Holdout: A Novel

by Jeffrey Kluger

  That fear was allayed the moment Sonia began medical school and attacked her studies with a lioness’ ferocity. She might or might not ever develop a gentle bedside manner, but she tore into the book work and the lab work and the endless memorization of the Latinate medical terms in much the way Beckwith herself had worked at Annapolis.

  “Tía,” she said to Beckwith after her first year as a med student, “I see why Mama loved this.”

  That might have closed the circle, might have completed the long journey from loss to redemption that Sonia had been making since the death of her mother. But before her second year in medical school could even begin, she and Beckwith again found themselves grieving a loss when the Houston police appeared at their door to tell them that Karman had been killed in a bicycling accident while pedaling in a lane in the northeast part of the city that was supposed to be closed to vehicles, but could not be closed to one vehicle that had jumped a divider because the driver was reeling drunk. Beckwith received a summer leave from NASA, and she and Sonia huddled close and mourned as one.

  They took walks in the city’s arboretum and Sesquicentennial Park, visited the Houston aquarium because they liked the dark rooms with the blue-violet lights in the tanks and the soothing, bubbling sounds of all of the little ecosystems keeping all the little fish alive. They lingered over long dinners, sometimes staying silent, sometimes crying together. Finally, after three months, the five-foot girl with the huzzah last name marched back to medical school, and the astronaut named after the street-tough pup jumped back into training, and they both pressed on as best they could. And then, three days before the collision in space that could have cost Beckwith her life, the same near-daughter almost lost her own, in the fire that killed fifteen people in the jungle but spared her.

  The Brazilians themselves—or at least the Brazilian government—did not speak much about the increasing number of jungle fires, and when they did, they spoke of them clinically, as an admittedly messy part of a larger project they decorously described as “the Consolidation.” It was a name and a policy dreamed up and executed by the new Brazilian president, Jair Bobo-deCorte.

  The president’s hyphenated surname struck plenty of people as openly comical, and his opponents in the media promptly dubbed him a clownish man with a name that suited him. But Bobo-deCorte himself was actually delighted with the name, guessing that it nicely rounded out his edges—making it easier for him to go about the decidedly sharp-edged ideas he had for his country.

  Bobo-deCorte had made his fortune in the Amazon jungle, first in ranching, then in lumber, then in farming, and most recently in hydroelectric-dam construction. He built each of those enterprises individually, then gathered them together into a single multinational giant—one that he actually named Multinacional Gigante.

  But a businessman was subordinate to the government, and the Brazilian government was largely subordinate to its president—and the president who preceded Bobo-deCorte was no friend of the industries that had made Multinacional Gigante so gigante. The Amazon rain forest could take only so much, he would argue. By US estimates, it was losing the equivalent of one New Jersey—or 8,700 square miles—every year to burning, clear-cutting, and dam building. At that rate the entire jungle could be razed to stubble within a generation.

  “A Amazônia é o jardim do mundo”—the Amazon is the world’s garden—the Brazilian president would promise on his trips overseas to the United Nations or to this or that conference in Paris or Geneva. The Europeans would applaud and the UN would applaud, and Bobo-deCorte would grumble to his aides that a garden is useless if you don’t pick the fruit.

  So even before the fifth year of the Brazilian president’s six-year term was done, Bobo-deCorte declared that he was running to become the next president. He promised that he would spend his yearlong campaign visiting all twenty-six of Brazil’s states, driving himself in his own weathered van.

  Anyone who had tried to drive Brazil’s notoriously poor roads—especially the ones that cut through the Amazon—would tell you that was a fool’s errand. Brazilian roads ate cars alive. But Bobo-deCorte didn’t have just one weathered van; he had six, and they were actually brand-new. They were exactly the same model and year, as well as the same shade of bivouac green, with dashes of chrome and faux leather seats. It would not be hard to weather them by hand, however—claw hammers, ball-peen hammers, and nails would do just fine. Pliers could loosen chrome and leave strips of it bouncing and slapping as the van moved. Salt, water, bleach, and vinegar applied in just the right spots could cause just the right amount of decorative rust. And Mexican serapes bought cheap in import market stalls could be used to cover the elegant upholstery.

  Deface and drape all six vans in just the same way, stash them in garages all over the country, and it would be a simple matter for the candidate to fly from city to city in a private jet headed for a private landing strip, pick up one of the vans, which would be waiting for him on the tarmac, and drive straight to a rally. Dirty shirts were kept in a satchel in each van for Bobo-deCorte to put on during the ride, along with plastic bags of soil and road dust he would spread around his neck and streak across his forehead. When he arrived at the rally, he would hop out of the van and climb onto the hood in front of the crowds who would already be assembled, having waited hours for the man who had driven a day and a half just to be here with them.

  Bobo-deCorte on the hood of a van with a microphone in his hand was a thrilling thing—passionate, fierce, seductive. His followers were his parceiros, his partners, he told them, and they had work to do together. They would get that chance: Bobo-deCorte would win the presidency in a landslide, with sixty-six million votes, out of a total ninety-eight million cast.

