Holdout

by Jeffrey Kluger

  The system was attached to the exterior of the Zarya module and consisted of two cameras—one for medium resolution and one for ultrahigh resolution. They were nicknamed Zoe and Ivy, and Beckwith adored them both. The first time she had a chance to try them out, she peered down into Wrigley Field during a Chicago Cubs afternoon game. She could see—from space—that the Cubs were just shy of a sellout that day. Using Zoe and Ivy without clearance from both Moscow and Houston Mission Controls was forbidden, and it was a rule Beckwith had so far not broken. But during her broadcast to Earth, she had promised she would be watching the jungle from space, and the system was indisputably the most effective way of doing that. She drifted into the Zarya and fired up the twin cameras, and no sooner had she done so than Mission Control hailed her.

  “Station, Houston,” came the call. It was Jasper; in the last twenty-four hours, it almost always seemed to be Jasper. Beckwith wasn’t keeping precise track of how many Capcoms were in the current rotation or when they were working their shifts, but it seemed to Beckwith that he was now putting in up to fourteen hours a day.

  “Don’t you ever sleep, Jasper?” she said.

  “Trying to keep up with you, Walli Bee,” he answered. “We’re seeing some activity on Zoe and Ivy. Can you confirm?”

  “Confirm. I’ll be working the girls for a little while.”

  “Procedure calls for you to ask permission first.”

  “May I?”

  “Walli . . .” Jasper said with a note of warning.

  “I’ll stay out of trouble,” Beckwith said, and before Jasper could answer, she muted the line.

  Carefully then, she oriented the cameras, took a bead on the ground, and looked with delight as the image they were capturing—the Pacific surf washing up white against the northern part of the long Chilean coast—resolved on her monitor. She focused it more finely, captured a stretch of beach, and while she couldn’t quite make out any people, she did manage to see what she believed to be a pair of dune buggies; they appeared to be racing.

  She watched as the station quickly crossed the shoestring width of the Chilean nation and into Bolivia, following a sharp northeastern trajectory. The path would take her over northwestern Brazil, and if she managed Zoe and Ivy deftly, she could see a fair bit of the way into the central Amazon too.

  As the jungle drifted below her, Beckwith felt a sting of grief at the thick green canopy, scarred in so many places by the bare, scabby patches of char and ash where there had once been trees. Then, suddenly, her gaze shifted. She spun the cameras’ high-resolution system to sharpen the image further and then further still. She locked it on a patch of ground near the Brazilian-Bolivian border and her eyes widened. She pulled the image back, scanned east, and telescoped down to another spot. With mounting alarm, she repeated the scan and zoom three more times in three more locations, with the same results. There was hardware, there was armor, there were soldiers, there were fire cannons. She cursed herself for having left her laptop back in her sleep pod. She darted out of the Zarya, back to the American segment, dove into the pod, grabbed the computer, booted up the phone app, and hit the speed-dial tab with Sonia’s face next to it. Far below, in the Bolivian jungle, Sonia’s phone vibrated in her pocket and she answered it.

  “Sonia!” Beckwith shouted. “Baby! Get out of there!”

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  Sonia Bravo-Beckwith was unaware that anything terrible was about to happen in the moments before the jungle began to burn. In the days she’d been in the Mercado camp in Bolivia, she’d spent little time outside the pediatrics building at all, tending the children who had been chased from their lands and continued to arrive, exhausted, hungry, sick with parasites, and in many cases suffering burns from fires that had claimed their communities but at least spared their lives. Some of the children, if they were small enough and not infectious, were sleeping two to a bed. Sonia caught naps in the increasingly crowded staff tents when she could and bunked down in Oli’s small bed with him at night, since the boy would not go to sleep after dark if she was not by his side.

  There was still a cyclone of grief and terror swirling in his head, though she saw only occasional gusts of it. He would stick close to her as she made her rounds, then would return to his bed, sometimes only an hour after he had gotten up in the morning, and fall into a deep, twitching sleep from which he could not be awakened. He once walked beyond the safety of the walls entirely, telling Sonia he was waiting for his father to pick him up. Sonia, unsure how to respond, said she’d wait with him. He looked at her oddly, said there was no point waiting because his father was dead, and walked back into the camp.

  But he managed his sorrow in other ways too. The day after he killed the butterfly, he wandered to a cluster of trees and began staring up at the trumpet-shaped flowers growing everywhere on the branches. He was looking for the Mainumby, he told Sonia, but when she asked him what the Mainumby was—or were—he shushed her and told her she would scare them away. So she went back into the pediatrics building, searched the term on her computer, and found that, like the Isondú and the Panambi, the Mainumby were animals—in this case hummingbirds—whose job was to transport good spirits living in flowers back home to Tupá, or God. Perhaps if his father and his grandmother weren’t to be found in the glowworms and the butterflies, they might be in the trumpet flowers and the hummingbirds might carry them home.

