Jake Fonko M.I.A. (7 page)

We corkscrewed earthward. He suddenly straightened 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 driver unceremoniously ran me directly to my hotel, the Phnom. No lights burned along the road between town and the airport, and the car’s headlamps stayed dimmed to the minimum necessary for navigating: we might as well have been traveling through a train tunnel. Inside the city, the streets seemed lively with people, even at that late hour. At least, I could see a lot of them still out and around. But you can never tell, from first impressions in the wee hours, what a new place is like. Colors don’t show true in the darkness, and there’s no depth: I couldn’t make out anything beyond the little circles of people and paraphernalia lit by the harsh glare of gasoline lanterns and the flickering flames of curbside bonfires.

The hotel lobby was decorated in the French colonial style—ornate pillars and ceiling, copiously trimmed with fancy woodwork. It reminded me of the Continental in Saigon. I checked in, and a native bellboy with crisp uniform and toothy smile humped my duffel and led me up three flights of carpeted stairs and down a long, high-ceilinged corridor to my room. So what next, I wondered, standing there by the neatly turned down bed as the bellboy left, closing the door gently behind him. Buy a book? Pick up a restaurant bill? Go sit someplace? Drink a cup of tea? Typical CIA assignment. A piece of cake. No problem. Sit tight. All be explained when I get there. No doubt that sealed manila envelope held answers to all my questions.

3

The sooner I
knew the score, the better. I dug that “Top Secret” manila envelope the driver had given me out of my duffel and slit the seal with my combat knife. It held a sheaf of papers. Most of the papers looked like government boilerplate—rules, regulations, amendments, disclaimers, etc—and could wait. There was a standard overseas post report on Phnom Penh, which I’d read in the Embassy library earlier in the day. One sheet gave Jack Philco’s particulars, certainly useful if they expected me to play my new identity with credibility. Another listed contacts in Phnom Penh—names of U.S. Embassy, CIA and AID staff. It included a telephone number back in Saigon to call in case of emergency, which I recognized as Todd Sonarr’s office number. Nothing there you couldn’t find in the government post directories. Some covert op!

The item in the envelope that interested me most was a typed briefing (with a heavy TOP SECRET stamp gracing every page) on my mission’s objective, this DRAGONFLY character, Clyde Driffter. He’d flown choppers for Air America, part of CIA operations in Laos, since the late 60’s. In 1973 he’d moved to Cambodia, where he coordinated shipments of American arms to Cambodian army units. Toward the end of 1973 some of his missions encountered trouble: twice he got shot down but made it back to base. Then in 1974 he vanished. Attempts to contact him had come up empty. A rescue team went into an area where an unidentified westerner (possibly Driffter) had been reported. They’d disappeared with no trace, helicopter and all, presumably caught by Khmer Rouge ground fire. The list of his former Phnom Penh contacts comprised mostly high officers in the Cambodian army. A topo map of Cambodia, with an area between Kratie and the Vietnam border circled, noted that all indications pointed to that sector as the location of Driffter’s disappearance.

Next I slit open my other sealed envelope, the one Sonarr gave me in his office. It held a passport, a bundle of American money, and a bigger bundle of some other kind of money, I assumed Cambodian (couldn’t make out the alphabet, and lots of 0’s on those bills); The well-used passport belonged to “Jack Philco,” but the photograph featured me.

I can’t say my situation became much clearer for having delved into my Top Secret envelope. The guess I’d made about Driffter had been close to the money; but instructions, or even a mission description pointing my next move, were nowhere to be found. It was late, and I was beat. Maybe things would make more sense in the morning. I showered down and went to bed, naked on top of the bedspread, wishing that the hotel management had somewhere along the line swapped the slowly-turning ceiling fan, fancy as it was, for a functioning air conditioner. 

I didn’t learn
until years later that about the same time I sat down for breakfast the next morning, our Heavy Hitters were meeting at the White House—President Ford; Secretary of State Henry Kissinger; national security advisor Brent Scowcroft; Army Chief of Staff General Frederick Weyand; and Graham Martin, our ambassador to South Vietnam. Approximately as I lifted my second cup of coffee to my lips, they decided to pull the plug on Cambodia. American support for Lon Nol and his crew ceased abruptly. Had I known at the time, probably little would have changed, but at least I’d have been better prepared for what was to come. Ignorance is such bliss.

Ordering breakfast in the coffee shop was simple enough—menu notwithstanding, the kitchen served what it had, and the management charged what it had to. That morning they offered bread or croissants and preserves, fresh local fruit, eggs, rice porridge, some sort of sausage, and tea or coffee. Take it or leave it. I asked about orange juice and was told they’d been out of it for a month. Shortages or no, the Hotel Phnom strove to Do It Right: service was efficient and impeccable. Prices varied, depending on what the smugglers demanded, who you were and what currency you carried. No difference to me, as it went on the tab, but I couldn’t but be awed by the price of an egg in local money—if that was any indication, I might as well substitute the stack of Cambodian riels Sonarr provided for the toilet paper in my bathroom.

