Top Gun

by T. E. Cruise

  “Well, I’m not laughing,” Don said. “He wants to ruin this company, you know?”

  “I know he had this love-hate thing going with my father for over forty years. Ever since they disbanded their partnership…”

  “He couldn’t bring GAT to its knees while your father was alive,” Don muttered. “So he’s trying again now.”

  Steve said, “Listen, Don. I want to work with you on this. Tim Campbell is one tough son of a bitch. You’re going to need somebody flying on your wing—watching your back— if you intend to take him on.”

  “I could use the help.” Don nodded. “We’re way out on a limb on this one. The wind is blowing and the bough is starting to break.”

  Steve nodded grimly. “And old ‘Uncle Tim’ is the tree surgeon.”

  CHAPTER 5

  (One)

  Agatha Holding Company

  BADCO Towers

  Los Angeles, California

  4 March, 1974

  Tim Campbell’s huge corner office was on the fiftieth floor, with sky-blue carpeting and walls of translucent frosted glass framing dramatic, panoramic views of downtown L.A. There were no file cabinets or bookcases in this office, and minimal furniture: just a set of sleek chrome-and-leather armchairs arranged in front of Campbell’s long desk with its gracefully carved redwood pedestal and thick glass top. There were no folders or papers on the desk. Not even a pen. Just photographs of Campbell’s wife, his children and grandchildren, and a large, sophisticated telephone console. The telephone was Campbell’s weapon of choice—with a phone he could move mountains—but the phone was it. Campbell had other offices scattered around the country and the world, and they were all just as Spartan. At one point in his life Campbell had coveted things, the pricier the better, but not anymore. Anyway, Campbell’s spiritual adviser had stressed the importance of lack of clutter as well as transcendental meditation if Campbell wanted to lower his blood pressure without resorting to medication.

  Campbell didn’t believe in pill popping, and he didn’t believe in doctors. He believed in mind over matter. Thought into action. “Will to power,” as that kraut Nietzsche put it. Campbell thought about Nietzsche a lot, just like he thought a lot about that other kraut son of a bitch who’d so influenced his life: Herman Gold.

  Campbell was seated behind his desk in his big leather swivel chair. He was wearing a green silk turtleneck and a tan gabardine suit. He should have been meditating on his mantra, but instead he contemplated an imminent, sublime victory. Thanks to Campbell, Gold Aviation and Transport was about to join its founder in the hereafter, or at the very least, became a crippled shadow of its former self.

  Campbell smiled in anticipation of this crowning achievement in a life that had been dedicated to the art of coming from behind in order to even the score….

  Campbell was born in Providence, Rhode Island, the youngest of seven children. His father spent his days slaving away in a textile mill, and his nights getting drunk, coming home to rage and swear and beat his wife, while the children watched, cowering. It was during those nightmarish outbursts of domestic violence that young Tim Campbell, huddled in the corner of that shabby living room, learned what it was to be powerless. It was then that he swore that someday he would be the hammer, not the nail.

  He ran away when he was twelve, riding the rails to Boston, where he joined a gang of older boys who found his big, dark eyes and winning smile useful in panhandling. The gang took care of him, taught him how to survive on the streets, to be a pickpocket and con artist, to take what he wanted through stealth and guile.

  Once Campbell felt he’d learned all that the older boys could teach him, he ran away from them. He preferred being a loner. He rode the rails for a while, making the freight boxcars his home. He was little and fast, and knew how to hide when it suited his purposes, so he managed to stay one step ahead of the railroad-yard bulls for over a year, until the odds finally caught up with him in Tulsa, Oklahoma. The railroad cops turned him over to the Tulsa police, who didn’t know what to do with him since Campbell refused to tell them where he was from: There was no way he was going back to that hellhole in Providence. In 1913, the Tulsa authorities put him in a nearby work farm run by the Protestant Church.

  The work farm turned out to be Campbell’s first lucky break. He could have done without the preaching, but they gave him a warm bed, clothes, three square meals a day— and an education. Campbell came to love learning, especially arithmetic. By the time he was fifteen, he’d earned his high-school diploma. He asked the supervisors if there wasn’t some work he could do on the farm that would let him use his book learning as opposed to working in the fields, which he loathed. They let him teach reading and numbers to the youngest boys, who called him “Mister” and “Sir.” Tim Campbell reveled in the status and respect that his cleverness won. He knew that he was on the right track, that knowledge was the way to power, to paraphrase Francis Bacon.

