Whitney Terrell - The Good Lieutenant

“And Faisal?”

“If Faisal is leaking your intel, he has to have somebody to leak it to, right? Why wouldn’t it be this guy? Maybe he got nervous. Maybe he wanted to confess. Maybe that would explain why the guy freaked out when Faisal came in.”

Masterson looked at the note, glanced up. “Shit,” he said.

“My feeling is, we get this translated, see if it matches what Faisal told Pulowski. If it doesn’t, I go get these cameras and stake out this guy’s place. And you lean on Faisal to tell us where it is. Which you appear to be doing anyway.”

“I knew there was a good reason I let you stay,” Masterson said, smiling.

“I am not good,” Fowler said. She had not consciously moved the rolling stool that she’d been perched on, so when their knees touched, she was surprised and quickly flinched away. “I’m just improvising.”

“Yeah, well,” Masterson said, “welcome to the team.”

* * *

Fowler stood for a time in the sunlight, staring out over the barren infield of the patrol base, the surrounding blast walls and sniper towers, trying to shake off the crawling darkness that she’d felt in Masterson’s tent. Then she went to check on her platoon. The tent they’d been assigned had a single hole in its roof, which Masterson had told her had come from a mortar attack, and when she pushed through the front flap, Crawford was crouched in a column of daylight, examining an unplugged air-conditioning unit that looked as if it had been smashed by a giant fist.

“You got a little project there?” she asked.

Crawford peered up at her with his child’s unlined skin. “My grandma has one like this. York. Shame to ruin a good AC unit like this.”

“You think your grandma can send us hers?”

“I doubt it. She’s real attached to it.” He was still examining the top of the boxy AC unit, the hole that had been punched in its lid. “They say the shell came through and landed right here. Didn’t go off. They all just sat there real quiet, looking at it.”

She would’ve liked to hold or hug Crawford, touch his body gently, the opposite of how she’d handled Faisal, whose smell was still on her fingertips. Instead, she hiked her pants, eased down next to him, and ran her finger around the damaged area, so that their hands touched. He glanced up. She grabbed his forearm, squeezed, as if that were the end of their conversation, as if she understood what he was doing by not asking where she’d been. “Where are your glasses?” she said in a brighter tone.

“Fuck,” Crawford said. “They around.”

“You had them coming in, didn’t you?”

Crawford glanced up, sheepish, pleased.

“Now we’re getting somewhere,” she said appraisingly. It was well known that Crawford wore his glasses at all times, even in bed. “This is not a situation where you are having philosophical thoughts about an AC unit. This is a situation where you lost your glasses and because you lost your glasses, you’re afraid to go to sleep.”

“I looked around,” Crawford said.

“Did you look under things?”

“Nothing to look under, ma’am.”

“Is that right?” She was on her hands and knees, peering under one of fifty bunks.

“I ain’t been here long enough to get under them.”

“You check the guys?” She was already up then, looking. They were all asleep, but the search gave her an excuse to touch them, check them over, which she wanted to do anyway: Dykstra’s hammy double chin, Waldorf with his blast goggles strapped around a bicep, Jimenez, Halt, Eggleston, McWilliams with the burned-out butt of a Camel still clutched between his knuckles. She lifted the Camel from McWilliams’s fingers and folded his arm back against his chest, and when she did, Crawford’s gold glasses tumbled out from beneath his armpit. She carried them over and fit them silently onto Crawford’s upturned face, and he immediately curled up on an empty rack, knees against his chest. Then she sat on another. They were a good platoon. It was a sentimental thought, since the main thing she was thankful for was that no one had asked where she’d been, or why she’d spent the morning in a shed in the back corner of the patrol base.

There wasn’t any way she could ask their advice, though, and so, after she’d writhed around on her bunk for some twenty minutes, she crossed the gravel infield, entered the farmhouse that served as the patrol base’s TOC, and followed Masterson’s directions down an airless, stuffy hall to find Faisal Amar’s replacement. She drew back a shower curtain that had been hung across an alcove and found a fat, middle-aged man lying there, reading. “I am sorry, can I help you?” he said.

The room was no more than a closet, squalid, hot, and the man lay on his side atop a black foam sleeping pad, a small stack of Arabic paperbacks and an electric light beside his head. She wondered if these had been Faisal’s things.

“It’s all right, it’s okay,” Fowler said, reading the embarrassment on the man’s face. She averted her eyes until he’d buttoned his shirt. “I was just wondering if you could give something a quick look-see for me?”

“At your service,” the fat man said brightly. But when he donned his glasses, he clicked his tongue in disapproval. “Hello, yes, you are the lady who lost the soldier. I’m sorry to hear about you. You are here to kill my friend today?”

“Faisal?” she said. “Is he still your friend?”

The man’s face fell at her tone. “No, not anymore.”

“Good,” she said. “Then translate this.”

She left the ’terp with the note and walked back down the hall and logged into the base’s single public access computer to check her email, see if her camera request had gone through. Her SOS to Pulowski. The room was hot and stuffy, filled with the scent of food and tobacco spit. She sat for a moment before the computer’s shifting screen, her forehead furrowed. She didn’t have to tell Pulowski what she was doing, so why worry about it? By then the green bar at the bottom of her browser had loaded, and she opened up her in-box, found an email from Pulowski’s CO, Major McKutcheon, saying the camera system wasn’t ready yet. Then, a few lines down, she found one from Pulowski himself, with his contradictory response to McKutchon’s email attached.

Hey LT , Pulowski’s email said. The cameras are ready (see below). You were right about these assholes. Or I was right and you were wrong, then you were right and I was wrong. So at least we covered all the bases. Cheers. I’ll be waiting.

She stood and walked into the back room. The translator had disappeared, leaving behind the note and his translation, written in pencil on a legal pad.

I am Ayad al-Tayyib from Bini Ziad. I am 23. I have a friend who is a translator with the 27th Infantry. His name is Faisal Amar. If I help you, can you guarantee his safety?

The note proved that Faisal had lied about knowing the Iraqi. But it didn’t prove he knew anything about Beale. It wouldn’t be enough to detain him if she followed protocol and took him back to Camp Tolerance. So she had a choice. Either she allowed Faisal to be questioned by Masterson, which was probably the same as killing him. Or she reported Masterson and risked letting Faisal walk free. Which might mean never finding Beale. She crouched in the alcove where Faisal Amar had slept, her boots waffling patterns in the sleeping pad. The worst part about listening to Masterson evade responsibility for Faisal Amar was that she’d been reminded of the conversation she and Pulowski had had back in her trailer, when she’d blamed him for what had happened to Beale. Blame was what she needed. Stories of blame. Reams of affidavits supporting it. What was the proper gesture when you condemned a man? She touched the books, but couldn’t read them. Only a fool would lie down where he’d lain. Then she returned to her computer and typed in: 0800 hours tomorrow. 16th Engineer Brigade HQ. See you then. Then, after a moment’s hesitation, she added, We got the bastard , then pressed send.