The Price of Blood

by Chuck Logan

  Even if it meant digging her own grave.

  Broker set his thresholds. He would not talk to Trin. He would not beg. His life was a few tons of sand running through his fingers. He wished he had a cigarette. Trin had the cigarettes and matches in his pocket.

  There was pain and fear and fatigue. There was no adrenaline to run with it. Broker’s muscles balked, cold taffy. He discovered that he wanted to dig to warm his blood.

  To feel alive.

  He had the shovel. He could use it as a weapon if Bevode got close enough. At the right time. Swing it like an ax. Take his fuckin’ head off.

  They worked side by side, each in their private bargaining with what comes next. Trin giggled. “This is the second time I’ve dug up this damn hole.”

  Broker felt Nina’s irritation at Trin spike the night.

  And now, in total darkness, there were practical demands. “We need some light,” yelled Broker. Blue Shirt came over with two battery bar lights. Broker hacked shelves in the sand. The widening pit filled with soft illumination. They could see each other’s faces. Seeing the mad expression on Trin’s dripping face, it was a mixed blessing.

  He had never looked so foreign. Digging. He was spawned from a tribe of resolute diggers. In his chromosomes, Broker supposed, thousands of years of piling up the dikes to control the water to grow the rice to keep the circle of the seasons turning. One of the great warrior-digger races of history. They dug at Dien Bien Phu, at Cu Chi, at Khe Sanh…

  Were Ray’s bones really down there? All the graves in this damn country. You’d hit skeletons anywhere you dug. Bone City. Stacked up for millennia and cross-fertilizing a culture of ancestor worship and reincarnation and pretty soon there’d be no room left.

  Nothing but graves.

  Nice thing about a big young country. You could travel for days and never see a grave…

  Fuck this. Broker threw down his shovel, pushed Trin aside, and grabbed at the cigarettes in his chest pocket. He was so tense he bit right through the first one and had to light another. With a loony smile, Trin advised him, “Relax.”

  They worked. Drank water. And worked some more. Trin kept widening the hole and at first Broker fought a flush of petty resentment. Making more work. But a bigger hole meant more time. Time was what they had. They emptied it, shovel by shovel, out of the hourglass of their lives.

  Deep in his own bones he began to hear the whispers of childhood.

  Our father, who art in Heaven…

  He looked up. Great damn stars. He didn’t recognize any of them. His torn tennis shoe slipped off the shovel and he almost fell. Stumble-footed. He kicked at the empty plastic bottles. They bumped and staggered like sleepwalkers.

  Too done in to do the work. Out of time.

  Trin read their fatigue. “We must finish what we started,” he panted. Nina fell to her knees and yanked at her T-shirt. Sodden with sweat and wet sand, it interfered with her movement. She tore at the cloth, ripping a two-foot piece above the hem. Freer in the abbreviated shirt she wiped her face with the ripped cloth. Trin extended his hand for the rag. She threw it at him. He wiped sweat from his face and then handed it to Broker. “We work slow and steady,” Trin insisted.

  Nina glared at Trin. A copper wraith, her bare stomach was coated with a sugar of sand and sweat. She sucked in a harsh breath and spat, “How could you deal with them?”

  Trin’s smile was pure gook insane. “If we finish the work we live. That’s the deal. Now don’t quit on me!” he snarled at her.

  “Fuck you,” she hissed and drove her shovel into the sand. Trin smiled. A Vietnamese smile. Two thousand years old. Broker tried to decipher the expression on the short man’s square face. He was keeping them going.

  And so they dug with a new bizarre agenda within the grim prospect that waited. They would not fall down on the job. A credo Broker was raised with. He was a machine stuffed full of bullets. The bullets popped out as sweat.

  Six feet into the pit. Even with the already loosened sand from their previous labors, Broker’s arms burned with every lift of the shovel. Each time it became harder to clear the lip of the hole. Nina’s breath was a dry rattle.

  Scoop, swing, toss.

  Trin’s shovel stabbed into wood with a hollow thunk. Again.

  Loose ingots appeared haphazardly, as brilliant in the electric light as details from a Van Gogh. Must have spilled them in their haste their first time in this goddamn hole. Nina cradled one of them in her hands like a small flat loaf of bread. She put the bar down and touched the moldy webbing of the cargo sling that twisted around the pallet. The sling had not been treated with preservative and it crumbled in her hand.

  One by one Broker heaved the gold ingots up into the night, twenty, thirty of them.

  A flurry of flashlight beams played above the pit. LaPorte and his crew still stayed back, wary of their imagined booby trap. But they were no longer silent. The night animated with their excited voices.

  “We’ve hit the pallet. We’re taking a break,” Broker yelled, throwing down his shovel and collapsing in the sand.

  “That’s fair. We’re sending over some food.” LaPorte’s voice sounded in the night. His reasonable, collector’s voice. Trin slowly climbed to get it.

