The Price of Blood

by Chuck Logan

  An angry debate erupted among the vets in Vietnamese. Trung Si shouted at Trin. Trin shouted back. They had formed a circle around Lola.

  Nina shivered through another spasm of delayed shock, clinging involuntarily to Broker’s arm. In a hoarse whisper, she said, “Something’s wrong.”

  Broker nodded. They were in the dark, outside the circle. There were times when body language said it all. They overheard Trin seethe at Lola in English, “People are dead, that changes things.”

  Broker and Nina shifted uneasily.

  Trin issued crisp orders in Vietnamese. Two of the vets pulled Lola away. Trin turned to Broker and Nina. “We have to get out of here.”

  “Your turn to talk,” Broker said pointedly to Trin.

  He regarded him through lidded eyes. “You wanted to lure them in. I told her that if she’d give us Nina back, we’d bring her along and show her where it is. She didn’t say anything about this.” He curled his lips at the carnage surrounding them. His face was utterly cold and foreign. He’d locked them out.

  Nina and Broker remained silent while the vets tended to their dead comrade. The lantern light caught on a now familiar glint. His mouth had been stuffed with gold rings. Several of the glittering circles dropped from his lips like round, dead words.

  With peasant practicality the vets held the body upside down and shook it gently, cleaning the gold from his mouth.

  “This is my fault. I let them get a step ahead of us,” said Trin slowly.

  Across the yard Trung Si was talking in a steady intense voice to his housemates.

  “It’s time to wake up that militia post,” said Broker.

  Trin nodded. “Trung Si will take the van. We’ll go ahead and wait near the site. On foot. We can’t take the truck, we’d need the lights and lights would give us away.” Trin went into the house as they talked. One of the vets stuffed items in two roomy backpacks. Broker saw the little glass vial, undisturbed, on the shelf. He put it in his pocket.

  Trin slung one of the packs to his back. He tapped Broker on the arm and pointed to the other one. Broker put it on.

  “Food. Water,” said Trin.

  “We need weapons,” said Nina.

  Trin did not respond. He held Trung Si’s deer rifle, the butt resting on his hip. He made hurry-up motions with his free hand. Just before they extinguished the lantern, he turned to Broker. He did not make eye contact.

  “Lola has a radio to direct them in.”

  “What?”

  “In her purse. I’m sorry, Phil.” Trin pulled his shirt aside and drew a shiny 9mm pistol. So Virgil had had a gun after all. “Do as I say and it will turn out all right.”

  Broker glanced out to the sea, to the faint running lights on the vessel. The lights looked back like multiple all-knowing eyes. He sagged. He had violated Trin’s basic rule…

  He had trusted Trin.

  They left Trung Si at the van. Trin removed Lola’s purse from the back. Slowly Trung Si turned the vehicle around and drove away with the lights out. Broker and Nina filed off through the dunes. Trin walked behind them, the pistol hanging in his hand.

  70

  THE MARCH THROUGH THE DUNES TOOK FOREVER. They had to stop frequently. Artificial legs weren’t meant to go cross-country. Broker didn’t like it. The silence. Lola had been gagged again. Her two guards walled her off. Trin trod at the back of the tiny column with the rifle and the pistol.

  “What the fuck’s going on with him?” whispered Nina.

  “I don’t know. Are you strong enough to run if you have to?” asked Broker.

  He could feel her wince in the dark. “That bad?” she said.

  “It’s possible,” said Broker. He shifted the pack to ease the straps cutting into his shoulders.

  The man hobbling behind them muttered something. Broker heard his machete blade zing casually against some brush. The sound made the tiny hairs alert on his neck. Under guard, along with Lola.

  He wondered if Trin had decided to fuck a bunch of white people. Lure Cyrus in. And then dump all the hon-keys in one hole. Broker’s mind raced. Christ, he’s after Cyrus’s boat? He wants it all.

  Paranoia gamboled from the stunted shadowy trees and brush and joined the line of march. They hobbled past familiar landmarks. The abandoned hamlet and then the Spartan ranks of North Vietnamese headstones. Not far ahead they heard the waves breaking on the sand.

  Communication was now exclusively in Vietnamese.

