Al Steiner
Intemperance #5
Circles Collide
Chapter 1: Our First Stop
Bogota, Colombia
April 15, 1996
It was Tax Day in the United States of America and Jake Kingsley had left the country in the company of Jill Yamashito, his accountant, but not for reasons of evasion or exile. His taxes were already filed and paid in full, his return accepted by both the state of California and the US Internal Revenue Service, and, as far as the two of them knew, they were still in a state of grace with their monetary obligations. Instead, they were in South America for another reason; a reason that Jake was extremely enthusiastic about but that Jill, who was much more practical and niggardly with Jake’s money than Jake could ever hope to be, was quite dreading. It was time to take a look at the Avanti-180 aircraft that a gentleman named Eduardo Gomez wanted to sell.
Traveling with them was a man by the name of Travis Young. He was forty-three years old and was a supervising aircraft mechanic at the Fly Safe Aircraft Maintenance and Repair facility located at the Rocky Mountain Metropolitan Airport in Broomfield, Colorado, just outside of Denver. Fly Safe was one of only two facilities in the United States authorized by Piaggio Aerospace, the Italian manufacturer that produced Avanti aircraft, to perform B, C, or D level maintenance checks or major repairs on their products. Greenville, South Carolina, home of the North American Piaggio facility, was the other. Travis had been recruited for this mission with the assistance of Austin Grover, the pilot who had first introduced Jake to the Avanti (and had even let him take the controls for a bit). Austin had given Jake Travis’s phone number. Jake called him up and offered him a little all-inclusive paid vacation to Colombia if he would come along and examine the maintenance records of the Avanti-180 Jake was considering purchasing (as well as the actual aircraft itself). He had even offered to include Travis’s wife in the deal if she wished to come.
Travis’ wife did not wish to come, and Travis himself had been more than a little reluctant to travel to a city that was regularly reported as having one of the highest murder rates per capita in the world and was located in a country that was currently immersed in a decades-long civil war with radical communist guerrilla forces.
“We’re not going to be anywhere near any of that shit,” Jake assured him. “We’ll be in a five-star luxury hotel in the best district of the city. You’ll have your own suite, room service, all meals and drinks paid for by me. We’re not going to go trekking around in the mountains or anything like that. The only place you’ll have to go besides the hotel is this muni airport north of the city where the plane is kept.”
“I don’t know,” Travis replied, still clearly uncomfortable.
“I’ll give you five grand for the job,” Jake offered.
“Five grand? You mean ... five thousand dollars?”
“That’s right,” Jake said. “Cash money. You don’t even have to tell the IRS about it if you don’t want to. Call it a gratuity for a job well done.”
“That is a lot of money,” Travis had to admit, “but still...”
“Seventy-five hundred,” Jake said.
That did the trick. “All right,” Travis said. “I’m in.”
“Good man,” Jake told him. “Do you have your passport?”
“Uh ... no,” Travis said. “Will I need one?”
And so, after going through an expedited passport approval process paid for by Jake, Travis had been flown to Dallas-Fort Worth Airport (first-class) and put up in the airport hotel (one of the luxury suites) where Jake and Jill were already waiting for him. It was here that Jake had met the man in person for the first time. He was a friendly enough guy, though he did not seem to possess much of a sense of humor, and he seemed to be a bit of a worry-wart. He was short and stocky, balding, and had a distinct Midwest accent. He told Jake at dinner that night that he spent twelve years in the United States Navy and had served on two separate aircraft carriers (as well as several shore bases) as an aircraft mechanic, working primarily on F-18 Hornets. He, like Celia’s pilot Suzie, had been offered a healthy discharge bonus during the draw-down of forces following the 1991 Gulf War. These days, he was one of only thirty mechanics in the entirety of North America certified to work on Piaggio aircraft above the level of basic maintenance tasks.
The next morning, the three of them flew direct from DFW to El Dorado International in Bogota, Colombia aboard an American Airlines A-320—a five-and-a-half-hour flight. After clearing customs, where Travis got his very first stamp on his new passport and Jill and Jake got their very first South American stamps, they endured a terrifying thirty-minute taxi ride through the crowded, congested city streets of the capital city to the Hotel Charleston, a historic luxury lodging located on the east side of the city, nestled up against the towering Andes mountain peaks that rose another nine thousand feet into the sky.
The trio spent most of that day acclimating themselves to the high elevation of Bogota. The city sat an average of 8800 feet above sea level on a high plateau of the Andes and its air was very thin by Los Angeles, or even Denver standards. Jill made the adjustment by staying in her bed as much as possible and moving as little as she could. Travis tried this for a bit but then elected to go with Jake’s method: sitting in the bar and drinking while munching on local appetizers. It may not have been a method endorsed by the medical community for dealing with such a situation, but it did take their minds off their hypoxia.
And now, at ten o’clock in the morning of US Tax Day, it was time for them to head to Guaymaral Airport to take a look at the plane. Not wanting to put himself or his companions through the terror of another taxi ride, Jake had arranged with the concierge of the hotel to have a limousine pick them up for the forty-five-minute drive.
“How’s the breathing today?” Jake asked Jill as they settled into the back seat of the white stretch limousine in the valet area.
“It’s better,” she said with a shrug. “The headache is gone, and I only feel winded when I go up a staircase or a hill.”
“Then don’t do those things,” Jake suggested.
She gave him a sour look. “Why didn’t I think of that?”
Jake turned to the mechanic, who was dressed in a pair of faded jeans and a blue button-up shirt. “How about you, Travis?” he asked. “Did you sleep okay?”
“Passed out like a light,” he said. “And I still have quite a headache, though I’m pretty sure it’s not the altitude that’s causing it, but all that guaro we had at the bar.”
“Guaro?” Jill asked.
“It’s a very popular local drink, apparently,” Jake said. “And very economical, you’ll be happy to hear. Only five thousand pesos apiece, plus tip, of course. That’s cheaper than buying an American beer or a shot of American whiskey.”
“They did go down pretty smooth,” Travis said.
“That they did,” Jake agreed. “I wonder if I can get some of that guaro shit in the states?”
“If you can, it will undoubtedly be at an extremely inflated cost,” Jill told him.
“I don’t care about that,” Jake said, telling her nothing she did not know. “Think of how cool it would be to have a party and serve some genuine South American hooch as part of the theme.”
“It would go well on taco night,” Travis suggested.
“Hell to the yeah!” Jake said, smiling. “I’ll get the Nerdlys and their internet surfing skills working on this thing as soon as I get home.”
Jill simply shook her head and opened a bottle of water to help sooth her dry throat. You just couldn’t tell Jake anything.
The limo pulled out of the hotel valet area and onto the congested boulevard. The driver, who had introduced himself as Jeronimo, spoke only limited English and Jake spoke even less Spanish, but they had managed to achieve communication on a high enough level to get across their destination and to agree on a price for the trip, the waiting time, and the return trip (ninety thousand pesos, the equivalent of about twenty-five dollars American, which even Jill had to agree was a very reasonable price). He closed the partition as soon as they started out and turned on a local talk radio station, playing it loud enough that the sound filtered through into the back. He drove aggressively, with many rapid starts, stops, changes of lanes, but nowhere near as wild as the taxi driver from the airport.