Westerners filled the restaurant, mostly Americans, plus a sampling of European nationalities, except for French, who stuck to their own habitats. A correspondent from London sharing my table explained that the Phnom, always a gathering point for everybody who was anybody in Phnom Penh, enjoyed even more popularity these days, owing to the rocket round that took out the Monorom Hotel doorway two weeks earlier, killing eleven people and palpably compromising the ambiance. He told me heavy fighting encircled the city. The Khmer Rouge controlled the countryside, and were now closing in on the capital. Shelling increased daily, which explained the flashes I’d noticed as we came in last night. He painted a pretty bleak picture of conditions around town. Well, I’d see for myself soon enough.

After breakfast I went back to my room to vet out my instructions more carefully. I’d packed them along at breakfast for the sake of security, although anyone breaking into my room and rifling it in hope of finding Top Secrets would go away bewildered. “Jack Philco” was a part I could easily get into. He looked like me, came from Los Angeles, matched my size and even shared my birthday—October 23, 1949. We differed mainly in that instead of Army officer, he worked as an agricultural advisor for AID, and instead of college dropout he had a degree in ag economics from U. Cal, Davis. Philco (that is, me) was in Phnom Penh to touch base with the local AID mission, having just spent some time at the International Rice Research Institute in the Philippines. Well, with any luck no one would ask my opinion on the season’s rice crop.

His passport showed him to be well-traveled. Then I noticed a funny thing. On my last Army assignment prior to returning to Nam I’d made an extensive inspection tour to interview staff at American military intelligence bases all over the world (and we have more than you’d think!), part of a periodic readiness survey. Shuttling between the various bases and the Pentagon had kept me on the road the better part of a year, though it didn’t show up on my passport, since I used U.S. military transport and when overseas stayed strictly on base. The immigration stamps on Philco’s passport matched my tour perfectly, right down to the dates. When the CIA phonied up an identity, they didn’t miss a trick!

My second look-through turned up no clues, let alone specific instructions, regarding my mission in Phnom Penh. The pages of boilerplate were bureaucratic gobbledygook to baffle even a lawyer. In six years of Army I’d never seen anything close to half as half-assed as that batch of so-called orders. Well, yes sir, the CIA sure was different. Sonarr had told me to sit tight, that someone would contact me, that all would be explained when I got here. Okay, I’m here, quartered in a spacious, comfortable and elegantly appointed hotel room. I’d brought some stuff to read. I called room service for a pot of tea and a basket of fruit, settled onto the rattan and teakwood planter’s chair on my balcony and waited for things to start popping. 

By three days
later, nothing had yet popped, save the rocket and artillery shells exploding in nearby parts of town. I’d been hanging around the Phnom, deflecting friendly approaches by strangers and minimizing conversations with the people I bumped into in the bar and the restaurant alongside the swimming pool. I’m no workaholic, but I do feel better when I earn my paycheck. And I was just plain bored. Surely a call to Sonarr wouldn’t hurt—I couldn’t exactly claim an emergency, but what if I’d misunderstood my instructions? I rechecked my sealed so-called orders—nothing about secure communications. Was I supposed to know all that? They never told 
me
: their problem. I asked the hotel operator to place a call to Saigon. About an hour later he made the connection.

“Sonarr here,” came through the low-level line crackle.

“I’m calling from Phnom Penh. Anything up?”

“What’s up? Who is this? Oh, yeah, Phnom Penh. Hey, what’s happened up there? Anything happen yet?”

“Nothing unusual, I think. What’s supposed to happen? I thought somebody was going to contact me.”

“There’s been a little delay on that contact, but sit tight. Could be any time now.”

“Okay, but who’s supposed to contact me?”

“No problem. You’ll know it. We’ve got that covered.”

“What about my mission? Shouldn’t I be laying some groundwork, or scouting things out, or something?”

“Your mission?”

“That guy.”

“Oh, right. Yeah, why not? Can’t hurt anything. Sure, go ahead, just keep a low profile. And watch yourself. They tell me things are getting lively up there.”

“I’ll see what I can do.”

“Right. Check in again as soon as anything happens.” Click.

Strange. Sonarr didn’t show much interest in the object of this covert operation he’d sent me on. But he’d given me a go-ahead to do something about it, and that was enough to get me out of the hotel and give my cabin fever a break. Anyone who wanted to contact me would find me at the hotel soon enough.

As my first step I wanted to reconnoiter the city. I saw no taxicabs out front of the hotel so approached a fellow perched on a pedal-powered trishaw, cyclopousses as they called them. Like most everybody else in sight he wore a dingy singlet and shorts that seen their best days years ago. “Speak English?” I enquired.

