“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.
“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.”