Holdout: A Novel

by Jeffrey Kluger

  “Status please, Soyuz,” Moscow called.

  “Status nominal,” she said.

  She realized that she was speaking through gritted teeth—the first sign of an astronaut struggling against gravity. She looked at the g-force indicator on the instrument panel. It read 0.5—or half of Earth’s gravity. Nothing at all, except in her weakened, weightless state it seemed like a lot more. Before this ride was over, she’d be flattened by sixteen times that tiny load. The engines burned for their planned four minutes and twenty seconds before they went silent, bringing instant relief from the fraction of a g.

  “Shut down,” Moscow called.

  “Shut down confirmed,” Beckwith responded.

  Though Beckwith couldn’t feel it, she, her mice, and her Soyuz were now in free fall, high-diving from space and aiming for a hard collision with the upper reaches of the atmosphere 175 miles below—which was itself seventy-five miles above the ground. It was at that atmospheric interface that the g-forces would start to climb and an incinerating temperature of three thousand degrees would turn the Soyuz into a meteor—albeit an electronic one with a human being and five mice inside, protected by a heat shield at its bottom.

  Before that could happen, the spacecraft had to get smaller, jettisoning the now-useless orbital module on top and the service module on bottom. The loss of the service module would also expose the heat shield, allowing it to protect the ship. Explosive bolts would execute the separations, leaving only the little gumdrop carrying Beckwith and the mice.

  The maneuver would kick the ship and thus kick Beckwith and thus kick her head. When the countdown happened and the bolts exploded, the kick did come, and while it hurt, it was a predictable pain, as it was, in effect, part of the flight plan and thus easier to take.

  But then something less predictable happened. “Soyuz, check your eight-ball please,” Moscow called.

  Beckwith flicked her eyes to the attitude indicator on a screen on the instrument panel: a computerized image of a free-floating ball, scored with hash marks indicating degrees in three-dimensional space, which showed the orientation of her spacecraft. A blue light was flashing at the point on the sphere over which crosshairs were supposed to be positioned. As long as her reentry orientation was correct, the crosshairs and the light should be perfectly in alignment. Now, Beckwith could see, they weren’t; the light was up and to the left of where it should be.

  “No joy,” she said.

  “Copy. Reading that here too. Please perform visual confirmation of separation, Soyuz.”

  “Stand by,” Beckwith said. Moscow was asking her to do nothing more than look out her window. She should see both junked modules tumbling away into space, proof that the separations had occurred as planned. She looked—and saw only the spherical orbital module.

  “Visual confirmed on orbital,” she said. “Stand by.”

  She drew as close to the window as she could, looking as far in all directions as possible. She could see the Earth, a few stars, and what she guessed might be the station, a very bright star point still in her field of vision. She could see nothing else.

  “Negative on service module,” she said.

  “Copy,” Moscow answered and went silent.

  The drill now called for Beckwith to do nothing at all for a moment while Moscow determined if the service module had failed to separate and was still attached stubbornly to the ship. If it was indeed still there, the drill would further call for Beckwith to hit the manual separation switch on the instrument panel in an attempt to override any error that prevented the explosive bolts from blowing as they should. All of the people on the ground and the one person in space knew that that was what she would ultimately be ordered to do, but they had to wait for all the steps to be taken and boxes to be ticked. Finally the call came.

  “Soyuz, Moscow.”

  “Manual detonation,” Beckwith said, for the second time today jumping ahead of the ground.

  “Manual detonation,” Moscow repeated.

  Beckwith flipped open the plastic cover of that switch, then flicked it to its detonation position; it did precisely nothing. She toggled it back and forth a few more times.

  “Negative, Moscow,” she said.

  “Copy your negative,” Moscow said. “Stand by.”

