Fonko on the Carpet: Jake Fonko, #2

By B. Hesse Pflingger

TEHRAN, 1978. Running low on cash, former Army Ranger Jake Fonko receives a freelance referral for an unlikely client: the Shah of Iran requires a capable bodyguard. The splintering Iranian factions have grown restless, and the Shah's popularity is waning.

Jake heads to Tehran, but upon arriving, he soon realizes the job is far more dangerous than he first thought. As the country crumbles, Jake learns firsthand that the Shah's allies are no longer welcome.

And Jake will have to rely on his extensive training and capable tongue if he wants to survive Tehran in one piece.

• Language: English
• Publisher: B. Hesse Pflingger
• Release date: Aug 16, 2018
• ISBN: 9781386081371

Book preview

Malibu

If you tell the truth, you don’t have to remember anything. Mark Twain had that right. Though it didn’t apply to me in quite the same sense he’d meant it. Thanks to a few innocent little fibs I passed on in Tehran back in 1978, some unsettling memories still haunt me. Not that they shock me awake on lonely nights with the screaming-meemies, dripping sweat and round-house swinging at hallucinatory assailants—despite all my misadventures, I’ve been spared that particular horror, thank God. But some of the things that happened to me in Iran, I’d sure like to wipe off the slate, if that were possible. And had I only stuck to the truth…

…but come to think about it, sticking to the truth might have turned out even worse, you never know. Nobody wanted the truth in those days, except the man who hired me, and I never lied to him. I shudder to think where I’d be now (like, pushing up daisies?) had I not been fascinated by Señor Wences on the Ed Sullivan Show when I was little. What the hell, I survived it, even came out of it a millionaire, except that…well, we’ll get to that soon enough.

It took longer than I’d expected to clear Bangkok following my escape from the Khmer Rouge killing fields. Todd Sonarr, my erstwhile CIA boss who’d sent me into Cambodia on that half-assed fool’s errand, assured me I’d be heading back to Los Angeles after a few days. Typically, he neglected to specify which few days. The few days I went home after didn’t happen until several weeks had passed. I suppose I shouldn’t gripe. Having out of the blue been busted from captain down to E-7 platoon sergeant and then RIF’d from the Army, I had no special plans or program just then. In fact, between that, and the close calls I’d had with the Khmer Rouge, Emil Grotesqcu, and Clyde Driffter and his munchkin drug thugs, I felt pretty numb. Sonarr put me up in the Oriental Hotel on an open CIA tab, and the $5,000 he slipped me for pocket money kept me in beer and amusements and then some. I was still pissed off at Soh Soon, my Khmer Rouge lady-buddy, for trying to steal my diamonds the night the CIA shipped her out, and one thing Bangkok excelled at back then was temporary female companionship to distract a man’s mind from his woes. No, I had no grounds for griping, none at all.

I was pretty much on my own the last couple weeks of my stay in Bangkok. Standard Southeast Asian weather had settled in: soggy, steambath heat clamped down over the city with hardly a breath of breeze to stir it. I’d lost everything in my room at the Brinks when Saigon fell, so had to round up a whole new kit. When I wasn’t doing that, or wallowing in the hotel pool, or taking in the sights of exotic Bangkok, I was being pressured by Sonarr and his buddies to sign on full-time with the Company. Fraternity Rush Week was soft sell, by comparison. They’d swallowed Clyde Driffter’s Greatest Story Ever Told, hook, line and sinker, and convinced themselves that I was just the kind of guy the CIA needed for covert operations: tough, cunning, resourceful, indestructible, ruthless, able to charge in there and do the impossible. The perfect profile for a covert ops guy, from what I’d seen of them, but yours truly fell about 180 degrees shy of fitting it. One tour on the CIA payroll filled my plate and then some—those three ill-starred months would last me a lifetime (and damned near did). They wined and dined, wheedled, offered, threatened, cajoled, appealed and painted pictures of glory and heroism, but I held firm. I counted the wee hours, good-buddy drinking bouts as the worst of it—could those spooks swill down the hard stuff! I’d shake myself loose as soon as possible and hop a cab straightaway to Patpong, to unwind in a hot tub with a cute little naked Thai whore or two giving me a scrubdown and massage. Which never failed to put me in the proper frame of mind for the rest of the service. Count my blessings that the world hadn’t heard of AIDS in 1975.