  Machetes and wickedly curved rice sickles very much in evidence, the vets indicated that they should stop and rest in the cover of the three old round graves on the bluff above the cove. The packs were opened and food and water were doled out.

  Trin stayed aloof. Not speaking. A shadow in the moonlight, he’d handed off the rifle to one of the vets and kept the pistol handy.

  “It’s down there?” asked Nina.

  “About a hundred and fifty yards,” said Broker.

  “Maybe we shouldn’t get spooked. It could work,” said Nina, speaking with her mouth full. They scooped rice and fish from banana leaves with greasy fingers and washed it down with bottled water. Fuel. Their eyes had totally adjusted to the dark. The moon cast the surrounding terrain in silver relief.

  “If he puts the militia up here, they have a perfect field of fire down that beach.” Her voice was absent, practical.

  “Yeah,” said Broker. “But will we be up on the bluff here or down on that beach when the shooting starts?” He focused on Trin’s shadow. He’d freed Lola’s hands. And returned her purse. Now they were walking together down to the beach.

  The man with the rifle hobbled over to them and casually tapped the muzzle against Broker’s knee.

  “Watch it,” said Broker.

  “Yes,” said the man politely, his smile delineated in the moonlight. Then he chided them in Vietnamese, “Ngu. Ngu.” For emphasis, he transferred the rifle to one hand and reclined his cheek in the palm of the other. “Ngu.”

  Broker nodded. Exhaustion took precedence over anxiety. “Whatever happens, we need some rest.”

  As the man with the rifle stood guard or watch over them—or both—they squirmed, getting comfortable in the warm sand at the base of the old cement wall.

  “How’re you making out?” he asked.

  “I’m hurting some,” she said frankly, “and I still have those downers in my veins, but I can hack it.”

  Anger snaked in his chest. “I’ve done everything…wrong,” he blurted.

  “Shhh,” she said, touching her finger to his dry lips.

  He threw his arm protectively around her and she curled into his chest. Physical necessity almost immediately plunged them into a deep sleep…

  Beside a grave, on the pirate beach, in the graveyard of the iron elephants.

  71

  THEY WOKE UP TO A DAMP WHITE WORLD OF SAND and fog and the tang of burning wood. The vets had a cookfire going. A larger fire crackled on the beach. No one seemed particularly concerned about concealing themselves.

  Nina squinted and made a face. “Doesn’t look like our numbers have increased during the night.”

  Broker busied himself with pouring sand from his filthy socks. He put his busted-up tennis shoes back on and laced them tightly. Amazingly, the pain in his thumb had diminished since Trung Si had applied his gunk.

  Trin was nowhere in sight.

  Through his stiffness, Broker smelled the blessing of brewing coffee. They were fed steamed rice and dirty glasses of coffee. The coffee was good. Nothing else was.

  They sat and shared a cigarette in the cover of the willows, ragamuffins behind a clean sand dune.

  Where was the militia?

  Somewhere, away from their beach, there were governments and courts of law and the police. All of which Broker had avoided in order to deal directly with Nguyen Van Trin. On the beach there was only their pounding hearts, sweat, the itch of sand fleas, and the stink of betrayal. A fiery salmon sky streaked with lavender started to burn through the
mist.

  Two hundred yards away they could now see Lola LaPorte wander up and down the beach, picking up driftwood and adding it to the fire. A short compact figure walked the water’s edge and that was Trin. Gradually the mist lifted and then the sun broke the line of the sea like the blazing helmet of an approaching giant. They could see the boat, a white blur on the horizon.

  “The Lola,” said Nina with cold pride at her retention of detail. “She’s a hundred-five footer. Norwegian steel pilothouse research vessel. Built in 1960. She has a fancy yacht interior, heated and air-conditioned cabins for a crew of ten. Caterpillar diesels. Two generators, an emergency backup. She has a seven-thousand-mile range at ten knots. She cost LaPorte seven hundred and fifty thousand dollars five years ago.”

  “Subtract Virgil and he could still have a dozen guys counting Bevode,” speculated Broker.

  “They drove me down from Hanoi in the Mercedes and I was blitzed. Never saw more than two or three at a time,” said Nina.

  “You know,” said Broker, glancing around, “we’re real exposed out here. Where the hell is the militia?”

