Holdout

by Jeffrey Kluger

  She hit send, and the message, riding the electromagnetic updraft of the helicopter’s satellite link, went straight to space. Sonia put the phone back in her pocket, hoping to feel the vibration of a return message, but before it could come, the helicopter flew through another dense smoke bank, distracting her from anything other than simply trying to breathe and remain conscious. She lost the second of those two battles and for the remainder of the flight hovered in a state of nauseated near-blackout, returning to full awareness only when she felt the hard thump of the copter skids hit the ground in Brazil. When she jolted awake, she noticed two things: a swirl of activity outside the door of the helicopter and Jo’s voice barking orders.

  “Hit the deck, hit the deck!” he shouted to the doctors. “Go, go, go!”

  People trained in medicine might not have been accustomed to the ways and the language of the military, but they obeyed them all the same, climbing over Sonia, who had yet to orient herself fully, and leaping to the ground.

  “Be careful, be careful!” Raymond said to them.

  He helped Sonia up, and the two of them jumped out. They immediately joined the rest of the doctors, unloading crates of medical supplies and stacking them for transport into the camp. Three other newly arrived helicopters approached, variously bearing the insignias of the SSA, UNICEF, and the Save the Children foundation.

  About fifty yards away stood a tall iron gate, spiked at the top, which should have looked forbidding, except that it was painted a bright yellow, white, and green—each bar and spike alternating in color—surrounding a compound of pretty clapboard buildings, incongruously landscaped with lawn and flowers. It was a showpiece camp, a phony camp, one of the “Theresienstadt Novos” the press had reported—built and beautified to fool the world, only at the moment it would have fooled no one. The gate door had been swung open, and injured, smoke-choked people from the jungle and the helicopters were staggering in. A large tent—striped red and white as if it were meant for a circus—stood just inside the gate, its front flap opened and the chairs inside tossed and tipped. A cartoon—The Little Mermaid, Sonia noticed—was incongruously playing on the screen. If children had been watching it, they were no more.

  “Sonia!” Raymond shouted. He and the others had been unloading boxes and moving them in a fire-brigade handoff, and she had broken the flow.

  “Sorry, sorry!” she said, taking a box and nearly dropping it, having not realized how heavy it was.

  She focused on the work, receiving, passing, stacking the crates, her eyes burning from the dust kicked up by the blades of the choppers everywhere, her ears ringing from their roar, and her braid whipping side to side, occasionally smacking and stinging her face. She squinted, looking around, pointlessly she knew, for a little boy, five years old, with a crisscross of scratches everywhere on his arms and legs.

  Doctors and other hospital workers hurried past. Sonia leaned toward them, calling out, “Bebês? Crianças? Garontinhos?” Then, “Babies, children, little boys?” Then, struggling for still more words, “¿Dónde los . . . los . . . ?” until all at once she felt a hard hand on her shoulder and turned to see Jo looking down at her angrily.

  “None of that!” he said. “You came here to work? Then work! Look around!”

  She obeyed, and for the first time understood the true scope of what was happening in the jungle tonight, the scale of the injury and human displacement that was unfolding. Fire seemed to be rising everywhere; people were staggering in from all sides. There would be deaths here before the sun rose, and there would be sorrow too, as the people who did survive would lose children or parents or husbands or wives.

  “You’re a doctor!” Jo shouted over the helicopter roar. “Do your job!”

  Sonia nodded, and Jo turned and began helping to unload more boxes. Sonia did the same—all the while scanning around her, looking for the child who was nowhere to be seen.

  * * *

  • • •

  There was actually a bit of good news tucked inside the very bad news of Walli Beckwith’s meningitis diagnosis. The disease comes in two forms—bacterial and viral, both of which were infections of the layer of tissue surrounding the brain. The viral variety generally had to run its course, but bacterial meningitis—which was the variety in the vials being studied aboard the space station—could be cured with antibiotics and corticosteroids. The problem was that if you didn’t get properly dosed in as little as twenty-four to forty-eight hours, the disease could just as easily kill you. That was especially so if you were fatigued and your immune system was worn down—twin conditions that afflicted nearly all space station astronauts eventually.

  Beckwith had antibiotic tablets aboard the station—and they were powerful ones too, but they weren’t nearly as finely targeted as the ones doctors on Earth would administer intravenously. She did not have corticosteroids, and she most definitely did not have the CT scan or spinal tap equipment that would be needed to diagnose her disease properly and prescribe medication doses precisely.

  As Boysen continued to interrogate Beckwith about her symptoms—neck stiffness, absence of thirst—Moscow and Houston were doing what they could to conduct that diagnosis on the fly and at a distance. Electronic copies of all of the lab reports on the precise strain of bacteria that had been sent aloft were transmitted to NASA and were read and translated by bilingual members of the Houston medical team. Those reports contained worrisome news: A weak bug would not do if your goal for sending it to space in the first place was to develop a strong medicine against it—without the so-called forcing factor of gravity getting in the way of the work. So a particularly robust meningitis strain had been selected. Beckwith’s confidential medical records—especially her blood labs, antibody levels, and immune system function—were scrutinized for clues as to how she would stand up under that kind of bacterial assault. Those files were sent to Moscow for reverse translation and similar study.

