The Fonko Connection: Jake Fonko, #9

The Fonko Connection

Colombia/Panama 1989 (Book 9)

B. Hesse Pflingger

Copyright © 2018 G. Ray Funkhouser. All rights reserved.

This book is a work of fiction. Similarities to actual events, places, persons or other entities are coincidental.

The Fonko Connection/B. Hesse Pflingger. – 1st ed.

Contact: jakefonko@gmail.com

Contents

The Jake Fonko Series

Preface

Uno

Dos

Tres

Quatro

Cinco

Seis

Siete

Ocho

Nueve

Diez

Once

Doce

Trece

Catorce

Quince

Dieciseis

Diecisiente

Series Note

Editor’s Afterword

The Jake Fonko Series

Jake Fonko M.I.A.

Fonko on the Carpet

Fonko’s Errand Go Boom

Fonko in the Sun

Fonko Bolo

The Mother of All Fonkos

Fonko Go Home

To Russia With Fonko

The Fonko Connection

The Jake Fonko Series: 1, 2 & 3 Box Set

The Jake Fonko Series: 4, 5 & 6 Box Set

The Jake Fonko Series: 7, 8 & 9 Box Set

The Jake Fonko series is now available at all major online booksellers.

Preface

I believe an explanation is owed to our myriad faithful readers. Our originally intended scheme, whereby Mr. Jake Fonko and I embarked on the project of chronicling and bringing to public light his historically significant adventures and participation in critical world events, was to present them in sequential order. That, we surmised, would provide perspective and insights into his development as an important actor (no double-entendre re his cinematic career intended) on the world stage, as well as imbue this series of books with a sense of integrity and coherence. However, as the deadline for publishing this volume, The Fonko Connection (which was originally scheduled as number six in the series), approached, the final manuscript and all notes and ancillary materials mysteriously vanished from the publisher’s offices.

With an avid audience eagerly awaiting the further adventures of Mr. Fonko, we had no choice but to plunge ahead with our publication schedule and, notwithstanding the resulting hiatus, bring out the volume covering his exploits in Kuwait and Iraq, The Mother of All Fonkos, as our sixth book. This was followed by our seventh book, Fonko Go Home, chronicling his time in Serbia and Bosnia. Mr. Fonko then undertook laborious sleuthing, and as our eighth book, To Russia With Fonko, was finalized and dispatched to the production team for publication, he abruptly departed for unknown destinations. Some weeks later, a private courier arrived at the publisher’s door with the publication-ready copy of The Fonko Connection and several crates of ancillary materials. We wasted no time in transforming that heretofore purloined manuscript into the book you see before you.

Please accept our apologies, though in fairness the delay cannot be attributed to any malfeasance on our part. We hope you will have no difficulty cognitively inserting what you are about to read into its proper place in the continuing, remarkable saga of legendary Mr. Fonko.

B. Hesse Pflingger, PhD

Professor of Contemporary History

California State University, Cucamonga

Uno

15 November 1989

Turn on. Tune in. Drop out.

Poor old Timothy Leary. Once a professor of psychology at Harvard University, he made his big splash as a hippie guru and LSD promoter around the time of San Francisco’s dubious 1967 Summer of Love, but finally ended his days a pathetic public spectacle. Leary, the man, is now long forgotten, but his famous pronouncement lives on, not least in the memories of gray-ponytailed Dead Heads. Drug-addled Leary aspired to throw open wide the doors of perception and give the world profound insights leading to peace, freedom, equality and self-realization for all humanity. With no doubt the best of intentions. We know where the road paved with those leads…

Dr. Leary, perhaps from following his own advice, lacked the vision to foresee how far from enlightened mind expansion the flood of recreational pharmaceuticals he helped unleash would deviate. By two decades later, his famous slogan had morphed to Get Stoned. Get Rich. Get Killed. Well-meant LSD spiritual excursions were eclipsed by an avalanche of aids for detaching minds from reality, notably pot, blow, smack, meth and a cornucopia of happy pills. By the 1980s, a few global drug merchants had become fabulously wealthy and myriads of others wealthy enough. Millions of their customers got high but legions discovered that instant bliss led them into a merciless form of slavery, drug addiction. Many took dirt naps via ODs or the brutalities of the international drug trade.