  This time there was no particular drill. Beckwith had felt the bolts exploding earlier at both ends of the ship, which was surely what Moscow’s telemetry confirmed. If the service module was still attached, that meant that only some of the bolts connecting it to the descent module had blown clean and at least one had failed. But one was all it would take. Even a partly attached service module would cause the Soyuz to reenter upside down, with the hatch over Beckwith’s head at the top of the spacecraft taking the fires of atmospheric friction, burning through and killing her well before the ship ever reached the ground. The heat shield at the bottom of the ship—which was covered by the service module—would remain uselessly pointed up toward space. Beckwith glanced at her altimeter. She had descended to 650,000 feet—or 123 miles—just fifty miles above the atmosphere. At the accelerating pace at which the spacecraft was descending, that collision of machine and air was just six minutes away.

  On the ground, TV coverage of the Senate vote was suddenly replaced by the scene inside Mission Control, alternating with a computer illustration of a clumsy two-thirds of a Soyuz, with its descent module in a nose-down death dive and its service module still attached. The legends “Crisis in Space” or “Emergency in Space” or “Plunge from Space” screamed at the top of the various news feeds.

  In Mesa, Virgil Beckwith gathered Mae into his arms. In the United States Senate, more than seventy-five senators crowded into the cloakroom and the rest watched their smartphones or tablet screens. In the dining room off the Oval Office, the president of the United States stood before his seventy-inch screen with his arms folded and then nodded to Carl Bart, who was standing as well, for a chair. Bart complied, the president sat, and for the first time in the memory of either one of them, Bart pulled over his own chair and sat in the president’s presence.

  At precisely the instant the Soyuz was supposed to collide with the atmosphere right side up, with its heat shield facing forward, it instead collided upside down, its hatch absorbing the blow. Beckwith felt the hit and glanced at her instruments. She was carrying 1.5 g’s.

  “Soyuz, Moscow, toggle separation again,” the Capcom called.

  Beckwith complied, pointlessly flipping the explosive-bolt switch back and forth. “Negative, Moscow,” she called.

  Through her doubled vision, the eight-ball on the instrument panel began to gyrate, and she could hear and feel the whoosh of her thrusters firing to compensate. The g-load climbed to 2.5. The weight sat across her chest and arms and legs and horribly in her head.

  “Hold tight, Soyuz,” Moscow called.

  “Hold tight, Walli,” Jasper echoed.

  Beckwith tried to say something in response, but she could barely choke out the words through a g-load she could now see was 3.4. Through her porthole, she saw an angry red glow of superheated plasma generated by the thousands-of-degrees heat; the hatch above her head could take no more than two minutes of that punishment. The Soyuz bucked wildly one way, then the other, then back again, as the altimeter read 316,000 feet—or just sixty miles over the unyielding Kazakh soil.

  And then Beckwith heard something—something that should have been terrifying but wasn’t. She heard a clang resonating through the cockpit—the clang of metal on metal. It was—it had to be—her loosening service module, trailing behind her, swinging side to side and banging against the bottom of the descent module. She was surely down to just one or two bolts and they were weakening, melting in the thickening air.

  Without thinking, Beckwith reached forward, punched three breakers on her instrument panel, and took manual control of the thrusters. She grabbed t
he joystick and began to yaw the spacecraft violently from side to side. The banging increased. The eight-ball—both in the spacecraft and on the control panels in Moscow—swung wildly in response.

  “Soyuz! Status!” Moscow barked.

  “Gone to manual,” Beckwith said.

  “Negative! Relinquish!” Moscow ordered.

  “Negative! Manual!” Beckwith answered.

  She continued to slam the control stick one way and then the other. The thrusters fairly screamed in response, the ship bucked harder, the banging grew louder. Somehow Beckwith made out the gravity meter on her instrument panel and saw it rise to 6.2 and felt that force crush the air out of her. She gave the joystick two more violent pulls to the left and to the right.

  And then, all once, the noise quieted, the bucking stopped, and the reentry module spun 180 degrees. Where Beckwith’s feet had been pointing, her head now was. Where her head had been pointing, her feet were. And much more important, where her overheated hatch had been—facing downward, threatening to burn through—her wonderful, impenetrable heat shield now was. The service module had broken free and tumbled away and the descent vehicle had righted itself.

  “Separation!” Beckwith shouted through her mic. “Separation!”

  “Separation confirmed!” exulted the Capcom in Moscow.

  “Woo-hoo!” came the voice of Jasper from Houston.

