Holdout: A Novel

by Jeffrey Kluger

  Then she told him in their shared tangle of tongues what had happened—that his father had died, that his grandmother had died, that his village was no more. He reacted mostly by not reacting at all. The child was spent, wrung out, already cried out. What’s more, the empty look on his face confirmed Sonia’s suspicion that he already had known everything she had just told him. Perhaps he had known from the moment the clinic caught fire, from the moment Annie, in her final act, had ordered them into the helicopter and then dove into the flames. Perhaps he had slept so long partly to avoid the dawn—a dawn in a world in which he was now parentless.

  Sonia had nothing to offer him. There was no changing the fact that he was an orphan; no changing the fact that the mortal arithmetic had found him again—that he was a child who had had one papa and now had no papa. She could not undo that equation for him. She could only hold him—and promise him she would not leave him for as long as he needed her. So she did promise him.

  And she promised herself something too: The night before, in her wall-kicking rage, she had spat the words “I’ll make them pay” in the direction of the people who had caused such devastation. Having said it, she decided, she would have to do it.

  * * *

  • • •

  Attorney General Constance T. Polk was nothing if not punctual, and at 2100 hours to the minute, station time, on the day after Walli Beckwith committed her cosmic crime, the call came in from Houston. This time the first voice Beckwith heard belonged to Lee Jasper.

  “Station, Houston,” he said.

  “Jasper, station,” she responded, tweaking him for his earlier frostiness. But he would not be tweaked.

  “Please stand by for the administrator,” he said.

  “Roger,” Beckwith answered, mildly relieved. She hadn’t known what to expect from the call, but Joe Star scared no one.

  “He will be joined by a NASA house counsel, who will be there for your assistance,” Jasper went on.

  “Roger,” Beckwith said, more interested.

  “And they will be joined by the attorney general of the United States.”

  That got Beckwith’s attention. She certainly knew of Polk and she respected Polk. As with most people, that also meant she was eminently capable of fearing Polk.

  “Understood, Houston,” she said, no longer especially interested in teasing the one person she’d speak with today who bore her only minimal ill will.

  “Patching you through to Washington now,” Jasper said. Then, despite himself, despite his pique, despite his desire, just this once, to hide his affable Southern honey, he just couldn’t. “Good luck, Walli Bee,” he said.

  She could have cried. “Thank you, Jasper,” was all she trusted herself to say.

  There was a full minute of air-to-ground hiss as the connection was made, and then the familiar voice of the NASA administrator came on the line.

  “Lieutenant Commander Beckwith?” he said.

  Star never called her that; he addressed all of his astronauts by their first names and had readily accepted that Beckwith would be known as Walli, even if her paycheck would read Belka. But now, she suspected, he was performing for the attorney general.

  “Hello, sir,” she responded. She rarely called him that either, but she would honor the tone he was establishing for today’s interview.

  “I am here with Jerry Ullage, NASA house counsel,” Star went on. Beckwith liked Ullage; he had stood by the astronauts in various dustups with NASA over speaking fees and book rights and other means by which they might try to make some real money after their life of working for government pay was over.

  “Hello, Jerry,” she said.

  “Hello, Lieutenant Commander,” he responded. Him too, she thought with an interior sigh. She would address him formally for the rest of the conversation.

  “And Attorney General Polk is here as well,” Star said.

  “Madame Attorney General,” Beckwith said, not waiting to be addressed.

  “Lieutenant Commander,” Polk responded.

  “The president asked the attorney general here today to see if there is a way to resolve the current . . . circumstances,” Star said.

  “I would like that,” Beckwith answered.

  “Let’s begin, Lieutenant Commander, with why you’ve taken the actions you’ve taken,” Polk said. “There is a great deal of speculation about that, and the president has asked me to try to determine your reasons. Perhaps when we know them, we can do something about them.”

  Beckwith smiled. There was a great deal of speculation indeed. Earlier in the day she had opened up her browser and scanned the news online. Various sites had aggregated the prevailing guesses and ranked them. The leading theory was that she was, as Bazanov had suspected, simply crazy. Close behind that was terrorism—that the destruction of the station was somehow imminent. Following that was the increasingly popular theory that she’d committed a terrible crime on Earth—at least one dead body was usually involved. And after that came the theory that this was simply a wonderful bit of performance art. Beckwith was especially partial to that one. Few people mentioned, as Bazanov had, the matter of the Consolidation.

  “I’m not quite ready to disclose my reasons,” she now responded to Polk.

  “Why is that?”

  “Ma’am, I’d prefer—” she began, but Polk finished for her.

  “Not to.”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “Will there be a time you’d be prepared to have that conversation?” Polk asked.

  Beckwith smiled. “Yes. As it happens there will be: tomorrow at exactly 10:22 a.m. eastern time. That will be 2:22 p.m. station time.” She then added, “I will establish voice contact with Houston about ten minutes early just to be sure.”

  “Can you reveal the reason for so specific a time?”

