Whitney Terrell - The Good Lieutenant

Beale swung out the door and dropped, running.

The first shot was an RPG. Fowler saw a white puff of smoke, and then heard the bad sizzling sound, and she ducked her head behind the turret flanging. It hit the bank beside the RG. Dirt rained over her head. She sat up, got the binoculars out again.

“Three guys,” she said. “One’s in a blue shirt, two of them are in dishdashas.”

A second puff of smoke. This RPG flared high and right, way off course, into the bean field behind them. She didn’t even duck for that weak shit.

“All right, that’s it for the fucking rockets,” she said. “They’re gonna run, they’re gonna fucking run. Shoot ’em, Wally. You can engage. Use the canal for cover.”

The RG was slowly tilting underneath her. She had to keep leaning to the right to keep the glasses straight. Beale was yelling at her but she deleted this. “I got a pickup,” she shouted. “They’re in a white pickup, heading south, call that in. Right now, call that in.” And she dropped the glasses and the canal came back and the roof of the RG was tilting, the thing was rolling over, and she thought, This is fucking easy , and she ran up the sloping roof in a crouch and jumped off the back. Or it would have been easy except for the big antenna that she bumped going off, and it rotated her a little in the air and slowed her down just enough that she hit the edge of the canal, left shoulder first. “Whoof,” she said, as she rolled down the dirt incline. “Okay, that fucking hurt.”

“Hey, hey, hey!” She heard Beale shouting around the bend. “Don’t move! Don’t move. Shit! LT, you okay?”

The RG’s cab had impacted only a few yards away. She tried to sit up, but her left arm was pinned, so she rolled over and pushed up with her right and said, “I’m fine, Beale. I’ll be right there,” and checked her sidearm, and patted herself all over, and then tested out the shoulder where she’d hit. It wasn’t dislocated, and seemed at first okay. But when she lifted the arm above her waist, it felt like two electric wires had sparked and she dropped the arm quickly and said, “Oh, yeah, definitely kicking ass,” and started running.

When she got around the bend in the canal, Beale, Waldorf, and Dykstra were all waiting for her there. Beale had his weapon aimed at the Iraqi’s chest.

“He was a fucking decoy, is what I say,” Beale said. “Supposed to get our attention while those other dudes slipped up for a shot through the trees.”

“Is that right?” Fowler said.

The Iraqi made a noise that was something between a laugh and a reaction to being hit in the balls. She raveled up the collar of his shirt tight against his neck and turned just for a moment, checking for her zip cuffs, and that was when Beale drove the butt of his M4 into the center of his face.

* * *

The Iraqi was a mess. Beale’s rifle butt had squashed his nose and levered a cut above his eye, his collar lined with blood. Fowler checked his airway and his pupils, then wiped the blood on her pants. He wasn’t dead. As a recovery platoon, it was their responsibility to tow the RG back to their base, so she had brought the heaviest equipment that she had, the Hercules and a flatbed, and ordered their crews to start hitching towlines to the RG and left Crawford with the Iraqi and ordered Waldorf to assemble the platoon on the far side of her Humvee. Then she walked back to the ditch.

It was quiet there. A few yards away in the weeds, she could see a scatter of brass where someone had fired on the pickup. No weapon on the Iraqi.

When she turned, Beale blocked her way.

“Ma’am,” he said. “I’m asking a favor here.”

She stiff-armed him. The back of her hand was rusty and dark against Beale’s armor, as if she’d been playing in clay.

“I think I might know a way to fix this.” Beale sidled in close and spoke in a whisper, as if they were old buddies. “Why don’t we take this guy out to my friends at the patrol base? I’m just thinking maybe they’d give us a hand with the Iraqi.”

“Masterson’s platoon? You mean the guys who ripped off our gear and then spent three days smoking you? Those friends? Why the hell would he give us a hand?”

A long silence. Beale’s face looked like a hot water bottle from an old cartoon, swollen, red, and steaming. “I fucked up, ma’am,” he said finally. “Okay? You happy with that? You want to bail on me, that’s fine. But at least give me a fucking chance, huh? I didn’t kill this guy. I broke his nose. Take me out to Masterson. He can cover for me.”

“We’re in recovery,” Fowler said. “That’s what we do. And it’s our job to recover this vehicle and take it back to camp. If we violate the rules of engagement, we report it. The minute I put you outside the rules, that’s when I bail on you.”

“Masterson,” Beale said, “will let us off on this.”

“Us? What the fuck did we do here, Beale?”

“Is there a problem, ma’am?” Dykstra said.

“No, we’re fine,” Fowler said.

“Good,” Dykstra said. He grabbed Beale’s wrist. “Come on, let’s go over here, Sergeant. Let’s be fine in a different place.”

“No, no, no, man,” Jimenez said. He untied a sweat-soaked bandanna from around his neck and held it out. “Don’t do that. The sergeant is a sensitive guy. You gotta talk nice. Here, sir, you need a hankie?”

“Fuck you both,” Beale said.

“Let’s go sit down first,” Dykstra said.

“I am not sitting down, Dykstra, you fucking moron. You were fucking there. She hit that guy first. So I don’t want to get busted down a rank just because you and Jimenez are all up in the LT’s ass—”

“Hankie time.” Jimenez came forward, dandling the bandanna at arm’s length, as if he were going to wipe the tears from Beale’s face. “Come on, let it out, buddy.”

“Shut up!” Beale said. And he swung at Jimenez, a flailing, awkward punch, impeded by his weapon, but enough to knock Jimenez sideways into Dykstra, who in turn dropped to a knee and then came up, growling and burly, and went after Beale. It was inevitable. She’d been pushing Beale further and further outside the circle, criticizing him, isolating him, doing exactly what Masterson had suggested, until it had been natural for Dykstra and Jimenez to go after him, to come to her defense. She dropped down and wedged her way into the scrum with her elbow, prying and worming her way in, then pushing them apart with her outstretched hands.

“All right,” she said when she got them separated. The wires had touched again, but she kept her bad arm up anyway. “All right? Gonna be okay?”

“I’m good,” Dykstra said, wiping dust away.

The pain from her shoulder was a furious force moving inside Fowler’s head, like a wheel that kept spinning faster and faster. Beale was right. The position he was in now, beaten, humiliated, isolated from the rest of the platoon, was on her as much as anybody. “You? Are good?” she said to Dykstra, getting very close to his face. “Well, I’m not good. The detainee is my responsibility. That’s on me. So if you and Jimenez want to fuck with somebody, fuck with me. Is that clear? As for you, Beale, no matter how much of a shithead you are, you still ought to be smart enough to know I wouldn’t send you down for this. So … so—” She scanned their faces, trying to figure out what to say next, something to replace the silence that had overtaken her at Muthanna. “So we’re all fucked, okay? Beale”—she grabbed the sergeant by his body armor and dragged him into the group—“is fucked because nobody likes him. Dykstra is fucked because he’s forty pounds overweight. Jimenez is fucked with his hankie. Fredrickson and Arthur are more fucked than anybody. But I’ll promise you one thing, okay? It’s not going to feel any better if we start fucking each other, too. In fact, the only thing that might make it feel slightly better is actually doing our job right despite getting fucked. Okay?”