The Good Lieutenant (19 page)

She dug into the flap pocket of her fatigues, pulled out the heavy metal clip. It was solid steel, forged in the shape of a G, thick as her index and middle finger put together, but the hook of the shackle's lower jaw had been bent, distended.

“That one came off the Hercules,” she said. “That was the one we used to lift the slab. Thought you might want it for a trophy.”

“A bent shackle?” Beale asked. “Oh, that's nice, LT. Jeez, that's sweet. Just what I always wanted.” He held it between two fingers, examining the lower part of the shackle, which had bent so much that it was clear they'd been two centimeters away from dropping the slab.

“I thought you might want to give that to somebody. A trophy.”

“Who?”

“I didn't fucking get one,” Crawford said.

“I don't know,” Fowler said, in a light tone that she hoped suggested that she knew exactly to whom he might give it. “Somebody who's hard to impress. Somebody back home who doesn't understand what you've been doing.”

“How about somebody I might want to piss off?”

“Maybe,” she said. “You could go that way.”

*   *   *

With no lights on at all and the moon still low, the darkness seemed to pulse and crest beyond the edges of the rooftop as if it were a liquid. Beale had gone to bed. She thought it had gone well with him—not perfect, not Eisenhower-worthy. But better. An improvement. They weren't lacking for food out at the bomb site. Plenty had been brought in during the day and she sat with a pile of chips on a paper plate, staring out over the empty entrance to Muthanna, and thinking oddly of Beale's father—the one who'd run away, the one who, according to Beale's mother, he'd been trying to impress by joining the Army. What Fowler had wanted to do, what she'd considered doing, was telling Beale to take that shackle and mail it to his dad, show him what he'd done. Make up his own story, rather than look to somebody else for what his story ought to be.

Crawford sidled up to her, his gold glasses floating like a strange, delicate cage on his face. “The colonel sent a message.”

“What's that?” she said.

“You ain't gonna like it.”

“Try me.”

“Fredrickson and Arthur. Remember when we stole their shit?”

“Yeah.”

“Okay, so, the word is that those two dudes didn't show up on the convoys back to Camp Tolerance. No account of them.”

“Where'd they go?”

Crawford swung his boots over the roof's edge. The pile of rubble that had once constituted the checkpoint's barracks slumped to his left, while between his arches she could see the focused darkness of the blast zone, like a rotted molar, then some three hundred yards of emptied street and blasted cars. Nothing moved down there except rats.

“Maybe they just walked off, quit, dropped their weapons,” Crawford said, hopefully. “You know, went native on the thing.”

“Native what?” Fowler asked. “Native fuckheads?”

“Shit, man, I ain't native.”

“They're Delta Company. Masterson's guys. They're not dropping weapons anyplace.” She stared out for a while longer. “We looked pretty hard.”

“If I ever go native at a shitty checkpoint, you write my moms something different, you know. This boy died heroically.”

“Don't sweat it, Crawford,” Fowler said. “If anyone's writing their mom, it'll be you writing mine. And when you do, ask her why she never came to visit.”

Crawford chuckled at this. Fowler handed him her plate of chips. He ate a few in somber silence, then said in a more serious voice, “Damn. That is the case.”

*   *   *

The day before, there had been grumblings about the checkpoint's conditions, even after Weazer had been saved. As they'd hunted through the wreckage, Beale had pointed out that everyone had known the intersection's checkpoint didn't have any T-walls and soldiers would die if they were posted there. Which meant, as Waldorf noted, that the soldiers there had died to prove something that most everyone knew already. And finally, Dykstra had heard that the Iraqi bomber had been contracted to haul gravel to the checkpoint because it was Army policy to hire locals, even for jobs they could have done themselves. Which meant that Weazer had been killed (except, of course, they'd saved him) by someone that the U.S. Army was
paying
. So as Fowler prepared to address her platoon the next morning, she felt less like a lieutenant and more like a sex-ed teacher, hoping against hope that there were certain questions her students wouldn't ask.

