1
The target’s house was surprisingly palatial: three stories, winged and modular, its tan concrete balconies adorned with geometric, beveled corners, so that the whole seemed to have been cast from a mold. A stone wall circled it, covered with a matching taupe coat of mortar worked into a pattern of diamonds and grooved lines. Even after Lieutenant Emma Fowler directed her Humvee through the front gate, she still believed that she had not decided unequivocally to let Captain Masterson off the hook for all the illegal crap he’d pulled to find this place. Especially since that crap might well have been the reason her platoon sergeant, Carl Beale, was dead. She had merely come to scope the situation out. Make sure she was not endangering Lieutenant Pulowski or her platoon unnecessarily. Make sure that she could live with allowing Masterson’s whole bullshit-o-rama to stay intact. She’d expected this to be difficult but, somehow, during the hour it had taken them to convoy here from Camp Tolerance—the target’s house was deep in the Iraqi backcountry, west of Baghdad—the mere fact of driving in her own Humvee with Pulowski had made her feel as if, for the first time in months, they were together, and their old selves had come back. Inside the compound, she counted her soldiers as they chest-bumped the scorching summer air, feeling more than just relief. Yes, the war was fucked up. Yes, left and right you could see examples of people completely botching things in the worst way. Of people who refused to step up. But Pulowski and Crawford, Dykstra and Waldorf, the rest of the platoon—they had not fucked it up. They had not quit. They had not bitched and whined. They had acted in good faith.
She felt as if she had needed only that one gesture of good faith. Seeing Pulowski touch the broken shackle Beale had welded to his Humvee on the ride out, listening to him speak a memory of the sergeant, even after they’d gone all Survivor on each other over the past three weeks—especially after she’d cornered Pulowski in her trailer and, like some camera-hog New Jersey housewife, decided it would be helpful if she said the worst possible things to his face—as Jimenez might’ve put it, the moment had some serious bueno to it, the kind you didn’t feel every day. Better than tribal council, anyway.
* * *
As for the recovery of Beale’s body, after all this effort, it appeared completely matter-of-fact. She talked to Masterson about it at a broken picnic table in the rear of the compound. “Faisal says the body’s in the field out back,” he said. “We’ll just search it in sections, like we’re looking for a weapons cache.” He fanned his fingers on an aerial photo he’d pinned down with his pliers. “We form a straight line, walk it through. Take a couple hours, maybe. Faisal says he used to play here when he was a kid. There’s a well or something out there. Claims it’s hard to find, but I doubt it.”
The field was beyond the compound wall. Inside were nonincriminating beds of rosebushes, a toolshed, a half-swept terrace. The broken poles and stays of … a badminton net? She’d worried how badly Masterson might’ve hurt his interpreter to get this intel. Now she worried he hadn’t hurt him enough. “You find the owner?”
“Nobody’s here,” Masterson said. “But this patrol’s rotation began at three a.m. So, Lieutenant, I know this particular mission is important to you. I know you are eager to have this happen. I know you’ve been waiting a long time…”
“But you’ve got some tired men.”
“To say the least.”
“So what do you want from me?”
“I got a dozen guys here,” Masterson said. “We add your platoon, we can sweep this field in an hour.” He pointed to a road on the map, a black worm at the end of the field’s shaded gray. “Then we’ll have the Bradleys pick us up and take us home.”
“That’s on the opposite side of the field,” Fowler said.
“That’s right.”
She understood what he was asking then. With the twelve men he’d brought, Masterson would have to go down one side of the field and then come back up the other in order to cover the entire area. But if Fowler added her guys to the mix, they might sweep it in a single pass. “I can go,” she said. “But I’ve got those cameras we talked about with me. Plus a signal officer.” She avoided Pulowski’s name, bending her tone to suggest that this being was far beneath Masterson’s attention. “You don’t want him out there. And if he stays, I need my team in here for security.”
