Holdout: A Novel

by Jeffrey Kluger

  “¿Com permissão?” Raymond asked.

  The two guards gestured both of them forward with the butts of their guns, and Raymond and Lindsey approached, as the desperate people inside pressed against the gate. The selection of the sickest was made as it typically was, with one of the guards unlocking the gate while the other watched and the designated forty were pointed out and allowed to exit.

  When about twenty had been chosen, Lindsey stepped away and, in full sight of the guards, removed a smartphone from his pocket and began scanning the camp as if he were recording it. He wasn’t. The phone, which belonged to one of the doctors on staff, had long since stopped working after having been blown out while trying to take a charge from the camp’s notoriously unstable electrical system, which regularly surged and ebbed. The guards had no way of knowing that, though, and the moment they saw what Lindsey appeared to be doing they sprang toward him.

  “Sem telefones! Sem telefones!” they said in unison. No phones! No phones!

  One of the guards knocked Lindsey to the ground, while the other grabbed the phone, tossed it in the dirt, and smashed it with the same rifle butt with which he had just made his welcome gesture.

  “Eu sinto muito! Eu não sabia! Eu sou novo!” Lindsey pleaded in well-accented Portuguese and well-playacted contrition. I’m sorry! I didn’t know! I’m new!

  The guards yanked him up roughly and one of them picked up the remains of the phone, grabbed Lindsey’s wrist, and slapped it into his open palm, drawing blood where the broken glass cut skin.

  “De volta ao trabalho!” he ordered. Back to work!

  Silently, as all of that was playing out—as the guards’ attention was fully engaged—Sonia, now shoeless, dressed in the T-shirt and shorts, with dirt spread across her face and arms and legs, leapt from her jungle cover and sprinted toward the camp. She ducked around the twenty people who had been chosen so far, slipped past the open gate, and entered the horror within. Raymond, watching from the corner of his eye, saw her make her move. He and Lindsey, obeying the guards’ command, resumed their work, selected their next twenty, and left with the entire group for the showpiece camp. The gate of the main camp was closed and padlocked.

  * * *

  • • •

  The eight hours Sonia would spend in the western camp were eight hours in a hellscape. She saw diseases she recognized—malaria, cholera, measles—and ones she could not identify: skin lesions and pallor like nothing she had seen in a textbook; people flush and sizzling with fever, but when she asked them what other symptoms they were feeling, they said none. She saw burned flesh, infected wounds, limbs that would surely be lost. She removed her shirt, wearing only her brassiere underneath, and tied it round her mouth and nose, both to protect herself from infection and to reduce the smell of rot and filth. More than once she skidded in a slick of sewage.

  She recorded it all—in short bursts so as to keep the file small and make it easy to send to the world. And all the while she looked for Oli, called out for Oli, asked people if they had seen a such a boy, one with muitos arranhões, as if scratches would be noticed here. There was no sign of any such person.

  As the moon rose and approached the point in the sky that the meteorology websites Sonia had consulted before she left the main camp had said it would reach around midnight, she returned to the main gate of the camp. The crowds had already begun to gather there, awaiting the doctors, whose arrival was still about half an hour away. Half an hour was what Sonia needed.

  Staking out her place near the gate, she reached into her pocket and removed two of the oleander leaves. It was a pity she did not have the flowers themselves. They were pretty, pink, wide-petaled things. She remembered seeing them at a wedding once and being so struck by them she asked what they were. But the leaves were a different matter. She put them in her mouth and chewed; they were bitter, awful, evolution’s method of warning animals to stay away lest they pay. Sonia was one such animal, but she was one with a plan to follow, and so she chewed the leaves, reducing them to a thick, miserable pulp so as to release as much of their terrible chemistry as possible. Then she swallowed them.

