They all stood for a moment, watching the dust rise from the opening. Then Faisal tucked the flashlight under his arm and scribbled something on a pad, tore off the sheet, and handed it to Ayad as if presenting him with a receipt.
This is my gift, it read. Keep it hidden and your family will be safe.
PART TWO. CAMP TOLERANCE
6
“We gonna fuck before or after I kick your ass?” Fowler said, her thighs wrapped around Pulowski’s sparrow-thin ribs, her breasts brushing the back of his stubbly head as they finished a round of GoldenEye while spooning in her bed. Fowler had never been a gamer back at Fort Riley, or even before. Maybe a little Madden at parties as an excuse to drink. But here in Iraq, with no parties in sight, it was calming to spend an hour as James Bond, swiveling and swooping her Aston Martin through a pine forest with a decisiveness that had escaped her in reality — particularly after a twelve-hour shift emplacing concrete T-walls in the northern section of their camp.
Or at least it had been calming until Pulowski had started hassling her about the Muthanna bombing, two weeks back. And had informed her, just this morning, that he was going on leave in a couple weeks. “I thought we just covered before,” he said.
“No,” she said. “Right now is before.”
“Okay, then what was it that we just did?”
She peeked over his shoulder and down the dry pale curve of his hip, to the thatch of black hair, and his prick, which flopped out against the bedsheet.
“That was so long ago,” she said, evaluating it. “I’m not sure I remember.”
Pulowski tossed his controller to the floor and rolled over and tilted his head back and touched his lips to the bottom of her chin. “I seem to remember it okay.”
“Maybe I’m just not big on living in the past.”
“Really?” Pulowski raised his head. “Who taught you that?”
“I thought it was Professor Pulowski.”
“I think you’ve misinterpreted the lesson,” Pulowski said. “The professor, as I remember, suggested that you try not to plan everything. Go with the flow.”
“You sound like Beale,” she said.
“So?”
“So somebody needs a plan, don’t they?” she said. She rolled Pulowski over and slid her tongue down his flank. “What do you think would’ve happened if you’d wandered by to get laid and I wasn’t here?”
This was only the second time since the bombing that they’d had sex.
“I’m not really the right guy for the family values happy talk, Em,” he said.
“Do I look like I’m interested in family values?” Fowler asked. She picked his prick up and held it at eye level. “I am a corrupt and morally deviant officer. Beale’s vulnerable. That’s what you told me, anyway. I don’t expect him to know how to screw me properly. But you — well, I think you’ve got some skills there.” She put him in her mouth gently, held him, then released. “I just like to plan for it.”
* * *
What Pulowski didn’t understand was that when he said “Go with the flow,” what she heard was “Give in,” which happened to be her specialty, not his. It was exactly what she was doing when, an hour later, she crunched her way up to the E Company TOC and manned her desk in the plywood-floored front room of a double-wide trailer, starting a twelve-hour shift. The Army was all about giving in. Every decision, every order, every mission, every battalion update, every PT session. If your colonel ordered you to set up concrete T-walls inside the wire, you gave in — even if you thought that the walls could have been better used outside the wire. The flip side was you belonged to a structure you could trust, with rules that you didn’t have to just make up. So that the giving went both ways, and there was nothing to distinguish one person from the next, nothing too embarrassing or too horrible to share. So far, despite everything, it had pretty much worked this way. The one exception had been her relationship with Pulowski, and she wouldn’t have had to keep that a secret if she’d been a guy. Then she could’ve told people that she fucked Pulowski. Boasted about it. She could’ve said, Goddamn, I banged the living hell out of this lieutenant an hour ago, which was true.
But the body parts, the chunks of bone that they had bagged and iced at the Muthanna intersection (the cleaned and emptied coolers were stacked by the back door, red chunky Gotts, which nobody touched anymore), were a different kind of secret. It was like the Muthanna bombing contained within itself everything that was both great and ugly about who she was and what she did. Her platoon had been drawn closer to each other by it, had given in and cleaned it up — even Beale. And yet she was unwilling to talk about the details with Pulowski in part because she couldn’t find even a scrap of language to explain what had happened at the Muthanna intersection. Instead, the story of what might have caused it lurked above her shoulder, like a Warthog jet she knew was there but couldn’t see. She had her laptop on her desk. She had her paperwork spread out in front of her, fuel requisition slips, leave requests. She had her email open and blinking, and she could see Halt and Crawford bullshitting around over by the coffee machine. But her head was filled with things that were true and could never be admitted into this space.
The TOC, where she spent the next two days, was not designed for this. It was a cross between a nest and a clubhouse: plywood-floored, with a swaybacked velour couch along one wall, a scale, a map of their AO, and a whiteboard on which Fowler wrote the instructions and maxims for the day. Her desk was front and center in the main room, which was how she liked it — and there were side offices for Captain Hartz and for Operations Sergeant Simpson, who manned the radio. But where she worked there were no doors, no partitions, and she could see everybody who came in or out — an open shop, in its way. Professional, organized, and clean: that was how she liked to keep the TOC, but not so clean that it drove her soldiers away.
Which meant she allowed herself certain personal touches. On the whiteboard, next to the maintenance duties her platoon had on tap that day, she kept a list of movies available for checkout. In her desk drawer, antibiotics she’d wrangled for bronchitis. Traffic in the TOC was always heavy. You could easily forget, just by the sheer stream of incident, anything bad that you might have to worry about. Here was Waldorf, pretending to read the Stars and Stripes, but really just waiting until the room was clear to ask her, sternly, if she’d heard any news about his wife, who was a supply sergeant up at Camp Speicher, near Tikrit.
Here was Corporal Halt, unlacing his boot and showing her, shyly, a blister on his girlish, rosy heel. Here was Eggleston, the Hercules operator, who had spent too much time alone down in the motor pool and wanted to talk about the Jets. Did she know that the dumbshits over in Alpha Company had recovered an actual flintlock musket during a cordon-and-search? She did not, but she speculated on the meaning of this development with Jimenez and Dykstra, who had become, over the past six months, a pair just as tightly matched as her and Pulowski. If they’d invaded Philadelphia, Dykstra believed, they would’ve found sawed-off shotguns, nunchuks, and throwing stars — whereas from Jimenez’s point of view, among his people, all they’d want was papers.