Chuck Logan - The Price of Blood

“Uh huh,” said Broker. “In a little while I want you to take Irene into town, have a few drinks, and check into a motel on me.” Broker handed his father a fifty-dollar bill.

“Dirty movies on cable TV,” said Irene. Mike wiggled his shaggy eyebrows.

“Keep Tank close while we’re down on the beach,” Broker cautioned his mother. To Nina he said, “Don’t get carried away, it’s still early.” Then he and Mike took their beverages down the path to the water’s edge.

With his Spirits and his drink, Broker sat in an armchair of granite and listened to the murmur of the lake. Mike lit the firewood and removed his pipe from his chest pocket. Out on the water, a loon cried and Broker shivered, shriven by the haunting wilderness a cappella.

The bite of the Scotch and a smoke did not wash away the taste of the dandelion tea that curled under his tongue like an old root system. He raised his eyes up the column of flames and followed the stream of sparks up to the star-crazy sky and picked out the Big and Little Bear and the Pole Star and Arcturus and Vega-and right now it looked like a black target shot through with a million bullet holes.

“Dad, there’s one thing I want you to know. I never took, all these years. And my kind of work, I had chances.”

Mike sucked on his empty pipe and placed a stick on the fire. “Yeeaah,” he said slowly. “So?”

“I’m thinking of taking something.”

“You talking about straight-out stealing?” asked Mike.

“I don’t think so. See, the fact is…” Broker laughed and threw out his arms in an absurd posture. “I’m the only cop in Minnesota who’s blown up a jail to break the inmates out and who’s been investigated for robbing a bank of ten tons of gold bullion.”

“Ah,” Mike exclaimed softly like a man who had just been handed a key.

“Vietnam. I was the last swinging dick out. April 30, 1975.”

“This gold…?”

“National Bank in Hue City.”

“And you robbed this bank for the army?”

“No, I went in to break a Vietnamese guy out of jail. I was the diversion for robbing the bank, but, see, I didn’t know about the bank. I was the fall guy.”

“Ha…” Mike exhaled.

Broker took a stiff pull on his Scotch. “All these years I thought that girl’s father had set me up. I trusted him. You might say it soured me on people. Now I’m not so sure I got it right.”

Mike carefully placed one knee on the other and grasped the top knee in both hands. “We always thought you had something big in you, Phil. Irene is of the opinion that you were born in the wrong century. Me, I worried you had one of those…syndromes.”

Broker leaned back and savored another mouthful of Scotch, letting it roll medicinally from one side of his mouth to the other. How to communicate the mood that had gripped Vietnam at the end?

“There were five of us, four Americans, one Vietnamese, the same guys who came back for me at Quang Tri City.”

“I remember,” said Mike.

“Her dad yanked me back over to Nam to work with them again in a Special Intelligence unit. When the bottom fell out in April of seventy-five, we became part of the evacuation effort…”

Broker stared at the swirling pattern of the fire. What people had before electric lights and television. Where they saw their hopes and dreams and fears. He became lost in the flicker the flames painted on the lapping water and his voice sounded far away.

LaPorte was a colonel by then, Pryce still a major, Tarantuna a master sergeant. For a month they flew around the collapsing Republic of South Vietnam trying to salvage Vietnamese agents who had worked for American programs-an alphabet soup of acronyms-CORDS and Phoenix and PRUs. It was like running into a burning house to find scattered pictures from a family album.

Pryce had been closest to Trin, knew the language and the culture, they had worked some deep clandestine games over the years. The rumor was that Pryce had talked Trin into leaving the Viet Cong after Tet of ’68. LaPorte had the rank but Pryce was the ramrod.

“We grabbed whatever was around, helicopters, boats, sometimes we based in Laos, other times off ships in the South China Sea. We snuck into collection points in the central provinces. Trin did the dangerous work, working behind the lines, lining up evacuees. The command structure was disintegrating, we glommed on to whatever was around.”

Down in Saigon, the lemming rush to the sea was over and the last chopper had taken off from the embassy roof. They were winding down, calling it quits, afloat on the departing fleet off the coast.

“We were waiting for Trin to bring out one last group to the coast. Then Pryce learned from a holdout radio site that Trin had been nabbed on the street in Hue City. Trin was being held in the old MACV advisors compound with a group of high-ranking officers and politicals.”

A crazed huddle on the deck of a decrepit minesweeper LaPorte had commandeered for them. Cognac and the Gauloises and a slow voltage electrocution of adrenaline on empty. The insane notion was put forth by Pryce and seconded by Tuna-they didn’t leave Trin in 1972, so why should they leave him now. LaPorte wasn’t even there, he was stuck pulling refugees out of the sea around the port city of Danang. They had to expedite the raid on the radio.

“We decided to go in and get Trin out. Real nuts. But that’s what we decided to do. LaPorte got us a helicopter.”

They sat down over a street map of Hue City with one of Pryce’s agents who’d made it out with a floor plan of the prison. Hopefully, the victory-drunk North Vietnamese might be literally drunk, celebrating on this particular night.

Broker, with Quang Tri City on his mind, volunteered to lead the ground component of the operation.

The last time Broker saw Ray Pryce he was on the deck of the minesweep that had crept in close to the mouth of the Perfume River. Hue City was sixteen kilometers upstream. A Chinook helicopter sat ready on the deck. Broker would go in early, by boat, set some diversions and then blow the jail. The Chinook would rendezvous with them and pull them out. Broker had barely met the pilots. It was all-hey hubba-hubba-let’s get this fucker over with.

Before midnight, Broker, with six of Trin’s South Vietnamese commandos, slipped up the Perfume River in a fishing boat under the cover of a rain squall. After they set their diversions, the plan was to crack the jail at 3 A.M., free as many prisoners as possible, and get them to the broad lawn on the riverfront where the old province helicopter pad had been. Pryce and Tuna would come in with the Chinook, barrel down the river, land, and pluck them out.

Broker had walked the streets of Hue back in ’72 and ’73. Now the streets were strewn with flags and clutter from a victory march. That night he crept through garbage in the back alleys, clad in black fatigues with greasepaint on his face and a black watch cap pulled down tight. He was not particularly thrilled or frightened. He was too preoccupied with not screwing up. But it was a mind bender-everyone was leaving and he was going back in.

They set their diversions at a radio tower, a barracks, and the city hall. Just before they blew the plastique, he remembered hearing a dull rumble in the humid rain. Unafraid of the American Air Force, an unbroken convoy of trucks crossed the Perfume River bridge with their lights on, ferrying reinforcements and supplies down National Route 1 to the south.

Then life accelerated and time slowed amid the confused stutter of one last fire fight in the shadows of the blown building. The durable smile of Colonel Trin appeared in the doorway of a cell and Broker made his radio call. They ran for the riverfront and waited for the Chinook.