“Who is this guy, somebody’s brother?” Masterson was fitting his body armor back on. When Fowler didn’t respond, he sighed. “All right, have it your way, Lieutenant. We do these cache searches every day. We got to stay out an extra couple hours, so be it. Why don’t you have your signal guy put a camera up while we’re working, at least?”
* * *
Harris was her real brother’s name. She thought about him as she and Pulowski crow-hopped the tubs of camera gear into the target’s empty house. Harris in his yellow tie and moleskin coat, his lower lip poked out, concentrating, the last time they’d met before she deployed, at an actual skating rink with actual pastel skaters painted on the boards, a memory no more or less incongruous than the hocus-pocus things that Harris had actually said. Let somebody else worry about what’s supposed to be true. That way you can figure out what you really believe. Now, with Pulowski above her, sweating and sharp-edged as usual, wiping his beaked nose, as they heaved the last tub up a ladder to the roof, she would’ve said that it had never been about what she believed. She’d only wanted to believe with someone else. That was the bueno in the Humvee, and that was what it felt like now, as she and Pulowski scuttled together to the roof’s edge, his face smeared with two days’ growth of beard but open to her again. Seeing her. Like the last piece to a puzzle she’d been struggling her whole life to complete. From there, they could see the toylike, humped bridge that marked the midpoint of Route Valentine, the distant railroad tracks, the tawny, rough edges of the canals, their silent banks of reeds. The field behind the house appeared to be several acres square, roughly the size of a section back in Kansas. The palm forest loomed on either side, and a mix of darker, orange-tinted wheat stalks and the paper-white clumps of plain grass ran away from them, slightly downhill, in a rolling series of bumps. Beale was there. This did not make the field feel ominous. Not in the way that an empty alley in Muthanna might. She heard the hard, dry hum of grasshoppers, the almost comic—given the usual tension of their patrols—desolation of the place. But she felt the strange, giddy lightness you sometimes got when you pulled off the interstate after a long drive, piled out of the car, and squatted behind a tree to pee: amazement at the stillness going on here, the stubborn persistence of life, always continuing, away from the rush of things. “Man, it was like some kind of ghost town coming in here. You wanna talk depopulation”—Pulowski snapped a picture of the field—“it’s like the Iraqi version of Kansas. Maybe we should just evac whoever’s left to Salina, give them a chicken farm, and call it good. Holy shit, what’s this?”
Pulowski wandered over to a weirdly shaped object in the center of the flat roof. His neck was so skinny up above his collar that his helmet resembled a tapered mushroom cap, and his white hips flashed between his belt and body armor. “You clear that?” she asked one of Masterson’s men as Pulowski poked his head inside.
“Yeah, we went through everything.”
“It’s a fucking spaceship,” Pulowski called excitedly.
“What do you mean, a spaceship?”
“I mean like some guy built a spaceship here, you know? Like to play in. It’s kinda weird, right?” Pulowski had clambered inside the structure, which looked more like a vegetable steamer with its metal panels folded in.
“Probably a lookout post, is what it seems to me,” Fowler said.
She waited through a fussy, rustling silence, which was the sound of Pulowski worrying. “So what are we looking for here?” he said, climbing out.
Fowler hunkered down along the edge of the roof. “The note you gave me,” she said. “It was good. We think the guy who wrote it also took Beale. This is his house. Beale’s body is supposed to be out back.”
“Why didn’t you say that before we left?”
She’d expected this question. She’d decided that if she couldn’t explain what she’d done to get this information from Masterson’s interpreter, Faisal Amar, then she should ditch the whole scheme. “I had to push the envelope a little. Captain Hartz wouldn’t have understood. And even if he had, he wouldn’t have let me come out here.”
“Push the envelope? What the hell does that mean?”
“It means him.” Fowler nodded down at Faisal Amar. She’d located him in the yard below, lying on his side, cuffed, like a trash bag that somebody had tossed out for collection. “That guy’s in bad shape. Masterson’s been having a party with him.”
“So this is like, what, violence-bad? Bash-on-an-Iraqi-bad?”
