Holdout: A Novel

by Jeffrey Kluger

  “Yes,” he answered, with a candor that surprised Beckwith. “It’s immoral and it’s tragic. But I also know it’s none of our business.”

  “The voters are starting to say otherwise.”

  “I don’t listen to polls,” Oro said. And then, unexpectedly, he laughed at himself. “Do you believe me?”

  “No, sir,” Beckwith answered. “I don’t.”

  “Officer to officer, you shouldn’t. Still, I’ve announced my vote.”

  “Will you change it?”

  “No.”

  “Will you at least think about changing it?” Beckwith asked. Oro didn’t answer. “Officer to officer,” she added.

  “You’re a lieutenant commander?” Oro finally responded.

  “Yes.”

  “I retired as a lieutenant.”

  “So I . . .”

  “You outrank me, yes. If ROTC taught me anything, it’s that I must always consider any counsel I get from a superior officer.”

  “I would very much appreciate that, sir,” Beckwith said.

  “It’s the least I can do, ma’am,” Oro answered.

  The astronaut and the senator then said their goodbyes and ended their call. Beckwith smiled at the sweet and simple reasonableness of what had just taken place. After weeks of so much anger and heat, it was a relief. She once again felt the sense of contentment that being in space could give her. All the same, it would be awfully nice if she could shake her headache.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  September 16

  Yulian Lebedev was hoping to slip into Moscow Mission Control unnoticed. Zhirov might have expected a hero’s greeting for himself when he made his first entrance into the room after returning from space, but Lebedev had never seen himself as a hero, and he preferred not to be greeted like one. What Lebedev wanted and what Lebedev got, however, were two different things, and the moment he opened the door at the back of the grand auditorium and stepped inside, a controller seated at a console nearby sprang up and began to applaud. Other controllers turned, looked, and did the same. Lebedev was paler, thinner, moved tentatively, and wore a collapsible cane at his belt that he could have opened and used if he needed it—though it was not in his nature to lay so much as a hand on the thing and actually admit to that need.

  Either way, he was there—though later than expected. A burst eardrum can be a reasonably easy thing to get over, unless an infection results, leading to inner ear damage, which in turn leads to loss of balance, vertigo, and a cascade of other problems. All of that had happened—was still happening—to Lebedev, and the military doctors were unanimous that they could not yet get to the bottom of the problem and that he should not leave the hospital until they had him fully sorted out. But Lebedev was adamant that he had had enough, and that if he couldn’t be in space, he belonged where he could continue to serve in some capacity with the rest of his crew, and that meant in Mission Control. Roscosmos was unanimous that he should be there too.

  As the grounded cosmonaut made his unsteady way into the auditorium and the controllers stood and applauded, the ones closest to the door mobbed and hugged him. Zhirov, along with Bazanov, joined the scrum.

  “Get back, get back. Give him room,” Zhirov said to the other controllers as he fought through them and grabbed Lebedev in a bear hug. “Yuli, you are beautiful!”

  Lebedev hugged him back, but tottered slightly in the process and braced himself against Zhirov. “I am not beautiful, but I am here,” he said.

  “That’s good enough,” Zhirov said. He called out to the room, “Flight Engineer One is present. Crew is complete. Status five-five-five.” On the third “five” he gestured toward the picture of Beckwith on the left side of the giant screen. At that, at least a few of the controllers stopped applauding.

  Zhirov and Bazanov steered Lebedev to an observer’s console and pulled up chairs next to him. They purposely sat first, sparing the injured cosmonaut any sense that they would remain standing in case he needed to be helped into his seat. Lebedev acknowledged that kindness with a tiny nod and sat. The other controllers returned to their stations.

  “You are well, druzhók?” Bazanov asked, using the colloquial endearment he might have directed to a nephew.

  “Terrible,” Lebedev said. “But better. Still, I won’t fly.”

  Bazanov shrugged. “I don’t fly,” he said. “But I serve. You can serve.”

  “Perhaps,” Lebedev said.