“Okay,” she said, standing behind a rust-scabbed folding table that she'd salvaged from the wreckage, “we have a couple more soldiers unaccounted for. Fredrickson and Arthur from Delta Company. I've drawn up a grid. You will be assigned to work an area in pairs. Whenever you find anything that might be significant, the first thing you do is that you take a picture of it. So don't move it.”

Beale raised his arm for a question. She noticed that he was holding the bent shackle she'd given him the night before in his hand and, flushing, she ignored him.

“What I want you to do is flag it, come back here, get the camera”—she picked this up and showed it to everyone, as if she were the hostess on a game show—“and a Garmin”—she showed this too—“take a picture, write the coordinates of your object down on a note card, write down the photo number, and then bag it, okay?”

Beale wiggled the shackle. “Is it true that we were paying the guy who did this?” he asked. “The bomber? Do you have any intel on that?”

“We're in recovery,” Fowler said, trying to pretend nothing was out of the ordinary. “That's what we do. It doesn't matter how this happened. Our job is to recover these missing men, if they are here, or be absolutely sure that they aren't.”

“No, no, no, I get that,” Beale said. Beale always “got” the first explanation of any order, which made Fowler wonder why he was also always the first person to ask a question. “What I'm saying is, why do we have to do the GPS thing? We already spent a whole fucking day searching this place. If they
are
here, they're not worth finding.”

“The fuck!” Dykstra said. “You wouldn't want us to find you?”

“Find me, yeah,” Beale said. “But what are you gonna do, call up and give my mom the coordinates of my ass?”

“That's not the part she'd want,” Dykstra said.

“I mean this seriously,” Beale said. “This is not fucking
CSI
. What, you think they're gonna fly Grissom out, put a bunch of these pictures up on the wall in the TOC, shine a blue light on 'em, and tell us how Fredrickson got whacked? I don't see that—”

“No, no, no, man,” Jimenez said. “That's cum stains, man. For a blast they check the fibers. They do a spectrograph—”

“Jesus, you two are a piece of work,” Dykstra said. He stood, balled up a kerchief he'd been using to cover his bald head, and threw it at Beale.

“What's that for?” Beale persisted.

“Show some respect. This might be a grave site.”

Beale, however, shrugged off Dykstra's distress—as well as Jimenez's attempt at humor. He seemed more determined than usual. More confident, really, than he'd been when they'd saved Weazer, as if that had been merely an unexpected exception to what he had always believed, even back at Riley, was the truth of this place. “I'm saying we risked our lives to get Weazer out of that pile. You did it too. Look at this shackle. You and Weazer were about a couple centimeters short of biting it.” He held up the drooping shackle for the rest of the platoon to see. “I was thinking about what you said last night, ma'am. I say we shove this puppy right up Colonel Seacourt's ass and ask him who the hell's accountable for this shit.”

Okay, Beale
, Fowler thought.
Thank you for misinterpreting everything I said.

“Do you have any actual tactical suggestions for me to give the colonel?” she asked. “After I shove the shackle up his ass? Like how to better provide battalion-wide security? Maybe a new interpretation on all the intel you've been reading?”

“We don't need any fucking intel, ma'am,” Beale said. “What I'm saying is that we deserve a story that makes sense.”

It was true. Everything they'd done right, wordlessly, with no speeches, when saving Weazer was trumped by the very bad story of Fredrickson and Arthur.

“All right, Beale. What's your story?”

“There's no mystery to solve here. They got their asses kidnapped by Osama bin Laden's boys, so unless you think that Osama himself was riding in that truck, my suggestion would be that we ought to be using these little gizmos to find out who did it. That's the only justice there can be.”

He'd been good up until then, so she was surprised to find herself relieved to hear Beale's story—as well-intentioned as it may have been—devolve into something as half-assed as chasing Osama bin Laden with their GPS. After all, the Shi'ites were fighting in this area, not Sunnis. And yet, for the first time in her command, staring out at the faces of her platoon whitened with dust, she had nothing better to offer. The how and why of the bombing were blanks, or worse. All she had left was the where
.
Maybe Pulowski had been preparing her for this. Leno versus Letterman. The argument they'd had about tradition in her dad's backyard. Listening to Pulowski grouse that the war made no sense—in part because there wasn't any OBL to find—and still believing that her platoon would be exceptional. But they weren't, and neither was she. It was almost a relief, therefore, when Corporal Halt, who'd been off pissing along their security perimeter, wandered shyly up to the edge of her table and interrupted her, holding a small object away from his body with his right hand. “I found something,” he said.

