Holdout: A Novel

by Jeffrey Kluger

  Sonia was in the pediatrics building that afternoon, folding sheets with Oli’s help, though Oli’s help more or less meant just tangling the sheets—which Sonia then had to untangle and fold, telling him she was “just going to smooth these out a little bit.” His willingness to take on the little job encouraged Sonia. For the three days they had been in the Mercado camp, he’d spent his time alternately brooding and crying, trying to come to terms with what had happened to him, to his village and his family.

  He had learned from the cradle of the Guarani belief in the Isondú and the Panambi, the glowworms and butterflies that were said to carry the souls of the reincarnated dead. After dark one night he crept from his bed, sneaked outside the pediatrics building, and began scouting for glowworms. His patience was fleeting and he howled in frustration when he was unable to find any after just a few minutes, waking Sonia and Mia, who bolted outside and carried him back in. The next day he slipped away again, only this time it was the butterflies he was looking for. When he at last spotted one but it would not settle onto his outstretched hand, he picked up a broken, leafy branch lying on the ground nearby, swatted it out of the sky, and killed it.

  Sonia had anticipated that such rage—in this case, a tiny murderous rage—would come and had tried to get out ahead of it, allowing him to cling as close to her as he needed. Now, on that third day in the Mercado facility, as she and Oli wrestled with the sheets and the camp was sunk in an internet blackout, Sonia at last felt her smartphone vibrate in her pocket and heard a series of pings around the camp, indicating that everyone else’s phone had come back online too. With her hands filled with sheets, she ignored her phone, but a moment later she heard someone outside the building calling her name—getting louder each time, meaning he was coming toward her at a run. She and Oli came to the door of the building, saw who it was, and Sonia slumped.

  He was a med school graduate from Ohio State who was agreeable enough, but so very eager to please, so very anxious to be liked, that Sonia found it difficult to hold him in any real regard at all. His name was Raymond, and from the time they met, she feared he harbored hopes that she might come to regard him as something more than just another clinic doctor. At first by happenstance and later by design, she had never learned his last name. She suspected he didn’t realize that, but she somehow felt that the less she knew about him, the more of a remoteness she could project and the more he’d direct his attention elsewhere. Now, as he sprinted toward her, she was for once intrigued by whatever it was he had to say to her.

  “Sonia!” he called, waving his smartphone over his head. “Your aunt! Your . . .” He gasped for breath. “. . . your astronaut.”

  At last he stumbled to a stop in front of her, panting and able to get out only “Your . . . your . . .” while pointing at the phone.

  “What, Raymond, what?” Sonia demanded frantically. “Is she all right?”

  “Yes!” Raymond said. “But she stole”—here he paused for a ragged breath—“she stole the space station.”

  “What the hell are—” Sonia started to ask, but before she could finish, Mia ran out from the infirmary building, also with her phone in her hand, shouting for Sonia just as Raymond had, and shoved her phone, open to CNN, into Sonia’s hand.

  “Look at this, look at this!” she said.

  Sonia looked down and her jaw dropped. “HIJACK IN SPACE,” the headline read, with the smaller “Rogue astronaut seizes station” underneath.

  “What happened?” Oli asked, grabbing Sonia’s leg. “What happened?”

  “Something . . .” Sonia said distractedly, looking down at him and then back at the screen. Unable to focus on anything but the screen, she reached out and wrapped an arm around him in a reassuring clinch. She scrolled further, from page to page, site to site, now on her own phone as Mia and Raymond did the same on theirs. Finally, after about fifteen minutes, her phone buzzed and rang and she punched the answer button. She heard the hiss, turned to Raymond and Mia, and nodded yes. They leaned in to listen, but Sonia shooed them back and pressed the phone tight to her ear.

  “Sonia,” she could hear Beckwith say.

  “Tía!” Sonia answered. “What did you do, what did you do? Are you all right? What did you do?”

