Conquerors of the Sky

by Thomas Fleming

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  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Notice

  Epigraph

  BOOK ONE

  CHIEF EXECUTIVE OFFICER

  NIGHT FLIGHT

  THE MEDICINE MAN

  EXILE

  BOOK TWO

  BROTHERLY LOVE

  THE FUTURE IN THE SKY

  HISTORY’S LASH

  THE GIRL FROM THE GLORIOUS WEST

  WAR HERO

  THE LAST PATROL

  LOVE IN A COLD CLIMATE

  DOWN BY THE RIVERSIDE

  REALIST IN LOVE

  LOOP THE LOOP

  SON AND LOVER

  ONCE IN GOLCONDA

  GOOD-BYE TO EVERYTHING

  GREED: THE SECOND ACT

  LOVE AMONG THE ORANGES

  REVELATIONS

  BOOK THREE

  MEN AND BOYS

  THE GREAT GAME

  WHEN DREAMS COME TRUE

  THE GREAT GAME II

  AT WAR IN EDEN

  BOOK FOUR

  THE YANK AND THE SKYLARK

  RAINBOW EXPRESS

  AMERICAN KAMIKAZES

  MAN OF SUBSTANCE

  LOVE AMONG THE RUINS

  POWER PLAYS

  MOONLIGHT

  BOOK FIVE

  WELCOME TO CALIFORNIA

  HOME IS THE HERO

  DOES OOO WUVUMS WIDDLE ME?

  PEACETIME BLUES

  MYSTERY BUSINESS

  MOTHER KNOWS BEST

  HONEYCOMB

  THE DAWN OF FLIGHT

  SOARING LESSON

  FREEDOM FLIGHT

  HOME TO ROOST

  VORTEX

  LAYING ON OF HANDS

  TRIO IN BLUE

  WARRIOR

  BOOK SIX

  SCORPION

  WENN DAS HERZ AUCH BRICHT

  QUEEN OF THE NIGHT

  WHAT DO WOMEN REALLY WANT?

  SAVING THE QUEEN

  DYNAMIC COUPLING

  GOING SUPER

  LIMA BLUES

  MORALITY PLAYS

  BOOK SEVEN

  WAR GAMES

  WOMAN TALK

  SCHEHERAZADE AT WORK

  CAPITOL PUNISHMENT

  SERPENTS IN THE SKY

  BILE

  HEART OF DARKNESS

  DEATH IN THE DESERT

  MINDS AND HEARTS

  BOOK EIGHT

  HATRED AT WORK

  TICKET TO PARADISE

  HOUSE ON FIRE

  ASSASSIN TIME

  THE LADY OF DEATH

  AN EMPTY SKY

  BOOK NINE

  LIGHTS! ACTION! CAMERA!

  A FRIEND IN NEED

  ECHO CHAMBER

  THE MEANING OF MEANING

  AMORALITY PLAY

  FALL OF A CONQUEROR

  BOOK TEN

  MESSAGES

  EXILE’S RETURN

  QUESTING

  IS THERE LIFE AFTER AEROSPACE?

  DESTINIES

  BEYOND THE RAINBOW

  By Thomas Fleming from Tom Doherty Associates

  Copyright Page

  To Ted Chichak, colleague and friend

  MY PLANE WAS MY WORLD TO ME.

  —Charles Lindbergh

  BOOK ONE

  CHIEF EXECUTIVE OFFICER

  The dark brown whiskey splashed sullenly over the ice in the bottom of Cliff Morris’s glass. He raised the cold rim to his parched lips. The sharp musty odor of the single-malt Scotch flung him back, back in time like a plane trapped in jet stream winds, an airborne Flying Dutchman spiraling down out of tomorrow into yesterday. So many memories thickened, clotted in his big throbbing body, coalescing with that old companion, fear, for a moment he thought of death as simplicity, a cleansing.

  No. He let the living liquid slide down his hollow throat to burn beneath his breastbone. It was a foul taste, harsh, almost brackish, like water sucked from a crankcase. Was that why he liked it? Was this whiskey borne out of memory and misery telling him something about himself? Life still beat stubbornly in his middle-aged body, mocking the withered crybaby who clawed at the soft inner flesh of his belly like a pilot in a doomed plane. Maybe his bravery was not a fake.