  At length, the Capcom came back on the line, and again the person on the mic was Jasper. The air-to-ground feed was being carried live to the world.

  “Walli Bee, I’m told you caught a little something,” Jasper said without preamble.

  “Nah,” Beckwith said. “Navy doesn’t get sick.”

  “Mostly that’s right,” Jasper said. “Still, better let us have a look at you to be sure.”

  He then filled her in on what she needed to know about her condition—hedging nothing. She had to get to a hospital; she needed the scanning and spinal tapping and laboratory tests that could never be performed in space. The doctors knew exactly what bug she had and they knew the course it could take. They weren’t kidding about how quickly it could be lethal.

  “You have to come home, Walli Bee,” Jasper said at last. “The Russians are working on entry coordinates and your ride is waiting outside. Wave it in and climb aboard.”

  “I can’t do that, Jasper,” Beckwith answered. “Soon, not now.”

  “Soon ain’t soon enough. The doctors say twenty-four to forty-eight hours. This thing can kill you that fast.”

  “I need two days. Just till the eighteenth. When the vote is done.”

  “You can’t afford that.”

  “Two days, Jasper.”

  “Now, Walli.”

  “Two days.”

  “Two days is your forty-eight hours right there!” Jasper shouted, startling the room. “That’s your limit. These doctors aren’t fucking around!”

  If Jasper remembered that his voice was going out to the world, he didn’t care. The networks let it go; the viewers heard it live. Beckwith too seemed unconcerned with what people did or didn’t hear.

  “And I’m not fucking around either, Jasper,” she said levelly. “I’ll take the meds I have on board. They’re good; they have to help some. I’ll dock the Soyuz just in case. But until the eighteenth, I will not go near it.”

  Jasper did not
answer her—and at the moment he couldn’t. The astronaut-Capcom who knew Beckwith so well and cared for her so deeply that he had nicknamed her nickname—needing a “Bee” that was all his own to capture the depth of his feeling—had thrown off his headset and stalked out of the room to collect himself. The flight director nodded to the rookie Lagrange, who put on the headset and reclaimed the console.

  * * *

  • • •

  Nobody knew exactly how many people were living in the western camp at the border just inside Brazil—and nobody was really trying to find out anymore, at least not officially. It had been close to a week since a formal count had been issued, and at that point it was 82,000—a troubling number since it also represented the total official capacity of the camp. In the days since, however, the jungle burnings and land clearings had not slowed, and thousands more dispossessed people had been herded through the gates.

  The general who oversaw the camp would give regular interviews to the members of the press who were permitted to attend—a group that was limited to the official government-friendly Brazilian media, as well as reporters from Colombia, Uruguay, and Paraguay, the three nations whose unauthorized mercenaries had joined the Consolidation. The general always wore the black-and-yellow uniform with the black-and-yellow confederation flag, but his Portuguese-accented Spanish made it clear he was answerable only to Brasilia. No matter how he spoke, the job he did at the daily gatherings was an easy one.

  “How is the health of the people here?” the friendly Brazilian press would ask.

  “Their health is excellent.”

  “And how is the food they are given?”

  “The food is excellent.”

  “Are they happy to be here?”

  “They are happy and they are relieved to be out of danger.”

  Things got tougher—a little—when the marginally less pliant Colombian, Paraguayan, and Uruguayan reporters would get their turn, especially when they were asking about the population of the camp. But the general did a serviceable job of answering in a way that was no answer at all.

  “How many people are living in the camp now?” a reporter would ask.

  “The camp’s capacity is eighty-two thousand people.”

  “Is that how many are here?”

  “The camp is now full.”

  “Yes, but how full?”

  “Its capacity is eighty-two thousand people.”

  “So that’s how many are here?”

  “As I say, the camp is full.”

  It was a clumsy bit of spin, but perfectly sufficient for an official who faced only cooperative reporters at home and could easily wave off the few journalists pestering him from what he considered vassal states.

  The doctors from SSA, UNICEF, Save the Children, and elsewhere who actually worked in the camp estimated the population at a hundred thousand or so, growing by a thousand or two a day—and the place had become every bit the swamp of disease and despair that such an unclean and overcrowded facility could not help but be. Indeed, before long, the general would not even be able to hold his press conferences in the showpiece camp because the spillover of people from the main camp was so great that the once-prettified grounds had nothing left to show off at all. The soccer fields were crowded with refugees who either needed medical care or simply could not find a spot in the main camp. The food tents were now medical tents; the snack carts had been picked clean and toppled on their sides.

  The pilots from the Mercado hospital hopped back in their helicopters to return to Bolivia within an hour of dropping the SSA workers off. Jo was among them, and he deliberately left without a goodbye to Sonia or Raymond, sorely angry at both of them for forcing him to bring two such inexperienced aid workers to so perilous a place. If he intended that as a sober-up slap to Sonia, he didn’t succeed. She was fully aware of and prepared for the sickness and death that stalked the western camp, and the twin missions of getting Oli out of so dangerous a place and exposing that sickness and death to the world were the very reasons she’d come here.