  “Due respect, ma’am, but that will be clear at 10:22 a.m. tomorrow.” She turned her attention to Star. “Mr. Administrator,” she said, “will that conversation be carried live on NASA TV?”

  “I expect it will be,” he responded.

  “I need to know that it will be,” she said, “or the conversation can’t take place.”

  “Lieutenant Commander,” Star said, “you’re not in a position to make that demand.”

  “Mr. Administrator,” she began. “Joe, I have your space station. I think I am.”

  Polk cut off that line of argument. “I will speak to the president about the broadcast. I’m certain he will agree to your condition, though he will insist on a seven-second delay so that you can be silenced if you try to incite violence.”

  “I will not incite violence, but I accept that condition,” Beckwith said. She had, in fact, fully expected that condition.

  Polk then tacked another way. “Lieutenant Commander, remind me: You did not resign your naval commission before joining NASA, did you?”

  “No,” she said, “I have remained a naval officer.”

  “And as such, you are required to obey commands from superior officers.”

  Ullage interrupted: “Walli, you can feel free not to answer that question.” He had reverted to her first name. She liked him for a reason.

  “I understand that, but I don’t mind,” she said. “Yes, I am aware of the chain of naval command.”

  “And you’re aware that the president sits at the top of all military chains of command,” Polk said.

  Beckwith had anticipated this too. “Yes, I am.”

  “Accordingly,” Polk said, “I am authorized by the president to order you to return home with no preconditions.”

  “Even if I were inclined to do that, I couldn’t,” Beckwith said reasonably. “There is no spacecraft attached to the station at present.”

  “That can change in as little as a week,” Star said. “The Soyuz that was going to bring up the next crew was being
prepared to launch then anyway. The crew can’t fly as long as the station is in unstable hands—those are the words the Russians themselves used—but the ship can fly empty and automated on the way up and bring you down the same way.”

  Beckwith grimaced at the “unstable hands” business, which Star probably intended; the administrator was decidedly displeased with her and was not above indulging in a cutting remark. But she also felt terribly guilty for denying the next crew their mission. She knew all three of them and knew how hard they’d trained for it. For that reason as much as anything else, she responded impolitically, with a verbal slap of her own.

  “The Progress was supposed to fly empty and automated too,” she said sourly.

  “All the same, a Soyuz will be launched and you will be expected to help dock it and to board it,” Star said. “Walli, you’re in very real legal jeopardy. Come home and a lot of it could go away.”

  “I can’t do that, sir,” she responded.

  “You realize this exposes you to a court-martial,” Polk said.

  “You needn’t respond,” Ullage interjected.

  She ignored him. “I do realize that,” she said.

  “And there’s more,” Polk went on. “You’re familiar with the Outer Space Treaty of 1967?”

  It was an elementary question and an insulting one—probably calculatedly so. The treaty was a fundamental and early subject of astronaut training. “Of course I am familiar with it,” Beckwith answered tersely.

  “And you’re equally familiar with the 1998 intergovernmental agreement signed by all of the space station’s partner nations?”

  “Yes.”

  “And you’re familiar with the language?”

  “Walli . . .” Ullage warned.

  Beckwith shook him off. “I studied both in detail, yes.”

  “Then you probably remember Article VIII of the 1967 treaty,” Polk said, “which states that any nation that launches an object into space, and I’m reading here, ‘shall retain jurisdiction and control over such object, and over any personnel thereof, while in outer space or on a celestial body.’”

  “Again,” Beckwith said, “I studied it in depth.”

  “Then you know it means that you are subject to prosecution in the United States when you return to Earth as well as in Russia, since your crime was carried out in the Russian segment—a crime committed for no apparent reason.”

  Beckwith tightened her lips. It might have been Polk’s tone, so smooth and supercilious, or it might have been her dismissal of Beckwith’s exceedingly good reasons for doing what she was doing—the honor in what she was doing—but either way, in that moment she decided that she disliked this woman. And that, in turn, made her sloppy.

  “One final thing, Lieutenant Commander,” Polk said. “Did you decide before you left the ground to take the action you did?”

  “Walli,” Ullage said sharply, “this is not a question you should answer.”

  Beckwith barely heard him. “No,” she said.

  “When you were aboard, then?”

  “Yes.”

  “But you couldn’t have made the final decision to act until that morning, after the accident, as your crewmates were preparing to leave.”

  “Walli!” Ullage now fairly shouted. “Stop!”

  “That’s correct,” Beckwith responded, ignoring him.

  “Oh, Walli . . .” she heard Ullage softly mutter.

  “During the power-down, you shut off systems in all of the modules on the American end of the station, including the Japanese and European ones?” Polk said.

  “That’s what the procedure calls for, yes.”

  Polk then let the air fill for just a moment with the ship-to-shore static. When she spoke, it was with an unmistakable edge of a person savoring a victory.

  “Lieutenant Commander,” she said, “you flew under the authority of the United States, you committed your crime while on the legal equivalent of Russian soil, and you formed your intent on Japanese and European soil.”

