Holdout: A Novel

by Jeffrey Kluger

  He stared Jo down and Jo stared back, and then Raymond—smaller than Jo, less battle-tested than Jo—shoved him aside with his shoulder, took two strides to the helicopter, and placed Oli inside. “We’re leaving,” he declared. “He’s coming.”

  Jo, who had surely allowed himself to be shoved, had allowed himself to be defied, took a final look at the violent, smoldering anarchy all around him.

  “OK, son,” he said. “We’ll go.”

  “Thank you,” Raymond answered simply, then hopped aboard the helicopter and hunkered down with Sonia and Oli as Jo took his seat and the helicopter roared and shook and lifted off.

  * * *

  • • •

  Beckwith watched the House vote on her laptop as it played out. When the intervention measure passed, she cheered so loudly that she swooned from the pain that shot through her head. She closed the lid of her laptop to rest her eyes and within a minute reopened it to watch the Senate vote.

  She had found that closing one eye made it easier to focus, as that singled down her vision, but keeping just one eyelid shut was much harder than closing both, and the effort made her headache worse. So she opened the Russian first aid kit, dug about for gauze and surgical tape, and fashioned a patch over her right eye. Her headache was slightly worse on the right and she figured that if she gave that side a rest it might ease the pain a bit. It didn’t.

  Just as the news stations picked up the feed of the Senate gaveling itself to order, the air-to-ground line crackled to life.

  “Station, Houston,” came the call.

  “Jasper, station,” Beckwith responded.

  “Congratulations on that vote,” he said. It was something he knew he shouldn’t say. They were back on open mic, the world was listening, and NASA was an apolitical operation. But Beckwith was his friend, and today that was what mattered.

  “There’s still the Senate,” she said. “They’re going to need the same backbone over there.”

  “How about you let us take care of all that and fill you in as we know? You’ve got a ride waiting.”

  Beckwith consulted the clock on the corner of her laptop screen. “Ingress in fifty-eight minutes,” she said.

  “Moscow wants you to start now,” he answered. “They figure you might need more time.”

  On cue, Moscow, which had been listening on the line, cut in. “Station, please initiate ingress procedure,” came a businesslike Capcom voice Beckwith didn’t recognize. Clearly, the Russians were in no mood for American chatter.

  “Copy,” she said.

  Ingressing early or not, Beckwith was going to track the events in Washington until the last possible moment. The Senate, she could see, was now officially in session, and the reading of the day’s business had begun. The first matter that would receive attention was the intervention, still warm from the House’s oven. The bill was expected to pass handily but, as in the early House forecasts, fall well short of the needed two-thirds, with the head count now standing at a projected 57 in favor and 43 against—ten stubborn votes short of the 67 needed. But the drama of her imminent reentry plus the upset victory in the House was causing a lot of political recalculation.

  Beckwith pulled on her Houston Astros sweatshirt, which she needed at the moment since her sickness had flipped its polarity from the sweltering side of her fever to the side with shaking and chills. That would not last long, she knew, and she’d need to strip right back down to shirtsleeves as soon as her temperature spiked again. She gathered her laptop and moved toward the Poisk module, passing first through the Zvezda to collect the mice. Hours before, she had transferred them into a single cage, which made them furious at first, as they spent the first few minutes floating about in a swarm, batting one another out of the way. Now, though, they seemed comfortable with—or at least resigned to—one another’s company and had gone off to separate corners of the cage, latched on with one paw, and stayed put there. Even Bolt didn’t want to float.

  “I’m sorry about this, kids,” she said. “You’ll have plenty of room back in Moscow.”

  Beckwith used a bungee cord to anchor both the cage and her laptop to the bulkhead inside the Poisk. She closed the hatch leading to the Zvezda and the rest of the station, confining herself and her mice to the one small module at the far end of the giant flying machine. Then she went to work on the hatch on the Poisk’s opposite wall—the hatch that led to the Soyuz.

  “Commencing hatch opening, Moscow,” she called down.

