“I was nervous,” she answered.
“I didn’t notice.”
“Thank you.”
Jasper took a swallow of his Cutty. “Walli Bee?” he typed.
“Yes?” came the response.
“You mean this thing, right? You mean to stay?” He knew the answer. He was stalling.
“Yes,” she wrote. “Of course.”
“You know this could mean jail? Actually, it WILL mean jail.”
“I know that.”
“Walli Bee?” he typed again.
This time the delay in her response was longer than could be accounted for by the air-to-ground system. She was stalling too.
“Yes?”
Jasper plunged ahead. “Is this about Kandahar?”
“No,” came the immediate response.
Jasper began to compose his thoughts, but before he could, Beckwith answered again.
“Yes,” she typed. “A little.”
He had not needed the answer. He knew it was about Kandahar, and it was probably a bigger part than Beckwith was admitting.
When Beckwith was flying jets off carriers, it was agreed among the pilots that she didn’t so much pilot her planes as gallop them. Pilots who galloped their planes were said to fly them with a sixth sense, as if the machines were living things, understanding what their hidden tics and hiccups were, and how to coax the very most out of them in the very worst situations. Beckwith could do all of that, and what she understood especially well was a plane’s range. The manual might tell you that you could get 1,458 miles out of a Boeing Growler with a full tank of fuel, or 2,069 out of a Super Hornet. Try to go farther than that when you were over open ocean and you’d drop $70 million worth of US Navy property in the drink. But that was only if you believed the manual more than you believed what you felt when you were in the seat. Beckwith very much believed what she felt.
She could tell if a freshly serviced plane had been poorly tuned and was not flying at its best, or had been well tuned and could fly more nimbly and be pushed farther than the manual said it could. “Walli Bee,” Jasper had once said to her, “you can fly on nothing but fumes and ladyballs.” She took it as the finest compliment he’d ever paid her.
But that kind of instinctual flying wasn’t allowed on one of her last combat runs before she left active service to join NASA, when she and a flight of five other Super Hornets were on a surveillance mission over Afghanistan, taking off from the Eisenhower, which at that moment was stationed in the Arabian Sea due east of Oman. There had been multiple insurgent strikes around Kandahar during the previous month, and more than 150 civilian lives had been lost. Beckwith’s group was flying low, looking for hostiles and their vehicles, equipped with Sparrow air-to-ground missiles that would eliminate the threat of another attack before it could begin.
They’d been flying for hours and were all low on fuel, reaching the drop-dead cutoff point before they wouldn’t have enough to make it back over the sea and out to the carrier. They made one last pass over the Kandahar-Bamiyan Highway, near a commercial area that was close to a school, a wedding venue, and a hospital. All three of these extremely soft targets looked clear and the flight commander had just given the order to return when suddenly, to Beckwith’s eye, all didn’t look clear. A slow-moving truck had left the highway and was moving in the direction of the school. The truck was on a commercial road but draped for desert camouflage. Beckwith didn’t like a single thing about it.
“Swinging back around,” she radioed the commander.
“Negative,” he responded. “Break off and follow.”
“Possible trouble here, sir,” she pressed.
“There’ll be trouble here,” he snapped, “if you don’t break off, Lieutenant Commander.”
“Sir, it’s a truck—” she began, but he cut her off again.
“You are out of fuel, Lieutenant Commander! You will break off.”
“But there’s a school—”
“You will break off!” the commander shouted this time.
Now, at last, Beckwith obeyed. Defying a direct order in a combat zone would be a court-martial offense. She wheeled around, rejoined the group, and spent the entire fifty-eight-minute flight back to the ship pleading with circumstance, with chance, with the random fates of war, to spare the school from the attack she was certain had happened.
It was not spared. The school had been one for girls and it was fully attended that day. Only minutes after Beckwith had turned and flown off, the truck pulled up and thirty-two of the students, along with their young teacher, were killed in a spray of automatic weapons fire and the blasts of multiple grenades. The next day, another flight of Super Hornets went back in search of the group responsible but found nothing. Even if they had, nothing would have changed the arithmetic of what had happened: Beckwith had seen what was coming, was in possession of a jet and the weapons that could have saved thirty-three lives, and she did not act; she did not act because, at bottom, the threat of punishment and the loss of her career had stopped her, had rendered her obedient.
She would tell herself that it was the commander’s order that was to blame. Jasper would tell her that too when they spoke by phone one day later when the after-action report was back and the girls, some of them as young as six, were identified. And it was true. She was not permitted to disobey a command. But she was able to disobey it if she had chosen. She didn’t choose—and so the girls died.
On that very day, Beckwith promised herself that if she were ever in such a position again, she would not break off, no matter the consequences. She told Jasper of that resolve; to say it aloud would make it harder for her not to hold herself accountable when the time came. Now it had.
“Walli Bee,” Jasper typed, sitting in his seat at a bar that was slowly emptying of its last customers, “this isn’t the same thing.”
“It’s close enough,” Beckwith answered.
“You’re in very real jeopardy.”
“So are the people down there.”
Jasper contemplated how best to respond, but Beckwith preempted him, “Where are you, Jasper?”
