By her judgment, the door she’d seen halfway down the alley had to be farther back in the building, past the wall behind the counter, probably into a stockroom, or an apartment in the building’s back half. She was hurrying by then. Why hadn’t she hurried sooner? Fowler had already been worried before she heard the shooting, as if it had been prefigured in her mind—or at least as if she’d already recognized her mistake, which was that she’d been right to be afraid and shouldn’t have resisted the feeling. The only thing she’d been wrong about had been imagining that anything between her and Pulowski could be clean or hard or quick. The part of her that had imagined that it would be easy for her to cut someone off that way, send Pulowski in and forget him. Or Beale, even if it had been his idea. That was her flaw, to pull back, to get offended, to assume that the hurt would be coming, and so then push someone away. Claim that order called for it. Claim the rules told you that it had to be that way. There was a door at the far end of the counter, and she pressed her cheek against the floor and tried to see underneath it—nothing. The space wasn’t wide enough. You are slow. Imagine somebody dying because you took too long to get through a door. No one would know. But you’d know. Her hands were shaking and she felt like a fool, walking into a firefight with nothing but her Beretta sidearm, and she reached out and swung the door in and then pivoted quickly around the door frame in a crouch.
The hallway was a wreck, torn and bunched-up carpet, pictures on the wall, a light at the far end. Rooms on the right and left. “Beale! Hey, it’s me. You here?” It was a bad place, she could feel it. Nowhere to hide if someone took a shot at you in here, so she ducked into the first room that she passed. It was some kind of stockroom. Blood spatter and cardboard boxes in disarray, but no people—and the door out to the alley, she saw that. Beale could have come in there. She went back to the hallway, passed a staircase going up, sighted it, but nothing, and then she shouldered through a door, and she was in a bedroom and there were a man and girl sitting on the bed, shot, lifeless, small sprays of blood on the wall behind them and soaking into the bedspread, the girl’s feet bare. In front of them, a woman knelt on a prayer mat, prostrate, with blood glistening in her black hair like oil. That was when she saw the kid, hiding underneath the bed. He was wearing a Spider-Man shirt and cutoff sweats and looked to be about fifteen. They stared at each other. Fowler had flattened her sidearm on the floor and she could hear her own breath coursing through her chest. The rest of the apartment—if that’s what it was—was silent, uncomfortably so, as if whatever was happening to her had reached some new stage of development, which she had yet to comprehend. “I don’t want to shoot you,” she said. “I don’t want to fucking kill you, okay?” As soon as she said it, she knew that this was not the case. The kid must have figured that out too. They waited there together in that awful space until the kid’s eyes flickered briefly to the dead woman on the prayer mat and he bolted from beneath the bed and Fowler jumped on him. She shouldn’t shoot. “Stop!” she was shouting. “Stop! Get down!” She shouldn’t shoot him, not up close. She’d never shot anybody, and she didn’t know for sure what he had done, didn’t know for sure that he was guilty. There was just his face, dark-eyed, frightened—or maybe just confused. And then Waldorf’s voice in her ear, full-blast, like she’d become something dangerous, Get off, LT! Get off, LT! He didn’t fucking do it, and when he pulled her off, she heard a wet rattling as the muzzle of her Beretta chipped the kid’s teeth.
Later, the Hercules had bulldozed its way far enough down the alley that dismounts from her platoon could get in the doorway. They charged down the hall, going room to room, tearing up the place. Fowler herself swept clear through to the end of the hall and out the back of the apartment to the alley there. No Beale.
Waldorf came out, sweating, looking bleak. “We got nothing in here, ma’am,” he said. “I don’t know. Maybe this isn’t even the right place.”
“It’s possible,” she said. “Except where the hell else would he be?”
And then, a few minutes later, Beale’s voice whispered over her earpiece, cutting in and continuing on until all the other traffic died away:
“Okay, I got this turned down, the audio part, so I can’t hear you. So don’t call back. But this should be … it should be really easy. I am in—I didn’t see it, okay?—but I am in a trunk, definitely, so we’re talking about a passenger vehicle. Three guys, Western dress—I think. I don’t really. I really only saw flip-flops, pants cuffs. A pair of blue flip-flops was what…”
A long, long pause followed. Everyone was listening: the platoon’s other members at the intersection, Operations Sergeant Simpson and Captain Hartz, who were manning the radio back at Camp Tolerance. All of them could hear that the pathetic and utterly useless detail of the flip-flops had done something bad to Beale.