When Fowler nodded, Pulowski covered his face with his hands and started laughing and pacing across the roof. “Oh, shit, that is too perfect. I told you Masterson was a fucking stooge. You didn’t listen to me!”
She tilted her head to the side. “It’s worse than that. If you want to trace it all the way back, it’s probably Masterson’s fault that Beale got taken in the first place. He’s been fucking up big-time out here. The good news is, it also means that whatever’s happening here, whatever happened to Beale”—she nodded at the field—“it’s not on you.”
Pulowski did not seem in any way willing to classify the interpreter’s crumpled body as good news. “So if we find Beale,” he said. “You think that’s actually going to make this whole thing somehow less of a joke?”
“That’s what I’m hoping,” she said.
“Hoping?”
“That’s what I believe. We get our guy back. No matter what happened, no matter how jacked up it was, that’s the only way to make things right.”
Pulowski did not reply to this. She could remember feeling this way the first few months she’d worked recovery: trying to convince herself that the war was like a practical joke, one that couldn’t actually fool her so long as she was around someone who already knew the punch line. Like Pulowski.
Or now, in Pulowski’s case, like her.
She watched as he hefted a goobered-up antenna from one of his Tupperware tubs and, spooling out Ethernet wire as he went, set it on the edge of the roof. She went over and crouched next to him and grabbed his hand and put the palm of it against her lips. It wasn’t something she’d planned. But it felt right. Somebody looking would’ve thought that he was telling her to stop. But she kissed him in the folds of his palm.
“All right,” he said, blushing. He might have seemed just a little bit happier. She noticed that he didn’t wipe the kiss away. “Let’s get on with it.”
* * *
The Yagi antenna on the roof beamed the video back to Pulowski’s laptop at about sixteen frames per second (normal television was thirty), and so as the camera panned across the field, there was at each pass a certain level of trailing distortion, a moment when squares of color would flare up, a single pixel bolting out to supernova size, and the swarming calculations underneath the image—the Chebyshev filters, the anti-aliasing equations, the algorithms constantly drilling away at wave sample after wave sample—would be revealed in unnaturally perfect geometric shapes. After a few adjustments, however, the body armor of the soldiers who’d stayed behind pressed Pulowski’s shoulders, their fingers reaching out to brush the screen. They marked the shadows separating the wheat field from its bordering reeds, identified the wall that defined the house’s garden, its terra-cotta top, and the iron gate whose chain they’d cut, at Faisal Amar’s suggestion, in order to enter the back field. They could see, on each pass of the camera, the ragged line of Masterson’s platoon—accompanied by Fowler—as they walked down the left side of the field. At the controls, Pulowski felt increasingly magnanimous. Without him, the field would have remained a mystery. A fragment of someone else’s dream. Now he presented it to them as a gift. The Syscolite interface had an animated circle of buttons in its upper left corner. These controlled the camera’s pan, tilt, and zoom, and Pulowski allowed the men to play with it, breaking the camera out of its preset sweep and aiming at something specific: a patch of reed, a crinkle of paper blowing across the roadway, a pile of bricks. They did this not because they saw something interesting but only to prove that, safely hunkered down inside the compound wall, they had the power to see whatever they wished to see.
After this, the mood of Fowler’s platoon eased. Expecting a test, they’d been granted recess. Dykstra, the jowly sergeant from Philly, pulled MREs from the back of his Humvee, snipped their brown foil covers, like he was back behind his ancestral Wawa counter slicing Boar’s Head, while others did a SportsCenter recap of the Muthanna intersection bombing two months back. “Dude, you would not believe that shit,” a soldier named Jimenez said. He was about Pulowski’s height but rubbery, swaying on the outside of his boots, as if he was used to doing something more interesting with his feet. The bright emerald wingtips of a dragon wove up from his shirt collar and circled his neck. “Man, it was like some kind of fucking medical show cleaning that shit up. Giant fucking disaster. You know? I mean, we’ve seen plenty of wrecks and shit. One guy gets hit with an IED, that’s plenty nasty. But you got two dudes? Standing around a dump truck packed with a thousand pounds of dynamite and some gravel? It’s cold, man. Fucking cold. And at night, man? At night, man, you hear these fucking rats—”
“Damn, man … that was—I don’t even want you to mention that nastiness while I’m eating,” Crawford said. He was the youngest of the group and he made a frightened face, eyes wide and bulging behind his gold-rimmed glasses, mouth covered daintily with a paper napkin, which he’d folded neatly in his skinny, graceful hands.
