Chapter 22 alternate.
One evening just before Christmas, a week after the last part of our home's front wall (and garage door too) had been replaced we heard a car drive down the street, we've heard this guy before. The driver looked like he was about twenty years old. He drove a smaller Hyundai car with a huge booming stereo that seriously vibrated our house. I'm sure it rumbled every house in the neighborhood. It seemed to really piss off David. That night when we heard him approaching David jumped up and raced out the front door, after a couple seconds I jumped up and ran to the dining table and grabbed my pistol and took off after him.
Out in the front yard I saw him down the block running to catch up with the kid knowing he'd stop at the sign at the end of the block. Running at his top speed he looked like Will Smith in Men in Black.
When the kid stopped at the sign David ran over, yanked his door open and started to pull him out of his car. The kid was screaming, his car was still in DRIVE, but he wasn't wearing a seatbelt. He finally pulled the kid onto the street. His driverless car took off slowly and crossed the intersection but bumped into a tall curb and stalled the engine, the door still wide open.
I saw him hold the kid down on the pavement with his foot on the kid's groin as I approached with a pistol in hand, but I stayed back on the sidewalk beside a parked car. I could barely understand either of them with all the traffic noise and yelling. But I could make out David threaten him if he drove around with that stereo blasting like that he'd cut his dick off. The kid was crying for someone to help him and obviously scared out of his mind even though David was clearly unarmed.
When David finished threatening him he pulled him up to his feet and shoved him backwards towards his car. The kid stumbled, turned and ran to his car but it took some thinking how to start the car. We stood on the sidewalk and watched him figure out he had to put it in PARK first. He drove away with the stereo off, and peace was restored to the neighborhood.
David walked beside me with a big smile on his face, we walked back home and laughed a few times. I thought it was funny but I bet he really scared the crap out of that kid. David said he saw his Hyundai in the parking lot at Taco Bell out on Dyer Street and suggested after today if we heard it again we'd visit him at work.
Back at home he said that when the kid first landed on the pavement his shirt slid way up and he was super skinny and hairless, like an actual twink. He said his body under his shirt was rather ugly and pale white.
I told David, "You probably scared him so bad his dick shriveled up to a stump."
David laughed and admitted once when he took a physical exam for high school track he was so shy that his dick contracted all the way in, so all that showed was pubes and a small round lump. I reached over and sarcastically rubbed his thigh like I felt sadness for his suffering.
"Hey, it was embarrassing!" He insisted.
"Oh stop, you're gonna make me cry!" I dramatically spoke and put my hand over my mouth as if I was about to fake cry.
"Ass hole!" He mumbled and slapped my shoulder. We had a few moments of quiet as we stood by the kitchen counter.
"You think he's gay?" I asked about the car stereo kid.
"Uh... if I had to guess I'd say... no. That twink look is sort of universal these days, he's probably got a long dick, I'd give him that." David commented quietly.
"Yep, that's what they say about super skinny boys, often have very long dicks."
"Yep, but like I said his body was rather homely, his belly button stuck out like a volcano crater and his tits were tiny little dark spots, and his skin was as pale as an earth worm."
Then he added, "I'm surprised I didn't see any tattoos or piercings."
"Well, working at Taco Bell, he probably can't afford much."
"Yep, he's probably still making payments on his car stereo." David replied. I felt like he had more to say after having been in a physical struggle with the kid.
"How'd you get him out of the car?" I asked.
"The door was unlocked and saw the belt was behind him. I grabbed his arm and pulled, but he kept a death grip on the steering wheel. When I got him halfway out the door I grabbed under both arm pits and yanked really hard and he popped right out onto the street and slid away from the car, that's what hiked his shirt all the way to his arm pits!"
"Too bad he wasn't jerking off when you caught up with him." I offered and David laughed at the image that scene would make.
"Got any other impressions?"
"A few."
"Like?" I encouraged him to talk.
"What about a huge crop of wild pubes." He suggested with a smile.
"Uh huh, what else."
"What about arm pit hairs that are also thick and long."
