Holdout

by Jeffrey Kluger

  She reached the Destiny, pulled open a cabinet, grabbed a mask, put it on, and cinched its straps, then moved on through to the far end of the American segment and began sealing off its modules one by one. When she was done, she shot back through the Destiny lab, then stopped herself short, turned back, grabbed the mouse cage that held Bolt, and turned to go. Then she stopped yet again, silently cursed her own cold-bloodedness, grabbed the other four cages that held the mice she had not bothered to name, then flew back to the Russian segment, herding the floating mouse cages in front of her. When she reached the Zarya, she slammed the hatch behind her. The mouse cages dispersed around her, bumping up against a bulkhead and bouncing back off of it. She ripped off her gas mask, drew some clear, gasping breaths, and hailed the ground.

  “Station is secure,” she reported.

  “Confirm,” was all Houston said.

  “That was foolish,” Zhirov snapped. “Tupoy.” Dumb.

  Bazanov grabbed Zhirov’s headset.

  “Lieutenant Commander, you disobeyed an order from Colonel Zhirov, who remains in charge of this mission,” he said.

  Beckwith didn’t have to be told who was speaking. Astronauts and cosmonauts recognized Bazanov’s voice.

  “Yes, sir,” she said. “I did. I felt it was necessary.”

  “We do not run our missions based on cosmonauts’ feelings,” he barked and threw the headset back on the console.

  As he did that, the Klaxon, which had been sounding throughout the station and streaming through the communication loops in two control rooms in two cities more than 5,900 miles apart, suddenly stopped. The silence was a sweet relief. A voice from Houston then broke the brief peace.

  “Atmosphere is stable,” the voice said. “EECOM officer confirms acceptable environment and life support.”

  Beckwith dropped her head into her hands. “What was the anomaly, Houston?” she asked.

  “Uncertain at this time. Either a false alarm or a small, transient leak which has sealed itself. Recommend monitoring, as we will do here. But return to nominal status.”

  Nominal status, Beckwith repeated in her head. As you were. Had she not known better, she’d have sworn that someone on the ground had dreamed up a fake emergency just to scare her off the station. But she did know better. The ammonia system and its various sensors were notoriously glitchy, and the false alarm could just as easily have been a real one. She laughed softly—entirely at herself. She was engaged in an act of madness—madness and arrogance; she’d accepted that from the beginning. But now she had to accept that it might be an act of suicide too.

  On the ground Zhirov sat back in his chair, looked up at the ceiling, and closed his eyes. He was jolted back by a hard grip on his wrist. He sat up and turned. It was, of course, Bazanov.

  “Solve this problem,” he commanded. “Bring that woman home.”

  He turned and stalked back out of Mission Control. In the front of the room, on the left side of the viewing screen, Walli Beckwith, many times larger than life, smiled winningly.

  CHAPTER TEN

  The United States was never going to go to war at the insistence of an inactive lieutenant commander who, alone among the 7.6 billion people of Earth, was not even on the Earth. That was more or less the opening line of a blistering Wall Street Journal article, the overall sense of which was quickly picked up by most of the members of the president’s party. The intent, of course, was to diminish Beckwith, to make her seem an inconsequential, even comical figure, and after she read the Journal story and the commentary it sparked, she had more than a little doubt herself.

  “Who the hell does she think she is?” sneered one cable news commentator, with so perfect a blend of amusement and dismissal that, unbidden, the question Who the hell do I think I am? flitted through Beckwith’s head.

  There was no question that her following was growing. The September 18 Coalition was now being led by a third-year law student at the University of Oklahoma named Laurel Cady, who was already working as an intern in the Oklahoma branch of the American Civil Liberties Union. She had long been working toward a clerkship in the federal court system and had set herself a goal of at least being short-listed for the Supreme Court by the time she was thirty-eight, figuring that any younger would be unseemly and any older would be a waste of the fifty-some remaining years she fully intended to spend on the bench.

  “The law moves slowly,” she’d say by way of explanation. “I’ll need the time.”