Compared with the Hammermill paper on the table, Halt's object had a surprisingly sharp color, a yellowish, phlegmy gray. Its exterior—the whole gobbet was the size of a fingertip—seemed rumpled, like a bit of coral, something that had grown in on itself, accreted, and then there were the horrifying white strings, feelers, Fowler wanted to call them, extending from a charred, frowzy skirt at the base of the main piece. Standing on her tiptoes, she scanned the intersection, the dark maw of the blast hole, the Humvees scorched to the color of tinfoil, the field of rubble beside the barracks, trying to imagine two human bodies separated into pieces as small as the one Halt had brought back. She glanced down at the insufficient white roll of Hefty trash bags in her hand.

Then Shoemaker started to cry. She was a burly, cornrowed sergeant, normally assigned to Delta Company, and she bolted, her boots crunching over the gravel that Halt had just crossed, her pie-tin ass wobbling beneath her body armor.

 

PART FOUR

FORT RILEY

 

8

Colonel Seacourt and the tight, sunglasses-wearing phalanx of his personal security detail marched to the far end of the Fort Riley gym, where a stage had been hastily constructed—bare risers, three flags, a podium whose front had been covered with an office-paper printout of the 1st Battalion, 27th Infantry's seal. A television on a metal gurney played a DVD of still photos taken during the last six weeks of the battalion's preparations to go overseas. Shots of soldiers shackling Humvees to railcars. Shots of volleyball games. Shots of PT—all of it too far away for Pulowski to see from the back row of the bleachers, but this didn't matter. In his opinion, the DVD was static, designed to mask the fact that he and the entire battalion were in this gym under armed guard. And they would not be allowed to leave until 1800 hours, when they departed for Iraq.

“He looks a little smug, don't you think?” Pulowski's mother said. “I wonder why they haven't kept him in the gym with everybody else.”

This was exactly what Pulowski himself was thinking. “Don't worry about him, Mom,” he said. “He's just the battalion commander. I barely see him.”

“I guess that makes it easier to be smug, then, doesn't it?” said his mother, yet another point with which he found it difficult to disagree.

When his boss, Major McKutcheon, talked about Colonel Seacourt in private or out at the bar in Aggieville where Pulowski and a few of the other Headquarters Company officers met after work, he referred to him as “Bucky.” Normally, this would've been exactly the kind of information he would've been happy to share with his mother, make her guess how he got the name—or at least get her opinion on whether Bucky fit as well as Pulowski thought it did, because, in a certain sense, Bucky somehow seemed to exactly capture the essence of Colonel Seacourt's spurious and cheerful blandness. Maybe it had to do with his teeth: Bucky, as in buckteeth. That too would've been amusing to share with his mother, except for the fact that it was not any more reassuring than the armed MPs at the gym's exits. As if even Bucky understood the purity of Pulowski's desire, at this last moment, to never see Iraq. And so, as the colonel bowed his head to begin his speech with a prayer, Pulowksi shifted his eyes nervously to the rafters of the Fort Riley gym. Not much comforting up there, save some old satin banners that looked to be from the fifties and the wiring for a PA system that he could see was equally out-of-date.

Then he found Fowler on the crowded floor below him. She was on the opposite end of the gym from Seacourt's stage, kneeling beside a pile of packed rucks that he presumed belonged to her platoon. Her head was bowed and he could see the sash of brown hair across her forehead, and then the curve of her haunch underneath her fatigues, which was about the only actually, personally reassuring thing that he saw in that entire gym. She'd been more positive on the subject of Colonel Seacourt than he'd ever been, a defender of his organizational abilities, not to mention his fairness—able to overlook what Pulowski felt to be his cloying optimism by pointing out that at least he wasn't a screamer, or a bully, or a crook. “What are
you
looking at?” his mother asked.