"So that makes him hairy in his pits and his crotch, like a Great Ape, but pale and boney everywhere else, but he's got a really long dick. Is that it?"
"I'd add that he's a virgin, he doesn't bathe daily, and when he comes he shoots semen far enough to catch it in his mouth, but not him. He'd treat his semen like it was gross like piss."
"What a pretty picture. I like guys that shoot but the rest of him doesn't sound very appetizing."
"Yeah, and inside his car it smelled like body odor too."
"Okay, let's change the subject."
I leaned in and kissed him on the cheek, "Let's hope his father isn't a city cop."
David's last comment was, "I bet his dad owns the car stereo shop on Dyer." And I added, "So your dad owns a car stereo shop but you work at Taco Bell, that says something don't it!"
On Monday the captain asked us to meet with him in his office. While we sat down he closed the door (which was unusual) and told us about an optional mission outside the USA we were being offered with a juicy large reward.
"This one is unlike anything you've done in the past. And I'll emphasize this is a voluntary secret mission. The bottom line is this Op is a political assassination, three people, our government is requesting on behalf of the people of Cambodia. There is a new Khmer Rouge party formed and lead by the grandson of Pol Pot in Phnom Penh. The mission objective is to locate and kill Pol Pot III and his family, and escape undetected."
"What's the reward?" David immediately replied.
"Five million in tax free cash." Captain Johnson replied after searching the information sheet. Then he added that mission secrecy is required.
"Is there a deadline or any rules?" I asked.
"Yes it says, all three of them must be legally and medically dead, and the bodies must be intact for identification purposes, a photo must be taken of each corpse, and if you're caught the State Department will deny your citizenship and you'll likely spend the rest of your life in prison in Cambodia, but in all honesty you'll face a firing squad at dawn the next day, or they might just hang you slowly and shoot at you while you're suffocating."
"How do we get there?" David asked.
"The mission starts in Hawaii, but you will leave here using your real names and passports. In Honolulu you will meet with a CIA agent and get your new passports and a stack of Euros. After that you will fly on Malaysia Air from Honolulu to Manila. You fly to Manila then Ho Chi Minh City in southern Vietnam. Ho Chi Minh City used to be called Saigon. The nice hotel used by tourists near the airport is called Sunflowers Hotel.
There you will purchase guided tour bus tickets in the hotel lobby and ride the tour bus into Phnom Penh with about forty American tourists on a two-night guided tour of the ancient temples around the capitol city. The Khmer Rouge campaign office happens to be near the tour bus hotel downtown. We'll provide passports and money for transport but for the actual killing they suggest quietly using a locally purchased kitchen knife or straight razor."
"And afterwards?"
"Back to your hotel room at the Kim San Guest House and finish the tour with the rest of the Americans, then return to Ho Chi Minh City on the bus and decide to visit longer or catch the first flight back to Manila. This one will fully utilize your Seal training. And I know you two are not big on killing, and the goal of this mission is killing three people but the reward should ease your conscience, not to mention the silent mass appreciation of the people of Cambodia."
I told him we needed time to discuss the mission privately. David asked who the three people were and the Captain said: "Pol Pot the Third, his wife, and young daughter.
David and I got into his truck and drove to Chico's Tacos on Montana and had a long lunch and discussed the Op.
"Did he mention the criteria for calling the mission a success?" I asked David and he said, "Three people completely dead and photographed, don't get caught."
"How long until the reward is paid, and how will it be paid?" With a mouth full of crunchy rolled fried taco he nodded no.
"This one sounds risky, there's a lot of unknowns since it's in countries I don't know much about." We sat there crunching on rolled fried tacos and tossed questions at each other:
Body guards or other form of protection at home?
Alarm systems?
How would we get inside their residence?
Anyone else involved or is it just us?
Who provided all this information and who's paying the five mil?
Do we get a second try if the schedule fails the first night?
What is the timeline on the first night?
If something goes wrong, any chance of extraction?
Have the buildings been scoped or photographed recently, from all sides?
Who designed the timelines?
Are there any other reasons for this other than the obvious one?
What does Khmer Rouge mean?
