The Good Lieutenant

by Whitney Terrell

  She could also tell by McKutcheon’s tone how this was going to go. Disaster following disaster. Not one word accurate on its face. What surprised her was that Pulowski and McKutcheon still saw her as the kind of officer who would be shocked that Colonel Seacourt would put his name on this kind of transparent crap. “‘The Musayyib Water Treatment Plant in Babil Province is currently pumping water directly from the Euphrates River into the city’s drinking water system with little or no filtration,’” she read aloud. “‘This type of treatment was insufficient for fully treating raw river water.’”

  “Ya think?” Pulowski said. There was a forced pleasure in his voice.

  “‘The coalition recognizes that operations and maintenance of public infrastructure is one of Iraq’s biggest challenges,’” Fowler continued.

  “Translation,” McKutcheon said, still sounding like Thurston Howell III. “The last two foremen on this project had their heads cut off and their bodies dumped into the main … thingy, whatever it is. The place where the water would be going. Reservoir?”

  Pulowski sat on the floor with his legs stretched out in front of him, looking about as cynical and blank as McKutcheon. Except for the brief burst of nerves that she’d seen flash across his face when she’d first shown up for their meeting, she hadn’t been able to get a read on his intentions. Was he trying to humiliate her? Or did she just feel that way? “I don’t know about you guys,” she said, “but this sure cheers me up.”

  “I wanted you to know the risks,” Pulowski said.

  Beale made a fart sound. Which Fowler appreciated, mightily.

  “The risks of what?” she asked.

  “The cameras I’ve been working on are designed to prevent stuff like this. Give us a chance to monitor sensitive areas and projects outside the wire,” Pulowski said. “The colonel wants them deployed ASAP. I’m asking you for an escort. But I wanted to make sure you had good reasons to say no if you felt that way.”

  * * *

  A tapas restaurant had opened in the small cluster of Iraqi-owned shops known as Hadji Town that had been established in a eucalyptus grove outside the airport. Fowler found Pulowski at a table near the door. He’d framed the dinner as “official business” to discuss the camera mission. By itself that shouldn’t have been too threatening, since “official business” was the thing that she’d improved the most on since he’d left. A crash course starting with Beale’s rifle-butt incident, ending with Seacourt’s final exam. As far as she could tell, she’d passed. Hadn’t been overly idealistic, hadn’t been naïve, had gotten the best deal she could from Seacourt, hadn’t folded or gone negative. Had remained detached—all strategies that she’d learned from Pulowski. A learning curve that, as she lowered herself cross-legged on a pillow, tucking her unwashed socks protectively beneath her thighs, she felt pleasantly ready to diagram.

  It was a long curve. And Pulowski was the only person who’d appreciate it.

  “Sorry McKutcheon’s being pissy,” Pulowski said, after they’d stared at their menus for a while. “His wife’s filing for divorce.”

  “Your CO?” she said. “How the hell did he get married in the first place?”

  “Apparently by mistake,” Pulowski said. “On the other hand, a friendly legal divorce is a hell of a lot more civilized than fucking people over behind their back. Which I didn’t think was your style, but hey.”

  It was the first time that she’d ever been on the receiving end of Pulowski’s contempt and she felt its directness like a sting, as if she’d been elbowed in the nose. She picked up her water glass in an attempt to cover her emotion, but she tipped it too far back, the water pouring out in a glob and wetting her shirt and chin. She wiped it off with her hand, before remembering that she should’ve used her napkin.

  “I don’t do a lot of fucking over,” she said. “Up, definitely. Or maybe even in a cluster. But over isn’t really me.”

  “Yeah? So who filed the complaint about the colonel forgetting to put the T-walls up at the Muthanna intersection?”

  “I don’t know,” she said.

  “That’s funny, because the Muthanna intersection is the first place I’m setting up these cameras. Right where the bombing was. And McKutcheon says the reason I drew this assignment is that somebody filed a report blaming Seacourt for the whole thing.”