  “So you heard,” Beckwith answered evenly.

  “Yes, I heard! Everyone heard! The newspeople say you’re a criminal.”

  “They’re probably right.”

  “That’s not funny!”

  “It’s not meant to be. I know what I did.”

  “But why? You had to leave! There was an accident! Those are the rules!”

  “Sonia, baby, listen—” Beckwith began.

  “No,” Sonia interrupted. “It’s wrong! It’s dumb! You’re alone up there.”

  “Sonia!” Beckwith now said more crisply—a tone of address that Sonia had long since learned meant that she was to stop talking. She obeyed, and Beckwith said simply, “Listen to me.”

  Sonia did listen, backing several steps toward the wall of a building, sliding down it to a seated position, and waggling her fingers for Oli, who came over and settled into her lap, indifferent to what Sonia was talking about, content to hear her occasional “mm-hmm” or “right” or “no” or “yeah.” He heard her say “No!” sharply once, and he looked at her with concern. He heard her say, “I do understand,” more softly, and he relaxed. At last he heard her say “yes” and “of course” and “I love you too.” Then she clicked off and looked up at Raymond and Mia, staring down at her wide-eyed.

  “She stole it all right,” Sonia said. “And she aims to keep it.”

  “Why?” Raymond asked.

  “She’ll explain that soon.”

  * * *

  • • •

  Beckwith readied herself for her address to the world only three minutes before it was set to begin. It was 2:19 p.m. her time, 10:19 a.m. eastern time. She knew what she wanted to say, she knew how she planned to say it, and so when the time came, she merely gathered up her laptop and her camera and floated into the cupola—a five-foot-wide, seven-windowed dome on the bottom-facing side of the space station, located just off the Destiny lab. It was the cupola that was used for the most—or at least the best—photography of the Earth. The bright blue of the morning Pacific Ocean sprawled out 250 miles below her, filling the left-hand side of her field of vision. The green-brown stretch of western South America, cut by the white of the snowcapped Andes, glowed as the prenoon sun cast westward-pointing shadows across the breadth of the Amazon.

  “Houston, station,” she radioed down.

  “Station, Houston, reading you five-by.”

  The link was good, the transmission was clear, but the person on the mic was unfamiliar. Beckwith recognized the voices of all of the astronauts who would be manning the Capcom station during the mission, even if she could not always connect them with a name, and this voice did not belong to any of them. Military intelligence, she suspected, an officer who knew the language of space but also the business of espionage—just in case that was Beckwith’s game today.

  “Are we wide?” Beckwith asked.

  “Wide?” the ground answered.

  “Is this conversation broadcasting live?”

  “Yes, Lieutenant Commander,” came the response. “NASA TV is carrying this feed, as are all of the networks.”

  “Good,” Beckwith said. She glanced down at some notes she had scribbled on a card, but she had reviewed what she wanted to say so many times she had fixed it all firmly in her head. She collected herself and began.

  “Hello,” she said to what she rightly assumed was a planetwide audience below. “Twenty-two years ago, I took an oath as a commissioned officer in the United States Navy and promised to ‘bear true faith and allegiance’ to the Constitution. I aimed to keep that promise.”

  She paused, looked at her watch and then out her
window. Time was short. She went on.

  “The thing about the Constitution, though, is that it may have been written for the United States, but its principles are universal. Bearing true faith and allegiance to them does not mean ignoring them outside our own borders. In the past few months I have betrayed my oath. I spoke out—a little—when I saw something wrong, but speaking up a little was not enough. So I will do more.”

  She let a long air-to-ground hiss fill the comm channel, long enough for Houston to grow concerned that the downlink had been cut.

  “Station?” called the stranger on the Houston mic.

  “Stand by one,” Beckwith answered. She looked out the window. A dull orange glow and ugly smudges of black were unmistakably evident at more than two dozen spots in the thick canopy of the Amazon, rolling in from the east. Each second, they drew nearer, more vivid. She raised her camera and continued speaking.