“Eeek, eek, eek,” Jimenez said, his fingers fribbling along the table.
“No!” Crawford dropped his napkin and clapped his hands over his ears.
“Hey, hey, hey,” Jimenez said, tapping Pulowski’s shoulder, a dirty love band flopping on his wrist. “You ever seen anything like that?”
“I’ve been to the Muthanna intersection,” he said. It was where they’d lost Beale. “You know that.”
“That bomb was like a point-blank blast, man, except with gravel.”
Then, on Pulowski’s laptop screen, a dog appeared in completely clear silhouette, ears up, gazing back at the house and the camera there as if aware of them.
“You see that?” Pulowski said. He was panning the camera, trying to center on the animal again. “Dogs are usually with people, right?”
“Naw, naw, there’s dogs all over the place. Just keep it on the sweep.” Crawford stood and began to stretch as if preparing to take his leave.
“Wait a second, wait a second—where are you going?”
“The LT’s order is we stay here,” Crawford said. “Inside the wall.”
“What for?” Pulowski said. “What’s the point of going to the trouble to put this camera up if we’re not going to do anything about what we see?”
“You tell me, man,” Crawford said.
Pulowski paused. He looked up from the familiar rectangle of the laptop, its chrome highlights, the pleasing dry waffle of its keys, to Crawford’s glossy brown cheeks.
“Why did she have us stay inside the compound, then?” he asked. “It would’ve been faster if we’d all been out there doing a sweep.”
Crawford didn’t respond to this.
Pulowski looked up at the surrounding faces of Fowler’s platoon. Whatever interest or pleasure they’d shown when he’d originally fired up the camera had dissipated, and their expressions were blank, unfocused—not that far different than they’d been when he’d reported the loss of Sergeant Beale, just seventy-two hours ago. A nice little air pocket of unhappy.
In the center of it was him. He was the reason they’d stayed in.
“Okay, fine. I’m the idiot signal guy. I don’t know anything about field operations. I don’t know whether it means anything to see a dog out there or not. So I’m just asking for an opinion.”
“Could be one thing, could be another,” Crawford said.
“Don’t you think we should go check it out? Or at least alert them?”
“They ain’t got any coms,” Crawford said.
“All right,” he said. “Let’s do it.”
“Sorry, sir?” Crawford said.
Who the fuck is this idiot? Pulowski thought, listening to himself. What kind of moron leaves a protected compound when he doesn’t have to? It was a deep violation of the signal officer’s code. And yet, strangely enough, as soon as he spoke, he felt great. Not brave. Not smart. Just great. His hands had stopped shaking. He could handle fifteen minutes of stupidity if Fowler was genuinely at risk. “I said we’re going out. I’m the ranking officer here. Lieutenant Fowler, your lieutenant, is out there in the field. She’s got no perspective on this. She can’t see the terrain. How difficult is it to just drive down there and take a peek with a Humvee?”
* * *
When Masterson’s foot patrol started into the field—a line of thirteen soldiers holding their arms out for spacing—Fowler stood next to the captain and brushed his fingertips. They were nearly black, the dirt ground into deep half-moons beneath his fingernails, and he wore several days’ growth of beard. But the spackled, deformed skin between his glasses and his chin seemed less drawn and fearful, a tiny flicker of his frat-boy cheekiness coming back, and though she believed he deserved his fear, she also found its absence a relief. On either side of them were soldiers with metal detectors strapped to their forearms, waving their black disks over the furrows. “Worth a try,” Masterson said. “If he’s got a gun down there, they’ll get a beep. Faisal says he hears they put the body down in a well or something. For what that’s worth. Says he’s not sure he can find the actual place. But if Beale’s been down there since, what, Tuesday?”