  Pulowski hadn’t mentioned this in McKutcheon’s office. In fact, when he’d asked for her help, she’d had an old-fashioned Fowler vision that everything would work out—Pulowski was coming back to her. Her platoon would escort him outside the wire, fix what needed fixing, and life would return to normal—which meant that all the other shit had been worth it. Worth it to hold Beale to account. Worth it to fight Seacourt over the intersection. Instead, Seacourt had made good on his promise and come after him. Which meant that Pulowski was right: she had gotten him into this. “Maybe I made a mistake,” she said. “I thought you were asking me to help you with this mission.”

  “You’re going to help me?” Pulowski said. “Why do you think I got assigned this mission, huh? You got any ideas? And don’t play dumb about it either. Don’t give me that cow-eyed, ‘Oh jeez, I didn’t mean anything. I’m just trying to do the right thing, sir’ bullshit, because you are fucking smarter than that—I know that for a fact.”

  As much as she’d disliked what Colonel Seacourt had done when she’d confronted him about the intersection, she had to admit that his refusal to even deny her charges had been a tactical success. A strategy that Pulowski didn’t have. “I’m sorry you drew the mission, Dix, since it’s clearly pissing you off something fierce. But that doesn’t mean I know why it happened.”

  “Nothing at all you might want to share?”

  “We almost got the shit blown out of us doing the recovery on an RG,” she said. “Sweet little ambush—so that was amusing.”

  She could see, despite Pulowski’s attempt to answer this nonchalantly, that this admission had affected him more than he was willing to let on. But he also didn’t ask for details. “I’m sorry to hear that,” he admitted, “but I don’t think that’s the whole story.”

  “Well, you weren’t here, were you?” she said. “And I don’t remember getting any emails from you asking what the story was.”

  “Yeah, well, it’s about time.” The voice came from over her shoulder and, while Pulowski glanced up in surprise, Fowler did so only slowly. It was Beale.

  “Aw, shit, man,” Pulowski said, throwing down his fork as if he’d lost his appetite. “Once a day is enough with this guy, don’t you think?”

  * * *

  She’d invited Beale as a hedge, in case Pulowski’s invitation turned out to really be only about official business. After she paid the bill, the three of them strolled across the leaf-strewn paving stones, past the small hadji stores hawking bootleg DVDs and T-shirts. The Morale, Welfare and Recreation Center inhabited a fanciful, marble-floored building at the end of the strip, with a fountain out in front and a green neon sign mounted over the door that read CLUB COBRA—the kind of place that gave her the creeps, due to the intense effort that was being made to distract its patrons from reality. But tonight, as they sat down on a trio of barstools in the back, she’d decided that intense distractions might be necessary to get Pulowski and Beale where they needed to be. If the good they’d had together was going to turn into something other than just ash.

  “Beale is still my platoon sergeant,” Fowler said, starting out with the easiest lie. “You may think this particular mission is stupid, but if we help, it’s going to be our stupid. So before we decide anything, I’m going to need him to agree.”

  “Yeah, well, good luck with that,” Beale said.

  “Why am I not shocked?” Pulowski said.

  “I don’t know,” Beale said. “Why am I not shocked that you’d spend the last four months piddling around with some camera system? Then, the minute you figure out that you’ve actually got to set these things up”—Beale made a horrified, effeminate face,
touching the flat of his fingers to his open mouth—“you fucking come running straight to me. Or to your girlfriend here, which is about the most pathetic thing I’ve ever seen.”

  “You talk to Seacourt about that?” Fowler asked.

  She’d worked this one out over dinner. Beale was the only person who had the motive to tell Seacourt about her relationship with Pulowski. A glance in the sergeant’s direction, met with a smirking grin that wilted to a cough, told her that this was the case. So the camera mission was Seacourt’s payback, just as Pulowski claimed.

  Which meant that they had all bent each other over in some way. Beale had screwed her by telling Seacourt about her affair. Pulowski had screwed her by leaving. She had also screwed both of them: Beale, by turning in the detainee; and Pulowski, by filing the complaint. But she had a competitive advantage; neither Pulowski nor Beale believed she was capable of doing anything other than shooting straight. If they were going to pull together for this mission, it was the only play. “What I told you, Fowler,” Pulowski said, “was not to be naïve. I told you to go along with Seacourt. Be yourself. Don’t get caught up in macho bullshit when it came to Beale.”