  Sonia had an idea. She hurried to the food tent, boiled water, and dissolved several large tablespoons of sugar into it, then selected a bottle of red food coloring from a collection of colors the kitchen staff sometimes used to bake birthday cakes for the children when there were enough eggs, flour, and other supplies on hand to permit such an extravagance. She colored the water and poured it into a bowl. When she was a girl, this was exactly the mixture her father would use to fill the hummingbird feeder in their backyard, easily attracting the birds, which were drawn by the color and then drawn back when they sampled the energy hit the sugar gave their high-speed metabolism. Sonia carefully carried the now-cooling bowl back to Oli, who was still standing under the tree. He cocked his head curiously when he saw her approach. She set the bowl on the ground, then put her finger to her lips.

  “Shhh . . .” she said. “Sit.” He obeyed and then she pointed up to the trees. Within minutes, two hummingbirds appeared, drinking nectar from the trumpet flowers but twice swooping down toward the bowl and the giant boy beside it—clearly interested but staying just out of reach. Oli beamed.

  For the next two days, the boy spent much of his time under the trees, by his bowl, watching for the hummingbirds and sometimes napping in the warm sun when they weren’t about. But each time they did appear, they drew closer and closer to the bowl until finally, to Oli’s utter but silent delight, they hovered above it and sipped from it. He gently extended his hand while they drank, inviting them to alight. If they did, Oli told Sonia, that would mean they were carrying his father and his grandmother and they could go back to Tupá.

  “Yes,” Sonia said to him. “That’s exactly what it will mean.”

  Now, on the morning that Walli Beckwith saw what she saw from space and grabbed her computer to call her dauhter, Sonia stepped outside of the pediatrics building and heard a hoarse whisper from the stand of trumpet flower trees.

  “So-nee-ya!” it said. Sonia turned to look and her jaw dropped. Oli was sitting on the ground, cross-legged, his right arm extended. A pair of hummingbirds with ruby breasts and emerald heads sat on his hand, drinking from a small pool of the red sugar water in his palm. Sonia clapped her hand over her mouth, and Oli nodded vigorously, ecstatically. And it was at that instant that Sonia felt her phone vibrate in her pocket and, worse, begin to ring, in a frequency that was clearly intolerable to the hummingbirds, which leapt from Oli’s hand and took back to the trees. Oli cried out in frustration, and Sonia grabbed her phone and barked into it.

  “What!” she said,
not caring who was calling and whom she might be offending. She heard the signature hiss and crackle from space, followed by Beckwith’s voice calling down to Earth. Only in this case she was screaming down to Earth. Sonia didn’t hear Beckwith call her name; that was lost in the static. She didn’t hear the “Baby!” that followed it, but she did unmistakably hear the “Get out of there!”

  “What is it?” she shouted back.

  “Fires, Sonia! Get away!”

  “How do you—” Sonia started to ask, but the signal faltered and broke.

  Sonia stared at the phone, first in alarm, then in annoyance. There was no fire. She scanned over the wall and into the surrounding jungle. It was quiet, even windless, and she smelled neither diesel nor smoke on the air. She turned a full 360 degrees and saw the same calm everywhere. And then, due east, something changed. The faintest flicker of orange and yellow and, above both, a shimmer of violet that wasn’t quite violet. Her heart jumped. As she watched, all three colors—the orange, the yellow, and the almost violet—bloomed higher.

  Sonia tore her gaze away and bolted for Oli. She hoisted him up and then pivoted toward a small playground that had been set up for the children near one of the camp walls and lit off, knowing that two doctors had herded at least a dozen children there not half an hour earlier. As she ran, she heard a sound coming in from all directions, one that she could not identify and then, an instant later, could. It was the sound of helicopters—many, many helicopters, but not the kind she had heard before. The medical helicopters had a deep, throaty quality to them, and while their roar was fearsome, it promised a certain protective power. This sound was higher, angrier, waspier, promising only menace. As quickly as she recognized what the sound was, she could just make out the terrible machines that were making it—black, small, flying low, approaching the hospital from seemingly everywhere. As her sprint carried her closer to the play area, she could see that the dozen children and the two hospital staffers minding them were standing rooted, staring up at the approaching swarm.

  “Children!” Sonia cried out breathlessly. “Enfants! Crianças!” The children and doctors turned. “This way, this way, this way!” Sonia shouted, waving her arm forward in the general direction of the pediatrics building. The doctors herded the children forward and they all raced after Sonia.

  They ran-stumbled as a group, fighting their way through the crowds of people who had come outside of the hospital buildings and residence tents, looking up at the sky just as the children had been. People who were already outside sprinted to get into the same buildings and tents. There was panic everywhere, zigzag running everywhere. There were collisions and cursing and screaming and chaos, the muffled thud of flesh and bone colliding with flesh and bone.

  The helicopters now approached close enough and descended low enough that a flag painted on their flanks and undersides was possible to discern. It featured three horizontal bands—black, yellow, and black—with two black stars in the middle yellow band. There was no country that flew this flag, no regiment or militia that wore it. It was a nothing flag, an invented flag, a flag designed to maintain the ruse that the action in the jungle was not the work of one country—much less just one man leading the one country—but a bold initiative by a new alliance.