Finally Sonarr and Company reluctantly accepted my resolute no for an answer, at least for the time being. He chopped my paperwork and booked me on a flight home to L.A. Suited me—you can have too much of a good thing even in Bangkok, and I’d reached that point. I positively craved returning to civilization. I’d called ahead to Mom, who extended a surprisingly warm invitation to stay as long at her place as I needed to get things settled. I’d not spent much time in L.A. since my clouded departure when I joined the Army in 1968. Apparently bygones were bygones after seven years, as far as she and Evanston, my lawyer-stepfather, were concerned, and I’d never held any hard feelings about that incident. A familiar place to crash while I felt my way back into civilian life sounded good to me.

Todd Sonarr and his aide, Kevin /Ken, saw me off at the airport on a heavy, humid June evening. Just promise me one thing, Jake, Sonarr urged as the loudspeaker announced my flight’s boarding call. Don’t shut the door on us entirely. Think about my offer. We need you, Jake, we really do. I’m fully confident that in time you’ll come around to realizing that the CIA is the outfit where you truly belong. He reeked of Glenfiddich, as usual.

Todd, count on it, the CIA will always command a prominent place in my thoughts, I said. And I meant it. Much as I might like to expunge completely from my brain cells that hare-brained ordeal they’d inflicted on me, I recognized it to be a vain hope.

Glad to hear you say that, Jake. The country needs more guys like you doing those tough jobs that really count. I’ll stay in touch. Anything else I can do for you?

Can’t think of a thing. Say, thanks for the time in Bangkok. After that mess in Cambodia, I needed the R and R.

If anyone ever deserved it, soldier… he said, his voice detouring around a lump in his throat. He shook my hand and clamped a paw on my shoulder. He was showing a surprising amount of emotion, certainly more than I was feeling just then—geez, tug my heart strings, Sonarr. I bade him a manly farewell, pumped Kevin’s hand a few times, slung my flightbag strap over my shoulder and fell in with the herd of tourists, businessmen and corrupt Thai officials trooping onto the plane.

I rounded the first corner into the boarding corridor and pulled away the mask. The prospect of putting half the globe between me and Indochina charged my face with such utter joy and relief that my fellow passengers gave me suspicious looks and a wide berth. Missing in Action for five years, finally going home to beautiful, sunny California! I blurted excitedly to the matronly half of an elderly American tourist couple who’d started edging away from my electrified grin. Well, if you check my Army records, that’s what you’ll find there. It allayed the concerns of all within earshot, though everyone seemed at a loss as to how to respond to it. Fine by me. I’d been looking forward to a quiet and undisturbed flight across the Pacific, and I wasn’t disappointed. Still striving to lure me into the Company by every means possible, Sonarr had sprung for First Class, and up there people respect your privacy.

To my surprise, Mom and Evanston met me at L.A. International. They spotted me as I came out the customs gate and intercepted me en route to the rent-a-car counters. Quite a change from my departure in 1968, when I couldn’t butt out of town fast enough to suit them. The early June southern California evening air felt glorious—high 60s and crisply dry. Heaven, after three months of sweating away in Southeast Asia. Evanston sped us up the Coast Highway in his new Mercedes 450SEL. He deftly wound through the familiar curves of Sunset Boulevard to the same Pacific Palisades spread where I’d spent my high school and truncated college years. It was a nice enough house, but a few weeks stay in the Oriental Hotel in Bangkok has a way of making any place short of the Taj Mahal seem ticky-tacky by comparison. I did my best to exchange pleasantries with them in the family room, but thirty hours in airplanes and transit lounges, plus nine time zones’ worth of jetlag, had zonked me beyond coherence. Mercifully Evanston soon noticed it, and he had Mom usher me into my old room, all neatly fitted out for my homecoming, even with my UCLA pennant on the wall. I crawled into the rack, flicked off the bedside lamp and was asleep before the light faded from the room.

I slept halfway around the clock. A wake-me-up shit, shower and shave restored a modicum of mental clarity. Coming downstairs for something to eat, I discovered the origins of my warm welcome. Mom was fluttering around the carved rosewood telephone table in the living room, jawing with one of her buddies. .

