“Pulowski.” A winter Sunday night at the Harmony Woods apartment complex on the outskirts of Junction City—known locally as Fort Riley West. Pulowski was reading over an article on Fourier transform pairs describing how certain wave forms naturally correspond to each other despite being in different domains. McKutcheon had switched off his cell, jammed a snowboard into his Subaru, and headed to Colorado for the weekend. Fowler was away, her apartment windows dark across the snowy dimple of the complex yard, probably off doing some sort of extra brown-nose work for Hartz, and so Pulowski had been expecting … well, nothing. No visitors for the evening. He had his sweatpants on, wool socks, a pair of fleece-lined slippers mailed to him by his mother, and he was sitting at the kitchen table with a blanket over his legs, reading and occasionally glancing up at the apartment’s flat-screen, which he had, in an attempt to feel adult and responsible, tuned in to the NewsHour with Jim Lehrer. He shifted his gaze to the sliding black pane of his living room’s glass door, seeing a reflection of himself, blanket tucked neatly around his knees, Diet Coke open on the table, and then, looming up just behind his reflection, so that their faces mingled in the glass, Fowler in a black stocking cap and parka, her gloved hands beckoning for him to let her in. “Come on,” she said, her voice still muffled by the glass. “We got to go get Beale. Let me in.”
Beale, as far as he was aware, didn’t need getting. Still, five minutes later, Fowler stood inside the sliding door, her hair haloed by the static of her removed cap, waiting for him to get dressed. No information on where they were going, except that he was to wear civilian gear: parka, jeans, gloves, hat, boots. No ACUs. There was something mischievous and off-center in the way Fowler made this request—an energy, a confidence. The kind of self he saw in bed. Even so, as he tramped out the back door of his apartment, he’d experienced a small jolt of fear and displacement as if, however much he might have agreed with the spirit of this adventure, he wasn’t sure that he belonged with her as a part of it, whatever it might be. “Tunes,” a voice growled as he climbed into Fowler’s truck, and he was surprised to see Dykstra lying on his side in the backseat, dressed in a red-and-black checked woodsman’s jacket, his jowls caked with camouflage face paint. “Hey, welcome to special operations, Lieutenant,” he said, cuffing Pulowski on the shoulder. “See if you can coax some music out of the LT.”
They pulled through town, past the Casey’s General Store, past the strip mall where he and Fowler sometimes ate Chinese, past the mournful city hall, with its wind-stripped tinsel. Then the highway ran straight and flat, eddying with snow beyond the pickup’s headlights, and beyond that the white fields glossily and ghostly lit. Pulowski scanned the truck’s radio dial, picking up scratchy stations from impossibly far away: WGN in Chicago, a pastor preaching from Vancouver, a weather report from Arlington, Texas, and the news. The signals that brought their voices down through the truck’s antenna and into the cab were the very thing he’d been reading about back home, safe in his apartment. At one point, the scanner landed on a velvet-voiced news announcer, who said, “The Department of Defense has confirmed three more deaths in Iraq today. Private William O’Connor died when his Humvee was hit by an improvised explosive device in Anbar Province.” For a moment, this signal sent a chill down his spine, like the snow that had fallen into his collar on his way to the truck, foreign to the warmth that the three of them generated in the small cab. The next channel was country music, and Fowler reached out and punched the button, ended the scan, and they drove together listening to Garth Brooks without complaint.
About ten miles out of town, the truck trundled off onto a gravel road, unplowed, the double ruts of tire marks obscured by the smooth-faced slopes of drifted snow. She downshifted into four-wheel drive, then gunned the truck, cresting the first drift, Dykstra in the back shouting, “Yee-ohah!” in a Philadelphian imitation of a hillbilly yell. Fowler beat back a grin and thumbed her stocking cap down over her forehead, shoulders hunched with matching intensity, and for a moment he forgot the road, forgot his curiosity about the purpose of their errand, forgot the forbidding darkness of the fields outside the cab, forgot the radio, forgot even that they were moving, and instead watched her, downshifting, then upshifting, eager, certain, and surprisingly calm despite the violent shaking of the cab.
