Jake Fonko M.I.A. (5 page)

Other than the scooter episode, my mission went smoothly. I scouted up the third bookstall, ogled the books on display as I counted my 90 seconds, then scratched my head with my left hand. Who said we LRRPs couldn’t take direction? After I arrived back at the station, nothing more was said. Well, I can’t say that my afternoon outing lacked interest. More excitement than if I’d stayed in the office, and if you have to saunter, there were worse places to do it than downtown Saigon. Though a cold beer, rather than two cups of tea, would have been more to my liking. I’d keep that in mind to propose as an alternative, should the situation arise again.

Two days later Sonarr came down to the fourth floor a few minutes before noon. “Let’s go, Jake,” he said. “Lunchtime.”

“Right this minute?”

“Yep. On me. Let’s move out!”

Why not? I wasn’t doing anything I couldn’t drop—in fact, I ‘d been out in the bullpen area, putting some moves on one of the data processing girls, which I’d dropped when Sonarr loomed into view. We took a car from the Embassy pool, one of those white Chevrolets, over to the Cercle Sportif, the former French colonial country club. He steered me to the bar and we ordered drinks. I noticed, as we chatted about this and that, that he kept one eye constantly on the dining room. He also ordered more drinks—two Scotches, straight up—for himself. Drinking was one more interest he had in common with his idol, Bill Harvey. Abruptly he slid off his seat. “Getting hungry? Let’s grab a table,” he announced, and, drinks in hand, made for one just being vacated by a lone man, a fat European with greased-down, thinning hair.

“How about one of these?” I suggested, gesturing toward several empty and freshly set tables.

“Naw, over here’s better!” He took the seat on the empty side, leaving me sitting at the yet-to-be cleared place opposite. He downed one of the drinks. “Jake, when I leave, pick that up and slip it in your left pants pocket,” he said under his breath, motioning with his eyes toward the tray with the signed bill on it.

“Huh?”

“I’m going to the men’s room,” he explained in a low voice. “Put that bill in your pocket. Do it discreetly, but do it before they bus the table.” He got up and started to walk away. Then he stopped and barked over his shoulder, “Hey, order me another drink, will you?”

I did as told, including securing another Scotch straight up for Sonarr. He soon returned, carrying on as though nothing out of the ordinary had happened. A Vietnamese busboy cleared the table, and if he noticed the bill missing, he never let on. Our waiter came and we ordered up. Pretty decent lunch, actually. Sonarr never said another word about that bill. Back in the office I searched it up one side and down the other. Unless it carried microdot messages, there was nothing unusual about it.

Just about every day Sonarr set me doing something equally weird. Go to such and such a place and sit. Ask some guy for the time. Ask some other guy for a light (that one was strange, because I don’t smoke). Go to a particular bookstall, buy a particular edition of a particular book (even stranger: it was French, and I don’t read French), take it home and leave it on the nightstand by my bed. Odd jobs like that, which made no sense at all. Sometimes I got the feeling I was being watched, or followed. I tried to verify it, but I could never spot any tails. Anyhow, that made no sense either. Why would anybody want to shadow me while I executed fools errands?

On Monday, 24 March, more bad news arrived to kick off the workweek. The Charlies had begun bombarding Hue the previous day. Word around the office had it that Tom Polgar had already, for several days, been cabling CIA headquarters in McLean that the situation was unraveling. Now the news reached us that 
every
body in Hue, civilians and military alike, was butting out, streaming south toward Da Nang. There’d been no order to abandon the city, but nobody thought much of sticking around to defend it either. “Unraveling” degenerated toward “utter chaos” at an accelerating pace, leaving Military Zone I ever more doubtful. The frenzy in the CIA station ratcheted upward several more notches.

The entire American mission had received strict orders to do nothing that might seem to signal a wavering commitment to South Vietnam. Nevertheless, office buzz had shifted from how long would the ARVN hold out, to how long did we have to
get
 out? And not just us. Several thousand Americans spread all over South Vietnam, more than 1000 in Saigon alone. Not to mention dependents, not to mention all the South Vietnamese who’d been loyal to our side and faced radical grief were they still here when (no longer “if”) the Commies took over. The number to be evacuated could easily reach six figures. Getting people out was not the CIA’s job, but they’d promised safe passage to a lot of friendlies, and they wanted them lifted out along with the Americans.

Families posed the touchiest evac problem of all. Several thousand American “contractors” remained in Vietnam, working (if at all) for the US mission, or American companies, or the Saigon government. Some guys initially brought here by the military just sort of stuck around. This included not only U.S. Army retirees, but also outright deserters holed up with girlfriends out in the rice paddies. It’s a fact that many stayed in Nam not because of politics or even money, but because of sex. Those little Vietnamese gals could be mighty squeezable. That meant legal and common-law wives, plus children, plus mothers and fathers, plus brothers and sisters, aunties and uncles, cousins and so forth. The State Department had authorized Americans legally married to a Vietnamese to take out the wife, children, parents and kid brothers and sisters. That just got the ball rolling, as far as Asian families were concerned; and the State Department had no real authority to issue orders to those contractors. Some were simply hardcases—drunks or worse. The ambassador, Graham Martin, had responsibility for engineering the evacuation. I’d heard him refer to the lot of them as a bunch of “lotus eaters.” We saw a real mess developing, and fast.

I sure could sympathize with the problems those folks faced, but I’d been on the scene less than a month. I had personal responsibility for nobody else but me, and happy to have it that way. Come departure time, I wanted the least amount of trouble, complication and heartache possible.