  Beckwith punched the instrument panel breakers again and returned control of the thrusters to the computer. The reentry was a free fall once more—a beautifully stable, bullet-like plunge through the thickening atmosphere. She looked out her window and saw the red glow brightening as the heat shield absorbed and shed its fires just as it was supposed to. She clenched her teeth and croaked out the g-readings.

  “Six-point-five,” she said. Then, “Seven-point-one.” Then, “Seven-point-eight.” And finally, “Eight-point-oh, Moscow.”

  At last she reached 35,000 feet—or 6.7 miles, no higher than a commercial airliner flies. Beckwith knew what was supposed to happen then and braced for it. At that instant, more explosive bolts fired, this time perfectly and reliably, blowing off the parachute cover near the top of the module. She was jolted violently as the tiny pilot parachute bloomed and billowed, pulling out two larger drogue chutes—which jerked her again. Still, she managed a smile as she saw her velocity indicator plunge from 755 feet per second, or 515 miles per hour, to just 216 feet per second, or 147 miles per hour. It was still a death plunge, but it would get much slower very soon.

  “Pilot and drogues deployed,” she called.

  “Confirm,” Moscow said.

  With that deployment, the g-meter plummeted too—to a much-closer-to-normal 1.8. The Soyuz continued its high-velocity fall, the air and the chutes bleeding off more speed, until at just 24,000 feet, or 4.5 miles, the huge orange-and-white main parachute deployed—fully, beautifully, floweringly. There was one more violent jerk as the Soyuz slowed to a sweet creep of just twenty-four feet per second, or sixteen miles per hour, and the g-meter displayed a round and perfect and so very Earthly 1.0.

  “Main deployed,” Beckwith called.

  “Copy your main,” Moscow said.

  “Almost home,” Jasper called.

  Beckwith cast one more look at the mice. Four of them, including Bolt, appeared badly shaken but intact. One of them was not moving. She looked closer; she was certain it was dead and patted the cage once more.

  Then she lay back, closed her eyes, and listened to the almost-nothing sounds around her. She could hear the hiss in her headset; she could hear the cabin fans; and now, in the distance, she was certain she could hear the whup-whup-whupping of helicopters. She looked out her window and saw four of them coming, tiny as mosquitoes below and to the west. Aboard one of them would be Sergei Rozovsky—the man who had made sixty-one other recoveries during the past fifteen years, the man who would make this one too because, in case anyone doubted it, “Mi vipolnyáem chërtovu rabótu.” We do the fucking job.

  The spacecraft continued to descend and descend, and the choppers continued to approach. And finally, when the Soyuz was just two hundred feet above the ground, Moscow called, “Brace for impact.”

  Beckwith rubbed her blurred and exhausted eyes, massaged her throbbing temples, and then took hold of the frame of her seat. The altitude meter counted down to just a hundred feet and then just a few dozen feet and then, finally, to less than three feet above the ground. At that moment, a final set of explosives lit, as six small braking rockets at the base of the ship fired for an instant, slowing its speed to just five feet per second.

  Then Beckwith felt a final thump as she hit the ground on the face of a world that she had refused to touch for a long time, but had dearly, dearly missed.

  “Soyuz is home,” she said and pumped a fist in silent celebration.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

  Sergei Rozovsky’s helicopter was indeed the first one closing in on the spot where Beckwith had bumped down. She had seen just four, coming from the west, but three more were to the east as well. For a ballistic reentry with a grievously ill astronaut aboard, Rozovsky had wanted as much ground cover as possible. The flight-tracking telemetry had been working itself into a sweat trying to analyze what the flapping, banging service module was doing to the trajectory, but Rozovsky, who had participated in five ballistic reentries before, ran different, better calculations in his head and led his group out to a spot within a single kilometer of where the Soyuz actually hit.

  Beckwith had remained as still as she could inside the silent, smoking spacecraft. The whole-body muscle tension of the reentry, plus her pounding head, immobile neck, and raging fever were bad enough. But experiencing all of them under the unfamiliar gravity of Earth was wretched. Intermittently, Houston, Moscow, and the communications officer in one of Rozovsky’s four helicopters would call, “Crew condition?” or, in the case of the helicopter officer, “Ekipázh sostóyan?”