Behind them, three more vehicles pulled up, all of them civilian: a hulking black Suburban, from which Sergeant Waldorf descended, a white Ford F-150 with chrome pipes that belonged to Jimenez, and lastly Crawford’s car, which was a Honda CRV and looked like a toy compared with the rest. There was a brief blatting of bass that accompanied Crawford’s car as it chugged up uneasily, loud enough for Fowler to turn around and glance, but her expression wasn’t angry—Pulowski knew all her signals by then, even in the dark—more like ardent, even amused, and the music died as soon as the car shut off, and the rest of the platoon struck out after them through the field of snow, not exactly with murderous efficiency, since Pulowski could see Crawford and McWilliams horsing around together in the snow. But unified, at least.
There was a chain-link fence about a hundred yards across the field, and as they climbed the small berm that led up to it, Pulowski could see the watchtower tall enough that it had been fitted with red lights, to warn away small aircraft. Then, just beyond, banks of lights erected every quarter mile, shining down on rows of snow-covered tanks and Humvees, on flatbed trucks, and on the tents where every company commander in the battalion had stationed guard details to watch over their equipment as it waited to be loaded into the trains. The DRIF.
Dykstra was already kneeling, calmly cutting an opening into the links of chain. “Why in God’s name would we want to break in there?” Pulowski asked. In response, Dykstra tilted his heavy, cold-pinched face toward Fowler.
“We’ve got to borrow a couple of Captain Masterson’s things,” she said. Why? Pulowski wanted to know. Borrow what? Didn’t she know that this was totally illegal? Didn’t she know they had guards down there? What the hell was she thinking? Wasn’t the whole problem with her platoon that they didn’t have respect for the rules? Fowler squinted her eyes thoughtfully against the snow until Dykstra had finished cutting a seam in the fence, then lifted one corner with her gloved hand. “Beale’s getting smoked off-site by some of Masterson’s goofs,” she said. “He’s a dickwipe, but he’s my dickwipe, and it is my conviction my dickwipes don’t get punked like that. So we need some leverage, and you, Lieutenant, are here to be our guide. Besides, isn’t it your conviction that getting court-martialed now might not be such a bad thing?”
“Well, since you put it that way.” Pulowski shimmied through the opening, elbows pulling his body forward, the powder flaring up around his chin, and then they body-skied down the berm, sliding and falling, cushioned by the snow, so that the descent felt like an interesting mixture of something that was truly dangerous and something that was not. The DRIF resembled an immense city whose residents thought primarily of murder—or so Pulowski had described it to Fowler, largely to get her goat, but also because, in his opinion, it felt that way. Spooky as hell, especially if you tried to mentally put together the video he saw, say, on Lehrer, of the moment when an IED hit—the thoom sound of the tape, the way the camera always twisted and joggled with the report, and then the inky black column of smoke coiling up. And then you walked around the DRIF and saw about five hundred Humvees and wondered which one of them would be hit that way. But now it wasn’t scary. Not on this particular trip.
They huddled on the back edge of the lot, against a row of Bradleys, their armor fringed with icicles. Everybody hated the DRIF. Pulowski had worked several night shifts there, twelve hours in the command center, freezing his ass off in a poorly heated tent; in there, the DRIF was a giant algorithm, paperwork upon paperwork, lists of gear, every piece itemized, presented to him and then entered into the computer program that kept track of their logistics. But out here, in the actual open, alone with Fowler and her platoon, there was a perverse kind of freedom to it. Security was light. The forklifts weren’t running. Most of the officers had given themselves the night off, along with most of their underlings. The intruders rested, listening to the growl of generators and dusting off their pants, then Fowler peeked down one of the long central aisles, and said, “So, where does Delta Company keep their shit?”
Pulowski crept up and crouched beside her. Every so often, the lines of vehicles were broken by a passageway running perpendicular to the main aisle, and at each of these intersections—a solution that had been thought up a week into their time on the DRIF—was an orange cone that labeled the contents of that area. The next sign read HUMVEES. He fed this into his mind. He had a picture of the grid in there, the map of the whole DRIF, which hung in the command center and which, by now, he’d seen a thousand times. The key was to picture it clearly, as you might an equation. Somewhere out there was a long, snow-covered aisle with stacked containers filled with every company’s gear. He nodded when he had the location, pointed down the aisle ahead of them, then showed Fowler two fingers, and pointed to the left. Then Fowler stood and waved her platoon forward, repeating the sign that Pulowski had just made, and they all hustled down the snowy alley, Fowler charging out ahead.