He flew in just last night! she exclaimed, broadcasting her half of the conversation around the corner, down the hallway and halfway up the stairs. "From overseas, that’s where! No, I can’t tell you exactly where he was…yes, I know where, but I can’t tell you…"

She dropped the pitch of her voice to the low, confidential tone social climbing matrons reserve for disclosures guaranteed to score major envy points off their so-called friends. "Edna, I really shouldn’t tell you. It might get me arrested by the FBI…yes, arrested! It really might, you know how they worry about national security…oh, I couldn’t—it’s top secret. Top secret! Well, if you promise not to tell a living soul…swear it, not a word to anyone…"

Then, with a stage whisper that rattled the row of crystal wine goblets on the cherrywood sideboard: "He’s a secret agent! He was on a secret mission in, oh, you’d never guess in a million years…no…no, not Russia either…well, I’ll tell you, but keep it strictly to yourself…promise, now! We don’t want to spend the rest of our lives in jail, do we? Cambodia…isn’t that something! Where’s Cambodia? Well, of course it’s overseas…right across from Asia, I think…"

Good old Mom. All those years I’d been away she’d stayed true to her priorities with saint-like devotion. Image, status and appearances remained her unwavering beacons. With James Bond flicks the big rage, what could boost her society stock higher than having a genuine Secret Agent in the family? After the disgrace I’d heaped on her in 1968, my Ranger tab hadn’t fazed her, likewise my Distinguished Service Cross (she thought it had something to do with driving ambulances and bandaging the wounded). Getting my officer’s bars moved me ahead not one inch in her eyes. But a genuine Secret Agent! Now, that was negotiable. Doctors, lawyers, hedge fund managers, government officials—how she must have envied her canasta buddies whose broods sported those trophies (nobody swapped stories about their family beach bums, dropouts, druggies, jailbirds and retards, of course). But had any of them borne an actual Secret Agent, who went on actual Secret Missions? Not…too…likely.

Neither had she, of course, but why spoil her fun? What puzzled me was, where did she get that idea? My Top Secret Cambodian fiasco had turned out to be about as secret as the center divider on the Hollywood Freeway. But how did the leak reach Mom’s eager ears?

I found out that very evening. Evanston and I had never gotten along well—stepfathers and stepsons often don’t. Dad was a newspaper man, and Evanston was some kind of lawyer. Those two temperaments get along about as well as oil and water, and I tended in Dad’s direction. So Evanston and I co-existed under a mutually wary truce after Mom married him. The stupid stunt that got me thrown out of UCLA and into the Army had, I thought, foreclosed me from his good graces forever.

However, that first evening back home he took me into his study, along with a bottle of Wild Turkey and a couple glasses. Sitting me down in one of the cordovan leather arm chairs, he poured us drinks and hauled its mate over into man-talk range. Evanston had breached 50 a few years ago, and his narrow, well-tanned face sported more laugh-lines and sag than I remembered. The start of a bald spot on the back of his head showed through his kinky-waved, greying hair. He’d played basketball in college, back when 6’ 2" qualified a man as tall enough. I doubt that he’d gained fifteen pounds since then, and he still had an athlete’s moves. After swapping notes on the weather and the prospects of the Dodgers that season (doing very well—leading the Western Division of the National League with a .600 record), he veered toward Serious Stuff.

So, do you have any plans for your future? he asked.

Nothing definite yet. I’d been counting on an Army career, but the Reduction in Force scotched that and left me on the beach. I figured to take a little time and see what else I might do. I’d like to stay on the West Coast; but I don’t know what kind of civilian job combat experience and military intelligence training would qualify me for. Maybe there’d be something in one of the defense companies.

Sometimes it takes a man a while to find himself, after he’s seen hard service, he allowed, with a tone that signaled he knew whereof he spoke. Adjustments back to civilian life aren’t always smooth. How are you fixed financially? I mean, do you have enough to tide you over? If you’re short, I’d be glad to help get you over the hump.

Definitely not the same Evanston I’d always known. He had plenty of money, and the house, cars and club memberships proved he didn’t hesitate to spend it…but offer to give it to me? Something must have happened, to bring about such a radical change. Besides, I didn’t need money. Did he make the offer knowing that? That would be more like Evanston. Actually, I came away from Cambodia with a pretty decent stake, I said. He seemed genuinely cordial, and I don’t think it was just because the Wild Turkey had mellowed my mood. What the hell, he was family, sort of—take a chance. That’s a very kind offer, but I don’t need money. What you could give me, and I’d really appreciate it, is a little advice. The fact is, I’ve got more cash than I know what to do with. Do you know anything about investments?

A little. How much money are we talking about? For starters, I told him about the brick of $100 bills Sarge had gotten for my investment diamonds. He sat up straighter in his chair.

Where did you get diamonds worth that kind of money? he asked. It was not any kind of accusation, nor did he seem especially surprised, just curious.

I can’t tell you all the details, but I helped out a Chinese trader in Cambodia, and that was how he repaid me.

In Cambodia? Interesting. What’s his name?

Actually, he’s from Hong Kong. I only know him as Mr. Poon.

Evanston’s eyes narrowed to laser-beams and creases cleaved his forehead. Did you say ‘Mr. Poon from Hong Kong’?