A grateful nation turns its eyes to you, Dr. Tim.

I came within a hair’s breadth of joining the latter group myself, thanks to a routine bodyguarding gig, this one to Bogota, Colombia. Ultimately, that routine assignment entangled me with:

Two drug cartels.

Four American anti-drug efforts.

One terrorist group.

One covert CIA op.

Two international arms smugglers.

One impenetrable jungle.

One tin-pot dictator.

Several candidates for The Worst Man in the World.

And one U.S. Army invasion.

Yep, give me the simple life.

First let’s update my timeline: A slew of world events passed over the dam after I helped Corrie Aquino steal the Philippine election from Ferdinand Marcos (see Fonko Bolo), Mikhail Gorbachev came on the scene in Russia and Ronald Reagan thundered, Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall! Lo and behold, the Berlin Wall came down a few years later, to the surprise and astonishment to all concerned. Freedom broke out across Eastern Europe, commencing with Poland’s Solidarity Movement. In China, communist government tanks and machine guns curbed the enthusiasm of a pro-democracy throng in Tiananmen Square. To become rich is glorious remained the modern Chinese watchword, but actual free elections for the masses remained a step too far. Terrorist incidents radiated out from the Middle East at the customary pace. A Libyan bomb brought down a Pan Am airliner over Lockerbie, Scotland, for example. On the flip side, the American cruiser Vincennes in the Persian Gulf mistook an ascending Iranian airliner for an attacking fighter-bomber and blew it out of the sky. Russia finally had enough of ragheads picking off their choppers with CIA-supplied Stinger missiles, not to mention mounting costs and dead bodies shipped home, and threw in the towel in Afghanistan. Throughout Latin America, dictators tyrannized, protesters rioted, insurgent groups doggedly prosecuted their guerilla wars, and the peons sucked up their poverty whoever was in charge.

Myself, for a few years there I enjoyed a respite from life-threatening international escapades. For a change, I was directly involved in none of the world’s sordid goings-on. Those tumultuous years slid by while I took it easy at my Malibu beach pad and kept company with lovely Dana Wehrli. I pursued my career as a freelance whatever and business stayed steady. My take from the Philippines assignment provided a comfy cushion, despite that we missed out on the Yamashita hoard of gold. I bodyguarded, and escorted, and consulted, and generally made myself useful to a growing Hollywood clientele, bringing in enough bread to keep my beachside lifestyle going comfortably.

Colonel Ollie North tried once again to recruit me as an advisor in that dirty little war in Nicaragua between the exiled Contras and the communist Sandinistas. Congress refused to support the Contras, so the CIA egged them on via back channels, shape-shifting and operations of dubious legality. Again, I gave that one a pass, figuring it for a high risk/lousy pay gig. A good call, as it turned out. Had I signed on I’d have wound up with Ollie and others trying to explain to the world how we really didn’t break all the laws we broke. They finally let Ollie off the hook, but what a mess, and I’m glad I avoided it. At least our side won, sort of.

So I had no reason for worries over accepting the assignment I’m telling you about here, a brief business junket down to Bogota, Colombia. My client was a big-bucks builder of shopping malls in and around Los Angeles—for the sake of client confidentiality, let’s call him B. F. Deal. I’d accompanied him down there three times previously for conferences with the Colombian bankers who supplied investment capital for his projects. Those trips had been cakewalks. We’d fly into Bogota in his Gulf Stream III and hole up in a posh hotel. He’d spend a day or two in meetings, dickering with distinguished-looking executives at well-appointed banks. Everyone knew Colombia was home to major players in international drug trafficking, as well as sporting a notoriously high homicide rate, but during none of our visits had any of that impinged on B. F. and me. We landed without incident, passed our time with good company in elegant surroundings and, upon conclusion of business, flew straight back home. I always packed my SIG Sauer but never once had occasion arose even to remove it from my bag. I adhered to a SOP learned from my Nam tour with the Lurps—the Long Range Reconnaissance Patrol Ranger units. Avoid unnecessary trouble. If you know your stuff, most trouble is unnecessary. Well, I thought I knew my stuff. And I really did, just about everywhere but Colombia.