  When he turned sixteen, the work farm arranged a job for him as an office boy at the Western Union office in Tulsa. He worked there for a year, taking night-school courses in accounting and hearing a lot about California as the new land of opportunity. When a slot opened up in the Los Angeles Western Union office, Campbell applied for it, and was transferred to L.A. Within a month of the move, Tim Campbell left Western Union, landing a job as a teller at Pacific Coast Bank.

  He resumed his night-school education, intent upon earning a college degree in accounting. On his eighteenth birthday, after finishing his day at the bank, Campbell decided to treat himself to a steak dinner before accounting class. He went into a café near the school and sat at the counter, where he was served by a slim, dark-haired waitress with big blue eyes and a shy smile. It was a slow night, and she tarried to chat with him while he ate. Her name was Agatha Wilcox, and within a few years time she was to become his wife….

  Campbell gazed at the photograph of his wife on his desk taken on their fiftieth wedding anniversary. Aggie had passed away two years ago.

  When the United States entered World War I, Campbell was drafted but turned down as physically unfit due to a heart murmur. When Campbell was twenty, after three years at the bank, he was promoted to head teller. The increase in salary meant he and Agatha could be married, and soon they were. A little while later, Aggie became pregnant. That was a dark time for Campbell. He was ecstatic over the prospects of having a family, but money was tight. He was resigned to quitting night school and moonlighting at a second job in order to make ends meet, but Aggie wouldn’t hear of it, so the family suffered through some lean years while Campbell pressed on, finally earning his bachelor’s degree in accounting in 1923. That same year, the bank moved him out of his teller’s cage, promoting him to junior loan officer. The new desk job was gratifying, but money was still as tight as ever, especially when the Campbells had their second child.

  Time passed as Campbell cooled his heels at his desk at the Western Pacific bank headquarters in downtown L.A. Then one morning while Campbell was thinking about how lousy it was to always be a dollar short, and that it would be another three years at best before he could even hope that he might be promoted to senior loan officer, into the bank walked Herman Gold. Campbell recognized Gold immediately from his photo, which regularly appeared in the newspapers. Gold had curly red hair and a bushy mustache. He was tall and broad-shouldered, and looked on top of the world in his fancy suit and snappy fedora. Back then, Herman Gold was barely thirty years old, but he was already a somebody in L.A., thanks to his air-transport business that moved people, mail, and freight up and down the West Coast.

  Knowledge is power. Junior loan officers had access to the bank’s files, so Campbell made it a practice to stick around after closing in order to study up on Western Pacific’s most important clientele—the real VIPs—just in case the information should ever come in handy. From having read Herman Gold’s file, Campbell knew that Gold was here at the bank to see the bigwigs about getting some extensions on his consider
able loans. Campbell also knew that Gold was going to be turned down, because Gold Aviation was in tough financial straits. This was no surprise to Campbell. He had seen Herman Gold’s type before. Gold’s first and only love was airplanes. He was an innovator, a creative entrepreneur. Dreary day-to-day details were the bane of Herman Gold’s existence and always would be. Campbell was willing to wager that Herman Gold had never even balanced his personal checkbook, never mind his company’s ledgers.

  The bank did turn down Gold’s request, and that night Campbell let Herman Gold stew in his own juices a while before telephoning him at the Gold residence, using the unlisted number that he got out of Gold’s file. Campbell did some fast talking and managed to win himself a meeting with Herman Gold for the next day, in order to make his real pitch….

  “You know about airplanes, but you must put your company on a more businesslike footing,” Campbell told Herman Gold on that sunny Tuesday morning in August 1925. They met in Gold’s rough-hewn office, on the top floor of the Santa Monica waterfront warehouse that in those days housed the fledging company. “You and your staff have the ideas, but ideas need organization to turn them into reality,” Campbell argued. “I’m suggesting that I come to work for you as CEO of your company in order to supply that organization. I can run the air-transport side of the business for you. I can straighten out your books, control your expenditures, and keep track of your billing. I can supply you the firm foundation Gold Aviation needs to reach the heavens on the wings of your revolutionary airplane designs.”