After lunch we got most of our questions answered. "Return to the USA alive, all three subjects dead and photographed, no breach in security, reward paid within four days of 100% success, in cash, in person by armed guards to your house or wherever."
I asked if he had photos of the hotel in Phnom Penh or the campaign office of the Khmer Rouge and he grabbed a folder on his desk and set it in front of us. While we examined the photos I asked the captain why there was so much emphasis on them being dead.
His answer made perfect sense, "The human body is designed with lots of ways to prevent bleeding to death, there is a chance if it is not done correctly one of them could be found the next day barely alive, hospitalized and saved, even if comatose for the next ten years, they want no symbols of that family to remain alive. They specified all three of them must be 100% clinically dead, completely pulseless with no possibility for resuscitation. All three of them could go directly to cremation."
Inside the folder were several large color prints, hi-def photos of the outside of the buildings, it looked like a modern political campaign office. There were many people in Cambodia that feared a return to their failed communist plans that ended with the slaughter of millions of innocent civilians like the 1970s. I recalled the movie The Killing Fields and felt I could risk my life to make sure that never happened again.
"You have photos of the targets?"
"Yes." He pulled out another folder and set it in front of us. They had color prints, like family portraits taken in the past year, used for publicity in Cambodia. It reminded me of the propaganda photos of a smiling Chairman Mao walking amongst the smiling peasants (just before he had them executed).
I couldn't take my eyes off their daughter, she was a cute little girl with straight black hair and short bangs wearing a dress just like her mother's. The girl stood beside her mother, mom was seated beside dad. The girl had one hand on her mom's shoulder. Dad was seated beside mom, wearing casual clothes like he just finished sixteen holes on the golf course. They actually looked like a nice family photographed at a Walmart photo studio in Los Angeles! The thought of killing a child didn't sit well with me. Actually, hand-killing a person was difficult for me too, it's different when they were a silhouette in rifle sights.
"Why do they want the child gone?" David asked.
"Twenty years from now she might run for national office as Pauline Pot to carry on the family tradition. They want the entire brand name and family gone, this mission gets that started, then the Cambodian secret police will quietly finish the round-up and execution of distant relatives after the core family is gone."
"Why can't they kill him themselves?"
"Because they need deniability, if it became known they killed him it could trigger riots and unrest all across the region, possibly a military coup. That part of the world that has leaned communist for a very long time. I suspect any other relatives in Cambodia will begin to silently disappear."
Then Captain Johnson gestured to the photo of the campaign office and pointed out a building a few doors away and said that was the Kim San Guest House the tour bus company used, it's only about one hundred feet, door to door, the hotel occupied the entire 2nd floor.
I asked for his magnifying glass and studied them closely, David and I both looked closely at the images, then he asked the captain to bring up g-maps on his computer.
The first thing we both noticed was the buildings on that side of the street shared a common roof elevation. Everything on that side of the street was two stories tall. In a very soft voice the captain whispered that according to intelligence (CIA) the family lived in a two bedroom apartment above the campaign office, with rooms that looked out onto the street and a courtyard behind those buildings. He said it could be as easy as going to bed in the hotel, late at night climb out the window to the roof, silently walk over to their building, roof to roof. Then climb down to the 2nd floor balcony and into their rooms and terminate each one, then go back to the hotel and clean up any blood and go back to bed and finish the bus tour in the morning.
We all kind of stared at each other with blank faces. I had a sense of anxiety in my chest and felt my heart pounding. I thought to myself he made it sound so simple but tons of stuff could go wrong and if we got caught we'd be shot after being tortured for a few days. Who knows what would happen if we got caught, we might even end up in a prison in China.
David mumbled, '...they gotta have a body guard.' But the captain said that was marked 'no' in the CIA report, just that they were very vulnerable and accessible. The report said they wanted to appear as common people and walked the streets and signed autographs and posed for selfies with anyone that asked, just like the old Chairman Mao press photos, but this family did it for real. He said they probably felt very safe in that neighborhood, city populations in Cambodia tended to be poorly educated.
