The Price of Blood Part 4

And then, through eyes teared to glue by brick dust and sweat, young Phil Broker witnessed a scene from a 1950s newsreel out of Budapest. A gaunt figure in dusty American olive drab sprinted up and across the rubble. He clutched a smoking wine bottle c.o.c.ked back in his right hand.

At first the North Vietnamese tanker laughed at this puny intruder but then very quickly he popped back into his steel sh.e.l.l as Lt. Col. Cyrus LaPorte came straight in at a dead run, let out a chilling rebel yell as he hurled the Molotov.

Broker watched the bottle arc gracefully through the congested air and splash into flame against the side of the T-54. He inhaled an explosive rush of basic American gumption and gasoline.

The flames jump-started a machine gunner in the tank, who went seriously to work. LaPorte danced for a moment, in very uncolonel-like glee for a fortyish West Pointer, as rounds sprayed the loose bricks around his feet, drawing the fire away from Broker.

Then the turret cannon poked in LaPorte's direction. That's when Major Pryce's square body appeared over a collapsed wall thirty meters away with a LAW on his shoulder. The back blast raised a cloud of smoke and dust. The ant.i.tank round slammed into the T-54. A tread cracked off. The tank wallowed, stymied in the debris. Pryce waved to LaPorte, tossed off the LAW canister, and swung his M-16 from his shoulder to cover the burning tank. LaPorte unslung his rifle and scanned the smoking concrete wasteland for NVA infantry.

And Staff Sergeant Tarantuna, Adonis-tall and athletic, weighted down with his bag of explosives, broke through the smoke, running in tandem with a short wiry South Vietnamese in tiger-stripe fatigues.

Broker heard human sounds chorus quickly to a shriek inside the burning tank. The hatch flipped open. A boil of oily smoke obscured his line of sight. Pryce's rifle squeezed off laconic semi-automatic rounds.

But then Sergeant "Tuna" and Colonel Trin were scrambling across the rubble and kneeling next to him. Tuna grinned as he heaved his bag off his shoulder. "I say f.u.c.k him. He's just a brown bar lieutenant."

"He's got the radio," said Trin, also wearing a deranged blood sport grin.

"Radio's busted," croaked Broker, who was newer to this war business than they were and who definitely wasn't grinning. He'd been thrown to these wolves in a little town named Dong Ha up on the DMZ before the offensive. About two weeks after he arrived he looked through the mist on Good Friday morning and saw thousands of NVA and hundreds of tanks coming straight at him. They had been coming nonstop for a month.

"Then f.u.c.k him," said Trin in the perfect unaccented English he'd acquired as an undergraduate in America.

"Actually," said Tuna, "we figured you'd had it after we got split up. But you know Mama Pryce and Trin here, they insisted we come back to look for you."

But Broker was awed, far gone in distracted shock, watching LaPorte. The colonel danced a tight little victory jig in front of the burning tank and shook his fists at the smoke-stained sky. "All my life I wanted to do this. Nail a f.u.c.king Russian tank with a gas bottle. I feel like a f.u.c.king...Hungarian."

"Where the h.e.l.l you get the Molotov, Cyrus?" yelled Pryce.

"Over there, some collapsed hooch. There was a can of gas and a wine bottle. So I shredded a battle dressing for a wick. Worked like a dream." A triumphant grin knifed across LaPorte's lean Creole face. The whole front had collapsed, a rout was in progress. LaPorte was smiling.

Then, his local celebration spent, he swung his pale eyes to where Broker was entombed in cement. "Area's crawling with NVA. How bad is it?" he yelled.

Tuna studied the slab of concrete angling down over Broker. "Looks to me like he's got a ton of cement pinning his legs."

"I can wiggle my legs," Broker said hopefully. "It's like I'm stuck."

"How is he?" yelled Pryce, jogging up to the knot of kneeling soldiers.

"He's stuck," crowed Tuna as he spread out gobs of plastic explosive, primer cord, and detonators with blinding dexterity, his brown eyes checking the slab, the angles, the position of Broker's trapped legs.

