Conquerors of the Sky

by Thomas Fleming

  Frank flew back to Santa Monica with Cliff Morris slumped in the copilot’s seat. “You’ll do a lot better when you get some lessons from an instructor who’s not your father,” Frank said. “Fathers shouldn’t teach their kids to fly or drive.”

  “You wanta teach him, he’s all yours,” Buzz said.

  “I’ll teach both of them.”

  “I don’t know whether I want to fly,” Cliff said. “I’m not sure I’m good enough.”

  “I know I’m good enough,” Billy said.

  “You don’t know a fucking thing,” Buzz snarled. “You never open a book, you’re flunkin’ every subject in the curriculum and you think you’re good enough to fly? How, why?”

  “I just know it,” Billy said.

  “Flyin’ takes brains. So far you haven’t convinced me you’ve got any.” Buzz glowered at Cliff. “It takes guts too. So far momma’s boy here hasn’t convinced me he’s got much of that item.”

  Frank patted Cliff’s shoulder. “You don’t have to be as tough as he is. Adrian Van Ness thinks millions of people will learn to fly in the next twenty years. It’ll be as common as knowing how to drive.”

  “I don’t buy that idea,” Buzz said. “Planes are gettin’ faster, hotter all the time.”

  Frank hoped Buzz was wrong. He shared Adrian’s belief that the plane would help create jobs and prosperity, like the automobile. So far it was a faith with few followers.

  “You’ll be surprised how fast you learn to fly,” Frank said to Cliff. “Pretty soon you feel like you’re part of the plane.”

  “I feel that way already,” Billy said.

  “Shut the fuck up,” Buzz said.

  Billy’s face remained expressionless. But there were tears in his eyes.

  THE GREAT GAME

  Adrian Van Ness sat in his shabby office on the first floor of Buchanan Aircraft’s main building watching their latest plane, a sleek stylish trainer for the Army Air Force, come in for a smooth landing. On his desk was an invitation to the spring meeting of the Conquistadores del Cielo. Beside it was a letter from Jim Redwood, Buchanan’s sales manager, dolefully reporting he had failed to sell a single copy of SkyRanger II on his latest foray to New York.

  Ruined whispered in Adrian’s soul. He had begun to hate the bravura name the historian in him had selected for their trade association in 1935—the very year the bottom had started to fall out of the plane business. He watched Frank Buchanan climb out of the trainer and stroll across the tarmac, his arm around Billy McCall’s slim shoulders. A few minutes later Frank took off with Cliff Morris in the second seat. The chief designer was giving teenagers flying lessons on company time. Why not, when the company had nothing to sell?

  Buzz McCall stood in the doorway, a sketch in his hand. “Here’s Frank’s idea for the next-generation fighter,” he said. “It’ll make that crummy P-Thirty-nine look like a Curtiss Jenny.”

  The P-39 was the current fighter plane of the Army Air Force. The bulky creature was inferior in speed and maneuverability to the fighters of every major power. Adrian pondered Buchanan’s replacement—an angular craft with gull wings. “Who’s going to pay for it?”

  “I’ve practically got a guarantee—”

  “Practically a guarantee doesn’t pay the rent or the salaries or the taxes,” Adrian said.

  “Adrian—you gotta gamble to win in this business,” Buzz said. “You gotta bet the goddamn company.”

  “It’s easy to be a high roller with someone else’s money,” Adrian said. “Put this in a drawer until a war starts.”

  Buzz’s recklessness was as unnerving to Adrian as Frank Buchanan’s indifference to profit and loss. Both clashed with Adrian’s belief in forethought. For the moment the dolorous facts were on Adrian’s side. So far their plunge into the military plane business had been a financial disaster. They had sold only 150 trainers. Mockups of dive bombers, reconnaissance planes, fighters, cluttered the hangars. The Army and Navy procurement officers were delighted to encourage bold experiments. But other companies were competing for the same extremely limited appropriations. Don Douglas, an Annapolis dropout, had the inside track with the Navy. Boeing up in Seattle had a similar whammy on the Army.

  Adrian’s office intercom beeped. “Prince Carlo Ponte-something is here to see you.”