God must have decided to punish me for thinking selfish thoughts, because later that afternoon Todd Sonarr called me into his office on the sixth floor. His office window showed the dipping sun glowing reddish orange through the diamond-shaped gaps in the rocket screen enclosing the Embassy building. The sound of a helicopter lifting off the pad on the roof thumped through the ceiling. He told me to shut the door, turned up the volume of the music playing on the radio behind his desk—a “golden oldies” program, it sounded like—and bade me be seated. “Jake, the end is in sight, and we’re starting to tie up loose ends.” He spoke softly, slurring some of his words, which may have been connected with the reek of Scotch in the room (he’d been trying to live up to Bill Harvey again). I could barely make out what he said over the radio background noise (Danny and the Juniors doing “At the Hop”).

“Some of the experts here in the Embassy are estimating we have maybe until August. Personally, I don’t think this show will hold together past June. No need to panic yet. Still, it’s time we started making some moves.”

I sat expectantly as he peered intently at some papers. “When’s the last time you made contact with Mickey Mouse?” he asked me.

“Friday night after work.”

He studied the papers. “When’s the last time you had any contact with anybody Stateside—letters, phone calls, telexes, cables or so forth?”

I thought back. “I wrote an old girlfriend a card about ten days ago.”

“Nothing more recent?” I shook my head no. “Good, good,” he muttered, studying the papers in his hand. “Perfect!” he breathed. “Okay...” he underlined something on his sheet of paper .”..around midnight tomorrow there will be a little incident on Highway 13 out toward An Loc. A car with some ARVN officers and some Embassy staff, including Jake Fonko, will be ambushed while passing through a rubber plantation. They stop the car and take cover. There’s a little shooting, maybe a couple rounds through the windshield. Bodyguards return fire. Nobody gets hit. But in the chaos of the attack Jake Fonko goes missing.”

“How do you know about this?”

“Because we’re going to stage it.”

“So I disappear in the dark. Then what do I do?”

“Don’t worry about that. You won’t be there. That will be your cover. You’re going to be Missing In Action as of tomorrow night. Jake, I’m sending you on a little covert mission. One of our assets in Cambodia went out of the loop a while back. He’s a loose end that we very much want to tie up before our business is finished here.”

“We’re active in Cambodia these days?” I asked. This was the first I’d heard about Cambodia since I arrived. We had enough troubles in Vietnam, I thought.

“Well, yes and no,” he replied. “That is, we are, but we don’t say much about it. We don’t say anything about it, really. It would not be good for it to get public, not good at all. And we sure don’t want to leave certain things behind. So we’re sending you in there to service that asset.”

“Service that asset? What does that mean?”

“Oh, you know, take care of him. It’ll all be explained to you. Right. Now, since we’re keeping a very tight lid on our activities in Cambodia, we can’t just send you in there. I mean, we’re sending you in, but it won’t be you. You’re going in as Jack Philco, an agricultural advisor from A.I.D.—that’s Agency for International Development. They help farmers. You know anything about farming?”

“Approximately zip.”

“You’re from California. That’s a leading ag state, you know that? Grow a lot of rice up in that valley there, the Sacramento or whatever. Grow a lot of rice in Cambodia too. Must be about the same. Rice is rice, isn’t it? It’ll come back to you once you get there. The important thing is, when you return from Cambodia you’ll no longer be missing, but for the duration of your mission, nobody is to know the whereabouts of Jake Fonko.”

“If you say so,” I nodded, but this MIA bit disturbed me. Missing In Action was not exactly a command-level status. It meant that nobody knew where to locate you, or your body. It wasn’t even clear what I’d be missing from. Dean Martin had now taken over the background noise. “That’s A-mor-aayyy...”

“The asset in question is one Clyde Driffter, codename DRAGONFLY,” Sonarr continued. “He had been operating out of Phnom Penh as liaison with indigenous field forces. You LRRP guys ever work with indigs? Or was that only Special Forces? Worthless bunch of jerkoffs, if you want my opinion. The indigs, I mean. Special Forces guys are okay. Anyway, a while back Driffter just plumb vanished. We have reason to believe he may still be alive. We want you to locate him so that we can make arrangements to pull him out of there.”

“Could you fill me in on support, supply, backup, logistics, operational details like that? Who will I be reporting to? Some aspects of this, I feel a little hazy on. In the LRRPs our teams spent several days scoping things out before we went on mission. I assume there’ll be at least a situation briefing before I commence?”

“Jake, in CIA covert ops we do things a little differently from the Army. What do you think, you’re going to be calling in airstrikes? Don’t worry. It’ll all be explained when you get there. You’re going out on a rice flight tomorrow night. All arrangements are set. Be ready to leave tomorrow at 2300 hours. You’ll be picked up at your place. When you arrive in Phnom Penh, you’ll be met at the airport and taken to your hotel. When you get there, sit tight and await further instructions.”

“Any special equipment or gear I should take?” As my doubts grew, my spirits sagged. I didn’t have the first idea about how the CIA ran a field operation: screwed up, was the impression I’d gotten back in 1970. They’d given me no training whatsoever for anything like a covert mission. Though I’d heard of them, I didn’t even know what, strictly speaking, a CIA covert mission really consisted of. Were they going to give me some local contacts? What about the communication setup—what codes? What frequencies? Do I need maps? Passwords? Would I carry a silenced pistol? Should I sew a cyanide capsule into my shirt collar?

“No, no, just pack for a week of city living. No need for field gear. It’ll be just like Saigon.”

“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?