Masterson waved a hand in front of his face and she realized that he was trying to warn her that the body might stink. She breathed in deeply through her nose, but all she could smell were the smells of the living: Masterson’s perspiration, which was sharper and more acrid than her own. The sweet ammonia of the dip the soldier beside them was chewing. “You trust him?” she said, nodding to Faisal.
The interpreter was upright now and walking several spots over in the line, hands cuffed behind his back. His lithe, handsome features appeared mushy, like a smashed melon, and there were scabbed patches on his scalp where he was missing chunks of hair. He wore his familiar rotten suit jacket over a gold Lakers jersey. No body armor.
“Hell, no,” Masterson said cheerfully. “But I’ve tried to make it clear to him that it would be a bad idea to lie.”
“You think he did it?”
“Killed your soldier?” Masterson grinned. “No, no—he was with me that day, I checked my battle journal.”
“But he could have been involved.”
“It’s the usual crazy Iraqi business. You ask one question, you get a thousand and one answers.”
“And the current one is?”
“The current one is that a couple guys ‘showed up’ at his house with Beale’s body. Asked Faisal for a place to hide the goddamn thing, and he sent them here.”
“He was already dead?”
“If you believe Faisal.”
“That’s a relief.” Fowler said the words, but she did not in fact feel this. As soon as she’d seen the interpreter’s wounds, the good feeling she’d had back in the Humvee with Pulowski had started to fade. “My guys were real upset about the possibilities.”
“The possibilities of what?”
“The possibilities of what might happen to a guy who’s left alone with a bunch of Iraqis. To do whatever they want.”
“Which are?”
“Which are bad enough to make my guys really pissed. We were mostly fobbits, you know. Before we lost Beale at that intersection, these guys were happy as hell to be working inside the wire, putting up walls for the general’s bowling alley.”
“So that’s how you got them to step up, huh?” Masterson said.
“It definitely helped,” Fowler said. She squinted, staring at the gauzy far end of the field. “I’m not going to say I didn’t use that information motivationally.”
* * *
They found nothing on the first pass. They’d gone down the wrong side of the field, Faisal claimed, weaving more and more Arabic into his sentences, though she knew his English was perfectly good—explaining that he hadn’t been in the field since he was ten. Then that he’d only been in it when it was dark. When he started in on his third explanation, one of Masterson’s soldiers drove a rifle butt into his ribs.
* * *
There was a canal at the field’s end, broached by a single corrugated drainage pipe. Masterson wobbled heel-toe back over the culvert, consulted with the Bradleys waiting there, then returned, snapping his chin strap back in place, and signaled his men to head back up the field’s east side. “How’s your kid brother doing?” he asked.
“My who?”
A fishhook twisted in her gut, but then Masterson’s smile relieved her—just fucking around. A crinkle of amusement. “We just got a call from your signal guy.”
Oh, Jesus, Fowler thought.
“Says he’s got a mad dog to check out up ahead of us.”
“Is he in trouble?”
“No, no—a little unauthorized air usage, but no. I said we’d meet them there.”
She tried to scrub her face of meaning, aware of his scrutiny off to her left side, the nosy wetness of his curiosity. “So you take shit seriously, don’t you?” he said. “Fucking tell Fowler you’ve got a tip, and she calls out the cavalry.”
A strange dry heat spread over her scalp with this remark, like a powder. It was meant to be a compliment, but the aftertaste was ugly, like she’d done something desperate and needy. “Was I not supposed to?” she said.