  Ponty was as handsome and urbane as ever. He was in California with his mistress, a Hungarian film star who was making a movie directed by the most lecherous mogul in Hollywood. “I am here to protect my investment,” he said. He added a hilarious imitation of the mogul’s assaults on the English language.

  Ponty’s sex life stirred envy in Adrian. He was usually too tired to do more than kiss Amanda when he stumbled home from Buchanan Aircraft at midnight. Amanda never even hinted she was interested in anything more amorous. They made love only when Adrian suggested it. Even in the bedroom he sensed an element of mockery in Amanda’s manner. Again and again her eyes seemed to ask him why they were not rich. What had happened to his promises of a golden future as her compensation for turning Cadwallader Groves into a smelly, oozing oil field?

  Yet Adrian struggled to keep his wife happy. He bought her expensive jewelry he could not afford. He swallowed her awful cooking. She had the power to make him miserable if she chose. She had daily access to the mind and heart of the one female in this world Adrian loved without reservations, his six-year-old daughter Victoria.

  Ponty had married his French heiress. She seemed content to share him with other women—and with planes. He was known as the Italian Lindbergh for his record-breaking distance flights across Asia and Africa—and the elegant books he wrote to celebrate them. Like Lindbergh’s books, his narratives combined high adventure with philosophy—in Ponty’s case an uncompromising disdain for Europe’s drift toward totalitarianism. He roamed the world to escape “the pygmies of the right and left.”

  Adrian had kept Ponty in close touch with the fortunes of Buchanan Aircraft. He was an admirer of Frank Buchanan’s clean designs. “So, my old friend—how goes the profits and losses?” Ponty asked.

  “Unless a miracle occurs, we’ll be bankrupt in six months.”

  “I’ve suggested before, Adrian—and suggest again—you should see the whole world as your market.”

  Adrian sighed. “We’re not a merchant bank. We don’t have partners all over the globe, telling us where the deals are.”

  “That is something I would be happy to undertake. For old time’s sake—and whatever douceurs you might be inclined to add. Breaking long-distance records is expensive. My wife’s enthusiasm for financing me has distinct limits.”

  “I’m ready to add enough sweeteners to give you dyspepsia. Do you know anything we could go after right now?”

  Ponty pointed to a copy of the Los Angeles Times on Adrian’s desk. A black headline announced Adolf Hitler’s agreement with British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain at Munich, giving Germany the right to dismember Czechoslovakia. “Although the world sees it as a shameful surrender, the British are buying time. They’ve begun to rearm. But their aircraft industry has been starved for so long, they haven’t the capacity to meet half their needs.”

  “Can you arrange something? My—my mentor, Geoffrey Tillotson, died two years ago.”

  His reputation ruined by the catastrophic losses Tillotson Brothers had suffered in the collapse of airline stocks in 1929, Adrian’s English father had never returned to the business world. He had remained a stubborn believer in the airplane, writing Adrian letters full of praise for Buchanan’s modest early success.

  “It would be better for you to go yourself—and work through Winston Churchill. He’s out of power but he’s been calling for rearmament and has numerous friends in the military. I’d bring Frank Buchanan with you to deal with their design people. I would also contact your mother. She has many friends in English society. In these matters, every kind of influence helps.”

  Two weeks later, Adrian and Frank Buchanan were drinking tea with
Clarissa Van Ness in her Mayfair flat. She had stayed in England almost continuously since Tillotson’s death, saying she felt more at home there. They talked about Victoria, who had charmed her grandmother when Clarissa visited California last year.

  On her home ground, Amanda had been an unruffled hostess. Clarissa even conceded a mild admiration for the scenery. But the visit had been marred by Adrian’s desperate attempts to conceal the parlous state of Buchanan Aircraft. He had even rented a sleek black Packard for a week, ignoring the disapproval in Amanda’s eyes. They had taken Clarissa to the best restaurants. But when they visited the factory, the charade had exploded. Outside Adrian’s office, a small angry man in a derby declared he was not leaving until his client received three thousand dollars for a half dozen rivet guns purchased six months ago.

  Clarissa had said nothing, of course. But ruined clanged in Adrian’s head like a fire alarm. He had slept barely two hours a night for a month after his mother went back to London.

