The Good Lieutenant (18 page)

She pushed through the crowd until she found herself at the edge of what must have been the blast crater itself. An ossuary down there, soft white smoke, made worse by the fact that the checkpoint hadn't been fortified—no T-walls, no machine gun towers, not enough personnel. Nobody had wanted to station troops there except Colonel Seacourt, who'd volunteered. Short on manpower, he'd tapped a battery of artillerymen who'd been stationed in Dusseldorf sampling the local beer gardens, procured them a handful of Humvees, and ordered a platoon from Masterson's Delta Company to show them the ropes. Those soldiers, Masterson's soldiers, were what worried Fowler as she began to climb the pile of rebar and concrete where the front of the barracks once had been. She did not want to show her platoon another dead soldier from their own battalion, did not want to demoralize them any more than necessary. And so when an unfamiliar sergeant flagged her down on top of the pile and said, “I think one of your guys is trapped,” and pointed to a long, flattened slab of concrete, the first reaction she felt was despair.

“Is he alive?” she asked.

“Hell, I don't know,” the sergeant said. “Peters, you hear anything?”

The soldier he'd called Peters was lying flat down in the rubble and had his arm thrust in up to the shoulder under the slab.

“I'm touching him, sir,” he said. “I can feel him. He squeezed my hand. He's right down there, just right down there.” He shouted down into the hole, “We got some equipment. We're coming down. We're gonna lift this baby up and you're out. You're getting out, okay?”

*   *   *

They had practiced and practiced this, both at Fort Riley and in the first five or so recovery missions they'd so far made outside the wire. But these situations had involved vehicles that had broken down or been hit with an IED, and thus no actual human life had been at stake. Usually by the time they arrived on scene everyone had been evacuated, the area cleared by an Explosive Ordnance Disposal Team. “Eggleston,” she shouted, banging on the Hercules. “We got to go up this hill. Come on. There's a guy pinned in the rubble up top. Get the winch fired up, get the painter cable out.”

Eggleston popped his head through the hatch on top of the Hercules and gazed at the pile of rubble doubtfully. “This is a flat-ground vehicle, ma'am. Even if I did get up there, there's no way that I could brace her enough to lift anything.”

“Waldorf!” she shouted, turning away. She could see the rest of her platoon, some dismounted, some still in their vehicles, standing around in shock. Thinking the same thing she had thought when she came in. “Take the painter and a bunch of chains and go up the pile.” There was silence, stubborn gloom, horror, probably.

“There's nobody fucking alive up there,” Waldorf said.

“Where'd you go to school, Waldorf? Plano High, right?” She was unloading gear from the hatch on the side of the Hercules. “And I
know
you played ball there.”

“Yes, ma'am. Middle linebacker.”

“Good. Texas football. That's a real sport.” She tossed him a bundle of cable. “Give your weapon to Jimenez. You're leading us up.”

“Why do I got to hold his weapon?” Jimenez said.

“You volunteer to go up?”

“No.”

“That's reason one. Reason two is that you're Mexican. And reason three is that you played, what, beach volleyball? Come on, man, don't front me.”

“That's discriminatory, ma'am.”

“Good,” she said. “Give those weapons to Crawford. You're next on the pile.” She banged the side of the Hercules. “You hear that, Eggleston? Let the painter out. You got the pride of beach volleyball at San Bernardino High leading you up.”

“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.”

“Family Values, man,” Crawford said.

“I'm more worried about his emotional state,” she said to Crawford. “I think he might be depressed. I think he was genuinely fucking worried when Eggleston was listing that slab off of me. Is that true, Beale? Do we need to get you some meds?”

Beale took this in, absorbing something into his lumbering frame—hopefully the good vibe she directed at him beneath the talking. His face
had
been there, peering in at her, as the darkness closed down on her. She'd known he would've stuck his arm in and lost it, just to hold on to her. A fact both stupid and in some ways great.

“You might want to talk to the assholes who set off that bomb,” Beale said, “about what their emotional state happened to be.”

“Probably real disappointed,” Fowler said.

“
Werd
,” Crawford said.

Everything she'd been trying to communicate to Beale, every positive thought about what her platoon could do, might be—not all the bullshit stuff, not the benefits, not the personal glory, not the assholes (like, for instance, Captain Masterson) who told him he was somehow lesser and weaker for being in support rather than infantry, lesser and weaker for having a lieutenant who was a chick, but the good stuff, which she admittedly sucked at defining but
knew
was there—all of that had appeared in physical form, in the teamwork that had gotten the Hercules atop that pile, lifted that concrete slab off Weazer, and saved his life. A refutation of losing. That was what it felt like.

Three months ago, she might've just
told
Beale, Look, dumbass,
this
is what I've been trying to accomplish.
This
is what happens if you pull your head out of your ass and follow my advice. But Pulowski had taught her that the direct approach didn't always work. That it was a poor idea to be so certain about being right.

Instead, she sat with him for a while, waiting it out, leaving silence and some space. He squatted on his heels, his hands flattened on the roof in a strange position, wrist to wrist, as if preparing to climb into the starting blocks for a race.

“Remember those shackles Masterson stole from us?” she asked.

Beale shrugged, as if she were referring to a distant, murky past.