"He's stuck?" LaPorte laughed like he was delivering a punch line to a really old joke. "Check that out." He pointed through a cloud of smoke. South of the ruined town a flight of American Hueys rocked through the air, dodging small arms fire on their landing approach.

"Last American choppers that'll ever be seen in Quang Tri Province," observed Pryce philosophically.

"You can still make it to the landing zone," said Trin grimly. "I'll stay with Phil."

And Broker watched the three older Americans refuse to dignify Trin's suggestion with a verbal response. They wouldn't leave him. Or Trin. Tuna bent and fussed with his explosives. The others stood guard. There was a nervous moment when some infantrymen came tumbling over the rubble. Trin's men. The only organized resistance left in the town.

LaPorte, Pryce, Tuna, and Broker were all that was left of the advisory team a.s.signed to the South Vietnamese regiment commanded by Nguyen Van Trin.

Now the American advisors were being airlifted, leaving the South Vietnamese to survive as best they could. There was still time for LaPorte, Pryce, and Tuna to make it out.

"Can you do it, Jimmy?" asked LaPorte.

Tuna gnawed his lip. "It's a tricky one." He jammed small lumps of explosive at one end of the slab, squinting at the configuration.

"Jesus," muttered Broker.

Pryce put a steady hand on his shoulder. "We'll get you out, son." Then he removed a French f.a.g from the gold cigarette case he always carried in his chest pocket, lit it, and stuck it in Broker's lips.

Fighting in the ruined town they had all acquired a sidelong nervous aspect-heads constantly rotating, eyes sliding to the edges of their sockets. Broker had come to think of them as three stern uncles. LaPorte being the brilliant one and Pryce the older, wiser, steady one. Tuna was the dark indispensable joker, with a bag full of magic, who would give you a hot foot.

And Trin was the strangest man Broker had ever met.

"Okay," said Tuna. "Now, after the bang, this hunk of s.h.i.t is going to levitate two feet in the air on this end, turn ninety degrees on the fulcrum of the other end, and fall to earth three feet from your right boot."

"Right," said Broker in a shaky voice because they had all taken off their flak vests and were packing them around his face and torso and crotch.

"Young man," LaPorte encouraged, "if you had a hard on, Jimmy could blow your left t.e.s.t.i.c.l.e past your d.i.c.k without disturbing it and put it through the hole Pryce punched in the side of that tank."

"Absolutely," grinned Jimmy Tuna. "But we will all step back a few paces and watch from a safe distance."

So what do you do when you have time to watch yourself die. You lick your dry caked lips and you whisper the Lord's Prayer, except when you see the snaky hiss chase down the det cord fuse you shut your eyes and scream...

The shock put both of Broker's legs to sleep. When the smoke cleared the huge piece of cement was exactly where Jimmy said it would be. Broker reached. His t.e.s.t.i.c.l.es were still attached.

"Now what?" asked Major Pryce as he and LaPorte lifted a dazed Broker and dragged him along, one of his arms over each of their shoulders. Trin's men threw an infantry screen around them as they plodded toward a column of refugees and retreating ARVN soldiers.

"What have we got left, Trin?" asked LaPorte.

"A battalion, plus all the stragglers we can round up," said Trin.

"There's some time. The f.u.c.kers are consolidating after taking the town. We have to mount a rear guard so these refugees can get south to Hue City," said LaPorte. In the distance they all saw the flight of helicopters take to the air, lifting out the American advisors. "p.u.s.s.ies," sneered LaPorte softly.

Trin had his map out. Strung between LaPorte and Pryce, Broker watched them decide on a chokepoint: a bridge on a river a mile south of the town. And that's exactly what they did. For twenty-four mad hours they held Highway One south of the smoking pile of bricks that had been Quang Tri City. Thousands of refugees and dispirited ARVN soldiers crossed that bridge to an illusion of safety. Then Jimmy Tuna blew it under the first T-54 stupid enough to attempt to cross.

They walked to Hue City with barely a hundred men, all that remained of Trin's regiment. Back home the public didn't know. They didn't care.

The army knew. LaPorte's Stand added another flourish to his legend. They said he was on a fast track to being General of the Army. A West Point maverick out of New Orleans, he vowed to stay in Vietnam to the very end, with Tuna and Pryce and Col. Trin. And it was at the very end that Broker was invited back into the company of these "Last Dogs" to aid in the Evacuation. And that's when LaPorte's career was virtually destroyed and Broker, Tuna, and Trin narrowly missed dying.