  Herman Gold laughed appreciatively at that last line, as Campbell had thought he would the night before when Campbell had been endlessly rehearsing this spiel.

  “The first thing we do is set up a holding company for the airplane-manufacturing division and the air-transport line,” Campbell continued. “We could call it Gold Aviation and Transport.”

  Herman laughed a second time. “GAT, huh?”

  “GAT.” Campbell nodded.

  And the rest, as they say, was history….

  The first thing Campbell did after coming to work at Gold Aviation was to get the firm some much-needed interim relief from its creditors. Next, Campbell convinced Herman to take GAT public. Herman retained a 35-percent controlling interest and Campbell used his bank contacts to borrow the money to buy 3 percent. The remaining shares were offered to the general public, bringing in a little over a hundred thousand dollars.

  A hundred grand, Campbell now thought, laughing to himself, looking around his office. A hundred grand was chicken feed these days. It was less than half a year’s rent for the office space here at Agatha Holding, but back in 1927 it had seemed like all the money in the world….

  And back in those days, that hundred grand had been enough to get built Herman Gold’s first airplane design, the G-1 Yellowjacket mail plane. The United States Post Office and the private air-transport industry ended up buying about a zillion G-1s, and that cash flow funded the other airplane designs and allowed the company to buy the original patch of Burbank desert on which it now stood.

  Thanks to Tim Campbell, the rejuvenated Gold Aviation and Transport was flying high, and by then Campbell and Herman Gold had become solid friends. It turned out that Campbell’s and Herman’s origins were very similar. Herman Gold had been born Hermann Goldstein in Germany. An orphaned Jew, Herman had also endured a hard childhood on the streets of Berlin. During the First World War, Herman served as a fighter pilot, flying with the Red Baron and becoming an ace. After the war, Herman immigrated to America, where he’d worked as a truck mechanic and a barnstorming pilot before a dangerous stint flying booze from Mexico to California during Prohibition earned him the startup capital to establish Gold Aviation.

  Yeah, we were a lot alike, Campbell now brooded. Too much alike…

  When the Depression hit, GAT, like most of the other big aviation concerns, emerged relatively unscathed. Once things began to return to normal, Campbell got Herman Gold’s blessing to again restructure GAT in order to raise operating capital. Campbell split the firm into two companies with separate stock offerings. GAT remained the airplane design and manufacturing concern, while the newly severed Gold Transport changed its name to Skyworld Airline. Her man Gold kept a controlling interest in both companies, but Campbell sold all of his GAT holdings in order to buy enough Skyworld stock to be able to wrangle himself the job of president of the new airline. It was a momentous decision on Campbell’s part. For years, Campbell and Herman Gold had fulfilled their dreams of being wealthy, but now, for the first time, Campbell felt that he had become Herman’s equal in the business. In his own mind, Campbell thought he had moved from being Herman’s employee to becoming his partner….

  That was when the trouble started.

  On Campbell’s desk, the telephone console beeped. Campbell pressed the talk button. “Yes?”

  “Mr. Layten to see you,” the secretary announced.

  “Send him in.”

  The door opened and in came Turner Layten, Campbell’s personal assistant at Agatha Holding. Layten was in his early fifties. He was pear-shaped, with rounded shoulders, baby-smooth jowls, small gray eyes, and black hair seeded with gray, waxed and parted on the side. He was dressed in a gray suit, white shirt, and red tie.

  Still dressing like a government bureaucrat, Campbell thought as he watched Layten standing in front of his desk. Got to get this boy to loosen up, put a little flash in his wardrobe….

  “Jack Rosa just phoned to say he still hasn’t heard from Don Harrison concerning the Pont,” Layten began.

  “That’s good.” Campbell gestured to his assistant to take a scat.

  Layten looked perplexed as he sat down. “Sir, Mr. Rosa seemed extremely concerned that his call to Don Harrison some weeks ago may well serve to goad GAT into withdrawing its Pont jetliner from the market.”

