The Price of Blood

77

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.”

Trin smiled back. “I’ve been working this thing for years, since Jimmy sent Kevin Eichleay. Waiting to see who would come. But I didn’t really know what we had until we dug it up. Now they’ll get the credit.”

Broker grinned. “That whole story about the reeducation camps?”

“All true. I ate frogs, little goddamn birds,” Trin protested ruefully. “But…things changed. When the door opened to the West I was resurrected in slow stages. I had the language skills and the background to fit in with the tourist trade. And antiquities are being looted.” He shrugged. “And I was lucky. I had a sponsor in the party.”

“With a big letter A on her license plate,” said Broker.

Trin sighed and inclined his head. “She kept a lid on the operation. She kept them at arm’s length in Hanoi. She took charge of bringing in the force on the beach last night. Without her…” he shook his head, “catastrophe.”

Mai Linh stood in the crowd of dignitaries, at ease now in a tailored gray Hanoi power suit and sunglasses. With her arms folded, she chatted with Nina, who also had her arms folded across her chest. Broker recalled seeing female executives taking up those defensive stances talking to each other in American offices. Despite Nina’s bandages, she and Mai Linh shook hands. Nina resumed talking to the guys from State.

Mai Linh turned her head, lowered one lens of her sunglasses with a crooked finger, and winked at Trin. They exchanged curt sentences in Vietnamese. Then she walked away. “Great,” said Trin. “She has to go to Hanoi.”

Broker grinned. “I think you can afford the fare.”

“Shhh,” said Trin. “Let’s, ah, take a walk on the beach.”

They wandered away from the crowd around the helicopters and the pit. “Just checking,” said Broker. “Am I going to get arrested for stealing antiquities too?”

“I have a feeling my wife and I will need a sponsor in America in the near future,” said Trin from the side of his mouth. “If I don’t get killed by my own border guards sneaking thirteen crates of rare gold across the mountains into Laos. I don’t know exactly how to exchange it yet, but I’ll figure it out. Half and half.”

“Okay,” said Broker.

They started back toward the gathering. Nina came out, alone, to meet them. “Excuse me, Trin. Phil, would you walk with me?”

They went down the beach, away from the pit and the crates of gold and the blood drying under the sand.

“You know what happens now, what I get back there,” she said. He nodded. She took a deep breath. “I can’t cry,” she said. “Audie fucking Murphy wouldn’t cry.”

“Forget Audie fucking Murphy. You’re Nina fucking Pryce.”

“Aw shoot.” She threw her arms, bandaged hands and all, around his neck and burst into tears.

“Hey, knock it off, Jesus-hey, here, I have something that belongs to you,” he protested.

She sniffed and wiped her nose on her baggy sleeve. “Okay. I’m better now. What?”

Broker carefully worked the small glass bottle from his hip pocket with his taped hands. Somehow he had kept it intact during the ordeal in the pit. She stared at her earlobe and earring, an exotic sea creature swimming in rice whiskey.

“It’s how we ghouls profess our love,” he said, proud of the line, which he had rehearsed for an hour.

She closed her adhesive-plastered knuckles around it and backed away, uncertain. “Thanks,” she said, lowering her eyes. She turned and ran back down the beach to where they were all waiting for her.

And Broker figured what the hell-they could travel side by side for a little longer, but they were in different lanes and pretty soon she’d turn off toward the big time, where she’d been headed all along.

Trin joined him and they wandered back to the crowd. Another helicopter was landing. “That’s not a Russian,” said Broker.

“No, commercial. French make, I think.”

Wide-eyed Westerners with electronic gear piled out. Boxes, wires, cables. A television camera with letters on it. The TV crew literally slipped on their own drool when they saw the pile of gold ingots glittering in the sun.

“Oh good.” Trin laughed. “CNN is here.”

Broker watched the black American approach Nina and introduce himself. “Chief Warrant Officer Holly, Mam.” He lowered his voice and recited stiffly, “Ah, for the record, I think you got a raw deal in the Gulf.”

“Thank you, chief,” said Nina diplomatically.

“Now,” said Chief Holly, “if you’ll step over here, we’re about to get started excavating this site.”

It became very quiet on the beach as the recovery team made their measurements and took their pictures and very slowly began to remove buckets of sand and wood fragments from the bottom of the pit. The buckets were shifted through screened boxes. Artifacts were carefully set aside and labeled.

They sectioned off the dig with twine and labeled each segment. Nina stood very soberly, concerned. She had dusted the chip off her shoulder. No more defiant Jericho eyes. Broker figured she was calibrating herself. Video cameras were all ready recording the event. CNN was getting ready to tape.

She did not show emotion when the outlines of a human skeleton began to emerge from the sand. A hush fell at a rusty jungle…

Dog tags.

Nor did she wall herself off. She asked appropriate questions. Brief, to the point, about the procedure.

For the last time gold glinted in the pit.

Photographs were taken from all angles. Notes were made. People spoke into tape recorders in two languages. The team passed the cigarette case in gloved hands to Chief Holly who handed it to his Vietnamese counterpart. The Vietnamese carried it to the ramp and turned it over to another older Vietnamese who, walking in step with the American from the diplomatic service, carried it up and presented it to Nina.

There was a discussion among the technical people and they decided to open the cigarette case inside a large plastic bag, shielded from sun and wind. Very slowly, wearing transparent plastic gloves, a technical assistant pried the case open with something that resembled a dental tool.

A dirty lump of smoky gray plastic was folded inside. The tech very carefully peeled it open. The note was faint but legible, bazen tinged:

Over his protest, here noted, I order Major Raymond Pryce to command a helo extraction of materials vital to United States security from the National Bank of Hue. 0200 hours, 30 April, 1975.

Signed,

Cyrus LaPorte, Colonel, commanding

Tape ran. Camera shutters snapped like a piranha feeding frenzy. With a deft sixth sense, Nina Pryce anticipated it and tilted her face from profile to a more flattering three-quarter view that didn’t show her bad ear.