“But don’t I have to go looking for this guy?”
“No problem. You’ll see. Everything’s covered. Another thing. This mission is classified at the highest level. The very highest level. Absolutely do not say anything about this to anybody. Don’t tell your maid you’re going away. Don’t even start packing until 2200 hours. As far as all of Saigon is concerned, you are going to show up at work bright and early Wednesday morning, as usual. Okay.” He reached into a desk drawer and brought out a sealed manila envelope, which he handed to me. “Take no I.D. with you, you won’t need your passport, leave it in your room. In here is your I.D. and passport for the mission, plus some expense money. Your driver will give you sealed instructions. Don’t open them until you get settled in Phnom Penh. Needless to say, these materials, like everything else concerned with this assignment, are Top Secret/Need to Know. Good. I’m confident you’re the right man for the job. Yes, you have my full confidence, Jake. Good luck.” He gave my hand a brisk shake. End of meeting. I closed the door behind me, leaving Sonarr and Dino to each other; at least they shared a common interest in boozing.
It’s good I had Sonarr’s confidence, because I sure didn’t have mine. The more I thought about it, and I thought about it all that night and the next day, the more dubious the whole proposition seemed. Maybe he was right, the Army did it differently: they told you your objective, and they issued you whatever equipment and support they you thought you needed to do the job. Everything might be SNAFU, but at least you had some clue. I especially didn’t like the MIA aspect. It meant nobody was responsible for me, and if I disappeared, who would know? Officially, they’d already listed me as missing. Still, what could happen? They were flying me into the capital city. There I’d get further instructions. Until I got them I’d be in a hotel. How much could go wrong?
It being a Top Secret assignment, I couldn’t very well go around asking people to give me the scoop on Cambodia. The next day I sifted through the Embassy library to see what I could dig up—some maps; the 1968 Area Handbook for Cambodia, full of facts and figures; various history and archeological books, many in French (given my lack of French, no use at all); and assorted State Department and USIA reports. I wasn’t even sure what I ought to be looking for. Much too late I discovered that what I really needed to know about Cambodia lay buried under security so deep that even the U.S. Congress couldn’t get their hands on it.
At least I gleaned a general idea of the terrain—flat and swampy rice country in the middle around the Mekong River, and mountainous toward the coast and along the north and east borders. Virgin jungle covered about three-quarters or so of the land, and the rest was rural and undeveloped. Thailand lay to the west and north, Vietnam to the east and south (the Mekong Delta), with a bit of northern border touching Laos. The population numbered less than ten million, the bulk of it peasant rice farmers who lived in small villages centered around Buddhist temples. Phnom Penh, the capital, was much smaller than Saigon, about 600,000. Angkor Wat, a huge stone complex of ancient Buddhist temples and monuments, was the country’s major point of interest. It all sounded pretty basic—bonzes, peasants, rice paddies, temples, water buffalo, elephants, jungle. Like Vietnam must have been, before we went in.
Officially Cambodia had stayed neutral on the war in Nam (the reason we conducted our activities there so discreetly), but everybody knew the Viet Cong had long used it as a supply route and staging area for men and material carried down through Laos along the Ho Chi Minh trail. At the Parrot’s Beak, the Cambodian border bulged to within forty miles of Saigon. We’d bombed the trail and had hit some of those border enclaves as well. During my combat tour U.S. cavalry units went into Cambodia near the Parrot’s Beak and the Fishhook to shoot up some Cong staging areas, after which the amount of grief coming out of those sectors declined appreciably.
General Lon Nol, who’d taken power in a 1970 coup, headed the government and was sympathetic to the US. They ‘d recently been battling some Communist guerilla outfit, the Khmer Rouge, and government reports expressed confidence that they’d prevail. American news stories commented on troop positions and locations of skirmishes but gave no clear impression of the intensity of the fighting. If the situation here in Nam offered any guide, it made no difference what the papers said about Cambodia anyway, as the correspondents were making up their stories over drinks in hotel bars.
I wondered if this DRAGONFLY character had been working with the Lon Nol government forces and had turned up missing out in the jungle somewhere. The CIA had been active that way up in Laos, so it seemed like a reasonable possibility, but if so, what kind of mission had Sonarr involved me in? I had pretty solid jungle experience, but how could I locate somebody from a hotel room in Phnom Penh?