When I asked about security at home, he looked over the CIA summary form and said they found none except during the day there was an elderly man with a pistol inside the campaign office. We glanced at each other briefly, which told me David was very interested.
It seemed the boss had things he wanted to say and finally he cleared his throat and explained the CIA probably did to them the same thing they did to Osama Bin Laden. He said they recorded every phone call, probably watched in their windows from across the street and followed them around the city. They probably bugged their home with apps installed on their cell phones and took photos of them with their own cell phones every day, so yes what they said about almost no security was probably true.
Using the captain's computer we looked at the street and the buildings and printed about fifteen photos off G-maps. He pointed out that all the buildings across the street were four stories tall, and the two story buildings reminded him of the French Quarter of New Orleans, he said it should be easy to get to the roof if the balconies were as they appeared in the photos. Looking at them on Maps made it look like going from the hotel room to their roof would be easy, hopefully nobody would see us and we doubted it got dark there at night with all the street lights and business signs.
Luckily, tourists with those 360 degree cameras took photos of the courtyard behind the hotel and campaign office building so we had a view of the back side of the buildings and the stores between them. David spent a lot of time closely examining the back walls. The four storefronts between the campaign office and the hotel entrance did not have back doors.
I asked the captain what Khmer Rouge meant and he said he thought Khmer was Cambodian for a person born in Cambodia of parents also born in Cambodia. He said Khmer sort of meant the Cambodian race. Even though we think of it as a country they thought of it as a race. He said he thought they might be able to identify a fellow Khmer simply by their looks even though they may look the same to us. He said with a little practice it is usually easy to identify people from Korea, Japan, China, and the other countries by things like the shape of their faces, noses, cheek bones, chins, and accent too.
Khmer Rouge was the Cambodian Communist Party, it started in the early 1950s around the same time as other parties formed in Laos and Vietnam. Then he added that some people felt Khmer was also a race, not just a place of birth. He said, "Khmer are the indigenous people that have lived on that land for over a thousand years and built great cities and temples of stone."
Before we left his office David asked, "What if we get there and found the situation had changed and the mission couldn't be completed, like maybe the family left for the week to go fishing?"
The captain gathered the folders and cleared his throat and said we'd finish our two night sightseeing tour and go home like everyone else. David told him we needed to do some research and we'd discuss it with him again tomorrow. The captain added that if the family suddenly packed up and left town we'd be notified by the CIA within 48 hours. If we accepted the mission we'd start getting daily reports on their activities.
Before we left his office Captain Johnson said, "The CIA carefully specified that in case either of you is captured the best escape for the other is to reach the Mekong river and swim to a passing boat and ride back into Vietnam and find a way to the US Embassy in Manila."
That night we had our computers on looking closely at that block and the immediate neighborhood from satellite photos and street view photos too. All that area had was retail shops on the street level and small apartments, three or four stories above the storefronts, which equaled a lot of potential witnesses.
David read me stuff he found online, general information about Cambodia we never knew. He was reading on Wikipedia and said, "This is interesting. Cambodia is about 70,000 sq miles, roughly the same size as Missouri, which has a population of just over six million people, but in that same area Cambodia has 17 million people. The primary religion is Buddhism, about 97% of the population. The main exports are rubber, rice, and lumber. Tourism is a rapidly growing segment of their economy. The three primary languages spoken are Khmer, French, and Chinese."
He cited more facts like the surprising number of homes that have never had electricity was about 35% of the rural population. The famous Angkor Watt is in a northwest province of Cambodia. It is part of a very large complex, Angkor is only one of them. That area is about 220 miles northwest of the capital city Phnom Penh, which sits in the southeast part of the country. He said the name has had several meanings over the centuries but many people say it meant 'Penh's Hill' since the city was first declared the new capital in the mid 1400s. And it has roughly the same population today as Houston, Texas, both cities house about 3,600 people per square mile.
We spent all day and night closely examining the buildings and the ones across the street from the hotel and the campaign office. We counted 291 windows and 162 balconies that overlooked the buildings. By my estimate I'd say that translated into nearly 1,800 people that could see the roof of the hotel and the fronts of all those buildings.