  Within thirty minutes, her gut wrenched and knotted with a force and violence that made her cry out. Within another minute, she was vomiting more explosively than she ever had in her life. It was while she was bent over, retching and emptying herself onto the ground, that she heard the voices of two men, American men—the voices of Raymond and Lindsey. She heard the gate rattle open and heard them mutter to the guards as they made their selection. The first person they chose was the vomiting woman wearing the Detroit Pistons shirt with the Seattle Seahawks logo. Clearly someone so ill needed medical help fast.

  Raymond and Lindsey summoned Sonia forward and she staggered out of the gate, but the guards stopped her. More than one person had tried to fake illness by inducing vomiting with two fingers, and they were too clever to be fooled by that pantomime.

  “Este está realmente doente!” Lindsey said. This one is truly sick! He bent over Sonia, who was lying just outside the gate, rolling and moaning.

  “Não!” one of the guards answered. No!

  Raymond rifled through his medical kit, pulled out a skin thermometer, and trained it on Sonia’s forehead. It registered 39.5 degrees centigrade, or 103.2 Fahrenheit—more of the awful power of the oleander. Raymond looked up at the guard with an expression that said, Satisfied?

  Lindsey looked at the guard and asked, “Satisfeito?”

  The guard glowered but waved Sonia forward, and she crawled out of the way, vomiting in the soil, while the other thirty-nine of the sickest were selected.

  * * *

  • • •

  It took only two hours after Sonia was extracted from the main camp—writhing in pain and convulsed by a stomach seeking to empty itself of contents that were no longer there—before she was well enough to send her email to her tía-mama. Antiemetics and an antitoxin specific to the poisons in jungle botanicals relieved her symptoms quickly, and as soon as they had done their job, she sent the four minutes of short-burst video she had collected to Beckwith, as well as to The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, and CNN. All of the news outlets would post it soon enough, but being news outlets, they would have to confirm its authenticity first. Sonia’s tía-mama trusted her dauhter, watched in horror what she had sent her, and posted it on her website and Twitter feed immediately. Not only had she scooped the Times, the Post, the Journal, and cable; at this point she had a bigger audience than all of them, so anything that went out on her platforms beat anything that went out on theirs.

  The outrage over the video was immediate. The United Nations, the European Union, and the Organization of American States—with the grudging agreement of the US president—issued formal condemnations. The White House followed with a hedged statement read by the press secretary and released online with strategic italics, declaring that “the conditions depicted in the video, if authenticated, are entirely unacceptable and not in keeping with the humane standards to which the United States holds itself and seeks in its allies.”

  The late-to-the-game Times, Post, and Journal alternately called the scenes in the video “a nightmare,” “a mortal crime,” and “a scene from Hieronymus Bosch.” All of them also observed in more or less matching phrasing that the video “raises pressure on wavering lawmakers to cast their vote in favor of intervention.”

  Beckwith was as pleased as she was able to be about the results of the video. She was hopping mad at Sonia, too, for putting herself in such danger to record it, but at the moment she was far less capable of feeling pleasure or anger than of simply feeling the utter misery of her illness. After she made it clear to Mission Control the day before that she was not going anywhere before the vote on the eighteenth, she had remained in steady communication with the ground. Often it was with Jasper—though he avoided the jaunti
ness he usually brought to their air-to-ground chatter. He was fed up with her stubbornness in staying aboard even at the risk of her life, and during his Capcom shifts they kept things businesslike.

  Beckwith had to admit he had been right about the business of the forty-eight hours—specifically that those hours could spell her end. Her headache had become almost blinding, a thing so acute that she took an almost academic wonder in how her nervous system could produce something so monstrous. Her neck was in so much pain it was easier to pivot her whole body to look at something than to try to swivel her head. She had no idea what her fever was, but it was high enough that at one point, the image appeared to her unbidden of the blood in her veins forming tiny bubbles the way water in a pot does just before it jumps to a full boil. She would have shaken her head to scatter the image—if she had been able to shake her head at all.