  Almost immediately, the Consolidation began. The great resources of the rain forest were being commercialized by a patchwork of companies in a patchwork way, and now they would all be gathered together under a government authority that would advance their interests jointly. Roads would be cut where they needed to be cut; jungle would be cleared according to where the agriculture minister determined the best farmland was located, not according to where the environment minister said the impact would be the least. Even better, Bobo-deCorte promised, the Consolidation would not be a Brazilian project alone. Neighboring countries whose borders included portions of the Amazon would be invited to participate in what he promised would be a bold multinational alliance.

  It was all achievable, Bobo-deCorte would promise, but ever and always there was the problem of the tribes—and the tribes were everywhere. There did not seem to be an acre of forest, he complained, that wasn’t near them, or set aside for them, or somehow said to be essential for their survival. Dam a river upstream and there was a tribe affected downstream. Dig a mine on private land and the runoff would poison tribal land. It was exactly the kind of interference with the jungle’s natural order that had already turned the Guarani tribal lands into scrub and wasteland.

  The one million indigenous people were little more than a demographic blip next to the 209 million people making up the nation as a whole, but to Bobo-deCorte they were a blip that needed to be eliminated. “It’s a shame the Brazilian cavalry hasn’t been as efficient as the American cavalry,” he would lament to his cabinet, musing that the United States needed barely a century to clear eighteen million indigenous people off the North American continent, while Brazil could not handle a fraction of that in the south.

  The cabinet would shift uneasily when Bobo-deCorte said that—and not just because even for his most febrile followers, such murderous thoughts seemed best left unsaid. The fact was, the South Americans actually had been as efficiently lethal as the cavalry to the north. The trouble began the moment the Europeans first established a toehold on the continent in the fifteenth century, bringing with them diseases like smallpox, which they spread unwittingly, and weapons like lances and swords, which they used with deadly efficiency when there wa
s land they wanted to seize. By the middle of the twentieth century—after the Industrial Revolution boosted the global demand for rubber, which fairly ran from Amazon trees—the tribal population of eleven million was down to just a single million, devastated by displacement and disease and two centuries of war with the rubber tappers.

  Bobo-deCorte pledged to resolve the problem of that small but stubborn remainder. If Amazon industries could be consolidated, said the president, so too could the Amazon tribes. The vast jungle across which the million indigenous people were so diffusely scattered would be claimed by the state, then set to the torch where needed to turn unproductive wilderness into profitable farmland and ranchland, and the members of the tribes themselves would be gathered into a single population—for their own safety, for their own good—and relocated to lush Brazilian borderlands near Peru, Bolivia, and Paraguay.

  The government’s deal—relocate voluntarily to fertile new land—was carried to the tribes by official representatives who would travel into the jungle trailed by video crews who documented the friendly way the plan was being proposed. The tribes were not impressed; they had lived on these lands for centuries, and they would not go. Few people had believed that they would. But having been offered an easy route by the government—with that offer captured on camera—they would now be pushed out the hard way. And so the burning began.

  * * *

  • • •

  Beckwith was on the ground in Mission Control during her last month in the United States before shipping out to Baikonur, Kazakhstan, for her launch to the space station, when the first pictures of the fires being lit in the jungle to clear the land and roust the tribes began streaming down from the station. The bright spots of light could have been wildfires ignited randomly by lightning, except that they flared at fixed times, usually after dark, and burned for precisely two days, often linking into a small necklace of blazes, pushing west—and herding the tribes ahead of them. Nature didn’t do that; people did.

  “Are we tracking these?” Beckwith asked the flight director on duty when she got her first look at the pictures.

  “We’re observing them,” came the hedged answer.

  “Are we reporting them?”

  “We’re observing them.”

  Beckwith was not remotely alone in seeing what was going on. Every astronaut, flight controller, and administrator in the space center could tell the difference between an accidental fire and a tactical one. So too could the people operating other nations’ weather and military satellites. But no country had more influence in the Western Hemisphere than the United States, and the United States was staying mum. The orders from Washington—particularly the White House—were that no NASA images taken of the fires were to be released.

  That was what truly enraged Beckwith: the silence, the complicity—that, of course, and the fact that alone among the entirety of the NASA staff, she had a loved one in the middle of the violence in the jungle. She told herself that she wasn’t letting her personal feelings color her outrage at the inhumanity that was unfolding, and once in a while she believed that self-fib, but mostly she didn’t. Whatever Beckwith’s mix of reasons, they were more than enough to prod her to ambush Joe Star in a Mission Control hallway on a day he had come from Washington to Houston for what was supposed to be a round of morale boosting and glad-handing with the space center’s employees.

  “These are deliberate,” she said to him without an opening hello, brandishing a stack of pictures of the fires.

  “Yes,” Star said evenly. “Of course they are.” He kept his eyes on hers and did not look down at the pictures; he had seen them all already.

  “Are we sharing them with anyone?”

  “We’re sharing them with everyone, Walli,” Star said. “The president, the Congress, the Pentagon. Then we’re required to be quiet about it and let them decide what to do.”