  “I’m not a big fan of AK-47s, but we could use a couple dozen about now,” said Nina, gnawing her cracked lip.

  “I don’t think we should stick around to find out.” Broker stubbed out his cigarette and dusted sand from his palms. They stood up and stretched. The silent, walnut-faced cripple with the rifle motioned them toward the beach. Trin stood a hundred yards away. Lola was closer.

  She looked up, smiled, and called out, “Good morning, Vietnam.” It was written across his chest.

  “Trin’s out of pistol range. I think I can get that rifle. Then we head for the trees. Fast,” said Broker under his breath to Nina.

  “Just say when.”

  Because Lola had spoken, Broker steered toward her. She watched him approach, hands on her hips, with the wind in her hair, like a tarnished stainless-steel madonna. She had marvelous recuperative powers. The spot under her right eye where he’d hit her was hardly bruised.

  Broker stopped ten feet from her. Nina lagged a little behind. The guard labored to keep up on his artificial leg. He came up on Broker’s left side. The rifle hung casually in his hands at arm’s length. Not real alert, this guy.

  Lola folded her arms and smiled. “Well, how do you like the big time, Minnesota?” she said with a confident edge to her voice.

  “You know, I almost trusted you,” said Broker.

  “You didn’t really hope to take down Cyrus and Bevode…with these scarecrows? And that?” She jerked her head at Trin who stood at the water’s edge regularly checking his wristwatch and shooting impatient looks up the slope at the trees near the three old graves.

  “So now what?” said Broker, edging slightly toward the man with the rifle.

  She smiled indulgently. “We’re really not bad people once you get to know us. You just caught us in an extreme situation.”

  The urgent growl of an approaching motor vehicle carried to the beach. Behind them in the dunes. Broker saw that Trin heard it too. He snapped his head in a self-important gesture. Agreeing with something he had just said to himself.

  “Okay,” he yelled to Lola.

  She grinned at Broker. “Mr. Trin is about to get the surprise of his life.” She withdrew a compact, solid-state radio from her purse, whipped up the antennae, pushed the transmit button, and said, “Come to Mama.”

  Nina had moved beside Broker. Her eyes trailed back toward the dunes. “You think…?”

  But Broker was watching the guard, who was momentarily distracted, fascinated with the shiny radio. Broker swept out his foot, hooking the man’s good leg and wrenching the rifle away as he toppled.

  He hefted the rifle, covering Trin for a moment. Then they turned and sprinted up the slope. Broker heard Trin’s warning yell, “Don’t do it, Phil…” But they’d gained the crest and pounded past the surprised vets, who knocked over their pot of rice as they struggled to rise from their cookfire.

  The trees were thickest a hundred yards away. That’s where they headed. From the corner of his eye Broker spotted the gray van: Vietnam Hue Tours. Parked at the edge of the woods. He shot out his left hand, cautioning Nina, slowed his pace, and shifted the old bolt-action rifle up in his right hand, holding it like a long dueling pistol. His thumb fumbled on the unfamiliar safety. Breath coming in long ragged gasps. Nina not doing much better.

  “Broker!” Nina.

  Cyrus LaPorte stepped from the shadow of the trees. Red pirate bandanna. Real nonchalant in his pukka sahib desert duds. Another guy appeared. Hard-looking guy. Blue tank-top shirt, lots of muscle, no hat, short-cropped black hair. Had a rifle slung on his shoulder. The guy reached into the trees and pulled Trung Si into the sun-light. Not rough, like, C’mon…

  What the fuck…

  “Militia my ass. We’ve been had,” Broker panted, lurching to a full stop in the sand, rifle coming up smooth. Blue shirt first. Seventy yards. Couldn’t miss. Casually, Blue Shirt unlimbered his AR-15. Why did they just stand there?

  Broker found out why when he squeezed the trigger and the bolt snapped on an empty chamber. He yanked back the bolt and stared into an empty breech.

  LaPorte came toward him, smiling, with his hands clasped behind his back. “You’re not having a very good vacation, are you, Phil?”

  72

  BROKER DIDN’T THINK IT COULD GET ANY WORSE. Then it did.

  As they were marched back to the beach they heard more motors, loud, snarling, coming in over the water. Two sturdy rubber cargo dinghies cut through a lingering bank of mist, propelled by huge outboards. Lola jumped up and down on the beach like a cheerleader and waved them in.