We also examined storefronts and listed each one, but it was difficult to translate them into English. Many businesses had names like Flower Fragrance Garden, so what the hell would that be? What we were looking for were clues that might tell us if it was a CIA Op or not, those places usually had things in common, like particular shapes designed into their logos and signs.
David discovered on the hotel building there was a steel ladder going to the roof on the back of the hotel which might be better than scaling the front wall and going roof to roof in front of over 1,800 potential witnesses. I think he felt the entire roof idea was poorly planned.
Then we looked closely at the building that housed the campaign office, it also had apartments on the second floor. They had big signs in the windows, neither of us read their language (also called Khmer) but guessed it said `Pol Pot, for President, 2023, Elect the common man, a citizen leader, just like you!' David cited one of our favorite comedy movies when he said those political slogans reminded him of, 'The People's Front of Judea.'
David mumbled that it saddened him that he might be elected. It didn't speak well for education in Cambodia, "What's next? Adolph Hilter for Populist Party Chancellor of Germany and nobody questions it except elderly Germans in nursing homes? Or why not Jose Stalin running for Presidente of Russia!"
On our backs in bed, staring at the ceiling we talked about the mission for a few hours but were concerned that lots of details were still unknown: the tour bus hotel, the hotel in Ho Chi Minh City, passports, weapons, escape, capture, the lack of gear: no glasses or spiders.
Just as I was about to doze off David said, "What if we pulled it off and made it back to Vietnam as planned? Could we rent a local twink for the evening to celebrate? Some guy that looked sixteen but was actually twenty four and had a nice clean dick and big puffy tits and not a hair on his body, or maybe a shemale with big tits?"
"Is gay legal there?" I asked.
David said he saw a State Department map and yes, it's legal in most of Southeast Asia, but not Myanmar, Bangladesh, or India. He said it had something to do with the majority religion in those countries. He thought gay was illegal in many parts of the Middle East for obvious reasons.
The next day at work we had another meeting with the Captain and asked lots more questions like: What happens if we got there and found the mission was impossible as planned? What happened if one or both of us got caught? What was likely to happen in that neighborhood when the bodies were discovered the next day? What's the history of success of the bus tour service? Have they been in Phnom Penh during civil unrest in the past, what did they do?
In our office we researched the history of protests and police actions in Cambodia using a US government news retrieval database that went back to the 1850s.
Captain Johnson arranged for David to fly to Langley to the CIA building to examine their recent imaging of the area. What he found out was the Op could actually be done in the shadows on the back side of both buildings, for fire codes the backs were very accessible. Someone could leave the hotel out their back door and walk to the roof ladder on the campaign office building. He'd climb to the second floor and lean over and grab the balcony railing then step over to the balcony outside one of the bedrooms, probably the daughter's room. He said he saw colored construction paper shapes stuck to the windows on that room, which looked like a home schooled girl's bedroom. All that was missing was a Hello Kitty logo!
David said some of their photos were taken from the ground level, probably someone posing as a tourist. That courtyard behind the hotel was the ruins of a Buddhist temple the Khmer destroyed in the 1970s. The temple was flattened but the courtyard was fully intact with statues, fountains, and walkways that were hundreds of years old.
He also spoke to someone that was an expert on Cambodia and the people, he asked questions about the Pol Pot family and what would likely happen locally if they suddenly died in a car accident. He said it would cause some turmoil and maybe reprisals against known enemies, but it would be difficult to predict how far they might go. He said the best thing would be to remain unseen and hopefully some local person would report seeing suspicious people and use their physical descriptions.
After he got back from Washington we split research tasks and I plotted the actual trip, flights, bus routes, and the tour bus map and company as well as their history. We used the large dry erase board in the Tac Room to address potential problems and how they should be handled.
I showed David one interesting image I caught on G-maps street view. It was taken from the Google Car. I reminded him that the cameras they used were high above the roof of the vehicle, probably ten feet up, so it was idea for looking in second story windows. We knew the CIA was closely watching them and that's what I found.