He smiled. “I’m having a Cutty. Having a Cutty with you and Wally.”
Two hundred and fifty miles overhead, she smiled too. “I’m glad,” she wrote. “It’s late. Finish your drink, take a sip for me, and go home.”
They both signed off, and Jasper took a final swallow of his Cutty. Over the last two days, Joe Star had sent him a pair of emails that he’d read but ducked. No one in NASA knew the details of his and Beckwith’s past, but plenty of people had long since figured out that there had been a past. Star wanted to know if Jasper, with his intimate knowledge of who Beckwith was, had any ideas about what might best persuade her to come home. Jasper had not been sure he had anything to offer. Now he did. He scrolled back through his emails, found Star’s latest, and responded.
“Give her what she wants,” he wrote. “Give her what she wants and she’ll come home.”
* * *
• • •
The president had been glaring at national security reports all morning. They had been included in his daily brief, which he opened at just after 8:00 a.m. By 8:05 he was in a foul mood from which he hadn’t emerged for hours. After each of his meetings he’d pick up the security report and narrow his eyes at it menacingly. His aides had gotten used to this—his habit of returning and returning to some report or bit of news that had displeased him, staring daggers at it and defying it to transform itself into something more to his liking.
Today the news that was troubling him was dispatches from aid workers and independent humanitarian groups on the ground in South America. The reports revealed that displacement and refugee totals had now climbed to more than 150,000, about half of whom were wandering the jungle while the other half had been herded into the western border camps that no one e
ven pretended anymore were “lush tribal lands”—even if the Brazilian government continued to use the phrase.
The cable channels and the editorial pages that had been calling out repeatedly for the president and the US military to intervene had only gotten louder, now that they had Beckwith to whip them up, but he remained immovable. First of all, he didn’t necessarily trust that the reports from the jungle were solid. The sources were unreliable—amateur fieldworkers and do-good volunteer groups, all of whom, he believed, had every incentive to inflate the refugee totals. The president’s National Security Council had told him that its own estimates did track those of the aid groups, but he was still unpersuaded.
What’s more, there was the president’s stated and, for better or worse, sincere aversion to mixing in foreign wars. He had wanted to call his policy America First—he actually pleaded with his advisers to let him call it America First—but even before he ran for office, the phrase had accumulated more baggage than a steamship and his campaign manager threatened to quit if he used it. His aides focus-grouped alternatives, and to the president’s exceeding annoyance, American Objectives was the easy winner. “Sounds like a hedge fund,” he grumbled. Still, that was the term his voting base liked, and whatever the policy was called, the no-foreign-wars promise remained popular with a solid majority of them.
But there was a more troubling side to the American president’s aversion to getting in the way of the Brazilian president’s policies—or at least that’s what his opponents claimed. When it came to disdain for indigenous peoples, the critics argued, the two leaders were of one dark mind. That was a reputation the American president had brought on himself.
It was when he was serving his single term as governor of Oklahoma that the yearlong protest staged by the Sioux Nation against the construction of the Dakota oil pipeline across their native lands played out. The then-governor had penned an opinion column for the Oklahoma Tribune opposing the protesters and supporting the oil company. He had made no secret to his aides of his disgust with the idea of what he called a “ragged tribe that fancied itself a nation” standing in the way of necessary industrial development. In the first draft of his column he had included the line “We cannot let the stone age stand in the way of the silicon age.”
His aides pleaded with him to cut the patently offensive passage, and he acceded—especially after the line was leaked by a disgruntled junior staffer, leading to all manner of blowback from Native American groups. But the then-governor played cute too. In his final draft, which he sent to the paper without his aides’ sign-off, the word “stone” appeared three times: once when he called the tribes a “stone in the shoe of progress,” once when he accused the tribal leaders of “throwing verbal stones” rather than engaging in a dialogue with Washington, and a third time when he actually managed to get the words “stone” and “age” to bump right up against each other. Ending one sentence with the complaint that the tribes had been “implacable as stone,” he began the next with the claim that “age has been a factor in the uprising,” with irresponsible young people adversely influencing adults. When the editorial ran, supporters of the tribes picked up on the unsubtle dog-whistling, while supporters of the then-governor insisted that such an interpretation was nonsense. The governor himself, pleased with his wordplay, had some sharp words for his staff: “That is the last time you ever try to edit me.”
The “Tribune incident,” as critics of the now-president called it, continued to haunt him. It was partly because of that, and partly as an attempt to appease the activists and the press, that the president now decided to throw his weight, or at least his grudging approval, behind the move by members of both parties to hold their vote demanding military intervention on September 18. The plan was to introduce one bill in the House and a virtually identical one in the Senate, vote on them the same day, and reconcile them quickly, disposing of the matter and sending it on to the White House as expeditiously as possible. With the president’s party enjoying a majority in both the House and Senate, the White House had been confident that the legislation would not pass in even one of the two chambers.
But now there were these reports in the president’s morning brief, which he just knew he shouldn’t have read. If they were already being circulated by the aid workers and other groups nosing around the Amazon, they would surely be picked up and run with by the press. And the mutinous Walli Beckwith would surely run with what the press ran with, which in turn would rattle the lawmakers who would have to cast their votes on September 18. Her act of naked criminality was now in its fourth day, and the public was absolutely loving the show.