The sun was down and daylight half faded when I left the Embassy to make the short walk to the Brinks Hotel. The streets and the sidewalks teemed, the end of day tide of pedestrians and cycles. I couldn’t shake this assignment Sonarr had sprung on me off my mind—it didn’t compute, no matter how I figured it. He’d told me “no problem,” but still… midway along the second block from the Embassy, sudden running steps behind me derailed my thoughts. I heard the thunk of a blow onto flesh and bone, a groan and the rustling plop of a body striking the ground. I turned to find an American man, standard bureaucratic issue, behind me.
He was dressed in lightweight slacks and shortsleeved business shirt with collar open. He looked familiar; maybe I’d seen him around the Embassy building—he’d certainly blend right in. At his feet lay the collapsed body of a young Vietnamese man. “Tried to grab my briefcase and run off with it,” he spat scornfully toward the heap before him. “We can’t let these gooks get away with shit like that. Look, the sonofabitch was even carrying a knife.” From where I stood, it didn’t look as if that particular gook would get away with any kind of shit, ever again—he’d been quite expertly killed. I started to say something to the American, who after all may have been a co-worker, but he remarked, “You gotta watch yourself in this town—some real desperados roaming around loose,” and seamlessly melted into the throng heading back up the street in the other direction. Who was he that he could just waste a guy in broad daylight, leave him on the sidewalk and slip away like that? Funny. Hadn’t I noticed him pass by me? And if he were heading in the other direction, he’d have had to. That Cambodian mission must have been distracting me more than I’d thought. It disturbed me—I am not by nature a careless person. Look alive, Jake, I told myself. Be quick or be dead. Remember how it was in the jungle. Maybe Saigon isn’t so different. Pedestrians streamed by without breaking stride, nobody risking getting caught up in something by pausing to gawk. I saw nothing useful I could do, so rejoined the flow myself. No doubt the Vietnamese had some routine for handling such a situation, of which this was certainly far from the first instance.
Nine thirty found me in my place, working out with some equipment I’d brought along to help keep in shape. Back in those days I ran a 5.2 second 50, benchpressed 275 pounds, and swam 50 yards underwater. No point giving up your muscle tone if you can avoid it. In my line of work, you never can tell when it might come in handy. Also, physical activity helped take my mind away from my forebodings while I killed time until packing hour struck. Someone knocked on the door. I opened it to find Sarge Wallace beaming at me, a big paper bag nestled in the crook of his arm. “Sarge! What brings you by at this hour?”
“Evening, Jake. I had this batch of stuff kicking around my place you know, was going to chuck it, then I thought, hey wait a minute, maybe old Jake can find some use for it.”
“Come on in. I appreciate the thought, but I think I’ve already got more food on hand than I can finish.” Beers around, of course. While I fetched them out of my mini-fridge, he sat down on one of the rattan chairs, picked up my fifty-pound weight in his hand and absently began curling it, his elbow braced on his knee.
“No, this ain’t no food, just stuff and
things,” he explained as I brought the beers. He put down the weight and hoisted his bag onto his lap. “You know how it is, you get stuff and set in on the shelf, or you stick it in the corner, one thing and another, and pretty soon your place starts lookin’ like a New York City junkyard.”
Sarge’s apartment always looked regulation spit-and-polish to me, but who knows? “Okay, let’s see what you got there.”
He reached in and pulled up a small box. “Like these water purifyin’ tablets. You know I’m not gettin’ any use out of them here in Saigon, but lots of places the water will damn kill a man, if he ain’t careful. So, if you was ever going to visit one of those places, why, you’d want to have these along.” He put the box on my bed. “Now, what would I be wanting with a extra first aid kit?” he asked rhetorically, dredging one out of the bag. “Do me no good at all. But you don’t have one, I bet. No harm to bringing it over.” He put it beside the tablets. “And lookie here!” he exclaimed. He pulled a long combat knife out and slipped it out of its sheath. I hadn’t seen one of those since my LRRP days. He applied the blade to the edge of a page from the newspaper, slowly shaving a long, one-sixteenth inch ribbon along the top of it. “They do put some sharpness on these, do they not?”