In one of the street view images, nearly across the street from their apartment I caught an image of someone in the shadows sitting on a stool in front of a tripod mounted binoculars, leaned forward closely watching activities inside the apartment across the street. I told him that must be the CIA guy spying on them! We both looked at the shots I grabbed and were amazed that they were so obvious and stupid to be caught on camera like that. He told me that was one of the neatest things he ever saw on G-maps, the CIA spying on someone!
The two-night operation was timed out like this: the tour bus left Ho Chi Minh City before sunrise and arrived in Phnom Penh around 4pm. After checking into the hotel the bus re-boarded for a late day tour of the first temple inside the city which included a welcome buffet dinner. We'd return to the hotel by 7pm and leave the next day at 5:30am. About 7:30am we'd arrive at the first temple, which was two hours north of Phnom Penh, north of the city along the Mekong River. With any luck the bus would depart the hotel long before the bodies were found which would create an alibi in the minds of city police.
We'd get back around 6-7pm and have the evening off. That time could be used if we were unable to run the Op on the first night. The next morning at 5:30am the bus boarded and departed for Ho Chi Minh City and arrived at the hotel near the airport around 4pm. David commented for our safety the second night would be safer because by the time the bodies were found we'd be well on our way to the border.
On the first night we'd get to our hotel by 7pm then take off on foot to buy a burner cell phone with camera, knives, and maybe something else with a blade. We'd stop for a few drinks then back to the hotel and go to bed with the alarm set for 2am. That was the summary plan for the Op but we were not obligated to follow it.
We learned that passports were checked at the hotel in Ho Chi Minh City and there was usually only a brief stop at the border check station since the passengers were pre-cleared and Buddhist Temple Tours LLC was well established and trusted in both countries. Reservations were needed one week in advance, a non-refundable deposit was paid online so they could begin checking backgrounds to smooth out their border crossings.
David was told by the CIA that the use of video cameras in retail shops in Phnom Penh was highly uncommon. If you were caught shoplifting in Cambodia the shop owner dealt with you himself. There should be no video record of our purchase of a knife in that part of downtown. A hat and glasses should be sufficient disguise in that store. David suggested adding fake moustache and beard to our packing list if we took the mission. I added that to the list to request if we took the job.
Sometimes when we accepted voluntary jobs we got away with things like: 'we'll take the job if you...'
We continued to investigate everything for six more days, seriously examined that neighborhood too. We subscribed to a local English language news service online for southern Cambodia and the Mekong River valley. We also examined almost every mile of road from Ho Chi Minh City to the hotel in Cambodia and after almost ten days of research David told the captain we'd take the mission.
"I want to bring some technology along, our glasses, a spider, and a controller for the spiders, with voice controls." (Forward, back, stop, turn, left, right, scan, gas, self destruct, return, etc.) Normally under manual control of the spiders we used arrow keys on our batsuit wrist panels, but an older technology was there as a back-up, using our voices instead of arrows. One of the neat things about the spiders was the very tips of their legs were so tiny they could sometimes walk up a sheet of window glass.
Captain Johnson sighed and asked him to leave his office, he had some phone calls to make to the Pentagon.
Two hours later we had our answer, we would be allowed to bring one spider and they would fabricate a back-up controller that ran on normal AA batteries, and have them install it inside something relevant to bring along, like a cheap old walkman. That revelation changed the entire risk profile of the mission. The bad part, if caught it could implicate the USA. We asked to have a spider modified to use common button batteries we could replace if needed. And we wanted permission to dump them in a river if caught or chased. We always asked for back-up plans because of the possibility of arriving at the scene and finding the target wasn't there.
Later that week our stuff started to arrive. We got out one larger suitcase for our stuff, including bathroom gear, three pairs of khaki shorts, and short sleeve Hawaiian print shirts, scrunchable rain resistant hats, and two pairs of sunglasses each, two of those would be our IR glasses, which looked like real sunglasses but were actually TV screens and audio/video gear. The captain said we'd have very limited comms with anyone except each other with the comms gear activated. He said it would give us simple voice commands only for the spider. That feature was one we rarely used because both of us preferred manual control with arrow keys instead. I imagined us using a tiny joystick to manually steer the spiders but such a thing didn't exist yet, even though it was built into the middle of many computer keyboards.