“I’m in a blue sedan.
“The car has been driving just a couple minutes. I’m lucky I got my hands free.
“They aren’t pros. They were frightened and in a hurry. If they’d been pros they would’ve taken my radio away.
“I have a dislocated shoulder.”
There was other traffic by now, of course. There were people shouting orders in other rooms, over other radio frequencies; there was Fowler out in the dust, trying to mount her team up in their Humvees. But wherever Beale lay, it was quiet. And he was whispering into his microphone, in a way that seemed meant for her ears only:
“I’m good. It’s all good. You guys come and get me. Please.”
* * *
The night after Faisal Amar had left, refusing Ayad’s offer of shelter, a convoy arrived at Ayad’s house: two pickups and a familiar blue sedan. From the roof, Ayad watched as the front truck turned violently up his driveway and extinguished its lights. And then—Ayad was already moving then, hustling breathlessly along the roofline—a bright rooster tail of sparks danced from the chain on the front gate. On the ladder, coming down, he fumbled the boxlike trapdoor lid and its corner smashed his fingers. At the same time he felt a strange warmth boring into his heel. He jerked his right knee into the air, swatting at the cuff of his jogging pants. And then, peeking between his legs, down the canted steps of the ladder, he saw his mother in her veil. If there had been a moment when he’d contemplated doing something heroic, it ended there, in this hollow glimpse, down between his thighs, of his mother so absurdly pulling herself up that ladder, concentrating on her feet so that she didn’t see him, a snuffed candle in her upraised hand.
Now downstairs, past—he noticed this only in fragments—the shadowed pictures of his brother in his military dress, on leave from his brigade, on vacation, during his first promotion, the illustrious record of his family’s past which he’d long ago insisted be packed away. And which his mother, in her pridefulness, had refused to move. Next in this dumb parade was the actual physical body of his brother’s son, Ahmed, stationed in the front hall, every bit as proud as his grandmother, brandishing a paring knife. All of them would have to go, the living and the dead. All of them should have been sent away or hidden the minute that he’d rejected Faisal’s offer, the minute he’d made the mistake of believing in his friend. For now, in a single, furious swoop, Ayad wrenched the knife from Ahmed’s fingers, twisted up his shirtfront in his fist, and dragged him back, away from the front door (there were lights playing and flickering around its edges by then), and shoved him down the back passage that led to the kitchen, the women’s side of the house. He ran back to the door and stashed the knife in the frail top drawer of the hall credenza, which was still crammed, as it had been since Ayad’s youth, with the scraps of his father’s correspondence, cards, birthday invitations, stamps. From these he grabbed a writing tablet—a gift from some fertilizer store—and first a gold pen, then, throwing that down, a Bic. And armed with these, Ayad opened the door, pen and pad in hand. He held up a single word—Welcome—as if it were a shield.
Hands thrust him into the back of Faisal’s sedan. Cigarette butts littered the fl
oor carpet, along with a dried-out slice of tomato, bread crumbs, the golden balls of foil from the upper wrapper of a cigarette pack, the pull tops of Mirinda cans. This must have been where his friend had been living when he wasn’t on the American base. The front door jolted open, hard enough to sway the chassis, and then Faisal himself was thrust into the passenger seat hard enough that his elbows struck the parking brake. Ayad thought he’d been shot: that must have explained why, as he was humped over the glove compartment, he kept his arms curled up tight and pressed against his chest, moving only in a series of tiny upper-body jerks, as if clasping a wound. Only now, as Faisal squirmed around to face his friend, his forearms pressed together against the seat back, as if begging, did Ayad notice that his wrists were bound in clear plastic.