B. F. Deal pushed sixty years old. His graying hair was trimmed short, no comb-over. Formerly athletic and still robust despite gone a little thick amidships, he looked pretty fit for a man of his age. His Gulf Stream jet was luxury encapsulated in an aluminum tube—spacious and quiet, sporting soft leather reclining seats and a full galley with wet bar and a comely stewardess. I didn’t give it much thought at the time, but this trip to Bogota differed from the previous three. Only the two of us, plus Craig the pilot and Vicki the stewardess, were aboard this time. Previously he’d brought along posses of experts or specialists—architects, finance guys, retail mavens, politicians, planners, what have you. This time it was just him, with me riding shotgun for the sake of personal security.

We left LAX on the morning of 15 November 1989 and streaked through smooth weather across southwestern U.S. and the Gulf of Mexico. As 1800 hours approached, we neared the Colombia coast and B. F. declared a happy hour. Vicki, a slender brunette in a uniform-style mauve skirt-suit, built us some mai tais, and we sat back while B. F. told me about a recent hunting trip.

I had a hankering to bag an antelope, he was saying, "and that drew me to Wyoming, the best antelope country anywhere. I own some property out there, and a rancher friend has a spread where the antelope show up in season like damn clockwork. I brought a Hollywood actor friend along with me this time. I won’t say his name, but you’d recognize him if you saw him on the screen. Plays macho guys in the movies, TV, but the fact is that he’s big city born and raised, wouldn’t even know how to change a flat tire on the road. No way an outdoorsman, never hunted or even fished before. He thought doing it might improve his performance, give him a better feeling for the characters he portrayed, and he talked me into taking him along for my antelope hunt.

"So we went out to a rifle range, and I showed him how to shoot one of my goat guns, a 25/06. He got to be a passable enough shot, good enough to hit an antelope at a hundred yards with a scope sight anyhow, and I could tell he was really excited about it—stoked, as the surfers put it. Well sir, we fly out to Wyoming and get in my Range Rover and drive out to my friend’s ranch. I figure to say hello and ask permission to hunt on the property and get the lay of the land, but a rancher is pretty busy and I don’t want to take up his time, so I leave my actor pal in the car while I run up to the house. My friend’s fine with us hunting and he tells me where he thinks we might find some antelope, then he says, 'I’d like to ask a favor of you, B. F., if that’s all right.' I tell him ask away, and he says, ‘My old horse, he’s all but dead, just hurting and moping. I wonder if you could trouble yourself to put him out of his misery. I just don’t have the heart to do it myself.’ I tell him sure, and he says we’ll find the horse in the corral out behind the cow barn.

I get a notion to have a little fun with my actor friend, so I get in the car looking real mad and I say, ‘If that don’t beat everything. That sonofabitch told me we can’t do any hunting on his place.’ You should have seen that actor’s face fall, man, was he disappointed. 'Well, I know another place,' I said, 'but before we go there I’m going to teach that sucker a lesson. I’m going to shoot his horse.’

"The actor perks up at that. ‘Really?’ he asks.

"‘Damn straight,’ I say, and I drive us over by the cow barn. I stop and get my gun, and the actor gets his. ‘No shit?’ he says. ‘You’re really gonna shoot his horse?’