* * *
“What in the world are you doing?” Pulowski asked.
Beale was holding a black trash bag and picking up beer cans from the side of an unplowed county road, twenty miles outside of Fort Riley and the DRIF. Beale’s nose had a clear drop of snot suspended from its end. “Policing the area,” he said.
“For whom? Why?”
“Orders.”
“Come on with the fucking orders, Beale. Where were you last night?”
Beale glanced back down the road. There was a plywood structure in the milo field there—a cross between a building and a Hollywood western set.
“You stayed here?”
Beale nodded. His nostrils were ice-crusted and he walked splay-footed through the roadside snow, his upper lip trembling.
“Well, that was fucking genius. How’d that go for you?”
“Loud,” Beale said.
“Really.”
“It was very loud.”
“That wasn’t the answer I was expecting.”
“Wolves,” Beale said. “Other things.”
“Wolves? I didn’t know they had wolves out here.” Pulowski scanned the open field. Cut corn stalks poked up through the snow.
“Oh, yeah, man. It’s fucking badass out here. These guys have seen a bunch of wolves. Bear. No fucking around. Band of brothers, man.”
“No lions?” Pulowski asked. “No tigers?”
“Fuck you,” Beale said.
There was a stir outside the plywood building, figures in ACUs, standing out checkered brown against the snow-cropped field. “No fucking help,” one of them shouted. The sound was shredded up by the wind that cut through Pulowski’s jacket, and he dug his hands into his pockets and reminded himself how little he liked the country, in any form. “Mouth, Beale. Get your mouth into it. Show us your mouth.”
Another made what sounded like a pig call: Sooey.
Beale responded by getting down on all fours in the snow and rooting around in it with his nose. He pulled up a broken bottle, holding the neck of it between his teeth, and when he emerged this way, snow flecked on his nose and eyelashes, he held up the bottle for display for the soldiers who’d yelled at him and they cheered—though, even with the wind, Pulowski could hear higher notes of laughter. If Beale noticed these, he didn’t show it, but instead pumped his fist and made a show of dropping the bottle directly from his mouth into the bag. “So this is your band of brothers?” Pulowski asked.
“It’s SERE training, buddy,” Beale said. “Closest thing you can get to Ranger training and still be regular Army. All these guys have it.”
“This is SERE training?”
“Survival, evasion, resistance, and escape, dude.”
“Yeah?” Pulowski squinted. “What part are we working on now?”
“We aren’t working on shit,” Beale said. “You are standing there waiting to get ass-raped by a bunch of hadjis.”
“Really? That doesn’t sound like very much fun,” Pulowski agreed. He was slightly bored.
“Hey, to each his own,” Beale said. “But when the ass-rape team comes calling for Carl Beale, Carl Beale intends to have a little training.”
He picked up a second bottle with his teeth and deposited it in the trash bag, much to the enjoyment of the soldiers—one of them was Lieutenant Anderson, judging by his size—at the far end of the field. Then he stood up again and lumbered along beside Pulowski.
“You got a real nervous thing about this ass-raping,” Pulowski said.
“Nervous.” Beale blew air between his lips and shook his head sadly, staring up at the brilliant winter sun overhead. “Nervous. Fuck. You seen the reports we’ve been getting on IED traffic? You seen that shit on YouTube.”
“I seen a lot of shit on YouTube,” Pulowski said.
“Yeah, well, you want to fight the monster, you got to be the monster, dude.”
This was the kind of moment, the kind of argument, the kind of discussion that was not very valuable to have with someone in the Army. In his experience, this was the time you walked away, which he would have done with Beale, except for the fact that he found him funny. “Fowler wants you back.”
“Yeah, well, she was the one who kicked me out.”
“Because you let the captain steal her shackles.”
“She kicked me out because I let the captain steal her shackles,” Beale said. “She kicked me out because I let the captain steal her shackles. Shackles, sir. Fucking shackles.”
They were close enough now to the plywood structure that Pulowski could see it resembled a cross between a deer stand and a boys’ clubhouse. It had two stories and had been constructed out of rough wood studs and plywood walls into which windows had been cut, unglassed and unframed. Up in the shadows of the second floor, Pulowski could see paint cans wrapped with black gauze, like cheap Halloween effigies, attached to a T-shirt stuffed with hay. “Hey, Beale,” Lieutenant Anderson said. “Drop.”