  “No ‘perhaps,’ Yuli,” Zhirov said. “You will work. When do the doctors want you back?”

  “Every night, for now.”

  “Then they can have you every night. In daylight we need you.” Zhirov looked at Lebedev sternly.

  “All right, Vasily,” Lebedev said. “I will serve.”

  “Then you’ll start right away,” Bazanov answered.

  He summoned a controller and ordered him to bring strip charts from the past ten days of the mission—printouts of critical telemetry that had been streaming down from the Russian side of the station before, during, and after the power-down. If Lebedev was truly going to serve, he would do so in the capacity in which he was especially well qualified—as the cosmonaut who could disassemble the entire Russian half of the station in his head, rethink its systems, and put them back together better than they had been before. In all the years the station had been flying, none of the modules had ever been shut off in flight and then brought back online. The entire Russian segment had just been put through that sleep-wake cycle, and it was now connected to an American segment that had turned entirely toxic. There was no shortage of small breakdowns that could cause in the Russian systems. If they were there, Lebedev would find them.

  He bent over the strip charts while Bazanov and Zhirov lingered close at hand. Lebedev asked a question or two—where in the data stream this or that step in the power-down had occurred—then returned to the charts and before long had no questions at all. Bazanov smiled. Lebedev was an old-school engineer—his favorite kind—and old-school engineers preferred their data in the durable form of ink and pencil on paper, not in the passing flicker of numbers on-screen that lasted only until they vanished entirely and were replaced by other numbers.

  For the better part of two hours Lebedev studied the charts, circling and underlining portions in red grease pencil and slipping torn strips of notepaper between pages to mark key spots. Then he pushed away from the console and stood. He saw Bazanov and Zhirov at the back of the room and nodded to them, and they hurried over. He gestured to the strip charts.

  “There is nothing about the crew here,” he said. “There is nothing about Belka.”

  Zhirov looked at him questioningly. “She is not wearing biomed sensors, and she has been talking to Houston much more than us.”

  “Then we should talk to Houston and then we have to talk to her,” Lebedev said. “We have to do that right away.”

  * * *

  • • •

  Beckwith was sleeping when the tag-team calls from Moscow and Houston came in. Moscow was first, radioing up with a clipped command: “Station, respond and report.” It was Zhirov calling, but at that point, his usually welcome voice was nothing of the kind. Less than fifteen seconds later came the second call: “Station, Houston.” It was something-or-other Lagrange on the line, whose interruption she welcomed even less.

  Sleep had been nearly impossible for Beckwith for more than twenty-four hours now—though not for lack of trying and not for lack of exhaustion. She had climbed into and back out of a sleep pod in the Russian segment four or five different times, convinced that this time she must be so fatigued that she would simply pass out before she even closed her eyes. But she never did.

  The headache was one reason—easily the worst reason—but so was the fever she felt like she might be running. She would know for sure if she took her temperature, but if she did that and found ou
t she was sick, there was little she could do about it anyway. So she took some aspirin and then some ibuprofen, and while that made her feel a little bit less feverish, the pain in her head remained unchanged. Worse, more and more her vision would double up as if she were drunk. Perhaps it was a migraine; people said that migraines could make you see double. Beckwith had never had a migraine before, but people also said that sometimes you didn’t get your first one until you were in your forties. Or maybe people hadn’t said that; she really didn’t know.

  While she was getting the aspirin and ibuprofen from the Russian medicine bin, she’d dug through it looking for something much stronger, half hoping she wouldn’t find it—but she did find it. She couldn’t read the Cyrillic, and the English translation was so poor that it was impossible to know what was inside the package without the aid of pictures. But the pictures were there, and they told her what she needed to know. There was a tiny human form with little lightning bolts near the head, back, and legs—the lingua franca for pain. There was a sleepy-looking face with half-closed eyes—which always went with the lightning if the drug was any good. And there was a red slash through a steering wheel and a martini glass, which sealed the deal. She was tempted—sorely tempted—but she decided to put off such high-octane medicine as long as possible and for now try to sleep instead.