  Why? shrilled the crybaby. Why? Give me one reason why you deserve anything but oblivion? Cliff drowned the wail in another gulp of Scotch. The ice slid against his teeth. He sucked a cube into his mouth and crunched it slowly, bitterly, on the right side of his John Wayne jaw.

  Clunk went the glass on the teak desk. Cliff loosened his 150-dollar Gucci tie and struggled for altitude: a deep relaxing breath. He was sitting in the tenth-floor boardroom of the Buchanan Aircraft Corporation. The floor-to-ceiling windows looked out on Los Angeles International Airport, known to the air traveling world as LAX. The runways were dark and silent; it was close to midnight. Beyond the airport tens of thousands of car headlights streamed along the city’s freeways and boulevards. Millions of house windows glowed against the night all the way to the guardian mountains. Cliff liked to contemplate Los Angeles. He liked everything about it—its immensity, its variety, its incomprehensibility.

  Cliff Morris had helped create this opulent planetary metropolis with its endless eccentric moons of towns and subcities and villages sprawling from the sea to the desert. It was no longer the city of his birth, a laughingstock full of loony cults and glitzy movie moguls and their sycophants and stars, with endless miles of orange groves on its borders. He and his fellow plane makers had made it a megacity, a megaregion that rivaled Pittsburgh and Chicago as an industrial giant, New York as a financial powerhouse.

  For thirteen years Cliff had enjoyed being one of the leaders of this phenomenal place. Heads turned, smiles of recognition blossomed when he entered the Polo Lounge or the California Club. From surf-swept Malibu to sunbaked Palm Springs, from the jutting headlands of Palos Verdes to the teetering mansions of Holmby Hills, Cliff Morris was recognized, flattered, favored, sought.

  Now there was an undercurrent of mockery, disdain, even contempt in that recognition. If a career can be imagined as a plane and the man inside the career as the pilot, Cliff’s aircraft had recently taken a terrific beating in the all-or-nothing war American executives fought in their heads and hearts and boardrooms. He was struggling to stay in the air in spite of shredded ailerons and ravaged tail surfaces and wings that were starting to flap like feathers. Cliff was in danger of vanishing into the realm of the crashed, the cremated, the forgotten. The thought filled him with sullen rage—and that old companion, the secret crybaby in his belly—anxiety.

  The boardroom was splendidly decorated in California style. The walls were white. A series of abstract paintings in red, white, and blue added color and a hint of patriotism. The gleaming oval table, the high-backed, gull-winged armchairs, were teak, adding a Hawaiian or South Seas effect. At the far end of the room a solid silver shield emblazoned with the Buchanan Corporation’s seal, a plane soaring above a rainbow, glistened in the subdued lighting.

  Dick Stone was sitting a few feet away from Cliff Morris, who was in the CEO’s chair at the head of the table. Burly, short-armed, thick-necked, Dick was Buchanan’s executive vice preside
nt for finance. His hunched aggressive posture emanated a tense urgent energy, part physical, part mental. If an audience were watching them, Cliff was sure his six-foot-four physique and laid-back California style would win most of the applause.

  But there was no audience at this movie. For the previous hour, on a screen that had just returned to its recess in the ceiling, Dick Stone had displayed an array of flow charts and summaries, depicting the current and future profits of the company’s divisions. The bottom line was a shortfall of 240 million dollars for fiscal 1979. Unless they got a government bailout or persuaded several banks to loan them serious money, they were broke.

  “Our corporate budget this year is six billion dollars. How in Christ can you go bankrupt on six billion dollars?”

  “You know the answer to that, Cliff. Almost every cent is locked into total-performance contracts with the Pentagon that don’t give us room to breathe,” Dick Stone said.

  First the right cross, then the left hook, Cliff Morris thought. He tried to weave, duck, clinch.

  “What does Shannon say about our chances of getting more money on the Article?”

