“Sergeant,” she shouted. “Do you fucking trust me?”
Beale glanced around as if confused, as if maybe someone else in the platoon would share his sense of how ridiculous Fowler was being.
“Just be honest,” Fowler said. “I’m in a hurry.”
“No, ma’am, I don’t fucking trust you?”
“Why not?” From up on top of the Hercules, some ten feet above the ground, she could see why Eggleston was worried about the huge vehicle tipping. “It’s because you think I’m too fucking cautious, isn’t it? I don’t push the envelope. I got no balls. Literally.” She stood and pointed at her crotch. “No fucking balls! I’m too safety-conscious. I got all these stupid family values rules—”
“Uh,” Beale said.
“Tell him.” She pointed at Eggleston, who’d poked his head back up through the Hercules hatch. “Tell him I went to Pussydale High School in Vaginaville, Kansas, and I fucking don’t know shit about how to take a risk.”
“Why?” Beale asked.
“Because we are going to drive the Hercules up that pile and Eggleston thinks it’s too dangerous and I want you to explain to Eggleston that if Family Values Fowler is in on this thing, then there’s no fucking way it could be dangerous.”
“She’s got a point there, Eggy,” Beale said.
* * *
Fowler walked backward up the pile, waving hand signals to Beale, who stuck his head down into the turret to talk to Eggleston. Whenever the Hercules paused or seemed to teeter, Beale shouted, “Pussydale High!” down into the hatch, and Eggleston would gun the diesel engine and the Hercules would rise farther up the pile like some undersea beast. Fowler hand-signaled Eggleston to stop right at the edge of the fallen wall, like they’d practiced when towing junked cars out of a mud pit at Fort Riley. Beale laid the steel painter cable just along the slab’s edge and Fowler flattened herself beside it and peered into the darkness underneath and tried to shove the cable through, but it bent and wiggled in her hand. She scrabbled at the rubble and got her arm in underneath and wrapped the cable around her wrist and she nodded to Beale and said, “Tell Eggy to drop the blade,” and Eggleston dropped the blade that descended from the front of the Hercules and braced it against the bottom edge of the slab. Fowler wriggled her shoulder in until she could feel cold stone against her cheek. “Pry it up,” she said. Her team jammed pry bars under the top edge of the slab and with every little cautious hand’s-breadth or so that they achieved in lift, Fowler kept edging underneath, careful, careful, careful, with Beale digging under her shoulder until she was beneath the slab entirely and she could feel the weight of it smooth against her chest and her arm was extended beneath the concrete. Something plucked her sleeve. She tried to ignore it, imagining a rat, until she felt the trapped soldier’s fingers silently circle the soft skin of her wrist. Her head was turned in the wrong direction, though, so that instead of being able to see him, she was looking back at Beale’s sweating face.
“Aw, fuck-all, Jesus Christ, what were we thinking?” Beale was saying. “Get the hell out of there, ma’am. Even if we get this cable through, we’re at the wrong angle to lift this thing.” He was unhappy about the uphill slant of the Hercules.
“Tell him how we can’t do this,” she said to Beale.
“What the fuck you talking about? I’m telling you.”
She couldn’t move anything else so she tried to roll her eyes to indicate the fingers she felt around her wrist, in the dark. “Tell this guy we’re never getting him out,” she said. “Tell him what a lame-ass job we’re going to do, you and me.”
Beale had his hands cupped around his eyes in order to see into the shadow beneath the slab, so his dawning comprehension played out entirely in the tiny expansion of his pupils, the slackening of muscles about his eyes. “We got this!” he shouted abruptly into Fowler’s face. “You’re going to be drinking iced tea in about two seconds, buddy. We’re moving this rock ASAP.”