  Frank Buchanan was telling Clarissa about the radical designs they had experimented with when he worked at de Havilland before the last war. His favorite was a flying wing. It had the best lift-to-drag ratio of any plane he had ever seen. Clarissa beamed. “I remember my dear friend Geoffrey Tillotson talking about that. He put up a great deal of the money for de Havilland in those days.”

  “We’re hoping to sell the Royal Air Force some planes,” Adrian said. “We’re seeing Winston Churchill at the Athenaeum tomorrow at five o’clock. Can you put in a good word for us with him or anyone else?”

  “I sat next to Winston at a dinner last night,” Clarissa said. “I’ll be happy to mention your plight if I see him again. But I doubt if it will do much good. He could not be gloomier about his political situation. He blames a great deal on the Oxford Oath. That woman you used to escort, Beryl Suydam, was one of the leaders.”

  Beryl’s name had an extraordinary effect on Adrian. Her radical politics had not prevented her from becoming one of the best known women in English aviation. Except for those euphoric days when he had been a Wall Street wonder, he had never been able to read about her record-setting flights without pain. Now, in the center of London, he was filled with old longing.

  Adrian was familiar with the Oxford Oath, promoted by British left-wing intellectuals in the mid-1930s. Tens of thousands of students and professors and union members vowed not to serve England in another war. “No wonder Herr Hitler decided he could forget about the British and concentrate on intimidating the French and the rest of Europe,” his mother said, glaring at Adrian as if it were all his fault.

  “I hope the British and French don’t expect the Americans to fight this time,” Frank Buchanan said. “All we did was make the world safe for their revenge on the Germans.”

  “Keep your isolationism to yourself when we see Churchill tomorrow,” Adrian said.

  Back at their hotel, although he was exhausted by the two-day flight from Los Angeles, Adrian put through an overseas telephone call. It took an hour to complete the connection. Finally, Amanda’s voice was on the line. “I suppose you want to talk to the birthday girl?”

  In a moment, Victoria was on the line. “Hello, Daddy,” she said.

  An enormous tenderness swelled in Adrian’s chest. “Hello, Gorgeous,” he said. “Happy birthday. I’m so sorry I can’t be there to give you a kiss.”

  Victoria said she loved her present, a paint set. She promised to paint him a whole fleet of planes. She asked him about England and hoped she could go there with him someday. Adrian told her they would visit all sorts of wonderful places—New York, Paris, London—when she was older.

  “Mommy says we won’t have enough money,” Victoria said.

  A flush of anger and anxiety swept Adrian. “Yes we will, Sweetness. I promise you we will.”

  Amanda came on the line. “At forty dollars a minute, I think someone should stop you two.”

  “Any news I should hear?”

  “Douglas got a new Navy contract for some dive bombers. It’s on the front page of the Times.”

  Adrian hung up and composed a cable to Buzz McCall, urging him to contact his fellow veteran of the air war in France, Colonel George C. Kenney, chief of Army production, and fan his envy of the Navy’s decision to buy dive bombers. Frank Buchanan had a plane in his files that was superior to the Douglas plane in bomb load and speed.

  Adrian realized he was hoping for the impossible, even as he wrote the cable. The Army had a new bombsight that was supposedly so accurate, it made dive bombers obsolete. That was why they were in bed with Boeing and their lumbering B-17 Flying Fortress, which was supposed to be able to shoot its way to distant targets without fighter escorts. That meant the Army was not particularly interested in fighters either.

  Adrian went to bed and stared into the darkness, thinking of the future of Buchanan Aircraft. Amanda was right. After seven years of struggle, they had no money. This foray to England was their last gasp. It would be ironic if his attempt to become a man of substance ended where it had begun.

  The following afternoon, Adrian and Frank Buchanan drank brandy in the lofty library of the Athenaeum Club with Winston Churchill and Major George Knightly, a trim mustached man in a blue RAF uniform. Adrian proposed their trainer, touting the Army Air Force’s enthusiasm for it.

  “I rather think we have all the trainers we need for the moment,” Knightly said. “What we don’t have is a light bomber. Do you have any ideas?”

  “We’ve got a plane we call the SkyRanger Two,” Frank Buchanan said. “I could turn that into a bomber for you in ten minutes.”