* * *
The radio chatter was interrupted by a calming, booming bass that Pulowski recognized as belonging to Waldorf, the somber black sergeant who commanded Fowler’s second team. “Hey, boys, we got a target. I need Charlie and Delta to go right at him, straight through the field. Dykstra and I are gonna swing around to the tree line, just in case he’s got buddies.” The rest was broken up by the sudden seasick jolting of the Humvee as Crawford accelerated through the field, and Pulowski, after his helmet ricocheted twice off the Humvee’s roof, scrambled to secure both his computer bag and the camera system’s wireless receiver, which tumbled and banged around the cabin like a brick in a washing machine. By the time the computer was clamped between his knees, there were several unexpected things happening, all in such a rough jumble that he found it hard to keep track. First, he was impressed by the speed and precision of the platoon, a speed and precision that Fowler—he could see her, or at least the line of soldiers that included her, hurrying up from the bottom of the field—no doubt had taught them. They circled like wolves around the “target,” Crawford charging in directly, flanked by the tank-like recovery vehicle they called the Hercules, while the other two Humvees, containing Waldorf and Dykstra, flared out to the right, one of them, apparently, finding a back road on his Blue Force Tracker and punching through the trees—out of sight but still in radio contact—while the other swerved along the field’s edge in case the target tried to run away. This was, he supposed, what the camera system really was—a hunting device. A target finder. It had been completely idiotic to imagine that it would be used in any other way.
The real shocker, though, was seeing the target in reality: a shirtless, hobo-type figure in an oversize blue jacket, his front lip lifted rabbitlike over a pair of jutting teeth. He shifted in and out of focus as the Humvee bounded across the furrows of the field like a buoy out at sea—but his presence, at least to Crawford and McWilliams, seemed to change everything, to be like an electric charge, amplifying and overriding reality. “Get down, motherfucker! Get down!” Crawford was shouting. “Wave at the motherfucker, Mickey. Come on, you shithead. Please!” But each time the prow of the Humvee nosed down, there he would be again, like some kind of drifter or clown, flapping his arms at them, waving them away, his urgency mimicking Crawford’s urgency, the whole thing tightening up in what seemed like a bad way. Pulowski had wanted there to be a target, he supposed. At least that would prove his case. But now, seeing the target live, he found himself wishing that the Iraqi would escape. He wished desperately to warn him, had to literally cover his mouth to prevent himself from screaming, Watch out! Watch out! We’re coming! You have to—
* * *
The screaming voice Pulowski heard when he woke up was high-pitched, piercing, but he couldn’t figure out where it was coming from. It definitely wasn’t Crawford, who was leaning forward in the driver’s seat, his body suspended against the thickly woven strap of his shoulder belt, as if he’d been trying to lunge out his side door. He had light, walnut-colored skin and pale olive eyes, and what Pulowski saw in his expression, when he pulled Crawford’s body back toward him, wasn’t blame or even anger but some sort of outraged plea for sympathy: You see what I’m doing? Isn’t this ridiculous? I can’t believe you caught me doing such a stupid thing! and then when Pulowski propped himself up on an elbow, and he saw that the dash, the steering column, and the heavy metal cabin that held the vehicle’s electronics had swallowed up Crawford’s legs and that behind him McWilliams, the gunner, had no right ear or cheek and the blood from the dark hole that had replaced them was currently staining his pants at the knee. For a moment, Pulowski gathered himself and tried to push himself free, his thighs flexing, but his left leg was pinned and a bright current of pain flared up his thigh, and then finally he quit screaming and lay back into the quiet wilderness of the front seat.
“You think you can get out?” he said to Crawford. The door on Crawford’s side was missing.
Crawford clenched his jaw so tightly that the ridged skin of his lips disappeared and his mouth seemed only a nubby seam. The gold-framed glasses that he wore beneath his goggles had fractured and swiveled down along his cheek and he thrashed against the shoulder belt, lunging toward the open door, and the field beyond, in a way that reminded Pulowski of a fish flopping on dirt, or on a parking lot, on some completely foreign piece of asphalt, the water miles and miles away.