Her entire platoon had climbed the pile by then and they pried and strained at the top edge of the slab and she pushed the painter cable as far as she could into the darkness until she heard Waldorf shout on the far side of the slab and there was tension on the cable and Waldorf pulled it through, the braided metal slithering between her belly and the slab. The painter cable was too thin to lift the slab itself, so Waldorf hooked it to a chain and then they had to pull that back through, the links grabbing and bumping over her ACU and tearing out her hair, which she tried to deal with quietly, gritting her teeth and letting it pull away. They got five chains beneath the slab this way and she could hear Beale and Waldorf hooking their ends onto the main cable from the Hercules’ winch and Eggleston gunned the Continental diesel in the Hercules’ guts and everything shook, her flashlight rattled in her pocket, the gravel beside her eyes popped like jumping beans. And then she felt the weight lift, and for the first time she was afraid, because if Eggleston dropped it now, she would be dead, but he did not drop it and the slab rose and she scrambled out from under it and the men swung it away on a tether and there was Delta Company’s Lieutenant Weazer, blinking, pale with dust, and Eggleston dropped the slab to one side with a crash.
* * *
That night, Fowler climbed a metal ladder to the roof of the nearest intact building overlooking the intersection, and stopped when she heard voices. Crawford squatted twenty yards away, face illuminated by the radio he’d set up atop a crate; Beale was nearby in the shadow of the roof’s edge. “Any calls?” she asked Beale, as she crawled across the roof to him.
“Usual traffic,” Beale said.
“You ring up Hartz?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“No new orders?”
“Captain Happy advises us to stay safe.”
Fowler waited for her eyes to get used to the darkness. They’d spent the entire day making sure the living members of the Artillery Battery got on convoys back to Camp Tolerance, dousing fires, and then searching every single one of the spooky, dust-splashed bunks in the back of the blown-up barracks, checking for other bodies. It ought to have been a depressing detail, but once they’d seen the artillerymen haul Weazer from the rubble, his slender thumb poking up in the air, every empty pocket of rubble felt like a present, a victory, a prize. Her project now was convincing Beale to enjoy this. “So what’s it feel like, being a big war hero?” she said. “Saving a life.”
Bad start. Beale snorted, looked down at his boots.
“Just doing my job.”
“Oh, shit. Oh, no.” She punched Beale in the shoulder. It was like hitting a HESCO barrier that had gotten wet. “Listen to this guy, Crawford. Beale was just doing his job. Saving people. Which is funny, because what I remember from back at Riley was that he never liked this job in the first place.”
“Family Values, man,” Crawford said.
“I’m more worried about his emotional state,” she said to Crawford. “I think he might be depressed. I think he was genuinely fucking worried when Eggleston was listing that slab off of me. Is that true, Beale? Do we need to get you some meds?”
Beale took this in, absorbing something into his lumbering frame—hopefully the good vibe she directed at him beneath the talking. His face had been there, peering in at her, as the darkness closed down on her. She’d known he would’ve stuck his arm in and lost it, just to hold on to her. A fact both stupid and in some ways great.
“You might want to talk to the assholes who set off that bomb,” Beale said, “about what their emotional state happened to be.”
“Probably real disappointed,” Fowler said.
“Werd,” Crawford said.
Everything she’d been trying to communicate to Beale, every positive thought about what her platoon could do, might be—not all the bullshit stuff, not the benefits, not the personal glory, not the assholes (like, for instance, Captain Masterson) who told him he was somehow lesser and weaker for being in support rather than infantry, lesser and weaker for having a lieutenant who was a c
hick, but the good stuff, which she admittedly sucked at defining but knew was there—all of that had appeared in physical form, in the teamwork that had gotten the Hercules atop that pile, lifted that concrete slab off Weazer, and saved his life. A refutation of losing. That was what it felt like.
Three months ago, she might’ve just told Beale, Look, dumbass, this is what I’ve been trying to accomplish. This is what happens if you pull your head out of your ass and follow my advice. But Pulowski had taught her that the direct approach didn’t always work. That it was a poor idea to be so certain about being right.
Instead, she sat with him for a while, waiting it out, leaving silence and some space. He squatted on his heels, his hands flattened on the roof in a strange position, wrist to wrist, as if preparing to climb into the starting blocks for a race.
“Remember those shackles Masterson stole from us?” she asked.
Beale shrugged, as if she were referring to a distant, murky past.
She dug into the flap pocket of her fatigues, pulled out the heavy metal clip. It was solid steel, forged in the shape of a G, thick as her index and middle finger put together, but the hook of the shackle’s lower jaw had been bent, distended.
“That one came off the Hercules,” she said. “That was the one we used to lift the slab. Thought you might want it for a trophy.”
