There was a chain-link fence about a hundred yards across the field, and as they climbed the small berm that led up to it, Pulowski could see the watchtower tall enough that it had been fitted with red lights, to warn away small aircraft. Then, just beyond, banks of lights erected every quarter mile, shining down on rows of snow-covered tanks and Humvees, on flatbed trucks, and on the tents where every company commander in the battalion had stationed guard details to watch over their equipment as it waited to be loaded into the trains. The DRIF.
Dykstra was already kneeling, calmly cutting an opening into the links of chain. “Why in God’s name would we want to break in there?” Pulowski asked. In response, Dykstra tilted his heavy, cold-pinched face toward Fowler.
“We’ve got to borrow a couple of Captain Masterson’s things,” she said. Why? Pulowski wanted to know. Borrow what? Didn’t she know that this was totally illegal? Didn’t she know they had guards down there? What the hell was she thinking? Wasn’t the whole problem with her platoon that they didn’t have respect for the rules? Fowler squinted her eyes thoughtfully against the snow until Dykstra had finished cutting a seam in the fence, then lifted one corner with her gloved hand. “Beale’s getting smoked off-site by some of Masterson’s goofs,” she said. “He’s a dickwipe, but he’s my dickwipe, and it is my conviction my dickwipes don’t get punked like that. So we need some leverage, and you, Lieutenant, are here to be our guide. Besides, isn’t it your conviction that getting court-martialed now might not be such a bad thing?”
“Well, since you put it that way.” Pulowski shimmied through the opening, elbows pulling his body forward, the powder flaring up around his chin, and then they body-skied down the berm, sliding and falling, cushioned by the snow, so that the descent felt like an interesting mixture of something that was truly dangerous and something that was not. The DRIF resembled an immense city whose residents thought primarily of murder — or so Pulowski had described it to Fowler, largely to get her goat, but also because, in his opinion, it felt that way. Spooky as hell, especially if you tried to mentally put together the video he saw, say, on Lehrer, of the moment when an IED hit — the thoom sound of the tape, the way the camera always twisted and joggled with the report, and then the inky black column of smoke coiling up. And then you walked around the DRIF and saw about five hundred Humvees and wondered which one of them would be hit that way. But now it wasn’t scary. Not on this particular trip.
They huddled on the back edge of the lot, against a row of Bradleys, their armor fringed with icicles. Everybody hated the DRIF. Pulowski had worked several night shifts there, twelve hours in the command center, freezing his ass off in a poorly heated tent; in there, the DRIF was a giant algorithm, paperwork upon paperwork, lists of gear, every piece itemized, presented to him and then entered into the computer program that kept track of their logistics. But out here, in the actual open, alone with Fowler and her platoon, there was a perverse kind of freedom to it. Security was light. The forklifts weren’t running. Most of the officers had given themselves the night off, along with most of their underlings. The intruders rested, listening to the growl of generators and dusting off their pants, then Fowler peeked down one of the long central aisles, and said, “So, where does Delta Company keep their shit?”
Pulowski crept up and crouched beside her. Every so often, the lines of vehicles were broken by a passageway running perpendicular to the main aisle, and at each of these intersections — a solution that had been thought up a week into their time on the DRIF — was an orange cone that labeled the contents of that area. The next sign read HUMVEES. He fed this into his mind. He had a picture of the grid in there, the map of the whole DRIF, which hung in the command center and which, by now, he’d seen a thousand times. The key was to picture it clearly, as you might an equation. Somewhere out there was a long, snow-covered aisle with stacked containers filled with every company’s gear. He nodded when he had the location, pointed down the aisle ahead of them, then showed Fowler two fingers, and pointed to the left. Then Fowler stood and waved her platoon forward, repeating the sign that Pulowski had just made, and they all hustled down the snowy alley, Fowler charging out ahead.
* * *
“What in the world are you doing?” Pulowski asked.
Beale was holding a black trash bag and picking up beer cans from the side of an unplowed county road, twenty miles outside of Fort Riley and the DRIF. Beale’s nose had a clear drop of snot suspended from its end. “Policing the area,” he said.
“For whom? Why?”
“Orders.”
“Come on with the fucking orders, Beale. Where were you last night?”
Beale glanced back down the road. There was a plywood structure in the milo field there — a cross between a building and a Hollywood western set.
“You stayed here?”
Beale nodded. His nostrils were ice-crusted and he walked splay-footed through the roadside snow, his upper lip trembling.
“Well, that was fucking genius. How’d that go for you?”
“Loud,” Beale said.
“Really.”
“It was very loud.”
“That wasn’t the answer I was expecting.”
“Wolves,” Beale said. “Other things.”
“Wolves? I didn’t know they had wolves out here.” Pulowski scanned the open field. Cut corn stalks poked up through the snow.
“Oh, yeah, man. It’s fucking badass out here. These guys have seen a bunch of wolves. Bear. No fucking around. Band of brothers, man.”
“No lions?” Pulowski asked. “No tigers?”
“Fuck you,” Beale said.
There was a stir outside the plywood building, figures in ACUs, standing out checkered brown against the snow-cropped field. “No fucking help,” one of them shouted. The sound was shredded up by the wind that cut through Pulowski’s jacket, and he dug his hands into his pockets and reminded himself how little he liked the country, in any form. “Mouth, Beale. Get your mouth into it. Show us your mouth.”
Another made what sounded like a pig calclass="underline" Sooey.
Beale responded by getting down on all fours in the snow and rooting around in it with his nose. He pulled up a broken bottle, holding the neck of it between his teeth, and when he emerged this way, snow flecked on his nose and eyelashes, he held up the bottle for display for the soldiers who’d yelled at him and they cheered — though, even with the wind, Pulowski could hear higher notes of laughter. If Beale noticed these, he didn’t show it, but instead pumped his fist and made a show of dropping the bottle directly from his mouth into the bag. “So this is your band of brothers?” Pulowski asked.
“It’s SERE training, buddy,” Beale said. “Closest thing you can get to Ranger training and still be regular Army. All these guys have it.”
“This is SERE training?”
“Survival, evasion, resistance, and escape, dude.”
“Yeah?” Pulowski squinted. “What part are we working on now?”
“We aren’t working on shit,” Beale said. “You are standing there waiting to get ass-raped by a bunch of hadjis.”
“Really? That doesn’t sound like very much fun,” Pulowski agreed. He was slightly bored.
“Hey, to each his own,” Beale said. “But when the ass-rape team comes calling for Carl Beale, Carl Beale intends to have a little training.”
He picked up a second bottle with his teeth and deposited it in the trash bag, much to the enjoyment of the soldiers — one of them was Lieutenant Anderson, judging by his size — at the far end of the field. Then he stood up again and lumbered along beside Pulowski.