  It was then that the one-two calls came in from Moscow and Houston. This time she had almost, almost fallen asleep before she was disturbed. She hit a switch opening channels to both Mission Controls at once and barked a simple “What!” in response. She sounded annoyed. She wanted to sound annoyed.

  “Uh . . . report status, station . . . please,” said an uncertain Lagrange.

  “Systems on this side of the hatch nominal,” Beckwith said. “It’s up to you guys to tell me what’s happening on the other side.”

  “Crew status, not systems status, station,” Zhirov demanded. Lagrange might be rattled by Beckwith’s pique; the Russian commander wasn’t.

  “Crew was sleeping, Vasily,” she said, moderating her tone. “Or at least trying to sleep.”

  Zhirov did not respond immediately, but his mic was open and she could hear him muttering to someone. At last he asked, “Have you slept?”

  “Yes,” she answered.

  “When was the last time?” he pressed. Beckwith didn’t respond and Zhirov repeated himself. “Walli, when was the last time you slept at all?”

  “It’s been a while, Vasily.”

  “Copy. Stand by.”

  Zhirov clicked off and Houston clicked on.

  “Station, hold for flight surgeon,” Lagrange said.

  “Say again?” Beckwith asked.

  “Flight surgeon, station. Please hold.”

  Charlene Boysen toggled open her communications line, but Glynn Hampton, the flight director, gestured to her to wait. Then he spoke to Lagrange. “Kill the public loop,” he ordered. Immediately, the audio dropped out in the press booth at the back of Mission Control, as well as on NASA TV and any commercial stations that might have been carrying the feed. This was one doctor-patient call he wanted to be truly private. He nodded at Boysen to proceed.

  “Station, flight surgeon,” she said. “Please report your medical status—any and all symptoms.”

  “Status is good. No symptoms to speak of.”

  “Station,” Boysen began, and then amended: “Lieutenant Commander, this request can come through naval chain of command as an order if you’d prefer.”

  “That won’t be necessary,” Beckwith said. “A little bit of a headache is all.”

  “And you said sleeplessness.”

  “And sleeplessness.”

  “Yet you’re sleepy.”

  “Yes,” Beckwith said, “I am.”

  “Any fever?”

  “Some.”

  “Vision?”

  “Twenty-twenty,” Beckwith answered.

  “Twenty-twenty single or double, Lieutenant Commander?”

  “Double,” Beckwith conceded. “Just a couple times.”

  “And I imagine you’re not hungry?”

  “No,” Beckwith answered. Now, at long last, she felt a prickling along her skin—not of fever, but of fear.

  “All right, station,” Boysen said. “Please stand by.”

  The flight surgeon muttered into her headset to the two younger doctors in her backroom support team, then got up and took a few steps to the flight director’s console. A moment later the other doctors entered Mission Control and gathered around Hampton as well. They knew this was not ammonia poisoning; the symptoms were all wrong, especially the fever. What they had to determine was what it was instead.

  In Moscow Mission Control, a similar scrum had formed around the spot where Lebedev sat with his strip charts, red grease pencil, and scrap-paper placeholders. Bazanov was with him, as were three other engineers from Moscow’s own back rooms. They had brought with them other strip charts of the power-down and power-up procedures. Lebedev had torn through all of them too, making more red marks, flagging more pages.

  He had been grilling the engineers about each of the flagged pages, and the answers they gave him had been more or less to his satisfaction. But now he’d gotten to the lab racks in the Zarya module.

  “Did you cut all power to the lab?” he asked.

  “Of course not,” the lead technician in the group of three answered.

  “What did you leave running?”

  “All essential equipment.”

  “The refrigerators?”

  “Of course.”

  “The freezers?”

  “Of course.”

  Now Lebedev yanked open one portion of the strip chart and pointed a finger at a few lines on the page. “These freezers?”

  The three men leaned in and looked. One of them turned the chart slightly toward himself. He closed his eyes and swallowed.

