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alphabetical order atop his desk. His laundry wouldn’t be back until the following morning, so he dug around under his rack for a T-shirt, grabbed his cell phone, and then went outside.
    On the surface, Camp Tolerance—the Dining Facility, the laundry, the long stretch of dirt road that he and everybody else in the battalion walked every day, even the gravel corridor outside his trailer—looked the same as it always had. The rocks glowed faintly in the moonlight. The shadowed ranks of the trailers stretched out as far as he could see to either side, fronted by HESCO barriers and grainy due to the lack of light.
    However, the panic caused by Sergeant Beale’s abduction still twanged the air, an invisible vacuum, like the hallways of his old house in Clarksville, Tennessee, after his parents had had a fight. His immediate neighbor, Lieutenant Krauss, was a platoon leader with Alpha Company. Normally Krauss liked to leave his door open when he slept, but his door was closed, his trailer dark, which meant he was probably on patrol tonight. Also, Pulowski could hear shouting from the north, directly opposite the door to his trailer and the grated metal steps where he’d sat down to think. As he listened, the voices intensified, then a clear fragment— Well, get him the fuck in here! —broke through, and a pale band of headlights flashed along the frontage road outside battalion headquarters. At this time of night, there would be activity there only if a patrol was bringing Iraqis in for questioning. It was cool out, so he tugged the T-shirt on—noting briefly that it didn’t seem to fit—keyed McKutcheon’s number into his cell phone, and flopped along in his shower sandals to the right. The major would definitely be awake.
    â€œI was thinking about that request from the patrol base,” he said when the major answered. “It sort of makes sense, doesn’t it? I mean, if the cameras were good enough to deploy yesterday, why not send them out now?”
    â€œYeah, well, yesterday Fowler hadn’t fucked up and lost a guy,” McKutcheon said, more drolly than Pulowski would’ve liked, “ while she was supposed to be installing those cameras. Speaking of which, you got any information on how that went down?”
    Pulowski considered this. He hadn’t spoken to McKutcheon since returning from the Muthanna intersection where the attack had taken place. So there was no reason the major would know that he’d had a front-row seat for Beale’s abduction. “No,” he said.
    â€œYou didn’t see anything?”
    â€œWe got hit. There was a shooter in one of the buildings beside the intersection. The word I got was that Beale got picked off going in.” He was walking fairly briskly between the white ranks of trailers that housed the battalion—taking care to avoid Fowler’s and, especially, Beale’s. As he’d expected, he felt less guilty now that he’d allowed McKutcheon to make the case for doing nothing, rather than making it himself.
    â€œI’m just saying,” he continued, “if we’d had a camera at the exact same intersection two months ago, we would’ve stopped that truck bomb, don’t you think? No truck bomb, no dead soldiers. And if there aren’t any dead soldiers— and we already have a camera set up—then nobody’s out at the Muthanna intersection yesterday.”
    â€œMaybe,” McKutcheon said. “Except that truck was stopped two months ago. Fredrickson and Arthur checked the driver’s papers before the bomb went off.”
    A small electrified charge lit Pulowski’s stomach, a feeling that resembled the spark of despair when he found bad code early in a command—from this fork branched a thousand possible mistakes. “Why would they do that?”
    â€œThey let the truck through,” McKutcheon said, “because, apparently, we were paying an