  Beckwith could not say with certainty how much sleep she’d had in the past few days, except to say that whatever she did get was in brief, accidental bits. She had given up climbing into the Russian sleep pod because she knew that real sleep, true sleep—the deep blue ocean of a full night’s sleep—was entirely beyond her. Instead, she would find herself suddenly mugged by sleep. She’d be rummaging through the medicine bin for yet another ibuprofen, and all at once everything around her would go away and she’d wake up to find that the bin and its contents were floating in front of her and that she’d been in a state of blackout for ten or fifteen minutes at a time. The previous time Boysen called for a med check, Beckwith described these interludes, framing them as much-needed naps, hoping that might appease the flight surgeon. It didn’t.

  “That’s not sleep,” Boysen said. “It’s unconsciousness. And it’s not a good sign.”

  Earlier in the morning, when the ibuprofen—which Beckwith was taking three and four at a time—had temporarily dulled the pain by about half an order of magnitude, she had told Moscow that it might be a good moment to bring the Soyuz in for docking, since she felt that for now at least there was a chance she would be able to be useful if she had to intervene and help guide the ship. Zhirov took the Capcom console and talked her through the procedure as the thrusters on the Soyuz puffed to life and the guidance computers edged it across the tiny one-kilometer distance to the station. Beckwith looked down at the guidance readout in the hope that she could call off the distance and speed and thus prove to Moscow and to herself that she was not quite as sick as she felt. But the readout came back to her doubled and blurred, so Zhirov called out the numbers and she merely repeated them back.

  When the Soyuz was just a few feet away, Beckwith looked at it through the small porthole on the Poisk almost longingly, picturing the cockpit seat where she would buckle herself and close her eyes and fly away and then wake up on Earth in a hospital bed with a pillow under her pounding head and an intravenous line in her arm bringing her the sweet comfort of the drugs that would heal her. The Soyuz docked without incident, a light bump and the reassuring snap of the docking latches confirming it was where it should be.

  “We have capture,” Beckwith said.

  “Copy capture,” Zhirov answered.

  Now, half a day later, on the night of the seventeenth, as millions were gathering in Washington for the congressional vote the next day, Beckwith could take the pain and exhaustion and kaleidoscope vision no more. She floated back to the medicine bin in the Zarya module and dug through it once more for the blister pack with the lightning bolts and the sleepy eyes and the forbidden steering wheel and martini glass. She broke one of the blisters, removed one of the pills, grabbed a water bottle with a squeeze nozzle, and hailed the ground.

  “Moscow, station,” she said.

  “Copy, station,” Zhirov answered.

  “Vasily, I’m going to close the shades.”

  She had no idea who on the planet below might be listening in on the air-to-ground loop, and so she used the slang coined by an earlier cosmonaut when he had taken one of the tablets for a migraine headache and had warned the rest of the crew to take them only if they had absolutely no alternative. The feeling of curling up in the dark, cozy room that was the buzz of the drug would be just too tempting.

  “That’s a good idea, station,” Zhirov answered.

  Beckwith looked at her watch and set an alarm for 12:00 p.m. station time, or about thirteen hours away. That was a long time to sleep, but she needed every hour of it. When she at last woke up, it would be 8:00 a.m. East Coast time on the morning of the eighteenth, one hour before Congress would convene.

  “Call me at 1200 hours,” she instructed. “If I don’t respond, call again until I do.”

  “Copy, station,” Zhirov said. “Wake-up call at 1200.”

  Beckwith took the pill, closed her eyes, and floated in place, picturing the drug spreading through her bloodstream and bringing her the sweet relief of painless slumber. She drifted toward the sleep pod, slid inside, and within minutes felt a warm wooziness come over her.

  “Moscow, station,” came her voice across the air-to-ground loop. She sounded happy.

  “Copy, station,” Zhirov answered.

  “Vasily,” she said, “you’re a nice friend.”

  Zhirov smiled. “Copy, station.”

