The Price of Blood by Chuck Logan Read Free Book Online

quickly he popped back into his steel shell 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 antitank 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 fuck 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 fuck 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 fucking Russian tank with a gas bottle. I feel like a fucking…Hungarian .”
    “Where the hell 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