And so it went. A stack of lurp meals (“How many times have you woke up in the middle of the night, and you’re dyin’ for a bite to eat, and there’s nothin’ in the fridge?”). A field flashlight. (“We get these power blackouts, you know—this’ll he’p you find your way to the crapper.”). By the time he’d reached the bottom of his bag there was enough gear sitting on my bed to outfit an A-team. “Just stuff from cleaning up your pad?” I said.
“Oh, you know how things piles up as the weeks go by. Anyhow, I thought maybe you could find a use for it. Say, did I ever tell you about the Daniel Boones?”
“That Kentucky woodsman? I think I read about him in grade school.”
“No, not him. Some other Daniel Boones. A while back, mebbe 1968, they used to go on a few missions into that Cambodia. Heard about one of those missions one time. The Congs had a staging area over there, tunnels and roads and such. The B-52s came in from Guam and carpet-bombed it. Then a team of them Daniel Boones, disguised up in VC black pajamas and totin’ AK-47s, went in to see if they could find survivors to bring in for interrogatin’. They’d be all softened up, don’t you see? Easy pickings, just take their hand and lead them on home. Now, supposing you was to soften up a hornet’s nest by poking a stick into it? They’d be all riled up. Same with them Cambodians. Choppers set those Daniel Boones down amongst the bomb craters. Hadn’t been on the ground more than a few minutes when automatic weapons opened up from three sides. Half those Daniel Boones are still there, listed as, quotes, ‘killed in a border area’. The other half was grateful to get away alive. Interesting little guys, them Cambodians. They be smiling all the time, but they’re tough, they don’t take no prisoners, and I believe some of them isn’t too fond of Americans.
“Anyways, it’s just a story I heard.” A chill came into Sarge’s voice. “I don’t know nothing about no Daniel Boones, because before they send them in there, they have ‘em sign a paper that says if we ever so much as mention, to anybody, what we was up to, we’d be fined $10,000 and put away in jail for ten years.”
It was mighty quiet there in my room. We listened to the overhead fan beating out a hell of a racket for a long moment. “Wasn’t he the guy that went around grinning down bears?” I ventured.
Sarge brightened up. He snapped his big fingers. “You know what? I had him all confused with that Davy Crockett! That’s what I was talkin’ about. Wasn’t no Daniel Boones, at all, but a bunch of Davy Crocketts. Forget I ever even mentioned any Daniel Boones. Anyhow, there was something else I wanted to bring up with you. You know I’m in the gold business. Now, it might be that you’ll one of these days be running across some customers for me. So I wanted to give you a few fives, tens and twenties to carry around with you, samples like.”
“I can’t see how carrying American money would help your gold business.”
“Not fives, tens and twenties dollars. Grams. Little gold pieces.” He dug a fistful out of his pocket and unloaded them into my hand. “You carry these around with you, just in case, you know, so that folks can see what the goods look like. I buy them from Chinamen, then I sell them to the locals, and business sure is boomin’ this week. Them Chinamen just love gold, and they’s Chinamen just about everywhere these days. No matter where a man winds up, a little gold is a good thing to have along. My, my,” he exclaimed, looking at his watch. “Almost ten o’clock, and I got things to do yet. Remember, Jake, keep your eyes open, and one of ‘em always on your backtrail. See you tomorrow!”
I think old Sarge was trying to tell me something.
I didn’t have much to pack. You don’t need a lot clothing in Southeast Asia, and Sonarr had mentioned no formal occasions on my itinerary. My kit held plenty of room for the gear Sarge brought over, so I stuffed it all in. Like he said, you never knew when you might need it; and it struck me as good policy to heed Sarge’s advice.