  “Copy, station,” the Capcom answered. “Doctor says to take it slow please.”

  Beckwith took mild offense at the suggestion. She was miserably ill, but she’d opened hatches in forty feet of water in complete spacewalking gear during emergency ingress training in the neutral buoyancy pool in Houston. She could certainly manage now.

  Only she found that she couldn’t. The hatch latch required muscle to move, and even the slightest exertion went straight from her arm up to her neck and head, sending lightning bolts of pain through her.

  “Smart doctor,” she muttered.

  More carefully now, she worked the Poisk hatch, got it open, and was faced immediately with another hatch, which belonged to the Soyuz itself. That one unlatched and swung open much more easily, and she peered inside. The Soyuz was a three-part spacecraft. The hatch opened into the top of a spherical pod called the orbital module, which was used for storage and as a work area when the spacecraft was flying free. The bottom of the orbital module opened into the gumdrop-shape descent module, which was where the cockpit and seats and instrument panel were. Attached to the back of the descent module was the service module, which housed the engines, fuel tanks, and other hardware. Like the trailer end of a tractor-trailer, the service module was neither accessible to the crew from inside nor visible to them through their sideways-facing windows. The Soyuz had the singular smell of a new car mixed with the slight metallic tang of space, and Beckwith felt a surge of warmth for the little vessel that would soon take her home.

  “Station—” Moscow began, but Beckwith cut the Capcom off.

  “Hold,” she snapped. “Stand by!”

  At the moment Moscow had begun to speak, the newscaster on Beckwith’s laptop mentioned the name of Senator Garry Oro, and she shot back out of the Soyuz to look at the screen. The networks had been alerted that Oro had lingered at his desk this morning until the last possible moment, working the phones and contemplating his vote. Now Beckwith could see the scene outside of his office as he emerged to make his way to the Senate floor. She’d enjoyed the conversation she’d had with him. He’d promised that he would always consider the counsel of a higher-ranking naval officer, and she’d believed him. The reporters swarmed toward him, and he cut them off before they could speak, anticipating what they would ask.

  “You will know my vote when I cast my vote,” was all he would say.

  No sooner had Oro vanished into an elevator than the scene on the screen cut back to the Senate floor in time to reveal a yea vote on the tote board, cast by the senior senator from Nevada. “A significant defection here,” called the newsman—and he was right.

  The senator was one of the five in his chamber whose anti-intervention state was turning most sharply in favor of military action, and he had clearly made the same calculation the House defectors had: Defying the party today was better than defying his constituents, who would soon enough have their way with him at the polls. A few other votes trickled in over the next minute, and the total on the tote board showed a meaningless but still welcome early count of 5 votes yea and 3 nay. The predicted total vote had switched to 58 to 42, closer but still well short of the necessary 67.

  Then, just as Beckwith was about to toggle back on to Moscow, came the thunderclap news that the junior senator from Oklahoma had followed the senior senator from Nevada and voted yea. The actual vote was now 7 yea and 3 nay, with the projection creeping up
to 59 to 41.

  Beckwith let out with a hoarse cheer, and Jasper immediately hailed her.

  “Station, Houston,” he said.

  “Copy,” she answered.

  “Moscow says you’re ignoring them. Show ’em a little love, please.”

  “Sorry,” she said. “Breaking news.”

  “Station,” Jasper repeated and then shifted his tone. “Walli Bee.”

  She picked up the change. “Listening, Jasper.”

  “We’re getting the news here too,” he said. “We’re tracking it. We will not keep you in the dark. But you ain’t going to be any damn good in Washington or anywhere else if you don’t make it home alive today.”

  “Copy, Jasper,” she said.

  “Are you watching your computer there?”

  “Affirm, Jasper.”

  “Turn it off, Walli. Turn it off now. You have a spacecraft to fly.”

