The Good Lieutenant (14 page)

“I think pathetic is a little strong.”

“But now I'm supposed to love them up and forget about anything I saw out there at the intersection. Just be a good soldier and roll on.”

Pulowski stiffened. Now she'd ruined it. “I gotta get going,” he said. “McKutcheon managed to get me on an early flight.”

“Are you punishing me?” she whispered in his ear. He had once told her that when he looked at the sky over Camp Tolerance, he saw ones and zeros. Signals, orders, satellite tracking, Wi-Fi, cellular communications, encrypted channels, tethered zephyrs that videoed the world beyond the wall, then beamed it back to someone's desk. The point was to receive and interpret the signals clearly, not to fool yourself into imagining that you could affect them in any way. “Because if you really want to punish me, you ought to take me back to the trailer. Wouldn't it be more interesting to do it there?”

“I said I've got a flight to catch.”

“Today?” They were tangled up, Pulowski trying to slide his legs out from under her. She held him with her thighs. “You didn't tell me that. That's not even fair.”

“You think it's fair to ask me to be connected to this?”

Fowler glanced down at herself, rumpled ACU blouse, scuffed and faded knees on either side of Pulowski's clean fabric. “I showered,” she said.

“Aw, Jesus fucking Christ.” Pulowski gave her his rat smile, upper teeth biting down on his lip. She sat beside him. The base spread out below them like an industrial resort, ranks of trailers like grubs, motor pools, junkyards. “Not you. This,” he said.

“You're an Army officer, you dumbshit. You're already fucking connected to this. What are you going to do, fly to Canada?”

“Canada's in the coalition, you mope.”

There was a brief flash of humor there that she liked: Pulowski still had a little game. He turned to her and straightened out the collar of her blouse, so that the backs of his fingers touched her collarbone. It was more a fussy gesture than a loving one. Patronizing. She was frightened by how in control he seemed to be, by his lack of uncertainty. “You tell me what it was really like out there at Muthanna, picking up those pieces. It's not just remains. Or that's not the right word. There were dicks, right? I mean, there were actual physical dicks out there, right?”

“Come on, Pulowski. That's wrong.”

“No, no, no—it's
exactly
right. It is
exactly
accurate. You remember all the ladies running around kissing Mel Gibson's ass in that movie Hartz showed us? Waiting around to get their death letters? I am not going to do that. I want to do things differently.” He paused as if he had something more to say, staring at her cockeyed, then stood up wearily and beat the dust off his pants. “I want to be alone when I come back.”

“All right,” she said. It was the opposite of what she meant.

“Fuck, yeah, it's all right,” Pulowski said. “It's perfectly fine. It's
me
.”

*   *   *

The RG-31 was a specialized mine-clearing vehicle that the U.S. government had purchased from the South Africans for more than half a million a pop. There was a .50-cal on the roof, with a flared steel cowling around it, but its most important features, according to Colonel Seacourt's PowerPoints, were the extra-wide, specially armored windows that would allow their soldiers to search for the culprits in the Muthanna bombing without having to dismount. To Fowler, it seemed the kind of strategy Pulowski would've liked. Separation. Distance.
I'm not going to get involved
. She was also curious how, given all those windows, this RG's grille had become embedded in the mud wall of a canal off Route Serenade, a hundred meters from the main road. “Nice,” said Jimenez. “Man, shit, you'd think for the money they'd have some airbags in these things.”

“Or TV,” said Dykstra. “Huh? Nice fucking flat-screen.”

“Fuck the TV, man,” Beale said. “They need to get about four fifty-cals on this baby. Show the hadjis how we party.” The RG's rear bumper was propped up on the near side of the canal and Beale dropped beneath the chassis, checked for wires, then chinned himself up into the RG's cab, pants V'd with sweat, burrs cockling his pockets.

“Shut the fuck up, Beale,” Dykstra said.

“What, Jimenez gets to do jokes on airbags but I can't say anything?” Beale said. “What's that, a cultural thing?”

“It's a shut-the-fuck-up thing,” Dykstra said.

“Guys,” Fowler said. And that ended it.

