Free Jake Fonko M.I.A. by B. Hesse Pflingger Page A

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,