“A bent shackle?” Beale asked. “Oh, that’s nice, LT. Jeez, that’s sweet. Just what I always wanted.” He held it between two fingers, examining the lower part of the shackle, which had bent so much that it was clear they’d been two centimeters away from dropping the slab.
“I thought you might want to give that to somebody. A trophy.”
“Who?”
“I didn’t fucking get one,” Crawford said.
“I don’t know,” Fowler said, in a light tone that she hoped suggested that she knew exactly to whom he might give it. “Somebody who’s hard to impress. Somebody back home who doesn’t understand what you’ve been doing.”
“How about somebody I might want to piss off?”
“Maybe,” she said. “You could go that way.”
* * *
With no lights on at all and the moon still low, the darkness seemed to pulse and crest beyond the edges of the rooftop as if it were a liquid. Beale had gone to bed. She thought it had gone well with him—not perfect, not Eisenhower-worthy. But better. An improvement. They weren’t lacking for food out at the bomb site. Plenty had been brought in during the day and she sat with a pile of chips on a paper plate, staring out over the empty entrance to Muthanna, and thinking oddly of Beale’s father—the one who’d run away, the one who, according to Beale’s mother, he’d been trying to impress by joining the Army. What Fowler had wanted to do, what she’d considered doing, was telling Beale to take that shackle and mail it to his dad, show him what he’d done. Make up his own story, rather than look to somebody else for what his story ought to be.
Crawford sidled up to her, his gold glasses floating like a strange, delicate cage on his face. “The colonel sent a message.”
“What’s that?” she said.
“You ain’t gonna like it.”
“Try me.”
“Fredrickson and Arthur. Remember when we stole their shit?”
“Yeah.”
“Okay, so, the word is that those two dudes didn’t show up on the convoys back to Camp Tolerance. No account of them.”
“Where’d they go?”
Crawford swung his boots over the roof’s edge. The pile of rubble that had once constituted the checkpoint’s barracks slumped to his left, while between his arches she could see the focused darkness of the blast zone, like a rotted molar, then some three hundred yards of emptied street and blasted cars. Nothing moved down there except rats.
“Maybe they just walked off, quit, dropped their weapons,” Crawford said, hopefully. “You know, went native on the thing.”
“Native what?” Fowler asked. “Native fuckheads?”
“Shit, man, I ain’t native.”
“They’re Delta Company. Masterson’s guys. They’re not dropping weapons anyplace.” She stared out for a while longer. “We looked pretty hard.”
“If I ever go native at a shitty checkpoint, you write my moms something different, you know. This boy died heroically.”
“Don’t sweat it, Crawford,” Fowler said. “If anyone’s writing their mom, it’ll be you writing mine. And when you do, ask her why she never came to visit.”
Crawford chuckled at this. Fowler handed him her plate of chips. He ate a few in somber silence, then said in a more serious voice, “Damn. That is the case.”
* * *
The day before, there had been grumblings about the checkpoint’s conditions, even after Weazer had been saved. As they’d hunted through the wreckage, Beale had pointed out that everyone had known the intersection’s checkpoint didn’t have any T-walls and soldiers would die if they were posted there. Which meant, as Waldorf noted, that the soldiers there had died to prove something that most everyone knew already. And finally, Dykstra had heard that the Iraqi bomber had been contracted to haul gravel to the checkpoint because it was Army policy to hire locals, even for jobs they could have done themselves. Which meant that Weazer had been killed (except, of course, they’d saved him) by someone that the U.S. Army was paying. So as Fowler prepared to address her platoon the next morning, she felt less like a lieutenant and more like a sex-ed teacher, hoping against hope that there were certain questions her students wouldn’t ask.
“Okay,” she said, standing behind a rust-scabbed folding table that she’d salvaged from the wreckage, “we have a couple more soldiers unaccounted for. Fredrickson and Arthur from Delta Company. I’ve drawn up a grid. You will be assigned to work an area in pairs. Whenever you find anything that might be significant, the first thing you do is that you take a picture of it. So don’t move it.”
Beale raised his arm for a question. She noticed that he was holding the bent shackle she’d given him the night before in his hand and, flushing, she ignored him.