He stressed that there were no comms to Washington or El Paso with our gear in that part of the world, we'd be on our own. The captain also ordered some facial disguise pieces for us, sideburns and moustaches. They were a grade that the only person near you that could tell they were props was your barber. They were waterproof and hurt like hell to peel off.
On Saturday we saw photos of our new passports. We would be Canadian resident aliens from Honolulu, Hawaii (a town we knew very well). He would be Gary Paulson, I would be Brent Bennet. Our passports showed the same street address, both born in Vancouver, BC in 1991, with no current religious or political affiliations. According to the inside of our passports this was our first overseas trip. We'd pick them up at a hotel in Honolulu, near the beach.
We practiced calling each other by our new names all weekend. I practiced sucking Gary's dick on Saturday on the basement sofa while we watched John Wick-1 again. Another nice thing about the home theater in the basement was we could blast the sound almost a loud as we wanted. I told Gary his dick tasted exactly the same as David's. He rolled his eyes at me and gestured for me to shut up and keep sliding my mouth up and down, he was getting close.
A short time later he dumped his head back and moaned a bit. He thrust his hips towards my mouth with each contraction of his prostate while I swallowed everything then licked it clean. After he was done I pressed my face into his balls and enjoyed his scent and the intimacy while he caressed my shoulders. We both dozed off briefly in that position.
On Monday we booked our flights from Honolulu to Manila, and Manila to Ho Chi Minh City with two nights at a hotel near the airport. We also booked our hotel room near the airport in Honolulu, but not the one for the return trip.
We brought our suitcase to work and left it there to pack so our team could watch and comment on what was going along.
At work all week everyone called us by our new names and we took on their identities and researched our new home on the island just east of Diamondhead, on the southeast side of Honolulu. It was a small house in a crowded neighborhood that had lots of poor sailor's families. We also booked our tour dates and picked the cheapest package, two nights in Cambodia, meals and hotel included. A welcome dinner the night of the arrival, then one entire day on the road seeing the ancient temples within sixty miles of the city. The cost for their cheapest inclusive package was $650 each, or $610 Euros to be paid on arrival at the hotel concierge desk. We took photos of our passports and emailed them to the tour bus company.
Travel rules in those countries required us to also purchase return trip airline tickets so we got those too, all the way back to Hawaii. It was starting to look like it was going to be five days of sitting in lousy seats or walking around ancient ruins in weather where the temperature, humidity, and dew point would all be the same number (99), with winds and storms possible too. The airport in Vietnam would have different weather but those pilots were used to landing in bad weather.
A few days later a new spider arrived from Nevada, they had tiny battery slots that accepted two button batteries but only had room for one gas pellet, we loaded it with one pellet just in case.
David asked why we couldn't use a poison gas pellet instead of a knife and was told the gas was not guaranteed but severing someone's carotid artery generally was.
The comms box arrived from D.C., it was installed inside a fully working cassette/FM radio Walkman with one mix tape of Country favorites. The ear bud cord was the antenna, but it actually worked.
The maps said our hotel in Phnom Penh was on National Route 1, which was the highway that started at the Bavet Border Station then passed through downtown Phnom Penh, the same highway also continued on to downtown Ho Chi Minh City. The maps were poor and there was almost no signage that we could see but the side street near the hotel was simply marked '508.'
We also found someone's videos on youtube of them taking the same temple ruins bus tour around the city and stayed at the same hotel that provided us highly valuable intelligence.
The video included parts of their trip: the tour bus arrived at the hotel and a smiling elderly man wearing an ill-fitting suit met them as they stepped off the bus. Cargo doors were opened and each person rolled their suitcase, one at a time up the cracked concrete steps and in the doors to the check-in desk. The desk was in a hallway that went all the way to a door that opened to the courtyard behind all the buildings on that block. After showing their passports they received a room key and the desk lady said to take the stairs to the 2nd floor, she pointed to a staircase down the hallway. Actually she spoke in an unintelligible voice but pointed to the stairs, it was rather obvious what came next. The people in the video chuckled at her voice as they moved towards the stairway.