  Bevode stood in the prow of the lead boat, hatless, his oiled hair streamed in the sun. A mean black AR-15 was balanced casually on his hip and he had one foot up on the gunwale in a conqueror’s pose. Tall, gleaming brown leather boots, jeans tucked in. Safari shirt. A thick braid of leather wrapped his shoulder. LaPorte’s heirloom whip. He was smiling.

  Trin’s vets weren’t. Seeing Bevode, they clustered in a group and jabbered among themselves. Trin, the mother-fucking traitor, was trying to calm them.

  Intuitively Broker and Nina joined hands.

  Before the first boat ran up on the beach, three men rolled out and dashed through the surf with AR-15s at the ready. Not Cajuns. More related to the Blue Shirt. The same cropped hair. They vibrated a pumped-up military narcissism that wouldn’t be tolerated in veteran soldiers.

  “Mercenaries,” said Nina in a flat voice.

  Their rifles covered Trin. Virgil’s pistol had been his brief marshal’s baton. Now he was forced to drop it. One of the mercs shoved Trung Si into the group of cripples. Trin began to protest at the rough treatment. The merc swiftly butt-stroked him in the stomach and sent him sprawling. Fluent Vietnamese rippled from his lips. Under his direction, Trin and his men spread out and put their hands behind their heads.

  “How’d I do?” Lola shouted to her husband.

  “You were great,” said Cyrus LaPorte. His eyes were fixed on the horizon over her shoulder.

  She was grinning, but she also read something in Cyrus’s cold manner. In the way Bevode ambled up the beach.

  “Oh God,” whispered Nina under her breath, going rigid. Her fingernails cut into Broker’s hand.

  “What?” said Lola. Cyrus had turned his back on her. He walked away, down the beach with his hands cupped meditatively behind his back. Lola spun and confronted Bevode. “Hey,” she protested.

  “Ain’t personal, you understand,” said Bevode.

  Broker struggled with an inappropriate, disassociative thought. The day was too beautiful for this. Only Bevode looked inspired.

  Lola started toward Cyrus. Bevode cut her off, and shoved her back with his rifle.

  “Knock it off,” insisted Lola, still smiling. “Jesus Christ, I did everything you wanted.”

  “You did fine,” said Bevode conversationally as the rifl
e swung up. “Only problem is, Cyrus has enough maids. What he needs is a wife.”

  Crack. The rifle bucked. Broker jumped back. The shock of the gunshot pierced him like cordite needles. Bevode shot Lola at close range, between the ribs. She plopped straight back and down, heavily on her rump. It had happened so abruptly that her facial muscles were still untangling from a smile. Bevode pushed her over with his boot and, hardly looking, laid the muzzle into her thick black hair.

  Broker turned his body to shield Nina when the rifle cracked again and Lola’s head made a thump-dribble up and down on the sand.

  Nina tore away from Broker and charged. Bevode watched her come. “Stay put, you,” he joshed. “I mean it.” A rifle barrel pinned Broker in place, jammed deep into his neck, up under his chin. It spoke English with a European accent. Belgian. French? “Don’t even breathe.”

  Bevode danced back, taunting Nina, and giving himself time to drop one shoulder and uncoil the whip in a move he probably practiced in front of a mirror. Nina went in on instinct, her hands coming up, tendons raised, fingers arched.

  Expertly, with perfect timing, Bevode let the whip snake out toward her and flicked his wrist. The lash snapped somewhere around her hips. She went down like a singed spider and Broker saw blood against her bare flank through the rent in her blue jeans.

  “Told you to stay put,” said Bevode.

  Broker searched across the bloody beach for Trin’s eyes. Trin had his head bowed. Did not raise it.

  Bevode caught the eye play as he casually coiled up his whip. He sauntered toward Broker and stepped over Lola’s body, careful not to dirty his boots.

  “Broker, man, you should’a listened to Cyrus. He told you that ole Gunga had a habit of changing sides…”

  Broker sat in the sand with his hands clasped behind his neck. Shock manacled his ankles, turning them to wood. He was having trouble breathing. His eyes took pictures that his brain wouldn’t accept and the oxygen in his blood had gone on strike.