“Get your own speaker, Waldorf,” she said. “I got to eat.”
“I’ll say something,” Beale said, standing up.
It was not exactly the kind of place where she’d imagined having her first-ever military success. If at any point during the dinner someone had stood up and accused her of knowing nothing about what they were about to do, what dangers they were about to face, she would’ve confessed to this immediately. In part she feared this, and in part she wished that it would occur, so that she could get it over with, climb up out of the booth, strip off her ACUs and her lieutenant’s bars and go put on a brown apron and get back to waitressing with Susie Wrightman — doing something in which the worst-case scenario was that you got tipped badly, or had to work an extra shift, and nobody ended up dead. In the end, she was rescued from having to say anything further by the advent of the K-State basketball game. One of the servers had set up a portable TV on a table in the corner of the restaurant, below a two-man wood saw that had been nailed to the wall, and the players flickered soundlessly on its screen. Gradually, because she’d started watching it, they all turned that way. She let her eyes linger on the set, the glowing, orderly court, the cheerleaders waving their pom-poms, all of it more magical and electric and satisfyingly vivid compared with the long concrete vistas of the DRIF, the steady brown and tan colors of the base. After a while, she dropped her gaze, in order to pay attention to the food that she’d ordered, and she saw Pulowski watching her instead of the game. He had a sly expression on his face, his eyebrows raised, one that seemed to say that this moment, at this table, proved everything he’d been telling her about her ability to command. Suggesting that she’d made exactly the right call to break the rules and get Beale off. “What’re you looking at, Pulowski?” she said. “When did I get so interesting?”
She reached out and palmed the black padded book that Susie Wrightman had brought over, containing their table’s tab, brushing his fingers as she did it, briefly but firmly, giving no sign to the rest of the platoon that she had done such a thing.
10
“Pulowski.” A winter Sunday night at the Harmony Woods apartment complex on the outskirts of Junction City — known locally as Fort Riley West. Pulowski was reading over an article on Fourier transform pairs describing how certain wave forms naturally correspond to each other despite being in different domains. McKutcheon had switched off his cell, jammed a snowboard into his Subaru, and headed to Colorado for the weekend. Fowler was away, her apartment windows dark across the snowy dimple of the complex yard, probably off doing some sort of extra brown-nose work for Hartz, and so Pulowski had been expecting … well, nothing. No visitors for the evening. He had his sweatpants on, wool socks, a pair of fleece-lined slippers mailed to him by his mother, and he was sitting at the kitchen table with a blanket over his legs, reading and occasionally glancing up at the apartment’s flat-screen, which he had, in an attempt to feel adult and responsible, tuned in to the NewsHour with Jim Lehrer. He shifted his gaze to the sliding black pane of his living room’s glass door, seeing a reflection of himself, blanket tucked neatly around his knees, Diet Coke open on the table, and then, looming up just behind his reflection, so that their faces mingled in the glass, Fowler in a black stocking cap and parka, her gloved hands beckoning for him to let her in. “Come on,” she said, her voice still muffled by the glass. “We got to go get Beale. Let me in.”
Beale, as far as he was aware, didn’t need getting. Still, five minutes later, Fowler stood inside the sliding door, her hair haloed by the static of her removed cap, waiting for him to get dressed. No information on where they were going, except that he was to wear civilian gear: parka, jeans, gloves, hat, boots. No ACUs. There was something mischievous and off-center in the way Fowler made this request — an energy, a confidence. The kind of self he saw in bed. Even so, as he tramped out the back door of his apartment, he’d experienced a small jolt of fear and displacement as if, however much he might have agreed with the spirit of this adventure, he wasn’t sure that he belonged with her as a part of it, whatever it might be. “Tunes,” a voice growled as he climbed into Fowler’s truck, and he was surprised to see Dykstra lying on his side in the backseat, dressed in a red-and-black checked woodsman’s jacket, his jowls caked with camouflage face paint. “Hey, welcome to special operations, Lieutenant,” he said, cuffing Pulowski on the shoulder. “See if you can coax some music out of the LT.”
They pulled through town, past the Casey’s General Store, past the strip mall where he and Fowler sometimes ate Chinese, past the mournful city hall, with its wind-stripped tinsel. Then the highway ran straight and flat, eddying with snow beyond the pickup’s headlights, and beyond that the white fields glossily and ghostly lit. Pulowski scanned the truck’s radio dial, picking up scratchy stations from impossibly far away: WGN in Chicago, a pastor preaching from Vancouver, a weather report from Arlington, Texas, and the news. The signals that brought their voices down through the truck’s antenna and into the cab were the very thing he’d been reading about back home, safe in his apartment. At one point, the scanner landed on a velvet-voiced news announcer, who said, “The Department of Defense has confirmed three more deaths in Iraq today. Private William O’Connor died when his Humvee was hit by an improvised explosive device in Anbar Province.” For a moment, this signal sent a chill down his spine, like the snow that had fallen into his collar on his way to the truck, foreign to the warmth that the three of them generated in the small cab. The next channel was country music, and Fowler reached out and punched the button, ended the scan, and they drove together listening to Garth Brooks without complaint.
About ten miles out of town, the truck trundled off onto a gravel road, unplowed, the double ruts of tire marks obscured by the smooth-faced slopes of drifted snow. She downshifted into four-wheel drive, then gunned the truck, cresting the first drift, Dykstra in the back shouting, “Yee-ohah!” in a Philadelphian imitation of a hillbilly yell. Fowler beat back a grin and thumbed her stocking cap down over her forehead, shoulders hunched with matching intensity, and for a moment he forgot the road, forgot his curiosity about the purpose of their errand, forgot the forbidding darkness of the fields outside the cab, forgot the radio, forgot even that they were moving, and instead watched her, downshifting, then upshifting, eager, certain, and surprisingly calm despite the violent shaking of the cab.
Behind them, three more vehicles pulled up, all of them civilian: a hulking black Suburban, from which Sergeant Waldorf descended, a white Ford F-150 with chrome pipes that belonged to Jimenez, and lastly Crawford’s car, which was a Honda CRV and looked like a toy compared with the rest. There was a brief blatting of bass that accompanied Crawford’s car as it chugged up uneasily, loud enough for Fowler to turn around and glance, but her expression wasn’t angry — Pulowski knew all her signals by then, even in the dark — more like ardent, even amused, and the music died as soon as the car shut off, and the rest of the platoon struck out after them through the field of snow, not exactly with murderous efficiency, since Pulowski could see Crawford and McWilliams horsing around together in the snow. But unified, at least.