  He scrambled back down into the pit with a handful of candy bars, energy bars, some donuts, and more water bottles. They squatted like cave dwellers, tearing at the cellophane wrappers with hooked grave-digger fingers. Broker chewed sand along with mouthfuls of an energy bar. Trin bent over a wrapper near one of the lights: brain-dead, he read the list of ingredients.

  Nina averted her eyes from this weird normal moment and chewed methodically. Sand cascaded into the pit. Looking up, they saw Bevode’s shadow loom over them, outlined against the stars, catching enough spill from the lanterns to define the leer on his face.

  In leisurely stages, Bevode unzipped his fly and eased out his dick. For a long time he massaged himself pleasurably and then he let a thick stream of urine splatter down. The piss steadied in one spot and splashed on the wooden lid of one of the ammo boxes.

  “Break’s over,” said Bevode. He zipped his pants and slowly uncoiled his bullwhip.

  75

  THE YEAR 2000 WAS FIVE YEARS AWAY AND BROKER was building the pyramids in reverse, in the dark. Cyrus’s pyramid.

  Grunt and heave. His leg muscles coiled and nearly cracked. He was growing into his injured thumb. His thumb screamed as he dragged a box up the long sand ramp that Trin had stamped and shoveled into the side of the pit.

  He had lost track of time since the leather eye of the whip started watching him in the night. He was bleeding from the right shoulder now, where the whip saw something it didn’t like. Just him and the whip and the ramp and the Imperial weight of Ming Mang’s gold.

  Long fucking way up that ramp. Rope handles on the ammo boxes. Like a wire brush, stiff with tar. Ripped his hands. He’d torn the pockets from his pants and tried to use the blood-stained tatters as makeshift gloves. Trin was barechested, his sweaty torso muscled like a bantamweight. Lost his tiger tooth? He’d torn his shirt up and shared it with Nina to use on the cutting ropes.

  Broker stared at the ammo crate. Weighed anywhere from a hundred to two hundred pounds apiece. The rough wooden box had waited twenty years in its chrysalis of sand for him. This must be what slavery was like. Suffering doled out one drop of sweat at a time. Gimme water, gimme rest, gimme food, gimme another hour…

  History was turning backward in the pit.

  It’s a wheel. No wheels on the sand ramp though. Just muscle. And all his muscles were braced—not just with the obstinate weight of the box. With anticipation.

  For the whip.

  He cleared the top of the pit and the benediction of the sea breeze made his sweat sing. Up here in the fresh air there was organization. Purpose. A future.

  Men who owned the future stood with guns. And a whip. Making plans. They had a system. Broker, Nina, and Trin dragged the boxes up the ramp and
another twenty yards down the beach. LaPorte had decided this was the danger close zone. If there was an explosive device in the pit they should be protected by the walls of the hole and the distance. In teams of three, the crippled vets were hitched to the boxes and dragged them to the surf. Trung Si and the other three struggled with the boxes and loaded them into the dinghy.

  Hire the handicapped.

  Broker dropped the rope handle and plodded back toward the pit. Nina’s head inched up, then her corded shoulders and arms appeared, straining at the terrible weight. Couldn’t look her in the eye. Hadn’t been able to for hours. Supposed to protect her.

  “Don’t be eyeballing that woman,” shouted Bevode. The whip winked with a leather hiss. A light, flesh-clipping butterfly kiss on the shoulder blade.

  “Bevode,” chided Cyrus LaPorte. He sat in a chair, at the folding camp table, near the waterline. He was reading a copy of USA Today by the light of a battery bar. He was drinking fresh-brewed coffee. A dinghy brought it on a return trip from the boat. Broker could smell it. For the next hour all he could think about was the smell of coffee.

  In the morning.

  Because morning was coming. The texture of the dark had changed. From drenched canvas to velvet to gauze.

  The pit had started to look familiar, like an apartment they lived in and were remodeling. Broker lurched back down the ramp. Every time they dragged a box their bleeding hands left a little trail. He winced when he heard the whip crack. Bevode’s voice gloated in an epiphany of power and contempt. “C’mon, you split-tail nigger; tote that bale, bitch.”

  Trin met him halfway up the ramp, struggling with another box. No one had spoken for hours. What was the use? Trin continued to struggle on. Steady. Determined. With what? Nothing left.

  After hours on the ramp it had become familiar. A routine. Broker dropped to his knees and blinked. But now the remaining boxes were countable. A finite number. Six of them. He saw the rotting wood of the pallet base protrude from the sand. What was it Jimmy said. How many words…

  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!”

  76

  TRIN’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,” h
e 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.

  “Speak English,” he shot back.

  She took a haughty breath. Her thoroughbred nostrils quivered. “You said it would happen today. In daylight. Not last night! We couldn’t chance a fight in the dark. We might have hit you. Goddammit.” Her eyes flashed, taking in Broker, Nina.