houston and Moscow; the Gagarin Cosmonaut Training Center outside of Moscow; Zhezkazgan, Kazakhstan, and the little airport in which cosmonauts and astronauts are welcomed home; and the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Baikonur, Kazakhstan. Like Vasily Zhirov, I have been stuck on the wrong side of the tracks in the Kazakh cold after the dog has walked.

  Some of the emergencies in the book—a near-fatal Soyuz reentry with a service module still attached and an ammonia scare aboard the station—are based on real events. An out-of-control Progress spacecraft really has collided with a crewed space station, though it was Russia’s Mir station that sustained the hit—an accident I covered for Time magazine back in 1997.

  Walli Beckwith’s immovable declaration, “I would prefer not to,” is a nod to Herman Melville’s tragicomic short story “Bartleby the Scrivener,” about the legal clerk who will neither work when he is told, nor leave when he is fired, and answers all orders that he do one or the other with the same implacable words Beckwith uses.

  The character of Sergei Rozovsky, the leader of the Russian recovery team, is based on Sergei Malikhov, whom I met in Karaganda, Kazakhstan, during the filming of Time’s A Year in Space documentary. Malikhov, like Rozovsky, is legendary for his work recovering Soyuz crews and, like Rozovsky, explains his success with a dismissive, “We do the fucking job.”

  The character of Vasily Zhirov is based loosely on Russian cosmonaut Gennady Padalka, who never quite reached the Golden Thousand but has indeed boasted that he could fly a Soyuz spacecraft with two cabbages in the other seats.

  I owe a great many people a great deal of thanks for helping to make Holdout possible—not least of all the astronauts who were willing to take my calls, answer my questions, and share with me details of life aboard the station and in space in general. They are: Terry Virts, Nicole Passonno Stott, Scott Kelly, Mike Massimino, Ron Garan, Ken Bowersox, and my dear near-mishpocheh Marsha Ivins. I am smarter for the time I have spent with them all.

  My thanks as well go to the people who made it possible for me to visit so many of the exotic places in which I conducted my research, especially Time’s Emmy Award–winning video director Jonathan D. Woods, Roscosmos’s Dasha Scherbakova, and Sasha Gorokhova. It is Sasha’s winning smile and slip-the-traces laugh that inspired Walli’s own.

  Numerous people generously lent their time to reading and critiquing the manuscript as it was in various stages of completion. I owe special thanks to my brilliant Time colleague Haley Sweetland Edwards, one of the best reporters, editors, and friends a person could imagine; to Jill Santopolo, bestselling novelist and my editor at Philomel Books; and to the wonderful Sylvie Rabineau at William Morris Entertainment.

  Thanks as well go to Amelia Weiss, who copyedited the original version of the manuscript with a sharp and discerning eye, keeping my language clear and disciplined when it tried to slip its own traces, and to Alice Dalrymple and Mary Beth Constant at Dutton, who worked the same wonders with the finished manuscript. I am grateful as well to Ella Bouriak and to Robert Fradkin—retired professor of Russian, Hebrew, and Latin at the University of Maryland—for checking and correcting my Russian and ensuring that I was saying what I meant to say; to Marina Lau Peres, for doing the same with my Portuguese; and to Alejandra Kluger, for cleaning up my Spanish. Thanks, too, to my former Time colleagues Mark Thompson, for explaining to me how a military mobilization in the Amazon would play out; and Ryan Teague Beckwith, for allowing me to borrow his crisp and perfect surname for a character he’d never met. I hope I have done honor to the family crest.

  Most important, my deep gratitude goes to Stephen Morrow of Dutton, who saw the merit in Holdout and whose keen edits made it a far better book after it left his hands than it had been before. May we have more chances to do more work together in the future.

  As with every book I’ve ever written (and every book I ever hope to write), my thanks and love go to Joy Harris of the Joy Harris Literary Agency, for reading each version of the manuscript (and there were many), offering her tough-love guidance (of which there was much), and believing in the book through more than a few rough patches. Joy has long been—and will always be—deeply dear to me.

  Finally, my thanks and love to my daughters—all day, every day, forever and ever.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Jeffrey Kluger is an editor at large at Time, where he has written more than forty cover stories. He is the author or coauthor of twelve other books, including Apollo 13—which served as the basis of the 1995 movie—as well as two novels for young adults.

  What’s next on

  your reading list?

  Discover your next

  great read!

  Get personalized book picks and up-to-date news about this author.

  Sign up now.