"‘You bet,’ I say. ‘He got my dander up. Come on.’ We walk around behind the cow barn, and there’s the saddest looking horse I ever saw, like the rancher said, dead on his feet. Never saw a sorrier, more pathetic horse in my life. I raise the gun and shoot him in the head, and down he goes. ‘That’ll show him,’ I said. ‘Let’s go.’ Mr. Showbiz looked rightly shocked, as he’d never before seen anybody kill anything. I figured I’d let him in on the joke once we get back in the truck. Then I noticed him going into the cow barn. Probably wants to see what cows look like, I figured.

I hear BANG! and another BANG! and he comes running out of the barn looking pleased as punch and he says, ‘We better beat it, fast! I just shot two of that bastard’s cows.’

I looked at B. F. sideways, suspicious-like, and he said, "Maybe it didn’t happen quite like that, but you gotta admit it’s a helluva good story. We had a hearty laugh, and then he said, You know, I was watching that World Series game on TV last month, the Giants and the A’s, when that earthquake hit. World’s first televised earthquake. You see that?"

I missed it, not much of a baseball fan. I heard about it though. What, 6.9 on the Richter Scale?

"Something like that. Not the Big One everybody talks about, but even so, it got me to thinking. Now, I’m a builder, so I look at this type event in terms of buildings and infrastructure. That quake pancaked a section of interstate in Oakland, and it caused maybe four thousand landslides in the region, and it resulted in significant property damage from ground liquefaction in some tracts of land built on landfill. But that was not the Big One, far from it. When that happens, the damage will be far worse because a one-point difference on the Richter is logarithmic—ten times as strong. Now, when they design those skyscrapers they only calculate they’ll be earthquake-proof, they won’t know for sure until the Big One happens. Here’s the key problem in San Francisco as I see it: There are only four major roads out of town, and two of them are bridges. There’s that BART system under the Bay, run by electricity. If power is cut off in the region, and it likely will be, there will be one hell of a traffic jam and BART will be no place to be.

But you know Los Angeles lies near that same fault, the San Andreas, and it’s about as earthquake prone as Frisco. We’ve had some big quakes over the years, when only a fraction of the present population lived here. They talk about a Big One here too, and when it hits, what do you think will be the biggest problem?

Off hand, I imagine it would be traffic. It’s bad enough during weekday rush hour already.

Traffic’s always a problem here, he agreed, and a big quake would worsen it, no doubt. But to my mind, water would be a bigger problem.

How so?

Eighty-eight percent of LA’s water comes from hundreds of miles away, on the other side of the Sierra Nevada range. Back before they built the aqueduct in the ‘20s, the Los Angeles population was a little over a half million, and that was all the local water supply could support. It was a great climate for growing citrus fruit—oranges and lemons, you know—but the LA basin in its natural state is mostly desert. Hell, in its natural state all of southern California is mostly desert. So Bill Mulholland engineered the aqueduct to bring water from Owens Valley to here. It was a marvel, and since then LA’s grown to about ten times more people, not to mention Long Beach, Orange County and the rest of the basin. But that aqueduct crosses earthquake fault lines. If an earthquake, or any other kind of disaster, ever disrupts that water delivery system, what’s life in LA going to be like?

Pretty chaotic, desperate even, I’d think.

Jake, it’ll be hell on earth and the law of the jungle. People can deal with earthquake damage and power outages, but they can’t live without water. Myself, if that happened, I’d get in this plane and go somewhere east of the 100th meridian where they have a plentiful supply of natural water. But where will everybody else go that has water? And how are they all going to get out of town in their cars, with everything else messed up? Especially if the freeways that cross that fault were rendered unusable? I tell you, it’s something to think about.

Nothing I can do about it right now, I said. I’ll enjoy this mai tai and think about earthquakes tomorrow.

That’s realistic, B. F. sighed. A man can take precautions, but best we just enjoy the place while it’s still in livable shape.

We sipped our way through refills, then B. F. said, I’ve got a touch more paperwork to catch up on before we land, so if you’ll excuse me, Jake … and removed himself to the worktable. I re-immersed myself in the latest Jason Bourne book by Robert Ludlum—escapist fiction, divorced from reality, but entertaining and distracting. Certainly way beyond any adventures I’ve ever had or, for that matter, that anybody could ever have.