“English okay,” he said, flashing the standard Cambodian smile from under his straw coolie hat. “Speak American more expensive.”

“How much for all day?” I asked.

“How much want pay?”

“One hundred riels,” I offered.

“One hundred dollars,” he countered. We worked out a rate that I could live with and he could retire on. Actually he wasn’t Cambodian, but Vietnamese. He introduced himself as Sra Sar, Khmer for “rice wine,” the local name he’d adopted. Cambodians didn’t care much for the Vietnamese, so he picked that name to improve his popularity because “everybody like rice wine,” he explained. He took me on a slow tour around the central district of Phnom Penh. Traffic was a moving whore’s nest of bicycles, cyclos, motor scooters, women with bundles perched on their heads and coolie-hatted guys carrying stuff hanging from the ends of poles balanced on their shoulders, with enough trucks, cars and oxcarts mixed in to confuse it totally. The broad boulevards managed to accommodate the whole mess and keep it flowing.

As Sra Sar ambled along, a young white man peddling a battered bicycle fell in alongside. Lanky, dirty and cadaverous, he was a top-of-the-line hippie hardcase if I ever saw one. Straw sandals disintegrating, battered denim cutoffs, a T-shirt even a ragpicker would reject, rats-nested hair dangling down around his shoulders. A deserter, I estimated. He flashed me the peace sign and a sly grin and said, “Say, buddy, will you stake a fellow American to a meal?” He was surprisingly well-spoken: I’d been braced for lunatic raving.

“Another Bogart fan?” I quipped. Up close, he didn’t smell as dirty as he appeared. I examined his bicycle more closely and noted that the working gear for that tangle of rusty steel tubes—the bearings, brakes, gears and steering—was well-maintained and functioned smoothly.

“Right on, man,” he replied with a grin. “Fred C. Dobbs, in Treasure of Sierra Madre! I don’t have to show you no stinking badges! But I could use some spare change, if you have any, honest.”

“What made you think I’m American?” I asked. He stayed abreast of us effortlessly. Must have had plenty of practice navigating the streets of Phnom Penh.

“Couldn’t really tell, but it’s worth a try. Makes Americans feel good to be recognized, so they usually give me something. A Frenchie wouldn’t give me a sou, no matter what I said. A Brit—well, sometimes yes and sometimes no, depends on how superior he’s feeling that day. And if the guy just happens to be a Bogart freak, I hit the jackpot. I worked it out by trial and error.”

Why waste his time begging? With a mind like that, he could clean up hustling real estate. I fished up a fiver from my belly-pouch and passed it over to him. He gathered it in without missing a beat. “From now on, you have to make your way through life without my assistance,” I told him. Hey, I know my Bogart.

“Thank you kindly, sir,” he said. “Have a nice day.” Then he peeled off toward the center of the boulevard, to be carried away by the traffic.

It didn’t take long for the irony behind “Have a nice day” to hit me. Todd Sonarr had told me Phnom Penh would be just like Saigon. He’d lied. I could see that it 
used
 to be like Saigon: ten years before, it must have been downright charming. It was a much smaller, more compact city. The French colonial architecture and the angular Cambodian traditional buildings with their squiggly little points on every roof corner had escaped pollution by American slab construction; and the local culture showed little sign of the desecration that an onslaught of American servicemen will wreak. The decisive difference was this: Saigon, except for the Tet offensive, one rocket barrage and a few scattered bombings, had ducked the direct effects of war. Phnom Penh had suffered them—
was
 suffering them—greatly.

The international sector of town showed little war-wear. The front door of the Monorom Hotel had taken that hit with a big rocket round. Otherwise the appearance of order hung bravely on. Sra Sar took me past the Great Central Market, then down Norodom Street past the villas and gardens to the golden-roofed Royal Palace and the Silver Pagoda, then back along the river past the National Museum to Wat Phnom. We broke for beer several times, during which he explained the points of interest. Lovely place—spacious, well-kept, and prosperous-looking. War? What war?.

Outside the central district I found a different scene entirely. The night I’d arrived I’d noticed a lot of people on the streets and assumed the town was lively. Not so. In the poorer districts, low, rotting slums crowded the margins of narrow dirt lanes. Rusting tangles of barbed wire barricaded off streets and open areas. Sidewalks, doorways and gutters teemed with ragged, starving refugees—more than two million, in a city built for a quarter of that. Lively it wasn’t: death poisoned the air. Those lacking the luxury of cardboard lean-tos squatted passively in what shade they could find, looking hungry. Tiny children whose huge, haunting eyes I couldn’t avoid as we passed ventured wordless, imploring pleas for help. Bigger kids pressed up against the cyclo, their hands outstretched. Swollen bellies and toothpick limbs. The books in the Embassy library pictured crowds of smiling Cambodian kids. The kids I saw had quit smiling long ago. Now they were into thousand-mile stares.