Nina's father brought them all down when he went into business for himself and died in dishonor.

Broker had been briefly stationed at Fort Benning with Ray Pryce and had met his family and had supper at his home. After Pryce's death, in the awkwardness of youth, and believing that the sins of fathers should not be visited on children, Broker had tried to be a comfort to the dead man's family when all their other friends shunned them.

After that visit, Nina kept track of him. She'd written long tortured letters to him throughout her adolescence. Then she'd run away from home in Michigan at sixteen, hitchhiked to Minnesota, and presented herself in the midst of Broker's failing marriage. With her mother's permission, he gave her shelter for the entire summer before her senior year in high school. J.T. Merryweather pointed out that the gawky teenage girl was the straw that broke the b.i.t.c.h's back and sank Broker's marriage. J.T. thought it was a good thing-Broker got free and Nina straightened out. For a while.

Smart as h.e.l.l, she finished her undergraduate studies at the University of Michigan in three years. Broker attended her graduation. n.o.body was surprised when she squared away the huge chip on her shoulder and enlisted in the army. The new volunteer army required some of the old action and needed a certain kind of young person to stiffen its ranks. The kind of kid who'll walk out there and stick her finger in some roadkill. Nina had been like that at twenty-one.

Cards came at Christmas and always on his birthday. And he'd read about her and seen her on the network news after Desert Storm.

Then, last January, she flipped out again and emerged like a Valkyrie, riding a blizzard that roared in from Wisconsin.

Unable to locate him, she had pestered J.T., who, in an uncharacteristic lapse, gave in and pa.s.sed on Broker's Stillwater number-a mistake-because he was using the house to set up a ring of outlaw bikers. So he met her in a restaurant in Hudson, Wisconsin, a little to the south and across the St. Croix River. She had driven straight through the storm, rounding Chicago from Ann Arbor, where she was going to graduate school.

She was an obsessed, compulsive mess.

She'd had two severe blows in two years. Her unpleasant exit from the army, then her mother's death. Leukemia.

She didn't talk about that. Instead, she was back in the past, fixated on her father. She talked about "the cover-up."

And Broker explained patiently; he'd been there when it happened and at the cla.s.sified hearings afterwards. He was no fan of any organization, certainly not the U.S. Army, but the investigation had been thorough. He couldn't get through to her. From the time that she was a little girl, Nina believed fanatically that the army had it wrong. Now she added a new twist. She believed her dad had been scapegoated by Cyrus LaPorte.

It was a hard sell. In Broker's book, Caesar's wife was more reproachable than Cyrus LaPorte.

But Nina had made contact with Jimmy Tuna, who had failed big time as a civilian and had killed a guard and wounded several bystanders during a bungled bank robbery in New York in 1976. He was tried and sentenced to twenty to thirty in the Milan Federal Penitentiary in Michigan. He'd been there nineteen years. Last January Nina had "discovered" him.

She had expected Broker to drop everything and come to Michigan-he could get an interview with Tuna, she said. She had this deranged notion that Tuna would only talk to him, Broker, his former comrade in arms.

And him thinking. Twenty years, Nina. Twenty G.o.dd.a.m.n years ago. In plain language, Broker had told her to grow up. She called him a "chickens.h.i.t b.a.s.t.a.r.d" and stormed off. Watching her leave he had to admit that she had grown up. He also discovered that she had an effect on him. She had this way of getting under his skin.

Broker sat up in bed and groaned, and not because of his aching thumb. He definitely didn't want to deal with it. He had other problems. It had levels. It involved his core beliefs. No f.u.c.king way.

Morning was a renewal of small engines. Lawnmowers and a chainsaw growled somewhere-the first green, gasoline, and gra.s.s-scented blast of summer. A rectangle of sunlight fell through the open hospital-room window and rapped him on the forehead. He opened his fogged eyes and smelled coffee. Nina held the cup to him. She had changed out of her trashy outfit and had washed her face. Now she wore faded tomboy jeans, a washed-out green cotton blouse with ruffles, and beat-up tennis shoes. A storm of tired freckles p.r.i.c.kled her obvious hangover. He looked at her and some perverse part of his brain that lacked common sense was hearing "Green-sleeves."

