“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 said.
“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.”