“Okay, I get it, I get it. Chill out for a second.” Pulowski tried to open the door on his side of the Humvee but it wouldn’t budge. He couldn’t crawl over Crawford to get out. So finally he jabbed at the broken windshield, clearing away bits of glass as best he could with what appeared to have once been an air-conditioning vent, then stared out over the exploded engine, the axle, the soft, four-foot-deep hole where the bomb had been. Beyond it, he saw the Iraqi who’d waved at them. He was maybe twenty yards off and lay facedown in the dirt, his feet toward Pulowski, as if he’d been spun around by the shock wave. He was alive—that Pulowski could clearly see. He was crawling on his belly, moving with a painful, almost ridiculous slowness, his jacket covered with chaff and one of his legs folded sideways over the other at a wrong angle, like an insect’s. “Hey!” Pulowski shouted. “Somebody! There’s a guy here moving. He’s still alive! He’s trying to go someplace!” Then Pulowski heard the crunching sound of boots running across a chaff-strewn field and, at the same moment, saw Fowler approaching with an M4 at her shoulder. “Get down! Get down!” she shouted. And then, in a different tone, “Stop! Stop! Stop moving now!” Her face was familiar beneath her helmet, flushed, darkly tan, the blond-brown wisps of her hair plastered all around, then fading out pale into the curve of her cheek, but her expression was all wrong, blunt and explicit, terrifying in its intensity. “No,” he said. “Wait!” He raised his arms. “Down!” she shouted, and then he huddled quickly behind the ruined dashboard of the Humvee and he heard a flat burst of fire, and when he sat up again, the Iraqi had rolled over onto his side and curled up, as if he’d decided to go to sleep.
Pulowski definitely recognized his face.
* * *
When Fowler wrenched open the Humvee’s door, Pulowski struck at her, knocking her hands away, as if he had a train to catch. Fowler did not particularly care. He was alive. That was the cure for the black cape of badness that was swarming around the back of her head. “Settle! Settle!” she said, grabbing him, her thumbs on either side of his sweating nose, fingers curled around his cheeks. “Everything’s gonna be okay.”
“What the hell are you doing?” he said.
“Where’s Crawford?” She was craning her neck, trying to see inside the cab.
“Crawford,” Pulowski bleated. “He’s bad.”
She ran around the Humvee. Crawford’s body was leaning halfway out of the cab, at an angle that seemed impossible not to be causing him pain, and she lifted him back into the seat. He was dead. Standing up, she saw that two of Masterson’s soldiers were working slowly back the way they’d come, away from them, out of the field. In the other direction was a rough half circle composed of the vehicles from her platoon: Waldorf’s Humvee over by the edge of the field, then Jimenez’s, then the Hercules, which also had been hit and had thrown a track but was not on fire. Eggleston, the driver, was pulling Halt, the gunner, from his turret, and Halt, just based on body language, was not injured seriously. “Sergeant, my radio’s out here,” she shouted. “Can you communicate?” And when Eggleston gave the thumbs-up, she ordered, “You’re going to have to run comms for me. Call the TOC, make sure we’ve got medevac. Call Waldorf on the other side. Follow your own tracks back out. Do you got me?”
So, good: there was that. All this time she was avoiding the sight of the Iraqi’s body. The one she’d just shot. It was on Pulowski’s side of the Humvee, in the no-man’s-land between the Hercules and Masterson’s soldiers, and she kept her eyes averted so she wouldn’t see the dead Iraqi’s face. Instead, she checked on McWilliams—dead—dug out the Humvee’s med kit, and circled back to Pulowski, who was shaking his hands loosely in front of his chest, and pried open his ruined door. “You’re okay,” she said, opening the kit. “It’s going to be okay. You couldn’t have known what the guy was going to do. It’s not your fault, Dix. You can’t—”
“Not my fault!” Pulowski hissed.