  “Zero minus, unless Reagan wins next year.”

  “And then?”

  “Five, maybe seven on a scale of ten.”

  The Article—a secret plane that was costing them millions of dollars—drew Cliff’s eyes to the two paintings on the boardroom wall facing the windows. Cliff Morris had supplied old photographs that helped the artist capture their founder and chief designer, Frank Buchanan, in his prime. His bear-like physique, his shock of uncombed red hair, the lined hawk-nosed face vivid with visionary force all but leaped from the wall. From one angle he seemed to be glaring at the nearby portrait of the man who considered himself Buchanan’s real founder—Adrian Van Ness. Adrian’s response was an enigmatic smile. His domed forehead, his hooded eyes, seemed to deepen the enigma, stirring new anxiety deep in Cliff Morris’s body and mind.

  “What about Adrian’s trip to England? If he can get a hundred million from their banks it could loosen things up over here.”

  Adrian Van Ness had gone to England with the head of the Armed Services Committee of the House of Representatives and the chairman of the Senate Finance Committee to bolster his plea for a major loan. He was probably over the Atlantic at this moment in his Argusair business jet, bringing home the good—or bad—news.

  “I don’t think he’s going to get a damn thing out of them,” Dick Stone said. “Unless we do something dramatic.”

  Cliff Morris had begun to suspect Dick Stone knew exactly what something dramatic meant. Sitting on Cliff’s desk in his house on the Palos Verdes peninsula was a letter that told him in Adrian Van Ness’s oblique, soothing way that he should consider resigning as president. It was the only way they could persuade bankers and congressmen that the Buchanan Corporation deserved to be forgiven for its recent financial and political sins.

  Cliff lit a cigarette and put his voice, his face, into his chief executive officer mode. “How much did we make in the last quarter playing the exchange rates, Shylock?”

  It was dirty, using the Jewish thing. He knew it disrupted Dick Stone’s concentration. But Dick’s invitation to this midnight movie was pretty dirty too. His old friend had not spent thirty years in the plane business without learning how to fight dirty. Especially in the last ten years, when Adrian Van Ness had coldly, consciously pitted them against each other, like two gladiators competing for Caesar’s approval.

  “About fifty million,” Dick Stone said.

  “That’s more than the goddamn aircraft division made last year. Maybe we ought to sell everything and turn the joint into a bank.”

  “What fun would that be?” Dick Stone said. He looked up at the portraits on the wall, his eyes lingering wistfully on Frank Buchanan’s visionary face. “They’d both come back and lead a stockholder revolt. It would be the first time they agreed on anything.”

  Cliff Morris nodded. “It’s always meant more than money. That’s been the best part of it. Imagine coming to work every day and figuring out how to sell refrigerators or aspirin? How do those guys stand it?”

  Suddenly they were together, not in the boardroom but in a B-17 called the Rainbow Express. They were hurtling above burning German cities, with Captain Cliff Morris telling his skeptical navigator they were flying into a future as conquerors of the sky. For reasons only Cliff Morris understood, Dick Stone’s intensity faltered. Cliff had time to breathe, to think.

  The telephone rang. Both Cliff Morris and Dick Stone froze. The big clock on the wall, showing the time zones of the world, told them it was 10 A.M. in Tel Aviv and 8 A.M. in London and 2 A.M. the next day in Tokyo. Cliff thought of the other times the phone had rung in the middle of the night.

  Whenever a Buchanan plane went down anywhere in the world, the tentacles of the long distance lines reached out on undersea cables or on whirling satellites to clutch the maker by the throat with the gruesome statistics—and the threat of ruinous lawsuits.

  “Christ,” Cliff Morris said, and picked up the white receiver.

  The hollow voice belonged to Mike Shannon, head of Buchanan’s Washington office, former tailgunner of the Rainbow Express. “The Charlottesville police—Adrian—dead.” Cliff could not tell whether Shannon was gasping for breath or the stunning impact of the news disconnected the sentences in his own mind.

  “Are you still in Washington?”

  “Yes.”

