The Jake Fonko Series: Books 1 - 3

by B. Hesse Pflingger

  “Sit tight until a man in a light blue suit, wearing sandals and no socks, gets off the elevator. When he’s out of sight, buzz me immediately.”

  The walkie-talkie puzzled me—as a communication device it was about as secure as a bullhorn. You’d think the CIA would worry about unfriendlies listening in, if anybody would. Well, Sonarr must know what he’s doing, I figured (where, oh where, was my Motto?). I proceeded straightaway to the Continental and immediately encountered a glitch. Sonarr had said “third floor,” but the ground floor was numbered “0,” meaning that the third floor of the building was floor number 2. I dialed Sonarr and asked for clarification. I heard him mutter something that sounded like, “Oh, Jesus.” Then he said, “Listen, is there any way you can watch both those foyers from the same spot?” I told him no, so he said he’d get back to me on it. A minute later my phone buzzed. “Floor number 2,” a voice said, and the phone clicked off. Okay, I took up my position, sitting leafing through a magazine I’d picked up in the lobby and trying to look inconspicuous. I’d waited no more than a quarter hour when a dapper oriental man in an elegant light blue suit, wearing sandals and no socks, emerged from the elevator, strolled down the ornately finished hallway and let himself into one of the rooms. Staying where I sat (so as not to arouse any suspicions), I counted doorways to the one he entered and calculated the room number. Then I buzzed Sonarr. “He’s here,” I said. “What next?”

  “Nothing. Sit tight.”

  “Don’t you want to know what he did?”

  “No.” Click.

  Real cloak and dagger stuff. I was a spook! After a minute or two, my phone beeped discretely. “Fonko here,” I breathed into the mouthpiece, warily shifting my eyes to scan the hallway both directions.

  “Go down to the café on the terrace. Sit at the table on the far side away from the lobby entrance, third away from the bar, and order two cups of tea.”

  “What if it’s occupied?” Never hurts to have a backup plan.

  “It won’t be.”

  “Okay, Then what?”

  “Sit tight.” Click.

  Strange it all was, but easy enough to carry out. I did as told. Nothing happened. Except an oriental fellow, looked like Chinese, came over up to my table and asked if I could make some change for him. Glad to oblige. We swapped a few bills and an assortment of coins. A few minutes later my handphone beeped. “Fonko here.”

  “Anything happen yet?” I had nothing to report, save making change. “Okay,” Sonarr said, “now proceed up the south side of Le Loi Street toward the market. That’s the street that goes between the hotel and the National Theater, the side by the Caravelle. Take your time. Do you know what ‘saunter’ means? Do like that. When you reach the third book stall from the corner of Tu Do Street, stop, look at the books on display out front for 90 seconds, then scratch the top of your head with your left hand. Absolutely do not put either hand in your pocket, look at your watch or blow your nose, while standing in front of that book stall. Then saunter two more blocks down Le Loi and return to base. Don’t come straight back. Go some odd route.”

  “How do I tell it’s 90 seconds if I can’t look at my watch?” There was a long silence at the other end. I felt ashamed of myself, making sport of the intellectually-challenged like that. “Tell you what,” I suggested, “I’ll count ‘em off.”

  “That’ll be okay,” he said, sounding relieved. “Anyhow, it doesn’t have to be exactly 90, just a minute or two was what I meant.”

  “Got it,” I affirmed. “What about the tea?”

  “If you’re thirsty, drink it.” Click.

  Thirsty enough for one, anyhow. I finished it, paid the bill, and sauntered through the lobby and out through the heavy door the uniformed doorman crisply swung open for me. I crossed over in front of the National Theater to the Caravelle Hotel, then sauntered up Le Loi the half-block to the intersection of Tu Do Street. I waited for a let-up in the traffic of bicycles, scooters and cyclo-rickshaws. I’d have had an easier time picking my way through a swarm of bees. Forget sauntering or die! I bobbed, weaved and dodged through the torrent of vehicles, pouncing the last couple feet to the opposite curb.

  I’d just resumed sauntering when four big-caliber pistol shots rocked the street right behind me. I hit the deck and wrenched around on the ground to see what was happening. A motor scooter careened into the center of the broad intersection, its blood-soaked driver and buddy-rider teetering off on opposite sides. A scooter with two other Vietnamese men on it zipped by and fled past the Continental Hotel, the oncoming traffic parting to avoid it. The crippled scooter veered, wobbled and crashed into a heap of wounded riders and tortured metal, and a hand grenade clunked and thunked out a few yards ahead of it. Every pedestrian in sight flattened on the ground in an instant, and the previously impenetrable tangle of two- and three-wheeled vehicles miraculously opened a gap about ten yards across, like a school of bait fish giving wide berth to a passing barracuda. It was a flash-bang grenade, thank goodness. The high explosive charge would have killed anybody close to it, but it didn’t throw fragments. Random terrorists would have tossed a frag grenade, to spread as much mayhem as possible. That one had been targeted at somebody, but looking around the scene, I couldn’t figure out who. Whoever it was, owed one to the guys on the second scooter. We all picked ourselves up and dusted ourselves off, and the normal street buzz started all over again. My ears rang, but except for the would-be assassins, no serious harm done, just a few folks knocked off their bikes. Tough town.

  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 everybody 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 toget 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.”