  Since her undergraduate years, Cady had been fascinated by the history of organized protest in America, most instructively the Boston Tea Party, the Montgomery bus boycott, the March on Washington, the first Earth Day, and, by way of calamitous negative example, the 1968 antiwar march on the Democratic National Convention in Chicago, which turned into a riot. She took a near-technological approach to all of them, reverse engineering them from the moment the last placard was put down—or, in the case of Chicago, the last brick was thrown—to the first moment someone said, “You know what? I’ve had enough.”

  Everything, she had come to conclude, was dependent on laying down sprawling public roots—with activists practically everywhere, enraged, engaged, appearing ungovernable, but governed all the same by a twig, branch, and trunk system of local groups answerable to state groups and finally to one national group with one leader at the top of it. And Cady would be that leader. She had already been organizing local protests against the Consolidation throughout Oklahoma City, and the moment Beckwith began a similar protest from the somewhat more rarefied venue of space, she expanded her efforts nationwide.

  Working with the most skilled and committed group of students she could assemble on the fly in the university’s computer engineering school—plus a handful of employees she cadged from the school’s IT department—she oversaw the construction of a website that the engineers promised her was “unhackable, unbreakable, and absolutely bulletproof.” She loved that, hugged three of them in turn, and dubbed them her “Kevlar boys.” One of them promptly went out and got a tattoo reading just that, only with “boys” rendered as “boyz.” By the end of the week, all three had them.

  The coalition website was now coordinating the work of ninety-one groups in twenty-one countries and all fifty states. The organizations had raised a collective $9.3 million in small donations, and more was streaming in steadily. By now 1.5 million people had signed up to march in Washington on September 18, with an average of a hundred thousand new volunteers joining every thirty-six hours. In less-organized signs of Beckwith’s growing popularity, nine websites were circulating petitions for her to run for president in three years; student activists at Guangzhou University opened an account on Weibo, China’s Twitter, in support of Beckwith, using her English name as well as a Mandarin nickname with characters that translated loosely as “Moon Woman Revolutionary,” which delighted her enormously; and in most of the West “I would prefer not to” continued to be a lead search term across the Web.

  “You’re a meme, Mama,” Sonia emailed her.

  That, actually, was what Beckwith feared. A meme was, by definition, a fleeting thing. She was undeniably having some effect on a handful of representatives and senators from a few moderate districts and states, who were feeling the heat of the protests to come, but it was uncertain how much of a difference that could make. The best Washington handicappers put the current vote in the House of Representatives at 195 opposed to intervention and 170 in favor, with 70 undecided. In the Senate it was a somewhat closer 48 against and 40 in favor, with 12 undecided. Even if the undecideds broke heavily for military action, giving the intervention side the necessary majorities of 218 votes in the House and 51 in the Senate—and even if the Senate ran that total up to the 60 votes necessary to overcome a filibuster by the losing side—the president would just veto the bill. It would then require a two-thirds vote in both chambers to override the veto—a vastly longer long s
hot.

  In the unlikely event an override somehow improbably succeeded, the whole bubbling mess could be thrown straight into the lap of the courts. Article I of the Constitution gave Congress broad war-making powers, but Article II gave the president the absolute authority over all branches of the military, leaving it entirely unclear which branch had the final call. That constitutional booby trap was built into the nation’s founding document by its Founding Fathers, who either hadn’t thought things through entirely or did think them through and took a secret delight at the idea of punking their posterity. For pro-intervention forces, the only answer then would be a veto-proof, two-thirds victory in both the House and Senate in favor of intervention, plus a groundswell of popular American sentiment so great that the president would feel compelled to act lest the nation’s business cease to be done.

  Creating that groundswell was the job Beckwith had presumptuously assigned herself, and at the moment her tools were more limited than she’d have liked. Her official agency website was a slow and rickety thing, dependent on a series of patches that NASA had applied to internet software it first began using in the late 1990s. The site crashed when its traffic reached one million, which it often did. NASA for now had decided not to take the provocative step of shutting Beckwith’s site down entirely lest it inflame her supporters, and instead simply rooted for it to collapse on its own, and quietly rejoiced whenever that happened.