At 2300, as scheduled, a caravan of four Embassy cars pulled up in front of the Brinks. They motioned me into the third one in line and stowed my duffel. Going around a turn my car switched places with the second car. A mile further down the road my car peeled off toward the airport and the others headed for Highway 13 and my impending demise. Curfew kept the traffic light, so the ride out to Tan Son Nhut air base went quickly. The driver pulled directly out on the runway to a DC-8 transport plane, one of several whose Air Force insignia had been painted over. As I pulled my duffel out of the car he slipped me a sealed manila envelope. It was festooned with “Top Secret” stamps, which struck me as odd. Why advertise it? I stuffed it in with the one Sonarr had given me. Jet engines whistled as I clambered up the steel steps to the cockpit and was greeted with: “Welcome to Bird Air. Pilots Chuck and Ray at your service, wishing you a pleasant flight.” I was the last item to be loaded. The door shut, Chuck hit the throttles and we lurched out for takeoff.
Chuck and Ray flew for the Air Force Reserve. They must have been briefed not to ask questions, because they showed no interest in me, my business, or even my name. Otherwise they were friendly enough guys. Once in the air, they filled me in on the rice flights. The Khmer Rouge cut all roads into Phnom Penh back in December, leaving the Mekong River as the only supply route for fuel, rice and ammo, a sixty mile upriver trip from South Vietnam. In January they took control of the river, and even armed and sandbagged barges weren’t getting through. The last river convoy, carrying two weeks’ supplies, reached Phnom Penh more than two months ago. Since then, an around-the-clock airlift kept the city going. Something like 700 tons of rice flew up daily from Saigon. Fuel and ammo came down from Thailand. “Bird Air” was a gesture to the 1973 Congressional cutoff of U.S. military air support for Cambodian government forces.
It was a short flight, hardly half an hour. Chuck pointed out Phnom Penh as we slid toward it through the clear night air, a small, muted glow patched onto the otherwise nearly unbroken blackness of the broad, flat river plain. Dark ribbons cut through the right hand side of the faint pool of light—rivers, according to the maps I’d studied. As we drew nearer I noticed occasional bright little flashes here and there within the dim city outline. “Buckle up, buddy,” Ray advised me. “Never know when things might get a little exciting.”
We dropped lower, and bursts of tracer from several points on the ground rose vaguely in our direction. “They can tell we’re here by the sound,” Ray explained, “but until we turn on the landing lights they don’t know where to aim. Hang tight now.” Chuck must have trained on dive bombers. My groin wrenched into my seatbelt as he peeled the big transport over into a tight descending turn. “Evasive action,” he quipped. “They’ve got a bead on us if we use a normal approach.”
We corkscrewed earthward. He suddenly straightene
d and flattened the plane out, and Ray flicked on the landing lights. The runway opened up before us. It looked as smooth as the cheek of a teenaged chocolate addict. More tracer came at us, better aimed now: a couple “tinks” sounded through the bulkhead. As we touched down an explosion ahead and to the right gave the plane a little shake. I thought I saw a rocket round whiz by above and behind us. The plane bounced along, lurching to and fro, the tires taking a pounding. “Sorry about that,” Chuck remarked. “The commies have the range with rockets and mortar. They can’t hit nothing, but they make a mess of the runway, and the repair crew can’t keep up with the shellholes. I try to avoid the really big ones.” We hurtled toward some buildings, barely slowing. Then Chuck backed the engines, stretched the flaps out to the utmost and hit the brakes, hauling the big plane to a stop inside an area defined by high sandbag walls. “Welcome to Pochentong airport,” Ray announced with a mock airline-courtesy voice. “And thank you for flying Bird Air.”
Ray threw the cabin door open, and the muggy tropical night air hit me in the face. It carried the smells of battle—explosives, motor exhaust, sweat, death. As we clambered down the quaking steps, a nearby unmarked DC-8 eased off toward the runway, its engines stepping up from a whistle to a low shriek. The ground crew, wearing flak jackets, scrambled to offload the rice bags from our plane into Army trucks. I heard another explosion somewhere not too distant. Speed was the objective, so deplaning involved no formalities. My car and driver were waiting there inside the barricades. Lights of another big transport suddenly flared low in the distance as it approached for touch down. Tracer rounds whipped across the black sky like flocks of scared fireflies. Why hadn’t Sonarr told me I was going into a fucking combat zone? I tossed my gear in the back seat, waved bye-bye to Chuck and Ray, and climbed in after it. Their farewell smiles said, “Good luck, buddy, you’ll need it.”
The Jake Fonko Series: Books 1 - 3 Page 5