  Raymond was another matter. He had come to the western camp only because Sonia had come—a fact that was already causing her an uneasy feeling of responsibility for his safety. He had been looking around anxiously from the moment they had climbed down from the helicopter, and it was clear that if he wasn’t flat-out terrified, he was something awfully close.

  “It looks like we’re here for the duration,” he said to Sonia, blanching as he watched Jo fly off.

  “So are they,” Sonia said, jerking her thumb in the general direction of the main camp.

  “I know that,” Raymond said, abashed. “I know.”

  “I’m sorry,” Sonia answered sincerely. Raymond was kind and smart and would be a good doctor, but he would never be brave. It did not make her respect him less—not much less, at least—but it did make her feel that she would have to be more tolerant of who he was.

  The job the two of them were assigned at the camp was in keeping with their limited field experience. They did not have the speed, skill, or unflappability of people who had been doing this kind of on-the-ground work for years. Instead, they were put on triage duty, passing through an exit at the rear of the showpiece camp and making the short walk to the high gate at the front of the main camp. There the internees who needed medical care would present themselves—at 8:00 a.m., 4:00 p.m., and midnight. Sonia and Raymond were expected to be there at all three times, and the scene chilled them. Some of the internees had burns that needed dressing; others had open or infected wounds. It was impossible to tell at a glance which people were running fevers or suffering from malaria or tuberculosis or other diseases. The smells coming from the camp were overwhelming—a mix of sewage, sweat, and the far more menacing odor of dying or infected flesh.

  The people cried out to be selected for the short walk to the showpiece camp, where the doctors would care for them; the guards beat the fence with the butts of their guns to force them back. Raymond and Sonia were allowed to select no more than forty internees at a time—and chose the sickest or weakest or oldest or youngest or simply the ones who were at the front of the crush.

  And during each visit, Sonia looked for Oli. Every small child she saw drew her eye instantly; every time the round face or little body resolved itself into someone else’s, she irrationally resented the child for being the wrong child—and scolded herself for such lack of charity. On a few occasions she called out for him, sometimes shouting “Oli,” sometimes “Kauan.” Never did she hear a “So-nee-ya!” in response. The last time she called, a guard stalked over to her, clearly angry. Raymond interposed himself between them.

  “She’ll stop,” he told the guard, then spun to her. “Please stop,” he whispered. Then he turned back to the guard. “It’s fine. Go, go,” he said. The guard did not move. “Go!” Raymond snapped, with genuine anger. He added a dismissive hand gesture that could not help but offend the guard, but seemed to surprise him so much he could think of nothing to do but obey.

  Sonia smiled. “Thank you, Raymond,” she said, at his small and unexpected act of courage. Raymond faked an it-was-nothing shrug.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  September 17

  If Sonia was going to get inside the main camp and show the world the horror within, she knew she would have to do it fast. The congressional vote was one day away, and if anything could move the lawmakers to cast the right vote, the decent vote, it would be visible evidence of what they were voting to stop. She would make her move today, she decided, during the 4:00 p.m. visit she and Raymond would make to the camp. The guards who had worked the day shift were tired by then, impatient to leave, and the afternoon medical check was the last item of their workday before they were free to retreat to quarters. Sonia would be likelier to be able to slip in then and hope to be extracted when Raymond returned for the nighttime shift. She would enter the camp carrying just
two things: her smartphone—well concealed under loose Western clothes—and a pocketful of oleander leaves.

  Sonia described her plan in detail to Raymond early that morning—and he hated every little thing about it.

  “You’re going to get yourself killed,” he said.

  “Not if I’m smart,” she answered.

  “The plan itself isn’t smart!” he snapped.

  “You worry too much.”

  She explained the plan to another young doctor too, a graduate of the University of Pittsburgh named Lindsey. She would need his help as well, and when she told him what she was contemplating, he—unlike Raymond—loved every little thing about it.

  “Woman, you’re brilliant,” was all he said.

  Long before the 4:00 p.m. shift arrived, Sonia began preparing her either mad or ingenious plan, packing a shoulder bag with a pair of ill-fitting shorts and an oversize T-shirt taken from the supply building in the showpiece camp. The shirt said “Detroit Pistons” across the top, with the logo of the Seattle Seahawks beneath it. She and Lindsey and Raymond would leave the showpiece camp at 3:45 as was typical for the 4:00 p.m. visit, and if anyone asked why they needed a third set of hands, they would say it was because they anticipated bringing back four or five small children who were too sick to walk and would have to be carried.

  When 3:45 arrived, no one did ask and they left the camp without incident. They walked together most of the way to the main camp, but when they were within twenty yards of it, they split up, with Sonia remaining behind, concealed by jungle cover. Raymond and Lindsey proceeded alone to the terrible gate, with its terrible sights.