That’s what he told me. You act like you’ve heard of him. There must be a thousand traders in Hong Kong named Poon.

"That may be, but there’s only one Mr. Poon of Hong Kong. When he walks down the street in Wanchai, the triads cross over to the other side! He’s the only one who’d be doing that level of business in Cambodia these days. Jake, how could you get tangled up with that barracuda?"

Gee, I don’t know. He seemed like a nice enough guy to me. What’s the problem?

Evanston eased back in his chair and took generous gulp from his glass. I guess I’ve never told you much about what I do. I’m a specialist in international law. What that means is, I advise people from overseas—businessmen, politicians and so forth—on legal matters here in the States. The American legal system is a puzzle to foreigners. Hell, it’s a puzzle to Americans too, that’s why we have so many lawyers. I’m pretty good at it, if I do say so, and the people I advise are happy to pay proud fees. They do big business here, you see, and as healthy as my fees are, they’re just drops in some rather vast buckets. One of my clients had a go-around with Poon and came out a bit bruised, that’s all. I’d be on Poon’s side if he hired me, but the other guy did. It’s neither here nor there. I was just surprised you knew him, that’s all. Damn small world we live in, he reflected and took another sip. Is that all the money you brought back?

The way he said it made me think he knew it wasn’t. Actually, I needed some legal advice about that check Sonarr gave me. No. Also, my, er, last employer gave me a government check by way of, um, severance pay. However, there’s a little mistake on the check. Somebody slipped an extra zero in, in such a way that the amount is ten times what it ought to be. I’ve been wondering what to do about it. I mean, will the Feds come after me if I cash it?

Evanston shifted into confidential mode and leaned forward toward me. "My line of work involves a lot of, shall we say, gray areas, Jake. It helps to have connections in all kinds of places, Jake. All kinds of places. You can’t operate without them. Someday I’ll tell you what I did during the War—World War Two, I mean—but not right now. Suffice it to say that I’ve friends in places that would surprise you. Recently one of those friends passed some interesting intelligence to me, an item about you. Your last assignment was with the CIA, wasn’t it?"

I’m not at liberty to discuss it, but let’s say that if it had been, it would have been a temporary assignment, only for a couple of months. Officially I was Army up until I got RIF’d a couple weeks ago.

Well, however it happened, according to my source, you’ve got a jockstrap award sitting in the vault at CIA headquarters in Langley.

Your source is out of his gourd. I never competed for the CIA in any sports.

Evanston smiled. The CIA gives jockstrap awards for deep cover covert operations. It means the man was decorated for something so Top Secret that it can’t ever be made public. So the Agency joke is that the only place you can wear the medal is on your jockstrap.

Brother! The joke had gone too far. When the CIA covers up a disaster as horrendous as my Phnom Penh gig, they really go whole hog. Evanston continued, Now, I have no idea what it was all about, nor do I want to know. I have no business knowing, nor does anyone else. But I do know something about how certain Federal agencies operate, and if one of them issued you a check, you can rest assured there’ll be no trouble about it, no matter how big it is. He went on to suggest that he open an account for me with his personal banker and we’d find some way to put my boodle to profitable use. He also broached the topic of where I’d be living once I settled in. It was all quite matter-of-fact and man-to-man, with no undertones of putting a deadline on the length of my stay. America was in a deep recession, he told me, and real estate was cheap. I told him I’d enjoy living down by the beach, maybe Malibu. He thought I could probably pick up a decent beachfront property and still have a lot left over.

Evanston, we two never got along very well before, I remarked. I thought you were ready to kill me a few years back. I seem more welcome now than I used to be. Did something change?

Phoebe and I were pretty damned disgusted when you got expelled from UCLA for streaking Dana Wehrli’s engagement shower, that’s true, he mused. Well, the follies of youth. It takes a while to find out what kind of man a boy will turn out to be. From where I sit now, it appears that was no more than a misguided expression of the same vigorous spirit that made you a top-notch Ranger. Your DSC brought me around to seeing it in that perspective, but your mother has certain priorities that demand heavy symbolic content. Hell, let’s put it plainly. She’s a social climbing snob who must constantly make the right impression on a pretty empty-headed crowd, none of whom would know a LRRP from her own left tit. So she took longer to come around. When I hinted that you’d been a secret agent, that got her over the hurdle. She’s been flying ever since. She loves you, in her own way—but sometimes we have to help her along.

"Isn’t a little chancy, giving Mom ideas about secret missions? I heard her blabbing about it over the phone this morning. I must be a household word all the way