“What I want you to do is flag it, come back here, get the camera”—she picked this up and showed it to everyone, as if she were the hostess on a game show—“and a Garmin”—she showed this too—“take a picture, write the coordinates of your object down on a note card, write down the photo number, and then bag it, okay?”
Beale wiggled the shackle. “Is it true that we were paying the guy who did this?” he asked. “The bomber? Do you have any intel on that?”
“We’re in recovery,” Fowler said, trying to pretend nothing was out of the ordinary. “That’s what we do. It doesn’t matter how this happened. Our job is to recover these missing men, if they are here, or be absolutely sure that they aren’t.”
“No, no, no, I get that,” Beale said. Beale always “got” the first explanation of any order, which made Fowler wonder why he was also always the first person to ask a question. “What I’m saying is, why do we have to do the GPS thing? We already spent a whole fucking day searching this place. If they are here, they’re not worth finding.”
“The fuck!” Dykstra said. “You wouldn’t want us to find you?”
“Find me, yeah,” Beale said. “But what are you gonna do, call up and give my mom the coordinates of my ass?”
“That’s not the part she’d want,” Dykstra said.
“I mean this seriously,” Beale said. “This is not fucking CSI. What, you think they’re gonna fly Grissom out, put a bunch of these pictures up on the wall in the TOC, shine a blue light on ’em, and tell us how Fredrickson got whacked? I don’t see that—”
“No, no, no, man,” Jimenez said. “That’s cum stains, man. For a blast they check the fibers. They do a spectrograph—”
“Jesus, you two are a piece of work,” Dykstra said. He stood, balled up a kerchief he’d been using to cover his bald head, and threw it at Beale.
“What’s that for?” Beale persisted.
“Show s
ome respect. This might be a grave site.”
Beale, however, shrugged off Dykstra’s distress—as well as Jimenez’s attempt at humor. He seemed more determined than usual. More confident, really, than he’d been when they’d saved Weazer, as if that had been merely an unexpected exception to what he had always believed, even back at Riley, was the truth of this place. “I’m saying we risked our lives to get Weazer out of that pile. You did it too. Look at this shackle. You and Weazer were about a couple centimeters short of biting it.” He held up the drooping shackle for the rest of the platoon to see. “I was thinking about what you said last night, ma’am. I say we shove this puppy right up Colonel Seacourt’s ass and ask him who the hell’s accountable for this shit.”
Okay, Beale, Fowler thought. Thank you for misinterpreting everything I said.
“Do you have any actual tactical suggestions for me to give the colonel?” she asked. “After I shove the shackle up his ass? Like how to better provide battalion-wide security? Maybe a new interpretation on all the intel you’ve been reading?”
“We don’t need any fucking intel, ma’am,” Beale said. “What I’m saying is that we deserve a story that makes sense.”
It was true. Everything they’d done right, wordlessly, with no speeches, when saving Weazer was trumped by the very bad story of Fredrickson and Arthur.
“All right, Beale. What’s your story?”
“There’s no mystery to solve here. They got their asses kidnapped by Osama bin Laden’s boys, so unless you think that Osama himself was riding in that truck, my suggestion would be that we ought to be using these little gizmos to find out who did it. That’s the only justice there can be.”
He’d been good up until then, so she was surprised to find herself relieved to hear Beale’s story—as well-intentioned as it may have been—devolve into something as half-assed as chasing Osama bin Laden with their GPS. After all, the Shi’ites were fighting in this area, not Sunnis. And yet, for the first time in her command, staring out at the faces of her platoon whitened with dust, she had nothing better to offer. The how and why of the bombing were blanks, or worse. All she had left was the where. Maybe Pulowski had been preparing her for this. Leno versus Letterman. The argument they’d had about tradition in her dad’s backyard. Listening to Pulowski grouse that the war made no sense—in part because there wasn’t any OBL to find—and still believing that her platoon would be exceptional. But they weren’t, and neither was she. It was almost a relief, therefore, when Corporal Halt, who’d been off pissing along their security perimeter, wandered shyly up to the edge of her table and interrupted her, holding a small object away from his body with his right hand. “I found something,” he said.
The Good Lieutenant Page 14