A fat man in a head scarf piled in behind the wheel and they drove, at Faisal’s direction, through the side yard of his house, the sedan in the lead this time and the pickups—one of which had a mounted gun—trailing. Their tires had bungled through his mother’s orchids and rose garden, which occupied a delicately terraced and espaliered space just to the north of the driveway. They clipped a bleached lawn chair that Ayad’s mother had modified, cutting off the legs, so that she could sit in it to do her weeding. They tore through the sandy badminton court, where Ayad had scheduled many an intense match with Faisal, the sagging net looming up in their headlights, then vanishing, as if no more substantial than a cobweb. At the back gate, the fat man cut Faisal’s bonds and, eyes glinting in the dash lights, Faisal reached back to tug on Ayad’s sleeve. Ayad assumed he’d turned to say goodbye. What else was there to say? Both of them had failed. Neither of their strategies had worked. And yet, as they examined each other, closely and intimately, in a way that Faisal had refused to do the previous day, his friend blew a jet of air out between his lips, buffeting his overhang of rakish black hair. Then his tongue poked into one cheek, distending it, and he tilted his head as if to say: Minor setback here. No worries! And Ayad found himself staring at a familiar picture in his hand.
He recognized it immediately as the dry well. Or what he and Faisal always called the dry well, anyway, since nobody knew for sure what it had been.
Clearly Faisal had told the men about it. As they waded out into the grain, the hooded fat man who was tramping along with them, gun strapped across his back, kept flapping the picture of the well in front of Ayad’s face, then gesturing to Faisal, as if asking whether his friend was lying. Ayad ignored him. He could have also ignored the search, played dumb, led them wrong. He was furious with his friend for bringing the takfiri to his property, for violating his neutrality. Furious with him for being stupid enough to try to work with them in the first place. On the other hand, there had been his friend’s expression in the sedan: not carelessness, exactly, but defiance, cunning; his old assurance, the thing that he had taught Ayad, that in the end, together, they would always imagine a way to escape. That was the technology of the spaceship. So he did look. He stopped; he folded up the darkness as if it were a hinged panel that he could, with his mind, like a magician, push away. And there was the daylight of his father’s wheat field in midsummer. And there was Faisal in the straw hat that he’d affected back then, both of them in shorts, knees whitened from dust, walking out to play at the well. They were not supposed to. The well’s depth was unknown; for years a board had been placed over it to keep fieldworkers from falling in, but it was otherwise unmarked, protected only by the maze created by the thigh-high wheat. Still Ayad had always been able to find it. He had not known how, specifically, back then. He’d done it by some navigational device that he didn’t fully understand, lining things up according to the ragged pattern of the field’s distant tree line, the single big palm to the west, wandering along while Faisal did imitations, bugging out his eyes or sucking his cheeks like Rambo and pretending to shoot himself in the foot. The imitations were pantomime-only. Then Ayad would drop to his knees and shift the board away, the crickets sounding around them, the grasshoppers whirring up with the sound of bicycle clackers, and the well’s mouth would be revealed … and now, in the darkness of the wheat field, the lightless sedan following, here they were again. Could Faisal remember the same things? It was impossible to tell. Faisal’s magically pliable features were all blank, shut down, as if he wore a clear plastic shell over his face. When Ayad thought that they’d reached the well, he plucked Faisal’s elbow and his friend turned and gave him one last bug-eyed grimace: I am afraid, but also, I am aware, quite frightening.
The opening was found fifteen yards away. It appeared surprisingly small when Ayad was dragged to look at it, a tiny black crease, hay-strewn, barely large enough to stick a hand in, but a circle of machine gun butts enlarged it. What now? Ayad waited, flinching, for a bullet. Instead, the men gathered at the trunk of the sedan, and then returned with the white glow of headlights worming about their knees. The body drooped between the man who held its feet and the man who’d hooked his forearms through its armpits. A third handed Faisal his flashlight and obscenely tried to support the corpse’s ass. They pivoted, shuffling through the dust. He saw camouflage. A blond American boot sole. And then they squatted and laid the body out, like a limp roll of sod, and tossed an M4 rifle atop the corpse’s chest and freckled face. Ayad grabbed the flashlight from Faisal: a boy, perhaps, really a child, too young to have such a long, heavy body. By then, Faisal had caught him and snatched the light away. With no further ceremony, answering to commands that Ayad could not hear, the three men lifted the body and, holding it upside down, headfirst—that part, when he would be forced to review it later, seemed the most obscene—shoved him down, face first, into the earth. Pounding around the edges of the hole, they forced his shoulders through, his body armor, his belt. One man grabbed his legs around the knees and furiously leaned down, like a plunger, and then all at once the body disappeared entirely.