  Sonia was aware of the problem, and she suspected she might have a solution in the form of Raymond. He had studied programming before going to medical school, and while he fully intended to practice medicine when he completed his residency, he just as fully intended to get gloriously rich later on, designing uniform systems for electronic medical records, remote prescribing, and data sharing among research institutes. Sonia showed him Beckwith’s website, and he looked at it with the piteous gaze of someone regarding a wounded animal. His fingers almost seemed to twitch to get at it.

  Sonia straightaway emailed Beckwith and asked her to call at 6:30 that night, once the children in the pediatric ward at the Mercado camp were quieting down for the evening. The space station phone system worked in only one direction—the station could call Earth; Earth could not call the station. Beckwith agreed, and at 6:20 Sonia hurried over to the infirmary, where she knew Raymond would be working. She got no more than a few steps when she heard a voice behind her.

  “So-nee-ya!” it called. It was, of course, Oli hurrying after her. “Where are you going?”

  Sonia turned and crouched, he ran into her arms, and she picked him up. “I have a phone call, and you should be getting ready for bed.”

  “Who? Who are you calling?”

  “Well . . . I’m not making the call actually; someone’s calling me.”

  “Your . . . tía-mama?” he asked.

  Sonia nodded. “Do you want to talk to her?”

  His wide eyes and broad smile answered her question.

  The two of them hurried to the first aid tent, and Sonia spotted Raymond entering patient data into a laptop.

  “You need to come with me,” she said.

  “I do?” he asked, looking up and standing hurriedly, almost knocking over his chair—which was precisely the effect Sonia always seemed to have on him.

  “Yes, and bring your computer. She may have some questions for you.”

  “Who?” he asked, then realized what Sonia had to mean. “She . . . the . . . ?” he managed, glancing upward.

  “Astronaut,” Sonia said for him. “Yes. Try not to sound overawed when you talk to her.”

  She took his wrist, and the three of them ran about twenty yards away to a small pine storage building. It was usually private, save for the odd person coming in to collect supplies from the shelves, and it was close by the satellite trucks, which meant a strong cell signal—probably the strongest anywhere in the Mercado camp.

  The moment they slipped inside and closed the door, Sonia’s phone rang. She tapped it open and turned on the speaker function. Sonia said hello, and the hiss from space filled the little shed. Finally a voice cut through the noise.

  “Hello, hello,” Beckwith said. “You can hear me?”

  “Yes,” Sonia said. She glanced at Oli, whose eyes had widened again and whose mouth was slightly open. She smiled. She glanced at Raymond—who was mirroring the boy’s expression.

  “I’m here with a doctor friend, Raymond . . .” She briefly tripped over the blank spot where a last name should be. Raymond did not seem to notice.

  “Hello, ma’am!” he shouted toward the phone. “I am a doctor, like Sonia said, and I am here to help.” There was a brief pause and Raymond looked uneasy. He raced to fill the gap: “Over,” he said. Sonia rolled her eyes.

  “Hello, Raymond,” Beckwith said.

  “Oli is here with us too,” Sonia said.

  “Hello, Oli,” Beckwith responded. “I’ve heard about you. Are you being good?”

  The boy’s face flushed and he stammered a few words, and Sonia bent down and put the phone close to him. He seemed to have no idea what to say, and then he did.

  “Can you see me when I’m outside?” he asked.

  The hiss came through the phone, followed by a laugh. “Not so far,” Beckwith said. “Would you like me to look next time?”

  “Yes!” Oli said and bolted immediately for the door.

  Sonia caught him by the arm. “It’s almost dark now,” she whispered. “We’ll try in the day.”

  Oli nodded, and Sonia turned back to the phone. “Raymond says he can get you sorted out online,” she said. “I’m going to let him explain things to you.” She inclined the phone to Raymond, who by now seemed to have gotten himself collected.

  “I can fix your website, ma’am,” he said. “I’ll clean it up and speed it up and weave in a little code to keep it from crashing.”

  “You can do that?”

  “Within limits. The NASA site is a jalopy, but I’ll make it go.”

  Beckwith laughed an admiring laugh and Raymond looked set to swoon, but he held himself together. “You also need a social media presence,” he said. “You have no Twitter, no Facebook, no Snapchat, no Instagram.”