  “I am in the cupola of the International Space Station, the greatest spot in the greatest flying machine ever built. I am moving east at a speed of four-point-nine miles per second. In ten seconds I will be crossing over lands of ruin and death. More than a hundred thousand people who began this year living peaceful lives have now been scattered in a storm of fire and violence. An uncounted number have lost their lives in that storm. There will likely be many more fires and many more deaths. The jungle itself is approaching its own death. Burn away just another bit of what’s left, and the rest will collapse.”

  She leaned forward, aimed her camera, gathered the sweep of the burning jungle into her frame, snapped her picture, and spoke again. “In a moment I will post a picture of what all that devastation looks like from here.”

  She released her camera, let it float where it was, pressed her palms against the windows, and looked down again. “I will come home,” she said, “when we have put an end to the project that is causing damage so great it’s visible from space. On September 18, just under four weeks from now, the United States Congress will cast a vote either to stop the slaughter or allow it to continue. The people must gather in Washington on that day, by the hundreds of thousands, by the millions. And they must not leave until those in power do what is right. I hope to help lead that fight—and I hope you will allow me to help lead it. Meantime, I will be watching the jungle from here. I will warn when I can—and I will show the world what I see. For now, station out.”

  She cut the comm line, uploaded her picture of the Amazon disaster, and watched her website. It was immediately stormed by people seeing and sharing the image around the world.

  Far below, on the ground, the entirety of Beckwith’s transmission could be heard on a radio in a pediatrics building in the Bolivian jungle. A knot of doctors and even some of the children gathered around it. On the floor, closest to the radio, sat Sonia, cross-legged with Oli in her lap. He looked up at her.

  “Your tía-mama?” he asked her.

  Sonia nodded.

  “She’s in space now?”

  She nodded again.

  “Is she coming home?”

  “Not now,” Sonia said. “Not for a while.”

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  Beckwith had known there would be a great deal of noise from a great many people all over Washington and the media about what she had done, but she had not quite imagined the white-hot blast of it. She was alternately compared to Benedict Arnold, Rosa Parks, Ethel Rosenberg, Eleanor Roosevelt, Axis Sally, and Susan B. Anthony. She got two Lizzie Bordens from an elderly couple interviewed on TV in a Springfield, Massachusetts, diner, as well as numerous Joan of Arcs on numerous college campuses—which was inevitable.

  The more measured members of the media—especially the science and legal reporters—took a more cool-headed approach. What Beckwith had done was surely a crime, but it was well short of the hijacking or act of terror that a lot of people were calling it. The space station was flying through its orbits as it always had, and Beckwith couldn’t raise or lower that orbit by so much as an inch without NASA and Moscow knowing it and overriding her from the ground. As long as she continued performing the important work of cleaning and maintaining the station’s essential systems, one reporter argued, she was less a hijacker than a lighthouse keeper—one who might have refused to leave the lighthouse when she was told, but a menace to no one.

  Precisely that comparison was put to the White House press secretary during the briefing he called within an hour after Beckwith signed off. He was having none of it.

  “This is a $100 billion lighthouse with both global and national security implications,” he said. “Lieutenant Commander Beckwith has broken the law. She can’t stay in space forever, and when she comes home, she’s going to jail—probably for a long, long time.”

  The press secretary repeated the familiar notion that America “was not the world’s policeman” and could not be expected to wade into conflicts if other countries wouldn’t. But in this case, America was in fact the only option. The press secretary knew it, the president knew it, and Beckwith most certainly knew it.

  United Nations intervention in the Amazon would require unanimous approval by the body’s Security Council, and that vote was wired before it could even be held. There were five permanent members of the council—the United States, Great Britain, France, Russia, and China. France and Great Britain were in favor of intervention. Russia didn’t care either way except insofar as it could cast a vote that would annoy Washington, and since the president had already made it clear the US was opposed to any action in the jungle, Moscow declared that it would vote in favor. China was immovable. It had forged a quick and close business relationship with the Bobo-deCorte government, was pleased with the strategic toehold that was buying it in the hemisphere the US considered its own, and was not about to interfere with anything Brasilia might be up to. The US too would vote an immovable no.