  Jasper, her fine, smart friend, was right. She might never travel in space again. Actually, it was quite likely she never would. She had this one last mission, this one last landing to stick. She was a naval aviator, and she had not been behaving like one. She pulled off her eye patch and tossed it away to float aimlessly about the Poisk. The work ahead of her might demand the depth perception only two eyes could provide, and during the interludes when her vision did not double, that would be possible only with two eyes. Then she turned off the laptop, closed its lid, and left it bungeed to the wall for the next astronaut or cosmonaut who might come this way.

  “News off, Jasper,” she said. “Computer stowed. I’m on task.”

  “Thank you, Lieutenant Commander.”

  With that, Beckwith knew that the rest of her work today would be conducted entirely with Moscow. She set about doing it.

  “Moscow, station,” she called. “Please talk me through ingress.”

  The cosmonaut on the mic did just that, reminding her first to load any cargo she needed to bring home. Beckwith smiled; the only cargo she had was the mice. She unhitched the cage from the bulkhead and carried it, along with the bungee cord, into the Soyuz. She anchored the cage to the middle of the left-hand seat and patted it as if she were patting the mice themselves.

  “Eight g’s, kids,” she said. “I’m gonna need you to be strong.”

  At last she closed and sealed the Poisk’s docking hatch, then the Soyuz’s own hatch. Then she floated from the orbital module of the Soyuz into the gumdrop-shape descent module and sealed that hatch too. At last, confined to the descent module alone, she settled into the center seat—the commander’s seat, the seat that rightly belonged to Vasily Zhirov of the Golden Thousand—and buckled herself in. Tucked into a pocket on the right side of the seat was a plastic pouch that wasn’t part of the spacecraft’s standard gear. She pulled it out, closed one eye, and read the label. It was vodka, Polish, single-estate. She flipped it over. There was a note on the back. “For after landing,” was all it read.

  “Vasily,” she said aloud to herself, then keyed open her mic. “All right, Moscow, bring me home.”

  Moscow acknowledged and began reading up the procedures Beckwith would have to follow to power up the Soyuz and ready it for flight. With each switch she threw, each fan that came on or instrument panel display that flickered to life, she felt more and more enclosed by the Soyuz, a part of its ecosystem—dependent on it for her life. It was Beckwith and her spacecraft, and they would take this ride together.

  Houston, as always during a Soyuz reentry, would be second chair—there to assist but otherwise to stay quiet. Still, Beckwith now found that she very much wanted to know that Jasper would remain in the Capcom seat throughout her entire fiery ride to the Earth. The idea gave her some small comfort. There was no good way of confirming his whereabouts—not without making it clear that was just what she was doing. But she could always try a little misdirection. She keyed open her mic.

  “Houston, station,” she called.

  “Copy, station,” Jasper answered.

  “Sorry, Jasper. My mistake—meant to call Moscow.”

  “Copy, station,” he said again. And then he added, “Line’s always open.” He knew what she was doing; of course he’d know what she was doing. But she realized she didn’t mind.

  “Station, Moscow,” came the call from Russia. “You needed us?”

  “Never mind,” she said. “Just a comm check.”

  For the next few minutes, she and Moscow worked further along the checklist toward Soyuz separation—slowly cutting the electrical connections between the little spacecraft and the station, transforming the Soyuz into an independent flying machine. Twice during that call-and-response, Beckwith insisted that Moscow ask Houston to check the doings in Washington. Twice she got back nothing of note; the vote had advanced to an all-but-meaningless 8 to 5. Only thirteen senators had either the courage or the calculation to go on record. Eighty-seven more were still talking, arguing, dealmaking.

  “Cowards,” Beckwith muttered.

  “Stay on task, station,” Jasper said.

  At last the Soyuz was fully configured, and at last too the station had drifted to the point just over South Africa where a timely separation would put Beckwith on a long arc that would carry her from 250 miles above the Earth to the frigid plains of central Asia. Peering out the small porthole of the Soyuz, she could see the stark blue of the oceans cut by the jagged brown-green of the African coast.

  “Station, go for separation in three minutes on my mark,” the Moscow Capcom called.