And now, here, she was granted full, unfettered access to his pale eyes, his direct gaze. She’d made love to him like this, this close, her fingers running over the pores of his skin, his beaky nose, the acne that sometimes rose up around his eyebrows—and her favorite spot, the soft skin beneath his ear, leading down to his boy’s neck.
“Do you want it to be? I could think something up.”
It all checked out. No spinal damage. Nothing destroyed, except for down below, where the Humvee’s dash bit down on his legs. “Try me,” Pulowski said.
“You could’ve sat in back.”
“I could’ve stayed in bed.”
“Well, that goes without saying.”
“I’m pretty decent in bed. I know you have a hard time admitting it.”
“Try me,” Fowler said.
“Did you check my junk?”
She was straightening him up, trying to judge the angles on getting him out, and her chin was down in that territory.
“I’m serious. I want to make absolutely sure, when we get out of here, that you check my junk over carefully.”
She tugged his belt. “What for?” she asked. “Brass?”
But it didn’t work quite exactly right, the old banter thing. The skin tightened shiny along his temples, a simulacrum of amusement, but then, after a couple of seconds, he rolled his head. “What a shit show,” he said. “Look at what we did.”
“It was the fucking hadji’s fault,” she said.
“I saw him, the guy you wasted,” Pulowski said. “I saw his face. It’s the same guy who wrote that note. He was trying to wave us away—”
“He was guilty,” Fowler said, though she felt a sickness crawl across her skin like sweat. “He was guilty.”
Pulowski backhanded his nose to clear it of snot. “No,” he said. “No. If he was a bad guy, he wouldn’t have waved us away.”
“Pulowski.” She’d found the right tone finally. Not a lover’s voice, a commander’s voice. Masterson’s fuckup erasing confidence. “Tie it off. Okay? We got the paperwork on this guy. You found him. You did the right thing—” Without warning, she braced and tried to lift him from the cab. Pulowski stared bug-eyed, as if he were slowly being inflated with air, and then when she tried to tear his leg out from beneath the dash, he began to thrash and claw, making a deep horrible humming sound in his throat, and she had to set him down again, resting her cheek against the sweaty chest of his fatigues. “Okay. We’re going to need a better plan.”
Pulowski rallied, just marginally. “Ya think?”
She didn’t talk after that. The floorboard was wet with blood, and she lifted his right leg so it lay across her back and grabbed his left ankle where it disappeared into the dash. When she touched it, the bone inside was loose and wobbly and Pulowski clawed at her helmet and she grabbed the cuff of his fatigues and jerked hard and the leg came free and she dragged him out into the grass. “Hey! Hey!” she shouted. “Hey! We need some help here. Somebody help me with Pulowski, okay?” But the field was as silent as it had been from the roof of the house, only this time aggressively so, a nullity of silence, bodies moving, sun, grass, but the sound track shut off, and there seemed to be something very private that this nullity was speaking to her, irradiating her like a gamma ray so gently and so confidently that she was frightened of it more than Pulowski’s injuries, and so she propped his leg up and cut the pant to his thigh and pulled a Velcro tourniquet from the Humvee’s medical kit. The foot and boot were gone and she could see gristle and flayed bone and she put a compress on and held it tight, counting to sixty, and when this failed she strapped the tourniquet above his knee and tightened it, screwing down hard, and then fit the plastic windlass beneath the Velcro strap, and then waved to Eggleston and Halt and pointed back at the house and shouted, “Let’s go! Let’s go! Follow your vehicle’s tracks,” and then picked Pulowski up with one arm under his thighs and another under his back and said, “Come on, Dix, we got to go,” and began walking as quickly as she could out of the field, feeling the blood rush to her head, keeping her eyes fixed on the target’s house. Twice Pulowski gagged, and she set him down and banged his chest with the ball of her hand and then, muttering in embarrassment, “All right, all right,” put her lips over Pulowski’s and blew in, hating and clinging to the salt there, the sweat, the staleness of his tongue, his dirty teeth, his awful breath.
Copyright © 2016 by Whitney Terrell