Chuck Logan - The Price of Blood

Trin pointed to the helicopters again.

“Office guys, Cyrus,” said Broker helpfully. “No sense of humor whatsoever.”

“He’s right,” said Trin. “When they get here it becomes official in a stuffy way. Right now I have some discretion.”

LaPorte’s eyes locked wide open. Flight . Trung Si snaked the whip across the sand and let it skitter, undulating next to LaPorte’s desert boots. The cripples hurled another shower of gold. LaPorte heard the broken wet squeal from the hole. He looked around once and bolted, running in long strides across the sand. Some soldiers, who had stayed to picket the top of the slope, chased him, yelling insults. Laughing.

“You let him get away ?” Nina’s voice was confused.

Trin smiled grimly. “If you find what you’re looking for down there, let the U.S. Army catch him when he gets back to America.” Softly, he added, “One last joke on Cyrus.”

Nina drew herself up. “You are really something, mister.”

Then, pitiless, they turned their attention back to the pit.

Bevode was losing a lot of blood from his face and scalp. One arm hung, smashed and useless. His crouch had deteriorated into a fetal curl. With his good hand he pawed through the punky wood and scooped feeble handfuls of sand.

“Jesus,” gasped Nina in a harsh release of emotion.

Bevode, blinded by blood, raised a shard of chalky bone in his functioning hand, trying to protect his face.

Trin snapped an order.

The cripples dropped the gold of Ming Mang and Trieu Tru and Gia Long and Tu Duc. Slowly they lurched and tottered and staggered down the sand ramp. They dragged Bevode to the side of the pit. Carefully, remorselessly, they pried the bone from his twitching hand and reverently placed it aside. Then they formed a semicircle and, arm-in-arm for stability, balancing on their artificial limbs, using their good legs, they kicked Bevode Fret to death.

American rock-and-roll drifted down the beach from a portable radio that some of the troops played under the shade of a poncho liner. Four-wheel-drive vehicles were parked hubcap to hubcap along the edge of the dunes. Some of the fiercest old faces in the Politburo had arrived by chopper. They didn’t seem to mind the music.

A cooling sea breeze rippled through the camouflage silk of a parachute that had been strung between the rotors of the square Russian helicopters. Like half-time in the Roman arena, sand had been kicked over the pools of blood after Bevode’s carcass had been dragged away. Nina, Broker, and Trin sat in the shade on camp stools and waited. Army medics had cleaned their wounds. Now a doctor was coming.

Two young troopers in white gloves, with carved bronze faces and bayoneted assault rifles held at the ready, guarded a carefully stacked pile of ammo boxes. The loose gold ingots formed a solid cube on top. They had been carefully washed in the sea to expunge all traces of Bevode Fret. Apparently saltwater was the natural thing to spruce up gold. Broker tried to remember where he’d heard that before. Shook his head. It sure dazzled in the sun.

Older Vietnamese men in white shirts, straw hats, and gray trousers lingered near the gold. Ponderous Marxist-Leninist pressure ridges plowed their foreheads and they had lots of pens in their chest pockets. Very senior office guys, Commie type, figured Broker. Occasionally one of them would reach out with perverse pleasure and steal a touch at an ingot.

An orderly brought around a tray with chilled bottles of Huda beer. Trin reached for one. Then withdrew his hand. Broker, who took one, raised an eyebrow.

“I drink too much,” Trin admitted as the orderly returned with a cold can of Pepsi. Nina, who sat quietly between them, raised her hand to touch his shoulder. But her hand was raw hamburger waiting for the doctor and she lowered it. She pronounced his name fondly, “Trin,” and resumed her silence.

He gestured with the pop can. “See all these bigwigs? Most of them fought the war in offices.” He gestured down the beach to where Trung Si and his men sat in the dunes, in the sun. Poor country cousins. They had been given food, drink, and cigarettes. And had been moved down-wind. Trin exhaled. “I changed sides and, now, because of Mai Linh’s protection, I have status again. They won the war and they’re fucked. Everything’s rotten. So I drink.”

Broker and Nina offered no comment to the complicated and bitter observation.

Trin kicked at the sand and inclined his head at Nina. “Maybe the young people…” His voice trailed off.

In the shade of the parachute, an army doctor set up shop and muttered indignantly as he cleaned and bandaged torn hands and whip lacerations. First Nina’s, then Trin’s, then Broker’s. A sloe-eyed nurse with beautiful black Annamite hair swabbed Broker’s face with a cool scented towel. His thumb had gone on a rampage and conquered both his hands. They were a stiff study in gauze and adhesive tape.

He had been given a clean pair of Army fatigues. Extra, extra large. But he couldn’t put them on with his bandaged hands. Soldiers who had watched without expression as Bevode died now wore easy boyish smiles and helped him. Vietnamese are fastidiously clean people. They insisted that he wash in the ocean first.

They were given inoculations. Tetanus and vitamin boosters. A field kitchen had been set up. The nurse spooned hot pho-beef soup-and hand-fed Broker warm fragments of baguette, piece by fluffy piece. In rifts of wind change he caught a whiff of electronic circuits and radio crackle from the interior of the choppers. Trin and Broker were no longer the center of their adventure. The office guys had taken over. The office guys clustered around Nina.

She stood at the edge of the pit wearing a baggy pair of clean, olive-green Vietnamese army fatigues and a soft army cap. She had also bathed in the sea and washed her hair. A lot of Americans had arrived on the choppers. Some of them talked and postured to her nonstop. A few feet away, a husky black man in jeans and a Hawaiian shirt, who had the blue-collar aloof presence of a senior NCO, spoke in deliberate Vietnamese sentences. A Vietnamese officer listened patiently. A team of Americans and Vietnamese waited with boxes of equipment. Another American took a reading with a Global Positioning System.

Broker gathered that one of the Americans talking with Nina was from the State Department. Part of an advance team that was setting up the U.S. Embassy in Hanoi. The other was Department of Defense. A senior member of the MIA mission. More helicopters dotted the horizon. Words: “Should have been a combined effort. Phobic about security. A little too close to the edge if you ask me…”

Nina raised a hand, mittened in tape, in a feminine reflex, to touch her hair, to smooth it down to cover her deformed ear, which the doctor had scrupulously cleaned and left exposed. Too short. Stiffly she dropped the hand. After that she stood with her bandaged hands clasped behind her, listening. Appropriately austere and under control, her eyes never wandered toward the pit.

Broker asked Trin, “You put all this in motion?”

Trin nodded. “Right from the time you landed in Hanoi. Mr. Hai, the driver, was one of my men. The cyclo driver outside the villa in Hue, who took Virgil away, also my guy.” Trin knit his brows. “I made two big mistakes. I didn’t expect they’d be so bold as to grab Nina in Hanoi. And not putting security around the vets’ house. That cost a life.”

“You in trouble?”

“Probably not. Tot, the dead man, was just an ex-Viet Cong rifleman. Not a party member. He won’t cast a shadow in Hanoi.”

Broker clicked his teeth. “Fuckin’ office guys, look at them, crawling all over the place. They even brought their own kitchen.”