  “Five,” she’d say to the two Mission Controls. “Pyaht,” she’d say to the man in the chopper. She knew the code and she knew the calls. She would announce herself the way she wanted and let the doctors prove otherwise.

  The mice were a different matter. As best as she could tell, she had four fours—shaken up but fine—and a one. The mouse she had feared was dead was indeed dead. She lay back and closed her eyes again and, in her fever, began imagining burying the dead mouse here on the steppe—having a little ceremony and digging a little grave and planting a little marker, and maybe in the future people would come to visit it and salute it and remember the story of the mouse who died a Hero of the Soviet Union, an award that hadn’t even existed since 1991, when the Union itself died. But never mind, the mouse had earned it, and just this once the medal could be given again. She sank further into a febrile dreaminess in which mice were flying and onion domes were rising and Vladimir Lenin was wearing a spacesuit, only it was also evening wear, and either way he had a cape, when at last she heard the whup-whup-whupping of the chopper blades nearing her ship. She made an effort through her feverish haze to straighten herself in her couch, which was positioned so that she was still lying on her back.

  Through her window, she thought she could see the four helicopters land. Rescue crews scrambled from them and quickly set upon the Soyuz. Beckwith could hear banging on the bulkhead as the wooden bracket was pushed to the side of the ship. Next came the hurried footfalls up the ladder and then the grinding and clanging of the latches at the top of the ship. At last the hatch opened.

  The circle of sky that flooded in was a brilliant blue-white, almost searing her eyes. It was followed by an impossibly fresh, impossibly cold blast of air from the steppe. It was wonderful, delicious, the finest air she’d ever breathed—and it revived her considerably. The circle of light filled and darkened, and she looked up to see the face of Rozovsky—smiling the smile he’d shown sixty-one times before, when he’
d cracked a hatch and seen his crew and felt genuine joy at being the first face they’d see in return.

  “Hello, Belka!” he called.

  “Hello, Sergei,” she said in what was mostly a whisper.

  “You look terrible.”

  “Please don’t tell them.”

  “I would give you a three.”

  “I feel like a two.”

  Rozovsky turned away and shouted, “She is a five.” Then he turned back and gave her his smile. Beckwith could have kissed him.

  She gingerly unbuckled her seat restraints and handed the mouse cage up to Rozovsky, who looked at it curiously and passed it on to someone outside. Then he reached low inside, and Beckwith reached high up for him. Their hands locked and he pulled her up, and more hands then reached inside and grabbed her. She was hoisted out into the sun and sat on the rounded top of the spacecraft, her feet on the top rung of the ladder.

  She looked around herself blinking, dizzy, swoony. She saw helicopters, off-road vehicles, Russian TV cameras. She also saw four uniformed officers from the Russian Federal Security Service—FSB, in the English initials for the Russian name. FSB was the son of the KGB and the grandson of the Revolutionary-era Cheka. Either way, the men were not a welcome sight. She put them out of her head and turned to Rozovsky.

  “What happened in America? In Washington? Is there news?”

  “What news?”

  “A vote,” she said. “In the Congress.”

  “America’s business,” Rozovsky said. “I don’t know.”

  The rescue team helped her down the ladder, and for the first time in nearly three months, there was scrub and hard-packed soil beneath her feet. But there was something wrong with it too. It felt like beach sand, sliding and collapsing under her weight and throwing her entirely off-balance. She started to fall and the rescuers caught her. She looked down. The ground was solid; it was she who was not.

  A medical team hurried toward her, carrying a collapsible chair. They unfolded the chair, sat her down, swaddled her in blankets, and began taking her vitals. Her fever was spiking at 104.1, her blood pressure was low, her heart rate was accelerated. They gave her a shot of some kind of narcotic painkiller, and Beckwith felt a pleasing drugginess flow through her immediately. They gave her another shot of what she assumed was a first dose of antibiotic. Then they lifted the chair, apparently planning to carry her to the helicopter.