  “I don’t like those,” Beckwith said.

  Sonia cut in, with an all-business voice Raymond sometimes heard her use in the clinic. “You’re going to have to learn to like them, Tía.” He looked at her shocked, but Beckwith sounded unconcerned.

  “Copy that,” she responded.

  “Ma’am,” Raymond said, “I can set up an account for you on Twitter right now if you like.”

  “Will anyone follow it?” Beckwith asked.

  Raymond laughed. “You’ve heard of Beanfinger, ma’am?”

  “No, I haven’t.”

  “No reason you should have. They’re a San Francisco band with exactly eight songs—all of them terrible. Do you know how many followers they have?” Sonia had seen where he was going and was already consulting Raymond’s computer.

  “Just over three million,” she whispered, showing him the screen.

  “Just over three million,” Raymond repeated into the phone. “Yes, ma’am. I think people would follow you.”

  Beckwith sighed a resigned sigh that was audible all the way from 250 miles above the Earth to a pine shed in the Mercado camp in the Bolivian jungle.

  “OK, Raymond,” she said, “set it up.”

  “Thank you, ma’am!”

  Raymond began tapping at his laptop, which he had taken from Sonia and set on a stack of crates, and then frowned. Beckwith had become so popular that all manner of people had snatched up all variations on her name for themselves. Belka Beckwith and Walli Beckwith and Walli Belka Beckwith and Belka Walli Beckwith and all of the possible combinations with initials had been taken. Finally Raymond added the abbreviation for her naval designation—“Lt. Cdr.”�
�and it took.

  “OK, ma’am,” he said with a note of triumph in his voice, “You’re now ‘at Lt Cdr Walli Beckwith.’ Please remember to put the ‘at’ sign first, run all of the letters together, and capitalize the L, C, W, and B so it won’t look like gibberish. Would you like to try logging in? Your password is . . .” He hesitated slightly. “It’s ‘Sonia.’”

  Sonia looked at him and shook her head in affected exasperation—but she smiled too.

  The two of them watched Raymond’s screen, and a few minutes later the first tweet from @LtCdrWalliBeckwith appeared. It read: “This is Walli Beckwith in space. I have Twitter now.”

  Raymond sighed. “We’re going to have to work on these, ma’am,” he said.

  “Yes, Raymond,” she answered.

  Within forty-eight hours, Walli Beckwith from space would have 3.5 million followers—or half a million more than Beanfinger from San Francisco.

  * * *

  • • •

  In the first few minutes after signing off with Sonia and Raymond, Beckwith felt optimistic, excited, and almost drunkenly powerful. It was a heady feeling—one she recognized and that she, Jasper, and a few other pilots she knew called conqueror’s syndrome. She snuffed it fast. If you were a flier in command of a fifteen-ton machine that was bristling with weaponry and capable of moving at Mach speeds, all that power could make you reckless, stupid, even murderous. Beckwith was in command of a far bigger machine, moving at a far greater speed, and even if it wasn’t carrying so much as a single target pistol, it conferred on her a power that was already allowing her to move millions.

  She felt the need to use that power now—thoughtfully, soberly—and she knew how she could. In twenty minutes, the station would pass over South America; the angle would be oblique, not an ideal one for viewing, but it might still serve her purposes. She pushed off for the Russian segment.

  The United States, Russia, and all of the other station partners had always promised that not a cubic foot of any one of the orbiting facility’s fifteen modules would ever be devoted to military or surveillance work, but nobody expected that pledge to last forever. It did manage to stick, for a while, but then four years ago a Canadian company working with the cooperation of the Russians, and the winking connivance of the Americans, had launched an Earth-observation system to the station aboard a cargo vessel. It was ostensibly to be used only for environmental and agricultural monitoring and for that reason the ground had no control over it, lest one or another government try to use it for aerial spying. Of course nothing could prevent Mission Control in Moscow or Houston from colluding with a cosmonaut or astronaut to do a little snooping. Still, as long as everyone had equal access to the new capability—and an equal opportunity to sneak a forbidden peek at everyone else—no one would have an advantage.