The rooms were tiny, maybe 12x14 with a toilet and stand-up shower inside a closet sized bathroom. The sink was in the main room which had a queen size bed, bedside tables with lamps and a telephone, a small old wobbly dresser, wall hooks to hang clothes, a ceiling fan that hummed, and a large window that looked out over the balcony and the busy wide street, and a door to step outside onto the balcony that ran the length of the entire second floor.
That was when I paused their video, it showed the buildings next door continued the balcony and it appeared to run the entire block, so the buildings were all connected on the second floor too (only on the street side). They had decorative iron railings to stop people from walking onto the balcony next door.
Their video also showed the tour bus crossing into Cambodia. It was boarded by some short dude in a military uniform, he held a clipboard and with the tour guide woman they stood beside the driver and did a head count, he made eye contact with every passenger then left. They talked briefly out on the sidewalk then the bus proceeded west from their lavish and old border crossing station.
Lots of the border between Cambodia and Vietnam was just farmland or a narrow dirt road but there were usually no fences, like the USA/Canada border. Their first video ended after they left the hotel to begin a day of touring ruins, it was dark when they started shooting video out the bus window. On the bus they handed out boxed breakfasts to eat in your seat to save time. I told David what I saw on that travel video.
Their video also showed crossing back into Vietnam and some sights and family shots around three different temples that were north of the city.
Our dates were set, our reservations and travel dates were confirmed, everything was go for our trip to Vietnam. Our layover in Manila would only be a few hours so we decided to stay in the airport and sample the local food around the facility. The menus were mostly variations of seafood, rice, eggs, chicken, and pork.
The comms box arrived installed inside an old Walkman. The spider was inside the suitcase handle. We had to carefully unclip the strap from one end so the spider would slide out, pre-loaded with a gas pellet and extra batteries. The visible light portion of the optics were gone, as were GPS and most of their software, these were custom for this job. I'd never seen the DOD go that far to facilitate a voluntary op before.
During the week we had one last formal meeting with the boss where he recorded us discussing the risks and requirements. We must guard the technology with our lives and the USA would deny us if captured. There will be no rescue or prisoner swap if captured, no body returned if killed. David interrupted and said "Five million in US cash within one week of our return after satisfying mission requirements," and the boss laughed but kept reading our agreement. After he was done he added if we had been active duty military we could expect promotions in rank job offers in Washington D.C., but we were legally civilian contractors and had no government rank or pay grade.
We signed the forms and Captain Johnson seemed very happy, the op seemed doable and well within our ability. He invited us out to dinner but we had other plans and thanked him but declined his offer, David told him maybe we could do it after our big payday.
Three days before we left the boss arranged for a very private tutoring session. He told us he did not mean for that to be an insult, but he wanted to improve our chances of success during the op. He said we were being taken to a special training facility on Fort Bliss where two retired marines were going to review the fine art of killing.
They used models and lots of photographs to show us how to quickly slit a human throat to facilitate a rapid death with the least amount of injury, in the shortest amount of time. Our goal was to completely sever the internal jugular vein and common carotid artery on the person's left side of the neck about mid-way between the jaw and shoulder muscles. They said in most cases the victim will faint within six seconds due to a major drop in blood pressure in the brain. Cutting the artery would be the best goal, although almost any vein or artery in the neck would accomplish the goal, the carotid artery would do it the fastest.
We were shown training videos and some actual combat footage during the Vietnam War of prisoners being executed by the same means. We got into their training pit indoors in close combat situations and spent four hours learning how to properly slice a throat. We asked to be taught how to do it to someone that was passed out drunk in bed. We spent 35 minutes on just that scenario doing it over and over, the exact hand movements and the types of knives were the best. They also taught us how to not get sprayed in blood doing it.
Contact the author: borischenaz gmail
Reminder to readers: this story is 100% fiction, none of it happened, none of the characters or places are real.