One network had already begun running on-screen chyrons reading, “The Holdout: Day One,” which became day two and three and now day four, and could, as far as the president knew, go on for the rest of his entire term. On another, there was the “Walli Watch,” a tagline for regular station updates that affiliates in no fewer than thirty-four markets adopted. The president’s political advisers had nothing to offer him except that he should project leadership, stay above the fray, and not engage publicly with Beckwith. But what he was in the mood for was very much to engage with her. And so when his morning meetings were done, he canceled his first two afternoon appointments and called for Connie Polk. He might not like her much, he might already have begun looking for a second-term replacement for her, but she was a knife fighter, and that he very much admired.
“Mr. President?” she said as she entered. He liked the way she always framed it as a question; it was the only bit of real deference she ever showed him.
“Connie,” he said airily. “Sit, sit.”
He liked the way too that she obeyed, sitting on command. The thought flitted briefly through his head that once he retired he’d buy a dog, name it Connie, and make sure that fact was released to the press.
“What can I help you with, sir?” she asked.
“Beckwith,” he answered.
She nodded. “We’re working on that. We can prosecute at will once she returns, probably a military court-martial. The Russians are being cagey about their intentions. She’ll eventually land in Kazakhstan, so Moscow will have her first, and what happens then is up to them. The Japanese are furious; they spent $6 billion on their Kibo module, and they don’t like the idea of a criminal trespassing on it. They’ll likely indict her immediately.”
“And the Europeans?”
“Hungary, Italy, Poland, Norway, Germany, and Greece all want to prosecute. France is opposed. The other fifteen nations have not yet committed.”
“France,” the president sniffed. “What’s holding the Russians back?”
“They want to tie a prosecution to continued aerospace sales. We keep buying their RD-180 rocket engines, they’ll indict Beckwith and then extradite her here.”
“Are the engines any good?”
“They’ll do,” Polk said.
“Have they killed anybody yet?”
“No.”
“Then tell them we’ll keep buying them.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Connie,” the president said confidentially. He leaned forward and glanced to either side, as if to make sure nobody else was listening.
Polk hated when he did that. It was his client pose, the one he’d assume when he wanted to confide in her as if she were his personal attorney. She had discreetly asked his chief of staff to remind him that was not her role, and the chief of staff had said he would. If he in fact did, the president hadn’t absorbed the lesson. He went on.
“This is not a fight I can lose,” he said.
“No, sir.”
“A war in Brazil would eat my first term, and I’ll have nothing to show when it’s time for the second. It would be nice to wrap this up quickly, well before the midterms.”
“How can I be of help?”
“We could lean on the rocket companies—Arcadia and CelestiX.
”
“Lean on them?” Polk asked warily.
“Tell them to get flying pronto so I can send someone up to bring her home—the astronaut.” He waved his hand, as if mentioning Beckwith’s name would only dignify her. “I can’t be seen to be sitting here waiting for the Russians to do our work for us.”
“Sir, neither company can fly right now. Not with the strike at Arcadia and the explosion at CelestiX.”
“Tell ’em I’ll nationalize them then. Truman tried it with steel; I’ll do it with space.”
“Mr. President,” Polk said as levelly as she could. “Launching a rocket is an order of magnitude harder than running a steel mill. You’ll only look reckless—decisive, but reckless.” She added the “decisive” as a balm, hoping it would appease him and cause him to switch tracks. It did.
“Look into her past then—Beckwith’s.”
“We’re doing that. There’s nothing there to work with, and what there is you want no part of. Naval Academy, fighter pilot, astronaut—hero business.”
“What about her family?”
“There’s not much. A niece, both parents, a few cousins,” Polk answered.
“Husband?”
“She’s never married.”
“Hmph,” the president said with a knowing smirk.
Polk did not respond.
“Look into the parents then,” he said.
“I doubt there’s anything there either. They’re old-school engineers—early space program. Retired in Arizona. They do a little consulting work on the side to stretch their pensions.”
“Send someone to visit them anyway—badge-and-earpiece types. That gets people talking.”
A great many things Polk would have liked to say went through her head. Instead, she settled for, “Yes, sir.”
She rose and turned to leave before the president could declare the meeting over. He raced to catch up. “You may go, Connie,” he said, pointlessly.
CHAPTER NINE
Whatever entrance Vasily Zhirov might have wanted to make into Moscow Mission Control when he returned from space was not the one he actually got to make. Zhirov might have been a national hero, but he wasn’t above his vanities, and no sooner had he landed in Kazakhstan than his mind shifted to the grand scene that would play out later that evening at Mission Control, when he strode into the room having come straight from an emergency evacuation in space—still carrying some of the cosmic shimmer, still smelling of thruster fuel. There would be hugs; there would be handshakes. He would smile and express his thanks, but he would make short work of the greetings, take a seat at a console, and resume command of his mission. After a full eight-hour shift was done, then there would be time to accept the controllers’ plaudits with cognac toasts in an adjacent meeting room.
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