Free The Price of Blood by Chuck Logan

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 somebody . And she had something that was taking on an irresistible momentum.
    Find Broker. Have Broker find Trin. All arranged . Written in a dead man’s hand.

12
    B ROKER 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