They all stood for a moment, watching the dust rise from the opening. Then Faisal tucked the flashlight under his arm and scribbled something on a pad, tore off the sheet, and handed it to Ayad as if presenting him with a receipt.
This is my gift, it read. Keep it hidden and your family will be safe.
PART TWO
CAMP TOLERANCE
6
“We gonna fuck before or after I kick your ass?” Fowler said, her thighs wrapped around Pulowski’s sparrow-thin ribs, her breasts brushing the back of his stubbly head as they finished a round of GoldenEye while spooning in her bed. Fowler had never been a gamer back at Fort Riley, or even before. Maybe a little Madden at parties as an excuse to drink. But here in Iraq, with no parties in sight, it was calming to spend an hour as James Bond, swiveling and swooping her Aston Martin through a pine forest with a decisiveness that had escaped her in reality—particularly after a twelve-hour shift emplacing concrete T-walls in the northern section of their camp.
Or at least it had been calming until Pulowski had started hassling her about the Muthanna bombing, two weeks back. And had informed her, just this morning, that he was going on leave in a couple weeks. “I thought we just covered before,” he said.
“No,” she said. “Right now is before.”
“Okay, then what was it that we just did?”
She peeked over his shoulder and down the dry pale curve of his hip, to the thatch of black hair, and his prick, which flopped out against the bedsheet.
“That was so long ago,” she said, evaluating it. “I’m not sure I remember.”
Pulowski tossed his controller to the floor and rolled over and tilted his head back and touched his lips to the bottom of her chin. “I seem to remember it okay.”
“Maybe I’m just not big on living in the past.”
“Really?” Pulowski raised his head. “Who taught you that?”
“I thought it was Professor Pulowski.”
“I think you’ve misinterpreted the lesson,” Pulowski said. “The professor, as I remember, suggested that you try not to plan everything. Go with the flo
w.”
“You sound like Beale,” she said.
“So?”
“So somebody needs a plan, don’t they?” she said. She rolled Pulowski over and slid her tongue down his flank. “What do you think would’ve happened if you’d wandered by to get laid and I wasn’t here?”
This was only the second time since the bombing that they’d had sex.
“I’m not really the right guy for the family values happy talk, Em,” he said.
“Do I look like I’m interested in family values?” Fowler asked. She picked his prick up and held it at eye level. “I am a corrupt and morally deviant officer. Beale’s vulnerable. That’s what you told me, anyway. I don’t expect him to know how to screw me properly. But you—well, I think you’ve got some skills there.” She put him in her mouth gently, held him, then released. “I just like to plan for it.”
* * *
What Pulowski didn’t understand was that when he said “Go with the flow,” what she heard was “Give in,” which happened to be her specialty, not his. It was exactly what she was doing when, an hour later, she crunched her way up to the E Company TOC and manned her desk in the plywood-floored front room of a double-wide trailer, starting a twelve-hour shift. The Army was all about giving in. Every decision, every order, every mission, every battalion update, every PT session. If your colonel ordered you to set up concrete T-walls inside the wire, you gave in—even if you thought that the walls could have been better used outside the wire. The flip side was you belonged to a structure you could trust, with rules that you didn’t have to just make up. So that the giving went both ways, and there was nothing to distinguish one person from the next, nothing too embarrassing or too horrible to share. So far, despite everything, it had pretty much worked this way. The one exception had been her relationship with Pulowski, and she wouldn’t have had to keep that a secret if she’d been a guy. Then she could’ve told people that she fucked Pulowski. Boasted about it. She could’ve said, Goddamn, I banged the living hell out of this lieutenant an hour ago, which was true.
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