  “Those two appear to have gone off for the period of time the modules were powered down, but they’re operating again.”

  Lebedev fixed the man with a stare. “What is stored in those freezers?”

  The engineer flipped urgently through his own thick pile of documents and found what he was looking for. He appeared relieved.

  “The first one is empty,” he said. “Awaiting resupply.”

  Lebedev drew a wary breath. “And the other?”

  The engineer scanned down the page and his eyes stopped on a line. He blanched.

  “And the other?” Lebedev repeated.

  “Meningitis,” the man said. “E. coli and meningitis.”

  Bazanov hit his fist on the console desk, immediately opened a back-channel line to Mission Control in Houston, and was put through to Hampton. The twin heads of the twin centers spoke briefly and then Hampton spoke quietly to the doctors around him. Boysen returned to her console.

  “Station, surgeon,” she called.

  “Copy, surgeon.”

  “Walli, come home.”

  “I . . . what . . . ?”

  “Come home. Now,” Boysen said.

  Beckwith sounded weary—very, very weary. “I would prefer not to,” she said.

  “Cut the room,” Boysen ordered. Hampton nodded, and immediately the audio loop went silent in Mission Control as it had in the pressroom and on the TV feed.

  “Walli,” Boysen asked, “have you been in the Zarya module?”

  Beckwith was mystified. “Yes, of course, yes,” she said.

  “Since the power-down?”

  “Yes.”

  “Did you touch anything? Anything wet?”

  “Everything in there is wet,” Beckwith said. “I cleaned up as best I could.”

  “Walli, come home,” Boysen now repeated. “You are very, very sick.”

  “I can’t be—” Beckwith said, then stopped herself as
a flood of images came rushing back to her from the day of the accident: The cap on the meningitis vial that she may have snapped on badly. The high, sharp sound the vial made as she banged it back in the tray. The freezer door that she slammed, that didn’t catch, that she had to slam a second time—and that still might not have caught. And the wet mess she had so recently sopped up from the air with a cloth and her bare hands, then wiped on her pants. Her stomach turned over.

  “The freezers were off, weren’t they?” she said hoarsely.

  “Yes, Walli, they were.”

  “I have meningitis, don’t I?”

  “Yes, you do,” Boysen said. “Come home or you will die. I can almost certainly promise you that.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  September 16

  The flight from the Mercado hospital to the western camp in Brazil was a particular kind of awful for Sonia and the other doctors in the SSA helicopter, one that would have been easier to tolerate if it had been possible to draw a clear breath—which it wasn’t. Jo had warned everyone aboard that they would need to “strap in, hang on, and probably throw up,” and two of the doctors did need to lunge for a bucket and bring up whatever they’d had to eat that morning in the first twenty minutes of the two-and-a-half-hour flight. Sonia had no such problem, but Sonia had not eaten that day—or much at all since Oli was taken.

  Part of what made the flight so grueling was the altitude at which the helicopters had to fly—little more than treetop level, to stay out of the way of the wasp helicopters that seemed to be everywhere, looking for evacuees who had fled the burning patches of jungle. Flying low meant a constant lurching, as the hot, rising air of the fires lifted the helicopter up and intermittent cool pockets dropped it back down. No matter the exact altitude, the cabin was continually filled with choking smoke from the tree cover burning everywhere below.

  “Lay low, breathe slow!” Jo would order when the smoke got too thick.

  “Take your seats and enjoy the flight,” he’d call when the air had cleared a bit.

  At some point during one of those clearer moments, Sonia reached for her phone and clicked onto her email. She had made Beckwith two promises when she had come to the jungle: that she would survive her time there and that she would always let her know exactly where she was. She now summoned up Beckwith’s email address and typed “Promise #2” into the subject line, then in the body of the text wrote: “Flying to the western camp.” She added, faking a jauntiness she didn’t feel, “Hello again, Brazil!” Then, faking nothing, she signed off with, “Keep an eye on me, Mama.”