Chuck Logan - The Price of Blood

Well, Jimmy, how many boxes you think I got left?

Nina stumbled back down the ramp. Face set. Hammered copper. Mycenaean death mask face. Won’t talk. Setting an example. Don’t show emotion in uniform. Whatever. He could tell by the way she stared at the broken pallet. She’s going all the way, to the bottom. Like a kid playing a rough game of tag. Going to touch home.

But first there were six boxes. Broker wrapped his bloody hands around the rope and yanked, tried to straighten up. Trin stood above him on the lip of the hole, surrounded by cottony gray light. He studied the sky. “That’s it, you’re done,” he called down.

Done. Him up above. With Bevode and the whip. Them in the pit.

Nina was on her knees, wrestling boxes aside. She began to claw at the bottom of the hole. Her hands left bloody smears on the powdery wood. Losing it. Broker reached for something inside to brace on. Found nothing but pain. It’d do.

“I said, that’s it,” Trin repeated. A crazy man, forming iron words of command in his mouth. Dumb fuck. In a few minutes his mouth would be full of sand.

Broker had to try. He flung his shovel ahead, out of the hole. And went up the damn ramp with a box. Bevode watched him come across the sand, scuttling like a cockroach dragging its broken legs. Broker dropped the rope, grabbed at the shovel, set his feet to charge. The whip caught him across the chest and took his wind, and he had become so acute in his understanding of pain that he heard the skin split open when the lash snapped. Heard his own blood leak like a spigot.

“Come on, you sorry piece of Yankee shit,” taunted Bevode. He cracked the whip in a popping circle, like a lion tamer. “C’mon.”

Broker struggled up, vaguely menacing with the shovel. His will had turned to ash. A soft breeze blew it away. I can’t die this way, he thought. Not with that bastard winning. He lurched to his feet. Gotta. Try.

Trin was there, with considerable reserves of strength in his short compact body. He dragged Broker back toward the pit. Pushed him down into the hole.

“What’s going on?” muttered Nina, on her knees among the five remaining boxes.

“Give me your shirt,” Trin shouted down to Broker.

“What the fuck?” blurted Broker.

“Give it!”

Maybe it was the whip. The myopia of sweat and pain. Broker had learned in one night to respond to authority. He peeled off the torn rag and tossed it up. Trin held it and smiled as he read the ironic caption printed over the sand-and sweat-stained Commie flag. “Good morning, Vietnam,” he said quietly.

“Hey, who told you to take a break,” yelled Bevode.

“Meeow,” growled Trin. Then he waved the rag three times over his head. A crisp circular platoon leader’s hand signal: Gather on me . Impossibly, he sprinted down the ramp.

He went immediately to Nina and put his arm around her. “Hold it in. Just a little longer,” he said gently. Then Broker heard Save the Whales yell, down by the beach. “Bevode, we got us a sit-down strike here.”

Trin smiled and fished a Gauloise from the crumpled pack stuck in the sand. He put it to his lips and offered the pack to Broker. Something in that smile, thought Broker. Maybe hope does grow on gallows trees.

Broker took a cigarette. Trin found the book of matches and struck one. “What?” Nina yelled. “What?” They lit their cigarettes as a blinding band of sunlight cut a hot bar across the wall of the pit. Just above their heads.

Bevode was yelling and cracking his whip down by the water line. “Get up, get up.”

Then LaPorte’s voice. “Bevode, check the pit.” There was just a hint of apprehension in that voice. Broker started to rise, to take a look. Trin pulled him back and smiled broadly.

Broker blinked, fought off a blackout, and brushed at shadows that were suddenly flitting around his face. The air was full of dragonflies. They had materialized out of the sunlight. Must be hallucinating. He heard dragonflies swarming. The ghosts of a thousand helicopters.

“What’s going on?” Broker rasped.

“We are taking cover,” said Trin calmly. “This hole is the only protection for three hundred meters on a wide-open beach.”

The swaggering shadow of Bevode Fret’s head and shoulders jutted up in the band of sunlight on the wall of the pit. Growing larger as he approached with dawn at his back.

“Hey,” he yelled. Then, “You hear…”

Broker would never remember what he heard first, the shrill whistle from back in the dunes or the rifle volley. But he could tell that the gunshots were deliberate. Sparse. Aimed fire. He couldn’t tell who was screaming in pain or in panic. But they were all screaming up there.

Nina sprung at the sand wall and clawed her way up until her eyes were level with the top of the pit.

“Soldiers,” she muttered. Then she reared up, head and shoulders into the sunlight, and pumped her bloody fist in ferocious double-time glee. Her voice swelled into a hoarse cheer, “ Soldiers !”

T rin’s Rules .

Broker burst out laughing.

There were twenty of them, maybe more. Hard-faced young men in green camouflage tunics. Some carried AK-47s. Others toted deadly customized sniper rifles. They sprinted from the willows in the dunes, spreading out. Field radios crackled as they ran past.

Of their former tormentors, only LaPorte was still on his feet, running down the beach. Broker could see the sunlight catch the water that filled his footprints. Nina’s eyes marked him like iron bolts. She sprang from the pit, shucked her fatigue, and pounded after him.

Avenger . No angel about it.

“Let her go,” said Trin. Then he spoke curtly in Vietnamese to one of the soldiers, who, with two of his comrades, took off after Nina.

Broker kept laughing. Maybe he would never stop. He continued to laugh when he saw Bevode Fret crumpled over, clutching his right knee in both hands. Bevode appeared to be amazed that a bullet could go through his flesh and bone. “Jeez Louise,” he gasped through bloodless jerky lips. “You didn’t have to shoot me.”

Near one half-loaded dinghy, Save the Whales was also down, pushing hard on his thigh with both palms, applying pressure. Blue Shirt lay crumpled, unmoving. Two more of the Europeans made motionless rag piles on the sand. The rest of Cyrus’s men crouched behind the other dinghy with raised hands.

Broker had not been hallucinating. Three helicopters came in a line from the north, dots over the sea. Two fast patrol boats bracketed the Lola .

Then Broker saw two, three more soldiers who sat erect in spider holes in the sand a hundred yards up the slope where the dunes petered out. They were almost invisible in sandy folds of netting. Wads of sand-colored cloth hung from their helmets and tunics. They held heavy-barreled, scooped rifles. Snipers.

“Were they there all night?” he asked.

“I’m not sure exactly when they moved into position. The timing got all screwed up,” said Trin.

“These guys aren’t militia,” said Broker.

“Army Special Forces,” said Trin quietly. “The militia’s fine. They were a throw-away plan, for Cyrus to figure out.”

A lean Vietnamese woman in jeans and a military tunic ran from the last knot of soldiers and veered toward them, long black hair streaming. She had a pistol belt strapped on her waist with a red star on the holster.

“Who’s that?” asked Broker.

“A real bitch. The mayor of Dong Ha.”

She started screaming at Trin as soon as she slowed her pace. Just when Broker thought she was going to haul off and slug him, she hugged him instead.

Broker had seen those resilient lava eyes before. He stared as she unbuckled the pistol belt and handed it to Trin. She continued her harangue as Trin cinched on the gun with his torn hands.