This kind of bullshit was the reason that Pulowski spent as much time as possible avoiding the infantry. It didn’t have to exist, it didn’t always exist, but it could. The main problem that he had with it was his first instinct was always to laugh. “Come on, you don’t need to smoke this guy, Anderson. He’s good. He never did anything to you.”
“He’s good?” Anderson said. “You think he’s good?”
“Okay, what—you want to go with medium? He’s medium?”
Lieutenant Anderson smiled at this joke in a way that seemed to Pulowski clearly learned from movies. The smile that wasn’t a smile. The response he gave wasn’t much more original. “Yeah, well, it is what it is.”
“Maybe it is what it isn’t,” Pulowski said before he could stop himself.
By then Beale had dropped into the snow and was doing push-ups, grunting lightly, and one of Anderson’s subordinates had come over to put a boot beneath his mouth, making kissing sounds and shouting out, Sooey, each time Beale’s mouth touched it. Pulowski could smell Anderson too, smell his heaviness and his weight, and it wasn’t going to be enough, in this particular situation, to simply cancel out his signal, refuse to receive it, and walk away. There was something bad here, he could feel it, whether or not he knew how to translate it exactly, and he wanted somehow to enunciate a different principle. It was the first time he felt absolutely sure of that.
Pulowski withdrew his hand from his pocket and, glad that he was wearing gloves, tossed a lavender wad of satin into the snow at Anderson’s feet.
Anderson lifted a boot in the air, as if he’d stepped in something foul. “What the hell is that?”
“Your underwear,” Pulowski said.
“That true, LT?” one of the nearby soldiers said. “Shit, check that out. You got some fucking downtown taste there, man.”
The soldiers clustered around the tiny wad of lavender, hands on knees, inspecting it, one of them making a joke by poking at it with a stick. Anderson swept off his stocking cap and pushed them away. “Get up and get in my car,” Pulowski whispered to Beale. And then he started to walk backward, eyes on Anderson, who bent down quickly, stuffing the purple tuft of fabric into the pocket of his ACUs.
“There’s more where that came from,” Pulowski said. He was listening for Beale’s retreating footsteps behind him. He hoped he heard them.
“Give it,” Anderson said.
“You want your stuff back, Lieutenant Fowler wants hers. You give us Beale, we walk away. You don’t need to be smoking this guy anyway.”
“Fowler? The fat chick?”
“She says she likes a man in briefs.”
Anderson heaved the football he’d been carrying at Pulowski’s chest and Pulowski tucked a shoulder, so that it glanced off his back—still painfully.
That was the end of his tough-guy routine. He turned and made a break for the Celica, where he had a bag of personal items that they’d stolen from the Delta Company lockers out at the DRIF. Signal officers never did shit like this. In signal processing, the primary goal was to take the analog world and make it something that a machine could understand. Take light bouncing off white snow crystals and make it ones and zeros; take motion and make it pixels. You could store motion, store sound, store position, fold it up inside an equation, then an algorithm, imprint it on a wafer of silicon—and then re-create it, anywhere, on any machine. It was like stealing the world, except safely, cleanly. Nobody ever got hurt, or was actually cold, or got drilled with a football because of a digital file, and so, if you really thought about it clearly, you could see that signal processing was the future—hell, he could probably see this dumbass “secret” field of Masterson’s on Google Earth if he wanted to and, in a way, what you saw there was more real, to more people, than the actual field that he was running through would ever be.
Meaning that signal work did not normally involve cranking the engine of an old Toyota, or stamping the gas pedal and hoping it would catch—and when it did catch, shouting, Fuck, motherfuckerrrr!—and pulling a U-ey through the snowy field while Waldorf circled Fowler’s red pickup around beside him and Fowler herself, standing up in the back, tossed personal items out into the air—baseball caps, toothbrushes, boxers—and Anderson with his huge head and his beetle-black eyebrows high-kneed it down the frozen roadway after them, shouting, Hey, you two fucking worms, get back here. Get back here with my fucking shit, Pulowski. I’m not done with your sweet ass, Beale!