  “Be myself? You want to talk about something that’s naïve.”

  “No, naïve is this guy, okay? Naïve is anyone who tries to stand out, or do anything more than the absolute bare minimum that your job requires you to do.”

  Beale lightly hunched his shoulders, as if he took this as a compliment.

  “That’s funny that you should be so pissed at Beale,” she said. “Since you’re the guy who kept telling me to lay off his ass at Riley.”

  Pulowski swallowed uncomfortably, flattening his lips. Beale tore open a packet of sugar—the club served only tea and coffee—and began shyly grinding the white powder into the tabletop with his huge thumb. “Come on,” she said. “You guys don’t remember that party you threw down at the Cracker Barrel? What the hell was that? You never worked together? You never cared for each other? And now we’re going to sit here and argue about a mission that we all know needs to take place?”

  “You tell me what happened, then,” Pulowski said. “You tell me why I drew this assignment. Because from what I hear, the reason I’m fucking sitting here is Beale lost his shit and smacked some Iraqi, and you went after Seacourt to cover for his ass.”

  “It wasn’t him,” she said.

  “What are you talking about?” Pulowski said.

  “I’m saying it wasn’t Beale,” she said. “Beale took the rap for it, sure. But he didn’t do it. He was just looking out for the team.”

  It was her first truly professional lie. As soon as she said it, Beale tucked his head and ran a palm over his bristly orange crown of crew cut, which looked silky in the stage lights. No more mention of her relationship with Pulowski. No more complaints. He’d stick with her after that. “It’s true,” Beale said.

  “Oh, fuck. Who did it, then?” Pulowski asked.

  “I did,” she said. She could feel her lie working, even better than Colonel Seacourt’s had. It had everything going for it. Beale wanted his innocence. Pulowski wanted her to take the mission. “I busted the guy up. If you want some paranoid reason that Seacourt’s coming after you—which I don’t think there is—it’s for that.”

  “You happy now, Pulowski?” Beale said. “Because if you’re not, I’d be happy as hell to just chuck this camera mission and walk away.”

  “No.” Pulowski smiled weakly. He scanned Fowler’s face, trying, she guessed, to find a weakness, see a break. She gave him nothing. “But it’s my idea. I’m in.”

  She watched them carefully, fondly. She’d been wrong about the dream she’d had of Pulowski and Beale standing along a canal and flapping their arms. They hadn’t been calling her closer; they’d been waving her away. “So,” she said, “are you guys going to sit there and flirt with each other all night? Or can we shake?”

  PART THREE

  MUTHANNA

  7

  There was no traffic. Beale balled the convoy in at sixty miles an hour and peeled off the highway and cruised straight across the open dirt shoulder to the Muthanna intersection, where the traffic control point had once been. The convoy stopped facing the exploded, smoking front of the nearby building that had been the home to the thirty soldiers billeted there. It was as if, staring at the toy snow globe of a disaster, they’d been sucked inside its distorting glass. Bits and pieces of vehicles decorated this area, axles, tires, hoods; the rattletrap, clanking flagpole that had been mounted in the center of the checkpoint (topped, on her prior visit, by American and Iraqi flags) had fallen and lay like the arm of a sundial across the turrets of several Humvees. Fowler dismounted. Her second step caused a windshield wiper to lever from a yellow-green puddle of antifreeze. Larger hunks of metal were strewn across what had once been pavement, their wiring still cooking off. Tires collapsed and boiled in upon themselves and the bombed soldiers, some in nothing more than boxers, shoeless, jostled and sprinted around the open street with aimless and stunned expressions, emptied fire extinguishers in their hands. The report said that a truck bomb had detonated at the Muthanna intersection, but a different report—This is what it looks like to be losing—was what ran through her head.