"How do you feel?" she asked.

"All right." Broker's wooden tongue batted furball words. He took the cup in his right hand.

"Good," said Nina as she looked him over like a piece of busted equipment, estimating its longevity.

Then she had to be questioned by ATF while Broker debriefed with Ed Ryan. When Ed left, they cleaned and splinted and rebandaged the thumb. He received a prescription for an antibiotic the doctor affectionately called "gorrillacilian." The doctor told him he could ease the pain by putting his hand on his head. The st.i.tches could come out in two weeks. He should have full use of the thumb in two months. The knuckle joint and tendons were basically intact. The problem was infection.

They released Broker from the hospital at nine A.M. An unmarked squad car drove them to a pharmacy, where he filled his prescription, then to the sheriff's office in the new brick county-government complex. They brought him in through the garage and up a back stairwell so that no one would see him.

10.

WHEN BROKER STARTED AS A ST. PAUL COP, HIS mother, Irene, had expressed disapproval that he'd misconstrued all the lore she'd fed him with her mother's milk. "Just...contrary," she said sadly. "You go to Vietnam when everybody else is leaving and now this." His dad, Mike, had scratched his cheek and said, "I think she wanted you to be a college professor. Something like that."

Broker hadn't worn a uniform for almost twelve years. From the beginning he'd excelled at working alone. His flair for one-man undercover investigations resulted in invidious Serpico jokes and a detective's badge and eventually a unique job offer and promotion to detective lieutenant from the Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension.

He targeted drugs and illegal weapons. A free agent, he putted through Minnesota counties in his handyman's truck. He coordinated with sheriff's departments, county task forces, the attorney general's office and the feds, usually DEA and ATF.

Automatic military a.s.sault weapons were showing up on the street in Minnesota. Broker had been using Washington County, east of the Twin Cities on the Wisconsin border, as a base because Rodney lived there. On this case, he reported to the Washington County, east of the Twin Cities on the Wisconsin border, as a base because Rodney lived there. On this case, he reported to the Washington County sheriff.

As he climbed the stairs he took a deep breath. He hadn't been in the BCA office in St. Paul for two years. He had never set foot in this county building beyond the garage, where he kept his personal vehicle. He had an unreasonable reaction to offices that bordered on claustrophobia.

It was worse now that the jargon and techniques of corporate voodoo had crept into police work. Now they had "solvability tables" to evaluate cases. His dad, who had been driven out of law enforcement by paperwork, called it flata.s.sitis. Male Brokers were genetically resistant to it.

He averted his face from the security camera mounted in the corridor and went through the locked door into the squadroom. The tightness hairballed in his stomach. His ex, Kimberly, had wanted him to be a clotheshorse cop and play department politics. Wanted him to work in an office. Deputy chief maybe. Then run for politics.

He glanced around nervously. Here come the Lilliputians with a million yards of thread. And the mimeo paper. Death by paper cut. Don't bunch up, boys-they'll get you all with one memo.

J.T. Merryweather and Ryan were going over paperwork with a couple of Washington County detectives in a makeshift command post in a corner of the investigative unit. They'd nailed Rodney's cohorts and the lab in Pine County at the same time that Earl and company went down. They looked like they'd slept in their shirts.

"In case you're confused at your surroundings, this is a police station," joked J.T. with his sharp features shuffled in a touchy mix of Caribbean and Saracen razor blades. "You notice the modular office s.p.a.cers designed to promote efficiency, the tidy stacks of paperwork, the new computer system with which we try to keep cowboys in the field legal."

Broker's slightly feverish eyes roamed over the off-white computer plastic that packed the room. The stuff reminded him of the armor worn by the Imperial storm troopers in Star Wars. Now the f.u.c.kers had occupied every office in America.

He thrust his bandage, big thumbs up. "Two months medical leave. Without me out there, you guys will be breaking down the wrong doors. I can see it in the papers-Waco North." A chorus of groans came from the tired cops.