What she paid attention to instead—what she sensed, flowing alongside her anger and her impotence, calming it, easing it, compensating for it—were the motions of her platoon as they dispersed. She kept track of them like a melody, Waldorf across the canal to the northeast, Dykstra opposite him to the northwest, Jimenez behind them to the south, Crawford guarding the road, each of them concentrating his focus on the trees and grass and bean fields that stretched out from the RG on all sides. Even Beale, who—dick or not—she kept as close to her as possible, seemed to have things under control inside the RG. It was her first recovery mission since Pulowski had left, and she was happy to be away from the maintenance bay and her desk. Her platoon moved exactly as they'd practiced, just exactly according to the basic, simple rules for foot patrols that she herself had learned back in the woods around Fort Hays State: post security in all four ordinal directions, follow your team leader, do not speak. Not as good as sex, but definitely better than
GoldenEye
, or answering emails all goddamn day
.
So she noticed and secretly approved—and reminded herself to congratulate—the small hiss that Waldorf made across the ditch, and the response from Dykstra, which was to slowly, as if he'd sprung a leak, deflate himself into a prone position amid the thick bushy grass, each and every considered movement a redemption for the emptiness and confusion that had shamed and overtaken all of them, Fowler included, since they'd packed Fredrickson's and Arthur's body parts up at the intersection. To be involved in a battle in the proper way.

“I got something.” She could hear Beale banging around excitedly inside the RG. “There's somebody down along the canal, north,” he said.

Canals were bad places for people to be, generally. Canals, especially dry ones, were where people hid to detonate IEDs. “How far away is he?”

“Hundred meters—he's coming our direction, Lieutenant.”

Fowler was trying to imagine why an Iraqi would walk toward a patrol of U.S. soldiers down an empty canal, not hidden enough for an ambush, but not in the open enough to show he came in peace. It did not fit into any known categories of behavior. Or at least no category she'd been introduced to yet.

“Want me to take him?” Beale said.

“No, I want this motherfucker alive,” she said.

“He's gonna be here soon,” Beale said after some delay.

“Don't shoot,” Fowler hissed, climbing up on the roof of the truck.

There was something wrong with the whole setup. From the height of the RG's roof, she could see the guy down in the ditch. A male, maybe twenty-five. He wore gray dress slacks with an elastic waistband and he was thin and his tan leather shoes were delicately pointed. She got her binoculars out and scanned the far side of the canal. There was a tree line about a hundred meters out. A house behind it.

“Everybody down in the canal,” she said. She got the glasses up. This time she saw movement, a filtering sensation behind the trees. She called to Beale through the opening in the RG's roof, where the gunner would've stood. “Get around the bend,” she said. “All of you, go down the canal and get around the bend.”

Beale swung out the door and dropped, running.

The first shot was an RPG. Fowler saw a white puff of smoke, and then heard the bad sizzling sound, and she ducked her head behind the turret flanging. It hit the bank beside the RG. Dirt rained over her head. She sat up, got the binoculars out again.

“Three guys,” she said. “One's in a blue shirt, two of them are in dishdashas.”

A second puff of smoke. This RPG flared high and right, way off course, into the bean field behind them. She didn't even duck for that weak shit.

“All right, that's it for the fucking rockets,” she said. “They're gonna run, they're gonna fucking run. Shoot 'em, Wally. You can engage. Use the canal for cover.”

The RG was slowly tilting underneath her. She had to keep leaning to the right to keep the glasses straight. Beale was yelling at her but she deleted this. “I got a pickup,” she shouted. “They're in a white pickup, heading south, call that in. Right now, call that in.” And she dropped the glasses and the canal came back and the roof of the RG was tilting, the thing was rolling over, and she thought,
This is fucking easy
, and she ran up the sloping roof in a crouch and jumped off the back. Or it would have been easy except for the big antenna that she bumped going off, and it rotated her a little in the air and slowed her down just enough that she hit the edge of the canal, left shoulder first. “Whoof,” she said, as she rolled down the dirt incline. “Okay, that fucking hurt.”

“Hey, hey, hey!” She heard Beale shouting around the bend. “Don't move! Don't move. Shit! LT, you okay?”