  She pushed through the crowd until she found herself at the edge of what must have been the blast crater itself. An ossuary down there, soft white smoke, made worse by the fact that the checkpoint hadn’t been fortified—no T-walls, no machine gun towers, not enough personnel. Nobody had wanted to station troops there except Colonel Seacourt, who’d volunteered. Short on manpower, he’d tapped a battery of artillerymen who’d been stationed in Dusseldorf sampling the local beer gardens, procured them a handful of Humvees, and ordered a platoon from Masterson’s Delta Company to show them the ropes. Those soldiers, Masterson’s soldiers, were what worried Fowler as she began to climb the pile of rebar and concrete where the front of the barracks once had been. She did not want to show her platoon another dead soldier from their own battalion, did not want to demoralize them any more than necessary. And so when an unfamiliar sergeant flagged her down on top of the pile and said, “I think one of your guys is trapped,” and pointed to a long, flattened slab of concrete, the first reaction she felt was despair.

  “Is he alive?” she asked.

  “Hell, I don’t know,” the sergeant said. “Peters, you hear anything?”

  The soldier he’d called Peters was lying flat down in the rubble and had his arm thrust in up to the shoulder under the slab.

  “I’m touching him, sir,” he said. “I can feel him. He squeezed my hand. He’s right down there, just right down there.” He shouted down into the hole, “We got some equipment. We’re coming down. We’re gonna lift this baby up and you’re out. You’re getting out, okay?”

  * * *

  They had practiced and practiced this, both at Fort Riley and in the first five or so recovery missions they’d so far made outside the wire. But these situations had involved vehicles that had broken down or been hit with an IED, and thus no actual human life had been at stake. Usually by the time they arrived on scene everyone had been evacuated, the area cleared by an Explosive Ordnance Disposal Team. “Eggleston,” she shouted, banging on the Hercules. “We got to go up this hill. Come on. There’s a guy pinned in the rubble up top. Get the winch fired up, get the painter cable out.”

  Eggleston popped his head through the hatch on top of the Hercules and gazed at the pile of rubble doubtfully. “This is a flat-ground vehicle, ma’am. Even if I did get up there, there’s no way that I could brace her enough to lift anything.”

  “Waldorf!” she shouted, turning away. She could see the rest of her platoon, some dismounted, some still in their vehicles, standing around in shock. Thinking the same thing she had thought when she came in. “Take the painter and a bunch of chains and go up the pile.” There was silence, stubborn gloom, horror, probably.

  “There’s nobody fucking alive up there,” Waldorf sai
d.

  “Where’d you go to school, Waldorf? Plano High, right?” She was unloading gear from the hatch on the side of the Hercules. “And I know you played ball there.”

  “Yes, ma’am. Middle linebacker.”

  “Good. Texas football. That’s a real sport.” She tossed him a bundle of cable. “Give your weapon to Jimenez. You’re leading us up.”

  “Why do I got to hold his weapon?” Jimenez said.

  “You volunteer to go up?”

  “No.”

  “That’s reason one. Reason two is that you’re Mexican. And reason three is that you played, what, beach volleyball? Come on, man, don’t front me.”

  “That’s discriminatory, ma’am.”

  “Good,” she said. “Give those weapons to Crawford. You’re next on the pile.” She banged the side of the Hercules. “You hear that, Eggleston? Let the painter out. You got the pride of beach volleyball at San Bernardino High leading you up.”

  “I played soccer,” Jimenez said over his shoulder.

  “What, at recess?” Fowler asked. Humor. That was what she’d learned from Pulowski. Disarm them. Push the fear away. It wasn’t exactly Leno, but still, Eggleston dropped down inside the hatch. She could hear the painter cable playing out. Humor and momentum. Motivate each guy individually. Don’t be afraid to look like a fool. That’s the other thing Pulowski would’ve said. Don’t just tell them it’s the right thing to do, tell them why. She hopped up on the fender above the Hercules’ tracks and began to unshackle the boom for the main winch and nodded to Dykstra and Halt and they climbed up to raise it. She was still working on how to calm Eggleston down when Beale stormed around the back of the Hercules, weapon at the ready (for no good reason), trying to pinch his face into what she assumed was his version of tenacity and authority, but which to her looked like he had a stomachache.