He had come to view this as an emotional difficulty that flew in the face of evidence. It was probably the motive behind his continued association with the dead man’s crazy daughter. Now maybe he had a chance to lay it to rest. Remove the object. The thought was too big. Magical in its simplicity.
But Nina’s assertion that LaPorte was somehow to blame was sheer fantasy. Broker had seen LaPorte literally sacrifice his career at the inquest in an attempt to salvage Pryce’s reputation.
Even Jimmy Tuna, who had joked about growing up in a New York Mafia family, and whom LaPorte had expertly kept on a leash, never struck Broker as being capable of deserting a buddy in wartime.
Trin…
On the night of April 29, 1975, Broker had gone into Hue City to rescue the always mysterious Colonel Trin… or so he thought at the time.
Gold. There was that syllable again. What if LaPorte
He shook his head, annoyed at the way his imagination broke into a canter. And he was suddenly angry that these men, living, dying, and dead, whom he had known on two brief occasions, were still the planets exerting an influence on his life.
He took out the note again, got up, went into the destroyed kitchen, and stared at the telephone. He cocked an ear and determined that the shower was running upstairs. His hand shook as he picked up the phone and punched information and worked through the voice tapes until he had an overseas operator.
“What country?”
“Vietnam, Hue City,” said Broker in a dry voice.
“You can dial direct.”
The parts of Broker that lived in the present collided with the parts he kept ice cold on meathooks. He lit another Spirit off the half-burned stub of the one he had going. A film of sweat formed on his palms as he found the international code in the phone book. Just written right there. Vietnam: 11. What do you know. He punched in the number.
Seconds later a Vietnamese voice said hello on the other side of the world. Some hotel, “Hue,” he recognized.
He slammed the phone into the cradle as though it was hot.
But he copied the number onto several cards in his wallet for safe-keeping. Broker stored his passport in the freezer of his refrigerator as a precaution against losing it. He opened the icebox and retrieved the frozen document and weighed it in his palm. Then he slid it into the back pocket of his jeans. Now what? He seesawed back and forth. Planets in a tug of war.
It was too much. Twenty years of habit squirmed at this budding heresy and he retreated into the comfort of denial.
She was nuts. Probably still bent out of shape from the army thing.
On the second day of Desert Storm, Capt. Nina Pryce, in charge of a military police company trailing the advance of the 24th Mech. across the Iraqi desert, strayed in a sandstorm, got separated from her troops, and had driven her humvee into a nasty situation that had developed between a lost company of the 24th and a bypassed Republican Guard battalion.
It was an unusual, low-tech close-quarters fight for that “clean” desert cakewalk. A meeting engagement in the blinding sand. Nina arrived to find the company commander and his lieutenants down. A lucky shot had taken out the command vehicle. Communications were snarled. The Iraqis were encircling.
As ranking officer, and by force of example, she took command and proved to be utterly ruthless in action. Instinctively, she led the company in a charge through the encirclement, and reversed the tactical situation and attacked the Iraqis in the rear. The Iraqis, surprised when their pincers closed on empty desert, disintegrated. It took less than an hour. When communications were restored, Nina’s M-16 was smoking hot, she had wounds in her left hip and over one hundred Republican Guards were dead and three hundred were prisoners. She lost five men, and took twenty-three wounded, six of whom she had personally dragged out of the line of fire.
Word got out and CNN found her in an unpleasant mood at an aid station after she’d been chewed out for exceeding her authority by a colonel who didn’t have the full picture. Nina, always more salty than demure when her ire was stirred up, made a crack, not realizing that the video was rolling. A reporter asked what had happened out there. Nina replied, “Not much, except that if I had a dick I’d probably be a major.”
The remark wouldn’t die and was rebroadcast endlessly in the media. Sometimes bleeped, sometimes not. It hounded her, but she kept her professional cool, refused to comment, just doing her job. The real firestorm torched off months later. A ranking congresswoman joined forces with some retired generals and used Nina as a stalking horse to pose an inevitable question.
Nina had brilliantly commanded infantry in close-quarters ground combat, even after sustaining wounds. She had personally killed some of the bad guys and had saved some of the good guys and she had won.
They recommended that she be awarded the Combat Infantry Badge for her actions in the Gulf. Fed by rhetorical gasoline from army hard-liners on the one side and Tailhook-impassioned feminists on the other, the dispute rocketed onto national television. More than one TV commentator remarked about Nina’s “star quality.”
The U.S. Army wasn’t impressed. It closed ranks. Someone in the Pentagon took the low road and fed the media a murky snippet about how her father died in the process of deserting his comrades under fire.
The high-road resistance simply stated that a woman had never been awarded the CIB. Technically, Nina wasn’t eligible. The award was reserved for infantry and women weren’t allowed in the infantry. She could have her Silver Star and her Purple Heart but the CIB was high sacrilege. It would crack open the combat arms to the libbers. Two hundred years of tradition fell on Nina Pryce.
Approached by the press, she coolly pointed out that there was a lot of medal inflation in the Gulf ground war, which had lasted all of four days against human sea attacks of surrendering Iraqis. Her dad, she said, had spent six months under fire against a real army to earn his CIB in Europe. Her response prompted questions about her father and rumors of secret hearings. Her father, she charged, had been falsely convicted in absentia. After laying down that challenge to the army she quietly resigned her commission.
Broker wanted to believe that the combined effect of her resignation and her mother’s passing had snapped her. He shook his head. He didn’t really know her.
He did know that when she arrived she set up dominion. She was
12
Broker called his folks and told them he was coming up, and that he had Nina Pryce with him. Then he loaded a quick travel bag and slapped his cell phone into the Jeep glove compartment. As they pulled out of the drive he glowered at Nina as she warily swiveled her head, scouting the street. “You have your gun, right?” she said.
“Don’t start. Not yet,” said Broker.
He drove downtown to the business district, pulled in back of a row of brick storefronts and took his Thermos into a coffee shop and had it filled with strong French roast. Nina stayed at his side. Getting back into the car, she lightened up a tad. She laughed when she saw a riverboat churn through the old railroad lift bridge that crossed the St. Croix, and the tourists wandering the waterfront pavilions of an art fair and the church steeples that dotted the bluff. “Jeez, Broker, you wound up in a Grandma Moses painting. This isn’t you. Uh-uh.”
He wanted to strangle her. He wanted his quiet underground life back.
She poured coffee in the Thermos cup and held it for him so he could drive one-and-a-half-handed. He hot- footed it up Highway 95 through the river valley and turned east twenty minutes later, crossing the St. Croix River at Osceola, Wisconsin. Now he took less traveled State 35 up the Wisconsin side. He liked driving this particular