The RG's cab had impacted only a few yards away. She tried to sit up, but her left arm was pinned, so she rolled over and pushed up with her right and said, “I'm fine, Beale. I'll be right there,” and checked her sidearm, and patted herself all over, and then tested out the shoulder where she'd hit. It wasn't dislocated, and seemed at first okay. But when she lifted the arm above her waist, it felt like two electric wires had sparked and she dropped the arm quickly and said, “Oh, yeah, definitely kicking ass,” and started running.

When she got around the bend in the canal, Beale, Waldorf, and Dykstra were all waiting for her there. Beale had his weapon aimed at the Iraqi's chest.

“He was a fucking decoy, is what I say,” Beale said. “Supposed to get our attention while those other dudes slipped up for a shot through the trees.”

“Is that right?” Fowler said.

The Iraqi made a noise that was something between a laugh and a reaction to being hit in the balls. She raveled up the collar of his shirt tight against his neck and turned just for a moment, checking for her zip cuffs, and that was when Beale drove the butt of his M4 into the center of his face.

*   *   *

The Iraqi was a mess. Beale's rifle butt had squashed his nose and levered a cut above his eye, his collar lined with blood. Fowler checked his airway and his pupils, then wiped the blood on her pants. He wasn't dead. As a recovery platoon, it was their responsibility to tow the RG back to their base, so she had brought the heaviest equipment that she had, the Hercules and a flatbed, and ordered their crews to start hitching towlines to the RG and left Crawford with the Iraqi and ordered Waldorf to assemble the platoon on the far side of her Humvee. Then she walked back to the ditch.

It was quiet there. A few yards away in the weeds, she could see a scatter of brass where someone had fired on the pickup. No weapon on the Iraqi.

When she turned, Beale blocked her way.

“Ma'am,” he said. “I'm asking a favor here.”

She stiff-armed him. The back of her hand was rusty and dark against Beale's armor, as if she'd been playing in clay.

“I think I might know a way to fix this.” Beale sidled in close and spoke in a whisper, as if they were old buddies. “Why don't we take this guy out to my friends at the patrol base? I'm just thinking maybe they'd give us a hand with the Iraqi.”

“Masterson's platoon? You mean the guys who ripped off our gear and then spent three days smoking you? Those friends? Why the hell would he give us a hand?”

A long silence. Beale's face looked like a hot water bottle from an old cartoon, swollen, red, and steaming. “I fucked up, ma'am,” he said finally. “Okay? You happy with that?
You
want to bail on me, that's fine. But at least give me a fucking chance, huh? I didn't
kill
this guy. I broke his nose. Take me out to Masterson. He can cover for me.”

“We're in recovery,” Fowler said. “That's what we do. And it's our job to recover this vehicle and take it back to camp. If we violate the rules of engagement, we report it. The minute I put you outside the rules, that's when I bail on you.”

“Masterson,” Beale said, “will let us off on this.”

“Us? What the fuck did
we
do here, Beale?”

“Is there a problem, ma'am?” Dykstra said.

“No, we're fine,” Fowler said.

“Good,” Dykstra said. He grabbed Beale's wrist. “Come on, let's go over here, Sergeant. Let's be fine in a different place.”

“No, no, no, man,” Jimenez said. He untied a sweat-soaked bandanna from around his neck and held it out. “Don't do that. The sergeant is a sensitive guy. You gotta talk nice. Here, sir, you need a hankie?”

“Fuck you both,” Beale said.

“Let's go sit down first,” Dykstra said.

“I am not sitting down, Dykstra, you fucking moron. You were fucking there. She hit that guy first. So I don't want to get busted down a rank just because you and Jimenez are all up in the LT's ass—”

“Hankie time.” Jimenez came forward, dandling the bandanna at arm's length, as if he were going to wipe the tears from Beale's face. “Come on, let it out, buddy.”

“Shut up!” Beale said. And he swung at Jimenez, a flailing, awkward punch, impeded by his weapon, but enough to knock Jimenez sideways into Dykstra, who in turn dropped to a knee and then came up, growling and burly, and went after Beale. It was inevitable. She'd been pushing Beale further and further outside the circle, criticizing him, isolating him, doing exactly what Masterson had suggested, until it had been natural for Dykstra and Jimenez to go after him, to come to her defense. She dropped down and wedged her way into the scrum with her elbow, prying and worming her way in, then pushing them apart with her outstretched hands.