The Price of Blood Part 53

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 antic.i.p.ation.

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 b.u.t.terfly 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 n.i.g.g.e.r; tote that bale, b.i.t.c.h."

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 b.l.o.o.d.y 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 b.l.o.o.d.y 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 f.u.c.k. 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 d.a.m.n ramp with a box. Bevode watched him come across the sand, scuttling like a c.o.c.kroach 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 s.h.i.t," 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 b.a.s.t.a.r.d 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 f.u.c.k?" 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. Spa.r.s.e. 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 b.l.o.o.d.y fist in ferocious double-time glee. Her voice swelled into a hoa.r.s.e 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," he 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 b.i.t.c.h. 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. G.o.ddammit." Her eyes flashed, taking in Broker, Nina.

Trin nodded. "They got ahead of me. But it was right you waited. They had to be caught transporting it away."

"The house in Dong Ha, you were the woman," said Broker.

"Correct, Mr. Broker, and I'm married to a real b.a.s.t.a.r.d who likes to take too many chances. He thinks he's hot stuff, but he's just a colonel in the border police."

Trin smiled tightly. "Phil, meet Mai Linh, my wife."

With flowering understanding, Broker inclined his head. He couldn't shake. His hand was a mess. She nodded back. Then Trin conversed with her in rapid Vietnamese. She switched back to English. "You still insist on doing this thing?"

Trin nodded curtly. "Get them all out, except those two." He pointed first to Bevode, then down the beach. Nina had cornered LaPorte, who stood waist-deep in the ocean. Soldiers closed in on him and motioned to him with their rifles. Trin turned to Mai Linh. "You can't be here," he said flatly.

"I don't approve of this," she insisted.

"You're not going to see this. Go." She turned and jogged toward the beach. She stopped at Blue Shirt's body and spoke to two soldiers who were starting to drag it up the slope. One of them bent, got up, and sprinted back to where Trin and Broker stood. He handed Trin the gold tiger tooth. Trin closed his hand around it in a b.l.o.o.d.y fist and glared at Bevode Fret, who squirmed in the sand thirty feet away.

Then he turned and shouted at the snipers who popped from their holes and jogged down to join their comrades at the waterline.

A truck rumbled down through the dunes and most of the soldiers gathered up the dead, the wounded, and the prisoners and loaded them aboard. Trin's wife joined them. The truck gunned back up the slope and out of sight.

"What was that scene at the house about in Dong Ha?" asked Broker.

"I wanted her personally to see you. She photographed you through the window. To be able to identify you if it came to this."

"Who was the guy at the house with her that day?"

"Our driver. I'm a cop." A thin smile crossed his mouth as he aped Pidgin English. "How you say-undercover."

"You could have let me in on it."

Trin shook his head. "You might have tipped them off."

"Cut it kind of fine, didn't you?"

"You're the one who kept insisting we had to catch him loading it into the boat." Then he glanced up and his face could have been a rock on Broker's beach. In a tight group, Trung Si and the six cripples slogged up the beach toward them. "Don't interfere, Phil," Trin admonished.

Bevode Fret was situated between them and the approaching Viet Cong veterans. He began to scramble painfully toward Broker and Trin. He crawled over his whip and left it behind like a molted skin.

"Hey, Broker. Okay, man. I'm your prisoner..."

"Talk to the guy in charge," said Broker.

Bevode's eyes were brilliant yellow with pain. They swiveled to Trin. But Trin's gaze was fixed ahead, behind him. Slowly Bevode turned his head and saw Trung Si pause, balance on his good foot, and use his crutch to scoop up the whip and toss it in the air. He caught the whip by the handle and let it uncoil in a nasty twitch.

"Okay, you caught me. Quit f.u.c.kin' around," said Bevode.

The cripples filed past Bevode and walked to a stack of loose ingots-the first ones Broker had tossed out. Wobbling on their artificial legs, they reached down and loaded their arms.

Trung Si tested the whip in the air.

Crack! The sound echoed away down the beach. It took all emotions except hate with it.

The lash whipped across Bevode's legs. He shivered with an involuntary cringe and scuttled to escape. The cripples formed a gauntlet and funneled him toward the pit.

"Hey, knock it off!" Bevode's eyes were indignant. Still no fear. No remorse. Not quite getting it. But then that's where he got his dark energy: Not quite getting it.

Trung Si let the whip sway menacingly. Waiting. Broker saw Nina limping up the beach pushing LaPorte in front of her. A soldier had given her a pair of baggy fatigue trousers to cover her dirty underwear. She looked like Charlie Chaplin.

Two soldiers walked on either side, herding LaPorte with their AKs. Nina collared LaPorte by the scruff of the neck and pushed him to his knees in front of Broker and Trin. The soldiers stepped back.

"You're a...soldier?" She stared at Trin's pistol belt, numb, bewildered, definitely happy.

"He's a f.u.c.kin' cop," said Broker. "Don't ask me how."