  “That’s bullshit,” Campbell declared. “GAT ain’t never withdrawn from nothing.” Campbell enjoyed Layten’s involuntary grimace at his use of a double negative. It was part of the fun of being as rich as Midas that you could be as crude as you wanted, scraping your nails along the blackboard of life, and folks had to take it. “GAT ain’t never backed down when Herman Gold was running it,” Campbell reiterated. “Don Harrison ain’t about to start now.”

  “Yes, sir.” Layten nodded. “But Jack Rosa fears that if GAT should withdraw, the reduced competition would automatically drive up the price of the remaining aviation companies’ jetliner offerings.”

  “Jack Rosa ought to know better than to fret like an old lady,” Campbell snorted. “He knows I’ve guaranteed that TransWest will come out of this smelling like a rose no matter what happens in the marketplace in exchange for his having made that call to GAT.” Campbell frowned. “But if I’d known old Jack was going to be such a lily-liver, I would’ve had some other airline exec phone Harrison at GAT to give him the advance word about Agatha Holding.”

  “Sir. why did you want Don Harrison to know what we were up to?” Layten asked, looking puzzled.

  Campbell laughed. “So Harrison would know who it is about to do him in! I want that boy to see GAT tied to the railroad track, to see that locomotive bearing down with me at the throttle, and for him to know there isn’t a damned thing he can do about it.”

  Layten asked, “But by giving advance warning of what we intend to do, haven’t we given Don Harrison time to find a way out of the predicament we’ve put him in?”

  “How?” Campbell demanded impatiently. “How’s he gonna do that, son, you tell me?” Campbell shook his head. “I swear. Turner, you were in the CIA too long. All that slinking around on your belly you had to do, it’s no wonder your balls got rubbed clean off.”

  Turner Layten had turned bright red. He cleared his throat, clearly anxious to change the subject. “You’ve never told me, sir, why do you hate Herman Gold so much?”

  Campbell was amused. “Why do you hate Steve Gold?” he asked rhetorically.

  (Two)


  “Why do you hate Steve Gold?” Mr. Campbell asked.

  Turner Layten barely noticed that the man behind the desk was grinning like a wolf as Layten surrendered himself to his ever-constant, deep, and abiding hatred of Steven Gold….

  Layten and Gold met back in 1957, and disliked each other from the first. In those days, Steve Gold was an Air Force lieutenant colonel, a cocky maverick who thought he could have things all his own way. Layten was just as young, bright, and ambitious, but he didn’t subscribe to the notion that the way to get noticed was by having a smart mouth and a swagger. Turner Layten was proud to be a team player.

  In those days, Layten was assistant to Jack Horton, an associate deputy director at the CIA. Back then, the smart money had it that Horton was being groomed to one day assume the Agency’s directorship, and Horton might well have made it, taking Layten along with him to the very top, if it hadn’t been for Steve Gold’s meddling in the aftermath of the Mayfly MR-1 spy plane disaster.

  The MR-1 had been Jack Horton’s project from its inception. It was Horton who convinced Herman Gold at GAT to design and build the spy-plane fleet for the CIA. When it became evident that a war-hero-type Air Force fly-boy was going to be needed to front the spy-plane pilot-recruitment program, Herman Gold suggested to Horton that his son, Steve, be given the job. The Air Force was agreeable, so Jack Horton had the CIA borrow Steve, who plunged wholeheartedly into his new assignment.

  In retrospect, Layten had to admit that Steve Gold did an exemplary job of convincing top-drawer, young Air Force pilots to volunteer to fly the MR-1 over the Soviet Union. Steve Gold also did a fine job of motivating those men during their training. The trouble arose once the MR-1 spy planes began making their flights. The goddamned Boy Scout in Lieutenant Colonel Gold wouldn’t let the man simply walk away from a job well done. Steve Gold couldn’t leave well enough alone; he had to feel responsible for the men he’d recruited.

  In 1960, an MR-1 spy plane was shot down over Russia, its pilot captured alive by the Reds. There was a huge international diplomatic stink over the matter. The United States’ official line was that the MR-1 was nothing but a meteorological research plane, but the Reds put the pilot on trial for espionage, found him guilty, and sentenced him to ten years. The CIA’s position on the matter was that the pilot knew the risks when he’d signed on, that he’d been equipped with devices to take his own life to avoid being captured alive, and that if he’d chosen not to use them that was his business.