  “And what are they deciding?”

  “To do nothing, as you know.”

  Beckwith began to respond, but Star cut her off. “You have family down there, don’t you, Walli? A niece?”

  “I do,” she answered.

  “You’re concerned about her?”

  “Of course.”

  “And you’re concerned about the tribes and the jungle and the politics of it all.”

  “Yes, as I’ve said.”

  Star appeared to contemplate these facts. “That’s a lot to worry about,” he said, affecting a sympathy that didn’t really read like sympathy. “It could all become a distraction for you. Will it be a distraction for you?”

  Beckwith said nothing. Star, they both knew, was threatening her—specifically threatening her mission—and the coded word “distraction” made that unmistakable. A distracted astronaut heading for the space station would never get to go there in the first place. Beckwith, Zhirov, and Lebedev would all travel to Baikonur in a month, accompanied by three fully trained backup crew members. Any one of the second-stringers could be swapped in to fly in as little as a day before launch if a member of the prime crew were ill or unprepared or . . . distracted.

  “No,” Beckwith said frostily. “This will not be a distraction.”

  “Very good then.”

  Beckwith did curb her tongue and did make it to Baikonur and then to space, and as she’d promised Star, she did do her job there. But she had not promised that she wouldn’t do more than her job once she was off the clock. She used her free time to watch the ground; she saw when the big fires raged and when the smaller ignition fires were lit. She watched too as what seemed to be more-concentrated fires flared at the western border of Brazil, abutting Paraguay, Peru, and Bolivia. Patches of jungle were cleared there, and within days, narrow roads were cut in symmetrical lots in the blackened spaces, looking like they were intended less for lush, open tribal relocation lands than for contained refugee camps—where tens and even hundreds of thousands of people could be kept.

  She followed the news stories about the mounting refugee toll too: By her sixth week in space over one hundred thousand tribespeople—more than 10 percent of the entire indigenous population—were now either homeless and dispersed or being housed in what amounted to forced confinement. There had been a scattering of deaths in all the dislocations, and Bobo-deCorte himself had taken to the airwaves to pay his respects to what he called Os Lamentáveis—the Lamentables—promising their families restitution, but pointedly not promising that there wouldn’t be more dying to come.

  In the United States, angry lawmakers in both chambers of Congress introduced bills to mandate intervention in the jungle, with a vote set for September 18, lest the refugee toll soar to half a million and beyond. The United States had stayed out of the bloodbath in Rwanda in 1994, and even years later, the consciences of lawmakers were scarred by the global condemnation that followed the American inaction. The congressional bills represented an attempt both to fix the immediate problem and to get right with 1990s history. Few people expected the bills to go anywhere.

  And yet for all the ugliness Beckwith saw through her space station portholes as the jungle floor burned beneath her, there was also the occasional welcome fire, a tiny fire, so tiny she needed a high-resolution ground-surveillance system to see it at all—a fire that was lit just for her. They appeared at agreed-upon times, and they were hard to mistake for any of the other fires on the burning continent. In addition to the familiar orange and yellow of other fires, the little ones always gave off a quivery shimmer of purple first, way up at the high, vanishing edge of the visible spectrum. Beckwith couldn’t explain how she could see the purple, though since the only other person she knew who could see it too was her dauhter-niece, she reckoned it was something genetic.

  Either way, that dauhter-niece was in danger. And the entire continent was in danger. Beckwith was not so vain as to think she was the only person in the world who could make the devastation stop, but she was n
ot so modest as to deny that from her very particular position, she had a very particular voice. She would use it.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  August 23

  Sonia Peanut Bravo-Beckwith learned about her tía-mama’s plan to address the world at about the same time everybody else did. By now there was no newspaper, news site, cable channel, or social media platform on the planet that wasn’t devoting a good share of its coverage to the story of the possibly crazy, definitely criminal, and absolutely irresistible astronaut who had stolen the world’s only space station and was at last condescending to explain why. The news of Beckwith’s intention to make her address at 10:22 a.m. on her third day in sole command of the station pinged on Sonia’s smartphone just as it was pinging on every one of the hundreds of other phones in the Mercado camp.

  “Beckwith Will Talk,” was how the USA Today alert that appeared first on Sonia’s phone phrased it.

  That was followed by The New York Times’ “Astronaut to Address NASA, World; Will Explain Actions.”

  The New York Post was last with “The Pirate Speaks!”

  That real-time pop-up of the breaking news was not at all the way Sonia learned that Beckwith had taken the station in the first place, two days ago—or three days after she and Oli had arrived in the Mercado camp. She got word of that development hours after the fact—about 1:00 p.m. Bolivia time, 5:00 p.m. space station time, nearly five hours after an injured Vasily Zhirov and Yulian Lebedev had floated free of the station in their Soyuz spacecraft, leaving an injured and obstinate Beckwith behind. The Mercado camp had been in an internet blackout for most of that day, something that often happened when the satellite antennas mounted on the backs of a pair of uplink trucks went dark for one glitchy reason or another.