  The armed guards protecting the hospital sprinted toward the opening in the wall, blocking the entry as they’d practiced and pointing their weapons at the sky. They were big men and there were ten of them, and until moments ago they had seemed terribly brave and powerful. Now they seemed useless, silly. The moment they assumed their positions, several of the helicopters turned their noses their way. Their doors flew open, and there was suddenly a series of bright flashes and terrifying bangs on the ground, as the men in the helicopters tossed stun grenades down at the men guarding the opening in the wall—all of whom fell back, temporarily blinded and deafened, the balance systems in their inner ears blasted into uselessness. Three of them vomited where they lay.

  The helicopters landed and dozens of men poured out—wearing black-and-yellow camouflage fatigues, all of them with the nonsense flag on the shoulder and chest. All of them carried weapons too. They quickly disarmed the disabled guards, and two of the soldiers moved them, at gunpoint, toward a clearing under a single tree. The rest of the soldiers stormed into the hospital enclosure.

  Pandemonium followed, with patients and even some aid workers stampeding in every direction at once—which meant no direction at all—shoving one another, falling on top of one another, more than a few trampling one another. Inevitably there would be an audible crack that to the untrained ear of most of the people in the camp was easy to miss, but to the trained ear of the emergency physicians was the unmistakable sound of a bone snapping—followed by the unmistakable sound of a person screaming—likely from having been stepped on in the crush. Other cracks, gunshots aimed upward, followed, but they merely made the panic worse, and the soldiers who had fired them stopped.

  Mia was the only doctor in the pediatrics building and quickly rousted the children out of their beds and toward the wall farthest from the opening. She shoved several beds in front of them, forming a barricade that could be easily tossed aside by one strong soldier with one strong arm, but created a faint illusion of safety for the children. She then positioned herself at the building’s door, with her arms folded and her feet set wide and planted. Two soldiers—one of them a tall, broad wall of a man—approached her without words. Their guns were pointed downward, and they flashed something approaching smiles. Mia stepped forward and signaled them to stop. When they continued to approach and were in reach, she stepped toward the bigger man and shoved her hands hard into his chest.

  “Páre!” she snapped. “Eu disse para parar!” Stop! I said to stop!

  The smaller man scowled, but the big man seemed untroubled by either Mia’s tone or the hard slap of her hands. She struggled to say more in Portuguese, but her poor command of the language and the high emotion of the moment would not let her form her thought. She switched to English.

  “You may not enter this ward,” she said.

  “I am ordered to enter it,” the big man answered in accommodating Brazilian-accented English.

  “You have no authority. You are in Bolivia now, not Brazil.”

  He nodded slightly toward the insignia on his chest. “I am not sent here by Brazil, and I’m here on peaceful business.”

  Mia jabbed a finger toward the opening in the wall where the guards had just fallen. “Those men would not say it was peaceful.”

  “Those men had guns; we have more. It was necessary to stop them from taking actions that would have resulted in their deaths.” Even at a distance, the guards were visible, sitting under the tree where the soldiers had taken them. “You see? Unharmed,” the soldier said. “We mean your children no harm either. We are simply here to provide everyone but the hospital staff safe transit to new residences in Brazil. As you see, there are fires and the journey could be dangerous if they try to make it on their own.”

  “These are sick babies,” Mia said. “They cannot be moved.”

  “They must be,” the soldier said. “And they will be.”

  Mia took a half step forward, and the guard responded with a slight quarter turn, presenting his shoulder to Mia. He took one step and pushed her easily, though carefully, aside. “Com licença,” he said. With permission.

  He and the other soldier now entered and nodded to the children, who screamed at the sight of them and retreated farther behind the barricade of beds.

  “Bebês,” the bigger man said with a smile that the other soldier tried to mimic. The babies howled louder.

  Another voice now came from outside as Sonia ran toward the building with Oli in her arms and other staffers and children close behind her. “What is this? What is this? What is this?” she shouted, breathing hard.

  She forced her way into the building, with the rest of
the group behind her. The soldiers now found themselves in the center of the ward, facing more than two dozen children and four adults in front of them and behind them. They liked neither the arithmetic nor the positioning. The smaller soldier lifted his rifle in the general direction of Sonia and the group that had just arrived. The children screamed again. The bigger soldier placed his hand on the barrel and pushed the gun back down toward the floor. When he spoke, his voice was harder, less conversational. And he used Portuguese, with not a word of accommodating English.

  “We are leaving here soon. We are taking everyone but the medical staff. The rest of these people came from the jungle and if left alone would return to the jungle, to lands that are no longer safe for them. We will take them to new homes, good homes”—he tried his smile—“homes not far from here, in fact, just across the border.”

  “You cannot do this!” Sonia snapped.

  “Senhorita, we can do this,” the soldier answered. “We are doing it.” The smaller man then raised his rifle again, and this time the other soldier did not stop him. “All of the children will come,” he said.