  “Get the hell down to Charlottesville. Make sure no one but you gets into his safe. Bring someone from the National Security Agency with you to handle the local cops. There’s stuff in that safe that could put us out of business!”

  Cliff Morris dropped the white earpiece into its cradle and stared numbly at Dick Stone. “Adrian’s dead.”

  Dick shook his head, like a boxer who had just been hit with a Sunday punch. He could not believe it either. “A crash?” he said.

  “A heart attack. In Charlottesville. The housekeeper called the police. They contacted Shannon.”

  Dick shook his head again. His incredulity summed up both their relationships to Adrian Van Ness. Neither could imagine life without this man. The absurdity—and the reality—of that thought momentarily appalled Cliff. Fifty-six years old and he could not imagine life without the son of a bitch?

  Cliff took a deep slow breath. He could imagine it. He could handle it. Sudden death was part of the plane business. For thirty-five years Cliff had trained himself not to think about death as anything more than a fact.

  Except for certain deaths. One was a death Cliff still found unbearable to contemplate, a death that had left him falling free for a long time, like a jumper whose parachute had failed to open. Another was a death he and Adrian had shared, as mourners, accomplices, betrayers. A death that stirred his buried hatred of the man who had made him chief executive officer of this six-billion dollar corporation.

  Nothing could heal the free-fall death. Part of him would spin through space into eternity regretting it. But Cliff was suddenly able to believe Adrian’s death was connected by a shadowy cosmic justice to the betrayal death. Maybe that made Adrian’s death a large, breathtaking fact that led to an even larger possibility. For the first time Cliff Morris might become the real chief executive officer of the Buchanan Corporation.

  Cliff pondered Dick Stone’s stunned face. He sensed a state of mind or soul radically different from his own. Dick was bereft. He was almost—perhaps actually—mourning Adrian Van Ness. Cliff did not understand why. He did not even try.

  Other possibilities churned through Cliff’s mind. Perhaps it was not too late to reach an understanding with a woman in a Malibu mansion where he had once been welcomed with extravagant love. For a moment she was naked in his arms, teasing, laughing, resisting, finally surrendering with a rueful cry. For another moment their son was in his arms, almost repealing the eternal gravity of the free-fall death.

  Where did that leave another woman who was living i
n the desert near Palm Springs—his wife of thirty-six years? Cliff’s response to that question was a mixture of animosity and regret almost as complex as the one Adrian’s death had evoked. He had reasons—good reasons—for hating Sarah Chapman Morris and she had equally good reasons for hating him. Maybe they should leave it that way.

  Fleeing that cruel thought, Cliff lurched to his feet. The important thing now was to concentrate on a return from the limbo of defeat and humiliation. “Where are you going?” Dick Stone asked.

  “Never mind. I’ll see you in the morning. We’ll talk. We’ve got a lot to talk about,” Cliff said.

  The misgiving in Stone’s eyes was almost an accusation. Did he know about Adrian’s letter? That made it all the more important for Cliff to see Frank Buchanan as soon as possible. But the woman in the house on the beach at Malibu was almost as crucial in Cliff’s new scheme of things.

  He groped for his original exultance and regained it. Love, power, happiness—all the meanings of a California life were still possible. Cliff Morris strode out of the boardroom, his big confident body alive with hope.

  NIGHT FLIGHT

  For another ten minutes Dick Stone sat in the empty boardroom staring at the portraits of Adrian Van Ness and Frank Buchanan. For thirty years his feelings, his ideas, his life had been interwoven with these opposites. He had alternated between admiration and dislike from decade to decade.

  For a while Dick had given his allegiance to Frank Buchanan, to his vision of the plane as a spiritual symbol, carrying man’s hope toward a better world. But the vision had not been enough to enable the Buchanan Corporation to survive. That had required Adrian Van Ness’s guile. He was proof that guile transcended vision in the second half of the American century.

  Or did it? Dick Stone wondered. Did the man of guile need vision to justify playing the game by survival rules? Was that why Dick Stone was telling Cliff Morris it was time to pay the price guile finally exacts? What’s your answer, Adrian? Dick asked the man who had won his grudging allegiance.