Chuck Logan - The Price of Blood

“Aren’t you going to clean up?” she asked.

“Up north.”

“What about breakfast?”

“We’ll stop on the road. Right now I just want to get out of town.”

“Oh. Look.”

Five carnival-striped hot air balloons, which had launched out of Lakeland, south of town, sailed low up the river. Absurd embellishments presented on the day, Broker thought that they should trail Monty Python’s Flying Circus captions. Like the number five written in the sky…

There had been five of them. Ray was dead. Tuna was dying. That left three…What would it be like, seeing LaPorte after all these years ?

He had glimpsed him occasionally on television. Usually on MacNeil-Lehrer , brought on as a military expert during Grenada, Beirut, Panama, the Gulf War. He had a reputation as a frosty critic of the overreliance on technology in the touchy-feely volunteer army.

Slowly Broker withdrew the folded piece of notebook paper from his pocket and smoothed it on his thigh.

Find Trin .

He looked up. Nina watched him carefully fold the note and tuck it in his chest pocket. “Well, I’m going to take a shower, after I pour some Spic ‘n’ Span in the tub,” she said.

Alone in the backyard, he lit a Spirit and sipped his coffee and watched the airships trail over him like gaudy pageantry. Their shadows billowed over his shrubbery and one shadow swallowed him briefly before it passed on.

Broker had accustomed himself to pulling the blinds of his life to ply his trade in darkness. Now, with Nina’s sudden intrusion in his life, he was confronted with the naggingly obvious thought he always avoided: The darkness might just be a shadow cast by an object, in this case, an unresolved event.

Even calloused by almost two decades of police work, he had never made peace with Ray Pryce’s desertion. He had come to view this as an emotional difficulty that flew in the face of evidence. It was probably the motive behind his continued association with the dead man’s crazy daughter. Now maybe he had a chance to lay it to rest. Remove the object. The thought was too big. Magical in its simplicity.

But Nina’s assertion that LaPorte was somehow to blame was sheer fantasy. Broker had seen LaPorte literally sacrifice his career at the inquest in an attempt to salvage Pryce’s reputation.

Even Jimmy Tuna, who had joked about growing up in a New York Mafia family, and whom LaPorte had expertly kept on a leash, never struck Broker as being capable of deserting a buddy in wartime.

Trin…

On the night of April 29, 1975, Broker had gone into Hue City to rescue the always mysterious Colonel Trin…or so he thought at the time.

Gold. There was that syllable again. What if LaPorte was on a treasure hunt.

Maybe I could cut myself in . He had Nina’s paranoia as an entry. Somebody had to return LaPorte’s maps…

He shook his head, annoyed at the way his imagination broke into a canter. And he was suddenly angry that these men, living, dying, and dead, whom he had known on two brief occasions, were still the planets exerting an influence on his life.

He took out the note again, got up, went into the destroyed kitchen, and stared at the telephone. He cocked an ear and determined that the shower was running upstairs. His hand shook as he picked up the phone and punched information and worked through the voice tapes until he had an overseas operator.

“What country?”

“Vietnam, Hue City,” said Broker in a dry voice.

“You can dial direct.”

The parts of Broker that lived in the present collided with the parts he kept ice cold on meathooks. He lit another Spirit off the half-burned stub of the one he had going. A film of sweat formed on his palms as he found the international code in the phone book. Just written right there. Vietnam: 11. What do you know. He punched in the number.

Seconds later a Vietnamese voice said hello on the other side of the world. Some hotel, “Hue,” he recognized.

He slammed the phone into the cradle as though it was hot.

Crazy .

But he copied the number onto several cards in his wallet for safe-keeping. Broker stored his passport in the freezer of his refrigerator as a precaution against losing it. He opened the icebox and retrieved the frozen document and weighed it in his palm. Then he slid it into the back pocket of his jeans. Now what? He seesawed back and forth. Planets in a tug of war.

It was too much. Twenty years of habit squirmed at this budding heresy and he retreated into the comfort of denial.

She was nuts. Probably still bent out of shape from the army thing.

On the second day of Desert Storm, Capt. Nina Pryce, in charge of a military police company trailing the advance of the 24th Mech. across the Iraqi desert, strayed in a sandstorm, got separated from her troops, and had driven her humvee into a nasty situation that had developed between a lost company of the 24th and a bypassed Republican Guard battalion.

It was an unusual, low-tech close-quarters fight for that “clean” desert cakewalk. A meeting engagement in the blinding sand. Nina arrived to find the company commander and his lieutenants down. A lucky shot had taken out the command vehicle. Communications were snarled. The Iraqis were encircling.

As ranking officer, and by force of example, she took command and proved to be utterly ruthless in action. Instinctively, she led the company in a charge through the encirclement, and reversed the tactical situation and attacked the Iraqis in the rear. The Iraqis, surprised when their pincers closed on empty desert, disintegrated. It took less than an hour. When communications were restored, Nina’s M-16 was smoking hot, she had wounds in her left hip and over one hundred Republican Guards were dead and three hundred were prisoners. She lost five men, and took twenty-three wounded, six of whom she had personally dragged out of the line of fire.

Word got out and CNN found her in an unpleasant mood at an aid station after she’d been chewed out for exceeding her authority by a colonel who didn’t have the full picture. Nina, always more salty than demure when her ire was stirred up, made a crack, not realizing that the video was rolling. A reporter asked what had happened out there. Nina replied, “Not much, except that if I had a dick I’d probably be a major.”

The remark wouldn’t die and was rebroadcast endlessly in the media. Sometimes bleeped, sometimes not. It hounded her, but she kept her professional cool, refused to comment, just doing her job. The real firestorm torched off months later. A ranking congresswoman joined forces with some retired generals and used Nina as a stalking horse to pose an inevitable question.

Nina had brilliantly commanded infantry in close-quarters ground combat, even after sustaining wounds. She had personally killed some of the bad guys and had saved some of the good guys and she had won.

They recommended that she be awarded the Combat Infantry Badge for her actions in the Gulf. Fed by rhetorical gasoline from army hard-liners on the one side and Tailhook-impassioned feminists on the other, the dispute rocketed onto national television. More than one TV commentator remarked about Nina’s “star quality.”

The U.S. Army wasn’t impressed. It closed ranks. Someone in the Pentagon took the low road and fed the media a murky snippet about how her father died in the process of deserting his comrades under fire.

The high-road resistance simply stated that a woman had never been awarded the CIB. Technically, Nina wasn’t eligible. The award was reserved for infantry and women weren’t allowed in the infantry. She could have her Silver Star and her Purple Heart but the CIB was high sacrilege. It would crack open the combat arms to the libbers. Two hundred years of tradition fell on Nina Pryce.