Chuck Logan - The Price of Blood

He remembered hearing the rotors and seeing the shadow of the big chopper flit through the flames from the diversion fires. But it swooped down two blocks away from their location. Frantic, he’d called on his radio. No reply. The helicopter struggled back aloft with a heavily laden cargo net. Wands of sparking groundfire batted around the chopper as it disappeared into the gloom.

They’d been abandoned in the hostile city. North Vietnamese soldiers-angry at the rude nightcap to their victory celebration-boiled out of buildings and swarmed the streets. Broker and his team and the freed prisoners split into small groups and it was every man for himself. A steady cacophony of small-arms fire stalked them.

Trin made Broker hide his radio and survival kit, then doff his weapons and remaining gear. They dove into the river and swam to the lower story of a restaurant built over the water. Trin left Broker in the care of the proprietor, a Frenchman, who hid him in his cellar.

The next night Trin returned with a small motorized pirogue and Broker’s radio and the survival kit. They paddled through lotus-choked canals and then side channels, then started the motor and went down the Perfume River to the sea. Off the coast, at dawn, Broker raised a Navy rescue channel and a Sea Stallion chopper homed in on his beacon. Trin declined the offer to escape. They exchanged gifts. Broker traded his Zippo lighter for a tiger tooth set in gold on a neck chain. Then Trin turned his small craft back to the misty shore.

“Then all Hell broke loose,” said Broker. He downed the Scotch and let the liquor talk.

On the deck of a navy carrier he learned that he was the sole survivor of the ground team. Only Tuna had survived of the Chinook crew that had gone in with Pryce.

Dumbfounded, he was interrogated by tense, exhausted intelligence types who wanted to know why Pryce had used him as a diversion while he took the Chinook in to rob the National Bank of Hue.

Broker and Tuna were placed in separate detention and didn’t get the whole picture until the preliminary investigation for their classified inquiry convened in Fort Benning.

He was saved by the radio communications from the helicopter, which had been monitored by the fleet. And by Tuna who testified that Pryce had switched the plan after the chopper took off.

According to Tuna, Broker’s raid was a decoy, to draw attention away from the real mission. Pryce had discovered that the Communists had amassed a huge cache of gold for shipment to Hanoi. Pryce intended to sling the booty and drop it in the Laotian jungle to finance continued resistance. He said it was a high-priority mission, denying assets to the Communists.

And Pryce had it planned to the last minute. Two Vietnamese operatives were positioned inside the bank and had eliminated the guards. They rolled the crated gold ingots out on a forklift and dumped them into the cargo net that was lowered from the chopper. The inside men scrambled up the net and they left.

Tuna had specifically stated under oath that he had queried Pryce about the ground diversion: Shouldn’t they pick them up.

According to Tuna, Pryce replied that they were “expendable.” The gold came first.

Tuna then described how the chopper was hit by ground fire, how Pryce was seriously wounded and their radio was damaged.

Two radio messages figured prominently in the testimony. The first was a call from the pilot requesting clarification from someone in authority because the mission had been changed in mid-flight. The second was a mayday call. The pilot was about to send a coordinate when the radio stopped transmitting.

The next day, as Broker hid in the restaurant cellar, Tuna was picked up on the South China Sea in a survival raft. He said they had looked for a place to put the bird down after the radio went out and decided against it. With Pryce wounded and the copter damaged, the pilot decided he’d never get back up if he set down. He opted to stay in the air and try to make it back to the fleet. But with the load in the net, he miscalculated. The damaged helicopter went down in the sea and only Tuna came out alive. Ray Pryce, the bird, the alleged gold, and the crew went to the bottom of the South China Sea.

Colonel LaPorte had testified how he had signed for the bird and authorized Pryce’s plan for the prisoner extraction. But he’d handled it verbally on the radios and nothing was in writing. When he learned what had happened he burned up the radio channels trying to send in another helicopter to get Broker out. The command had vetoed the project. Radio logs were introduced to verify his testimony.

Tuna and Broker’s appointed JAG attorneys presented the “good German” defense. They were cleared of charges when the inquiry board found that they believed they were following different versions of lawful orders. The blame for the renegade operation was conveniently placed on Ray Pryce, who was listed as dead, body unrecoverable. Inexplicably, no evidence was brought in the investigation that the gold really existed. The new Communist rulers of Vietnam never formally registered a complaint. The Hue gold became a mythic story.

The incident was a final ripple in the sewage of defeat and was buried deep. But the stench attached itself to Colonel LaPorte, who never commanded troops again. Doggedly he stayed in the army and got his Brigadier’s star before retiring. The dishonor also fell heavily on the Pryce family. Broker had assumed that the weight of it had twisted Nina Pryce into the obsessed young woman she was today.

Broker stared at his empty glass and looked up. Mike said, “Ah, Phil, Nina’s up there sitting on the porch with your twelve-gauge.”

“She’s cool, Mike.” He paused. “Actually, she’s not. She’s got the syndrome now.” Broker laughed.

He could appreciate the irony. The psychological antics associated with returning veterans were for other people. Hell, that was for the Oliver Stone war. His war was different. Four divisions of NVA-hundreds of tanks-coming at him across the old DMZ and batting him down the length of Quang Tri Province. No time to roll a joint. Now here he was, saddled with a fucked-up Desert Storm vet. Size six, female type.

“So,” said Mike, “why are you telling me this now, tonight?”

“Because Nina says she can get proof that Gen. Cyrus LaPorte set me and her dad up. But his gold heist went funny and the gold wound up in the ocean. Now apparently he has a boat over off the coast of Vietnam and he’s found the stuff. But the fact that he may have found it doesn’t prove he masterminded stealing it.”

Mike exhaled. “Ten tons of gold…Back up. How’s she know this-”

“Because last night she stole a map with the location of the goddamn helicopter wreck off LaPorte’s desk in New Orleans. Somebody’s after her. She says.”

“Oh,” said Mike, looking around mildly. “That why you’re packing the Colt? Are we expecting bad company?”

“Well, let’s put it this way. If we aren’t, I tend to disbelieve her story.”

Mike puffed on his pipe. “I pity any fool who meets Tank in the woods at night.”

Broker nodded. “I already put Tom onto a guy who may have followed us. He’s got Lyle Torgeson and some Grand Marais cops keeping an eye on us. We’ll be covered. But I still want you and Irene to spend the rest of the night in town.”

“So…” Mike finally lit his pipe and drew on it, creating a cyclops ember in the dense shadow of his head.

“So,” said Broker.

“A map that marks a…treasure.” Mike Broker chuckled and slapped his knee. “Kinda like when you were a kid and we’d come down here and read-”

“This ain’t no story book,” said Broker.