  NATO could have no role in the fight because it had no dog in the fight, since Brazil was not a member of the thirty-nation organization. If there were to be an intervention at all, it would fall to the Organization of American States, many of whose thirty-five member nations were indeed agitating for action. But here too there were problems. The group included big players like Canada, Argentina, Mexico, and Brazil, as well as tiny ones like Barbados, Belize, and Guyana. But militarily, none of them were much more than dickey birds on the rhino’s back of the United States. While the OAS did regularly run collaborative military-readiness exercises, they were “collaborative” only in the sense that the US military organized the drills, provided most of the hardware and troops, and sent its generals out to tell everyone else what to do. For now, an actual war in the Amazon was not something the American generals were permitted even to consider endorsing, much less leading. It was only the September 18 congressional vote that could make a difference, which was why Beckwith chose that single target.

  “She’s not dumb,” the US president said to his aides with grudging admiration as he watched Beckwith’s broadcast. The date of the vote had been set only days earlier, and Beckwith had seen its potential and pounced on it immediately. “She’s a criminal, but she’s not dumb.”

  If Beckwith was indeed a criminal, however, she was an awfully popular one. Over the course of just the first few hours after her broadcast, more than fifty groups were established around the world in support, including three dozen in the United States alone. They went under a variety of names—March on Congress, Stop the Killing, Save the Tribes, and Rainforest Peace. At the University of Oklahoma College of Law, in the president’s home state, a group and a website had been set up to gather in all of the disparate organizations, to aggregate, coordinate, or, as Jair Bobo-deCorte would put it in his darker, deadlier way, to consolidate their efforts. The group was dubbed, simply, the September 18 Coalition, and it was growing by the hour. Bobo-deCorte himself would envy Beckwith’s appeal.

  * * *

  • • •

 
Jasper got to Boondoggles Pub at 11:20 p.m. Houston time, at the end of the day on which Beckwith had called Earth. He needed barely four minutes to make the three-mile drive east along NASA Parkway to the pub—much faster than it typically took for after-shift drinks when he was working the 8:00-to-4:00 cycle at Mission Control. There was always traffic at that time of the day; there was none at 11:20 p.m.

  Jasper looked around the place as soon as he arrived, grateful that he saw no familiar faces since he had no wish at all for company. Just to be sure, he made straight for the bar and took a seat at the far right end, with several open seats to his left. He hailed the bartender and ordered a Cutty Sark on the rocks. He smiled. Cutty had been Wally Schirra’s drink, which meant it was Walli Beckwith’s drink, which meant that Jasper, who typically didn’t care which brand of whiskey he drank but very much liked the ritual of sitting down at a bar, wagging two fingers, and ordering the same drink for himself and a lady friend, made it his drink too. After that, he learned to prefer his Cutty—partly because of the taste, mostly because of Beckwith.

  He opened up his phone and typed the first few letters of an email address; the field quickly populated with Beckwith’s—something the algorithm had long since memorized. “You there?” he wrote in the subject line. In the body of the email he simply typed another question mark. It was close to 4:30 a.m. station time, fourteen hours after Beckwith had made her address to the world. If Jasper knew this woman—and Jasper did know this woman—she’d be awake already, especially after so eventful a day.

  The email first made its speedy way through Jasper’s carrier, then its much slower way through NASA’s security filters, and at last sped up to the space station 250 miles overhead. The response fought its way back down via the same route in reverse and eventually popped into Jasper’s inbox.

  “Here indeed,” Beckwith wrote. “Where else would I be?”

  Jasper smiled. “I heard your broadcast today,” he replied.