  Knightly pretended to set his watch. “Give it a try.”

  Frank seized pen and paper from a nearby writing desk and swiftly sketched the SkyRanger. Hurling technical terms that only Knightly understood, he redesigned the wings for extra strength and larger fuel tanks and reworked the interior to carry a 2,000-pound bomb load and a crew of five, with machine guns in the nose, tail, and a revolving top turret.

  “How much?” Knightly asked.

  “Two hundred and fifty thousand a plane,” Frank said, looking warily at Adrian.

  “Three hundred thousand,” Adrian said.

  “Umm,” Knightly said. “I like it. If things go the way Winston thinks they will—you may hear from us.”

  “Any idea how many you’d want?” Adrian asked.

  “Two hundred for starters.”

  Adrian barely managed to conceal his astonishment. Knightly was talking about six million dollars. “Surely you can spare a few thousand for the design work,” Adrian said.

  “Afraid not. We’re counting every shilling at the moment.”

  “We’ll manage it,” Adrian said.

  “Then we have an understanding.”

  Knightly went off to a staff meeting and Churchill ordered another brandy. “Is this man reliable?” he asked, eyeing Frank Buchanan.

  “Oh, absolutely,” Adrian lied, hoping Frank would keep his mouth shut.

  “Your old friend Geoffrey Tillotson, whose loss I still regret, spoke to me of you now and then in matters more important than stocks and bonds. If war comes as I’m sure it will, you may be contacted from time to time by a small cadre we’re sending over to offset German propaganda. I hope you’ll be helpful.”

  “I’ll try.”

  “Prince Carlo Pontecorvo will be handling matters in California.”

  Adrian, a student of the great game, wondered if Ponty’s casual advice to sell planes in England and Churchill’s prompt response were as accidental as they seemed.

  On the ride back to the hotel Frank Buchanan was his usual erratic self. “Do you realize what he just asked you to do? The same goddamm stuff they pulled in the last war. Lindbergh’s father wrote a book about it. They’re going to drag us into it to save their imperialistic asses. Are you going to help them?”

  “Yes,” Adrian said. “So are you. The day we get home, I want you to go to work on designing that bomber. Hire twenty
extra people if you have to. We’ll finance it out of the trainer sale.”

  “Whose side are we on, anyway?” Frank said.

  “Our side.”

  “Where is it?” Frank said. “Give me a moral or spiritual location.”

  “Beyond the rainbow,” Adrian said. “Where the pots of gold are waiting.”

  “Why don’t we make that our insignia?” Frank sneered.

  “Not a bad idea. Give me a sketch.”

  In the lobby of the hotel, Frank grabbed a piece of stationery and drew a plane flying above a crescent rainbow. Adrian thanked him and put it in his pocket, deciding it was pointless to try to explain to his chief designer how little morality had to do with playing the great game, the hidden struggle for power that nations waged. Like Ponty, he felt a sentimental loyalty to England, a belief that despite her flaws she stood for something valuable. But the thrill of the game was a far more powerful motive.

  At the hotel desk, the clerk handed Adrian a phone message. Miss Beryl Suydam 05-03-421.

  “Not the Beryl Suydam,” Frank Buchanan said, reading it over his shoulder.

  “I met her years ago,” Adrian said.

  Upstairs, his hand trembled slightly as he picked up the telephone and gave the operator the number. “Adrian,” Beryl said in that silky voice, unchanged by a decade. “A friend saw you in your hotel lobby. I couldn’t resist calling you.”

  “How nice,” he said.

  “For one thing, you’ve got a plane that interests me. That SkyRanger? I think I could beat Howard Hughes’s around-the-world record in it, with some help from the brilliant designer fellow you’ve got on your staff. What’s his name?”

  “Frank Buchanan.”

  “Yes. Could we meet in the next day or two?”

  Adrian decided they would meet without Frank Buchanan. He was anxious to visit de Havilland and a few other companies where he had old friends. While Frank rode a train out of London, Adrian met Beryl at the Savoy Grill. She arrived in a flight jacket and slacks and the headwaiter refused to seat them. She led him to a small Greek restaurant in Soho, a place full of shadowy corners. Someone played a zither in another room.