  Automatically, the event clock on the instrument panel in front of Beckwith cycled to 3:00 and began counting down. Both she and Moscow held their silence. She scanned about the little cockpit, resting her eyes on the handful of switches and indicators she understood fully, making what sense she could of the others.

  “Two minutes,” Moscow called.

  “Copy two minutes,” Beckwith said.

  Thirty seconds later, Moscow called again: “Ninety seconds to separation.”

  Then came the call, “Sixty seconds.” Then, “Thirty seconds.”

  At twenty seconds, Beckwith gathered herself and focused her eyes as best she could on the switch in front of her with the Cyrillic abbreviation “Разд” and the English “Sep.” Both “Разделение” and “Separation” called upon her to do the same critical thing.

  Beckwith flipped open the plastic safety cover on the switch and hovered her finger above it—maintaining at least a hand’s-width distance. Separate two seconds too early above the southern oceans and you’d come down hundreds of miles off target in the Kazakh Steppe.

  “Ten seconds, station,” the Capcom called. He counted down aloud as Beckwith counted in her head, and at precisely the moment they both reached zero, she pressed the switch and quickly withdrew her hand.

  The spacecraft gave an upward lurch as the latches holding it to the station popped free and compressed springs shoved the Soyuz off at four inches per second—or less than a quarter of a mile per hour. To Beckwith, even that tiny acceleration felt liberating, thrilling.

  “Soyuz, Moscow,” the Capcom said. The change in call sign from “Station, Moscow” was equal parts unmistakable and unremarked upon. “We have clean separation.”

  “Copy separation,” Beckwith responded.

  On the floor of the Senate chamber in Washington, lawmakers gathered around a television in the adjacent cloakroom to watch. In Mesa, Arizona, Mae Beckwith reached for Virgil’s hand, and they held tight to each other as they watched the coverage alone in their little fan-cooled home. Among the people with the most invested in Beckwith’s safe reentry, only Sonia was not watching—at that moment unconscious and in surgery in the Mercado camp’s modest operating room.

  Beckwith, 250 miles above all of them, enjoyed her quiet drift. Released from the upward-facing Poisk module, the Soyuz rose slowly above the sta
tion; the farther it moved, the more of the football-field-size vessel that had been her home for nearly three months fit into her porthole. At first she could see only the Zvezda module, but soon her little window revealed the Zarya, then the Destiny, then the full sweep of the whole huge machine. She gave it a little salute.

  After another few minutes, the computers executed a fifteen-second burn of the Soyuz thrusters, pushing her a full twelve miles above and behind the station. With that, the timeline—and time itself—seemed to compress. Beckwith could feel the thrusters nudging the ship this way and that—tiny shifts in orientation, like a sleeping person fidgeting for just the right position, as the Soyuz prepared for the far longer, far more powerful braking burn of its main engine that would slow it below the critical 17,500 miles per hour orbital speed and send it falling toward Earth. Beckwith looked down at the mice’s cage, bungeed onto the left-hand seat.

  “We’re in good hands, boys and girls,” she assured them.

  Finally the Soyuz found a position it liked—flying rump forward at the precise angle for a precise landing. There was a quick callout from the ground of fuel pressures and temperatures, which Beckwith confirmed with the help of the indicators in front of her that she was able to read. Then there was another countdown, from the same mark of three minutes to ninety seconds to sixty seconds to ten seconds and then the backwards countdown toward zero.

  Finally the Moscow Capcom sang out, “Ignition.”

  “Ignition confirmed,” Beckwith said—and she felt every bit of it.

  Braking engines were popguns compared to the massive main engines of the space shuttle and the Soyuz rockets that had taken Beckwith to space before, but after months in zero-g, they hit with hammer force. She could hear and feel the engines’ vibration through the body of the ship as the sudden deceleration shoved her back in her couch. Her entire body took the blow, but the force—and the pain—seemed concentrated in her head. She emitted an involuntary bark of pain.