  Beckwith said nothing. Polk pressed on: “There are twenty-two partner nations in the European Space Agency. Japan, Russia, and the United States bring us to twenty-five. And the 1998 agreement makes extradition among all of those countries mandatory in the event of a crime committed in orbit—even to countries with which the United States does not ordinarily have extradition agreements. This means you are currently subject to prosecution in more jurisdictions than most international drug traffickers. You could spend the rest of your life traveling from country to country, courtroom to courtroom, and jail to jail. I doubt you would live long enough to stand for all twenty-five of your trials.”

  Beckwith considered that very real prospect and blanched. Polk, famously, never bluffed. Facing the legal wrath of the US and Russia had been one thing; adding the wrath of nearly two dozen more nations was another matter entirely. For a moment, Beckwith was unable to locate her voice. Then she did.

  “Ms. Polk,” she said, “I ride rockets for a living. Before that I flew jets. Onto carriers. In the dark. I’m accustomed to risk. This interview is concluded. You will have answers to your questions tomorrow morning.”

  “Lieutenant Commander . . .” Polk began.

  “Station out,” Beckwith announced, and cut the line. Then, before her courage could fail her, she opened up her home page and told the world what she had told the attorney general: that she would have something to say at 10:22 a.m. the next day.

  CHAPTER SIX

  Of course it was about the Consolidation. It had always been about the Consolidation. Half the world was talking about the Consolidation, and Walli Beckwith had been talking especially loudly. But she had more reason than most to be as worked up as she was because she had a daughter caught up in the deadly mess—and yet, at the same time, she didn’t.

  Technically, Walli Beckwith had no daughter at all, and at forty-four years old, she probably never would. What she had was a niece, her very first blood-niece, and since Beckwith had had only one sibling and he had had only one child and now he was dead, that first niece would forever be her only niece.

  Beckwith’s brother was three years older than she, and she had looked up to him in all things. Their parents had named him like they had named her, in a loving nod to the business of space. In his case, the name was Karman, in honor of Theodore von Kármán, the Hungarian aeronautical genius without whose studies of hypersonic airflow modern rocketry would have been impossible.

  Karman Beckwith, unlike his parents or his sister, was uninterested in engineering and instead went to medical school, specializing in pediatrics and, once he graduated, shipping out to work in the jungles, first in Africa and then in Southeast Asia. He met his eventual wife there, a Mexican doctor with the serendipitous first name Carmen and the last name Bravo-Castillo. Karman adored the homophonic coincidence of the Carmen part of her name and the heroic huzzah of the Bravo-Castillo. That, plus her dark beauty and incandescent intelligence, led him to propose to her within four months of their meeting. She accepted, and after three years in the field, they moved back to the United States, took jobs at the pediatric center of the Mayo Clinic in Minnesota, and soon had a baby girl. The child looked entirely like her Latina mother and not a lick like her fairer father, which was absolutely fine with both parents. They named her Sonia Bravo-Beckwith.

  But Carmen would not see Sonia grow up. Years before, in northern Cambodia, she had contracted a case of drug-resistant malaria, and the parasite had lurked in her liver, where all malaria likes to hide. It flared up once after Sonia was born, then again a year later, then again eighteen months after that, and during that third bout, it killed her. Sonia was not yet four. She and a devastated Karman moved to Houston at Walli Beckwith’s insistence. She was now off-ship and working for NASA, keeping more or less ordinary hours so she could help raise her niece.

  Walli Beckw
ith had been with Carmen the day she died. Carmen had asked her to be as much of a mother to Sonia as she could, and Beckwith had agreed. But she was still surprised—and seized by guilt—several nights later at her brother’s home when Sonia awakened, crying convulsively, clutched Beckwith in a near death grip, and called her “Mama.” At first Beckwith assumed Sonia was crying out for Carmen, but when she repeated it several more times, it was clear that at that moment, at least, Beckwith was Mama.

  The next morning, Sonia was back to calling her “Tía,” as she always did, but over the years that followed, whenever the girl was feeling deeply sad, deeply in need, she’d come back to Mama. Karman and Sonia and Walli agreed that it was all right, that it actually honored Carmen’s wishes. And now and then, when Sonia was older, if Beckwith would send her a note or a birthday card in which she wanted to convey particular love or an email in which she had occasion to scold, she would address her as “Daughter,” which Sonia quite liked. But Beckwith would render the word “Dauhter,” hedging the spelling and thus the relationship in deference to Carmen, but embracing it too in obedience to Carmen.

  When Sonia grew older and chose to become a doctor, Beckwith both celebrated the decision and fretted about it. The girl had a sandpaper toughness to her that never seemed fully in keeping with the healing arts. Instead, Beckwith worried, Sonia might at some level be seeking to replace her lost mother by becoming her lost mother. It was not unheard of—or so the psychology studies Beckwith looked up online seemed to agree—and it often ended badly, with an offspring ill suited to a parent’s career winding up trapped there by misguided sentiment.