Presently, Craig brought us into the El Dorado Airport in Bogota. The day’s weather was clear and the sun hadn’t yet met the horizon. During our approach, I scoped out the landscape. Bogota butts up along the base of a range of forested mountains and sprawls out onto a plain. The geography is similar to Denver, except that Bogota sits way above mile-high—8,500 feet elevation. It takes a man even in good physical shape a few days to acclimate to the thinness of the air. The downtown sector features high-rise office towers and colonial-style government buildings, but the rest of the city mostly is low red-tile-roofed neighborhoods of shops and houses, and tin and tar-paper-topped slums. The sprawl resembles Los Angeles, except that Bogota has twice the population, few houses with yards and no residential swimming pools that I noticed. As South American capital cities go, it’s more prosperous than most but still shares that region’s gap between the poor and even the moderately comfortable. The favorable tropical/high-altitude climate—warm and dry—no doubt softens the oppressiveness some. Sited only 300 miles north of the equator, Bogota’s temperature stays pretty even throughout the year, and we arrived close to the beginning of one of their two dry seasons.

The airport lay just a few miles from the city center. B. F. had a Mercedes sedan waiting on the tarmac. We stopped at immigration and customs to get our passports stamped. From there it was on to the Hilton in the center of town. Mindful of what can happen to valuable property in Latin American countries—private jets do get stolen—B. F. had Craig and Vicki stay with the plane. They had a full galley, sleeping accommodations, a washroom in the adjacent hanger and, I suspected, a thing going, so they were agreeable to the arrangement.

The highway into town beat the LA rush hour jam by a mile. It was clogged with every conveyance known to man except elephants, camels and reindeer. Benzes and Beemers mixed it up with semis, clunkers, vans, horse carts and pack mules, even a llama or two, all scrapping and elbowing for whatever forward movement they could grab. The usual south-of-the-border assortment of garbage, drink cans and paper shards littered the roadway. The polluted air in town mingled car exhaust, industrial fumes and cooking smoke, overwhelming what otherwise would have been gentle breezes of pristine mountain air.

We arrived at the hotel around a little after 7 p.m. B. F. installed us in rooms at the Hilton, anticipating a two-night stay. As Latin American hotels go, the Bogota Hilton was top-notch. The tallest hotel in the city at that time, it boasted excellent city and mountain views from the upper floors, and our rooms were near the top. B. F. went down to the hotel restaurant to join some local business cronies for dinner. No need for me to accompany him there. I’d had enough to eat during the flight, and jet lag put my appetite three hours later than local time, so I wasn’t especially hungry just then. I knew how late dinner get-togethers could last in Latin America, and I didn’t expect to see B. F. before 2200 hours. Bogota nightlife didn’t tempt me—I’d sampled it on the previous trips, and LA nightlife was better, even if you desired noisy Latin rhythms—so I futzed around in my room for a couple hours, then went down to the bar for a bite and a beer. Some time after eleven, B. F. rapped on the door and I let him in. He looked none the worse for wear.

Get a good night’s sleep, Jake, he said. My meeting’s at ten, so we’ll want to leave here around nine. How about we meet for breakfast in the coffee shop at eight o’clock?

Suits me, I said. I’ll see you down there.

Thus passed our first night in Bogota, Colombia.

By morning, my stomach was eager for the dinner I’d not been hungry enough for, the night before. B. F. and I had hearty breakfasts of huevos rancheros and chatted about this and that, small talk mostly. He had never told me much about his business, and I of course never asked. What are bodyguards supposed to know, after all? My job was warding off threats, and nothing in my background touched on business at the level he operated. I had nothing to contribute, so there was no reason for him to confide in me. Loose lips sink ships, especially in the arena of international wheeling and dealing. We went to our rooms and freshened up. I