  “And this is a nice spaceship.”

  “Copy, station.”

  “Yes,” Beckwith said, “it’s very nice.”

  “Walli?” Zhirov said.

  “Mm-hmm?”

  “Go to sleep now.”

  Beckwith said nothing. Through her open mic, Zhirov could hear the steady sound of her breathing.

  * * *

  • • •

  The wake-up call Beckwith had requested came just when she asked, at 1200 hours station time. She’d been asleep for the solid thirteen hours she’d hoped for, and while she was not wearing biomed sensors, she had left her mic open and her breathing and occasional turning and shifting remained audible on the air-to-ground loop. Zhirov found the sound reassuring, and he suspected that all of the controllers in both Moscow and Houston did too.

  As Beckwith had predicted, she did not answer when he first called. He tried her again two minutes later, then two minutes after that. She finally answered on the third call.

  “What, what, what?” she said. She sounded groggy, thick-tongued. In the background, Zhirov could hear her watch alarm sounding.

  “Station, how are you feeling?” Zhirov asked. Beckwith muttered something, but Zhirov could not make out what it was. “Station, turn off your watch,” he said.

  The alarm stopped and Beckwith spoke again. “What time is it, Vasily?”

  “Twelve-oh-eight hours.”

  “I mean in Washington.”

  “It’s 8:08 a.m. How did you sleep, Walli?”

  “Fine,” she muttered.

  “How do you feel?”

  “Horrible. Horrible.”

  Beckwith remembered absolutely nothing from the moment she fell asleep until this very moment, but all that rest had availed her nothing. Her disease had marched on as she slept. Her headache was still blistering, her vision still doubled, her neck still immobile. Even with the lights off in the Russian module, the bit of Earthlight streaming through the porthole made her squint. And she was just as exhausted as she had been before she’d gone to sleep.

  “Walli?” Zhirov said.

  “Hmmm . . .”

  “Hold for Houston. I’m patching in the flight surgeon. I’ll stay on the loop.”

  Beckwith said nothing, the line hissed and then clicked, and then the hiss went to a two-note harmonic. Both Mission Controls were now on the line.

  “Station?” came the voice of Charlene Boysen.

  “Copy,” Beckwith answered.

  “Moscow still here,” said Zhirov.

  “Copy.”

  “We can speak in confidence, Walli,” Boysen said. “
Air-to-ground channel is open to keep the press distracted, but they’re getting only static. Your mic is on a private loop.”

  Beckwith grunted in response.

  “Has there been any change in your status, station?” Boysen asked.

  “Generally worse.”

  “Any new symptoms?”

  “Affirm.”

  “Nausea?”

  “Affirm.”

  “Walli, do you have a rash?”

  Beckwith looked up and down her arms, but only quickly. The light of the module was too much to bear.

  “Negative, Houston.”

  “Everywhere, Walli,” Boysen said, “not just the parts you can see easily.”

  Beckwith groaned, rolled up her pants legs as far as she could and saw nothing. She peered down the front of her shirt and her chest was clear too. Then she lifted up the bottom of the shirt and was jolted. An angry patch of red was spreading across her abdomen and wrapping around to her back.

  “Houston,” she said, “affirm on the rash. Abdominal.”

  “Walli,” Boysen now said very deliberately. “What is the date?”

  “It’s September 15,” Beckwith answered.

  “Are you sure of that?”

  Beckwith hedged and covered. “I mean the sixteenth, the sixteenth,” she said quickly.

  “It’s September 18, Walli. What is your rank?”

  “I am a Naval Academy graduate and I was commissioned an ensign.” As she said it, she knew it was right and yet it was wrong too. Then things came clearer. “Now I’m a lieutenant commander.”

  “Who is the president?”

  Beckwith got that one right.

  Boysen let a moment lapse, and Beckwith could hear her partially covering her mic and muttering to someone off to her side. Then she came back on the line.