J.T. rose to his feet and shook Nina's hand. "Been a while, Captain Pryce."

"Ten years, J.T., and it's just plain Nina."

"I was rooting for you when you were on TV. Other than having super bad timing yesterday, how'd you turn out?"

"Broker thinks I'm crazy."

"Uh-huh. How's that man going to know from crazy. C'mon, I'll get your things from the property room."

John Eisenhower appeared in the hall and motioned to Broker to join him in his office. The sheriff's gun belt lay on a chair under a Norman Rockwell print of a Depression-era cop and a runaway kid sharing adjoining stools at a soda fountain. John had affected a folksy touch now that he was out in the eastern burbs. But Broker knew him from St. Paul, a cop right down to his depleted uranium heart. Broker sat down. This little color-coded laminated card with a fingerprint lay on the desk facing the visitor's chair. Test your stress level.

They talked shop for a few minutes. Would Rodney handle in a continuing sting? Ryan wanted to use him to check out the gang-bangers over north in Minneapolis. Broker was unsympathetic to the notion. Rodney was an infant monster. He should be chained up in a damp, leaky bas.e.m.e.nt in Stillwater Prison and bricked over until he resembled a cavefish. Eisenhower's china-blue eyes circled above the fruitless conversation, watching Broker. He ended by saying, "Sorry about the thumb, but you need some time off..." He paused, eyes probing.

Broker deflected the close attention to detail in the sheriff's eyes. It was a game they had played off and on for more than a decade of working together. Eisenhower was an excellent administrator who'd never lost the touch of a field man. And he had the confidence to tolerate the idiosyncrasies of a brilliant subordinate, which he knew Broker to be. He'd brought Broker in as a deep undercover, unknown, in the beginning, even to his own investigative unit, answerable only to himself. But he didn't understand Broker.

John had done his time working undercover. A good undercover man should be able to fool the a.s.sholes, who were not thinking too clearly to begin with. But Broker could fool anybody, even very smart people. And he did it by boldly being himself, which is to say, by being blunt as a locked safe. Sometimes John thought Broker was really presenting his true undercover act when he was in an office, like now. And this disquieted John.

Not even scary J.T. Merryweather, who had partnered with Broker in St. Paul, who was as remote and hostile as a man could be, and who was the only human that Broker minimally confided in, knew the whole story behind Phil Broker.

Several years back, in St. Paul, John had asked a sharp, no-nonsense, female FBI psychologist, who had dated Broker, why she thought he was a cop and where he got his style. The woman, who profiled criminal pathology for a living, had obviously thought about this before and took her time responding.

John Eisenhower, who had graduate degrees in criminology and sociology hanging on his wall, was still disturbed and intrigued by her answer, which he remembered almost verbatim: "Broker got stung somewhere in his background and will not discuss it. Period. As to why he's a cop-that's easy. Phil's a fugitive from modern psychology. He's a romantic primitive who loves to hunt monsters. He expects them. Monsters were in the fairy tales he'd been taught as a child. Grendel in Beowulf was not a victim of domestic abuse or faulty nurturing. He's a cautionary totemic being, representing evil, greed, violence, and excess. He believes in monsters because only heroes can stop them. So he can't conceive of living without a weapon and pair of handcuffs in case he encounters one in the checkout line at the grocery.

She'd thrown in a bittersweet spark of intuition: "In a world of monsters, boys can climb the beanstalk and sail for Treasure Island and contend for the hand of a princess. And what are monsters anyway...except adults as seen through the brave eyes of a child."

The moment pa.s.sed. Eisenhower resumed his practical gaze and said: "We pulled a background check on the girl. She won a Silver Star and a Purple Heart in the Gulf. So that's Nina Pryce."

Broker nodded. "I was in the army with her father."

Conversation paused a beat. The only thing Eisenhower knew about Broker's army time was typed in impressive blank verse on his DD214. "Just bad timing, the way she turned up, huh?" he asked, but his eyes said, Broker, you've been out there too long running your lone wolf number. The girl was a slip.

He rose to his feet and clapped Broker on the shoulder. "The girl and the thumb threw a funny bounce into things. Your act is blown."