Conquerors of the Sky

by Thomas Fleming

  There was a mystery here, Amanda thought, as Frank Buchanan poured her coffee. This man was not the money-hungry manipulator her brother had portrayed. But how could she begin to search for the truth without telling him about her own unhappiness with Adrian? She knew what that might suggest to this lonely man. Anyway, how could she trust these intuitions? She was a naive woman, cut off from the politics of Buchanan Aircraft, the constant jockeying for power and money. She talked for an hour behind a shield of noncommittal politeness and went home troubled, full of inchoate wishes she could not even express to herself.

  A month later, Hitler’s armies swept into France and defeated the French and British in a few stunning weeks. Adrian went almost berserk with anxiety. He prowled the house from midnight to dawn, listening to the latest radio bulletins. He was terrified for England—and for Buchanan Aircraft. If the Germans bludgeoned the English into surrender, the 200 bombers already in production would never be paid for and Buchanan would be bankrupt.

  In the middle of this turmoil, the first bomber came off the production line and was rolled out for a maiden flight. The desperate British decided to make it a symbol of their determination to fight on. They arranged for national publicity. Adrian was of course delighted but he still could not sleep and Amanda deduced that publicity was all the British were putting up. Nevertheless, to the press and public, Adrian was a picture of confidence and pride.

  Amanda refused to go to the rollout celebration. Adrian almost exploded. “The British ambassador will be there with his wife! Harry Hopkins, Roosevelt’s right-hand man, is flying out from Washington! The governor, both senators will be there. I insist on you coming.”

  “I can be sick. Make excuses. You’re very good at that.”

  “I want you there.”

  Amanda shook her head.

  “I’ll take Victoria instead.”

  “I can’t stop you. But I think you shouldn’t. She’s too young to understand any of this. All she knows is we seem to hate each other.”

  “I’m taking her. I want her to see what her father is doing to defend democracy. Let her figure out why her mother sides with the barbarians.”

  On rollout day Amanda stayed home, working in the garden. It was a beautifully sunny June morning, without a cloud in the sky. She listened on NBC radio, which was devoting an hour to the ceremony. The British ambassador, Adrian, California’s governor, made brief speeches. Then the announcer described the preparations for the test flight. The test pilot and chief designer Frank Buchanan were introduced. Frank discussed some of the features of the bomber, such as two counter-rotating variable pitch propellers on each engine, which would add to the plane’s stability.

  “Are you going along, Mr. Buchanan?” the announcer asked.

  “I always go along on test flights of planes I design,” Frank said. “I believe the designer ought to risk his own neck to demonstrate his faith in his ideas.”

  The announcer described the two men boarding the plane, settling into the cockpit. He let the audience hear the roar of the two Wright Cyclone engines as they warmed up. In a moment he was describing the takeoff, the climb. Suddenly his voice changed tone. “Something seems wrong! The plane is pitching and yawing up there. The pilot doesn’t seem to have complete control! He’s trying to turn back to the field but he can’t do it. He’s losing altitude fast!”

  A roaring filled the sky. The plane was coming toward her. Suddenly Amanda was in the cockpit with Frank and the test pilot, as they fought to control the berserk machine. Her body remained in the sunny garden but she was in the careening plane, the thunder of the motors tearing her brain apart, hearing Frank shout to the test pilot. “Bail out! Bail out!”

  The pilot leaped and his chute billowed like an immense question mark. Frank was alone in the cockpit. Amanda could see what he was trying to do, turn in a wide wobbly circle to head back to the Buchanan airfield, five miles away. But he could not do it. The plane roared over Amanda in her garden and tore through the top of a house on the next street, smashed through a half-dozen trees and cars and disintegrated. The wings ripped through two other houses and the fuselage hurtled down the street for another block.

  Amanda saw the terrible things that happened to Frank in the cockpit. His seat ripped loose and he was catapulted into the windshield, then flung against both sides of the fuselage as fearsome forces smashed the plane back and forth in its passage down the street.

  Amanda raced for her car. The swath of destruction on the next street made her brain reel. Two houses, three cars were on fire. Women and children ran toward her, screaming hysterically. Amanda roared through the burning debris to the plane. Flames were swirling inside the fuselage. A fire truck came clanging around the other corner. “The cockpit. Get him out of the cockpit!” she cried, as firemen spilled from the truck.

  The fire was in the cockpit now. The firemen hesitated, afraid the plane would blow up. “Look!” Amanda cried.

  Frank was on his feet, clawing at the cockpit window. Two firemen raced forward with a hose spraying foam. Another one hacked at the window and the metal around it with an ax. In two frantic minutes they had Frank out of the plane. His face and hands were seared black. Blood drooled from his nose. An ambulance arrived, siren whooping. Amanda climbed in beside Frank and they raced for the nearest hospital while an intern gave him oxygen and monitored his vital signs.

  “He’s not going to die!” Amanda said.

  “If he makes it, I’m going to hire you as my full-time fortune teller,” the intern said.

  Frank was conscious. He stared dazedly at her. “What are you doing here?”

  “You almost crashed in my garden,” Amanda said.

  “Tell Buzz it was the propeller. I knew those counter-rotating propellers were a bad idea—”

  “Damn the propellers. Concentrate on staying alive,” Amanda said.

  Frank feebly shook his head. “My mother was right. Death machine. That’s what she called it the first time she saw a plane.”

  “Damn your mother too,”Amanda said. “You’re not going to die!”

  Frank managed a feeble smile. “There’s something—I want to tell you. I—never stopped loving you. Your brother forced me to—write that letter. He had a film of me—Buzz—we were all naked—a drunken party. I was ashamed—afraid it would hurt you—”

  “I don’t care,” Amanda said, barely listening. “It’s ancient history. You’re not going to die.”

  She sensed, she knew, death was loose in Frank’s soul, a huge black spider clutching him with multiple legs. She had to slay the creature.

  At the hospital, they rushed Frank to the operating room. Buzz McCall and Adrian and others from the company soon joined Amanda. Gradually, she absorbed what Frank had told her in the ambulance. She looked at Adrian with a new, almost visible loathing. He must have been in the conspiracy. He must have known about Gordon’s scheme.

  Late in the afternoon, a grim-faced doctor in an operating-room gown gave them a gloomy prognosis. “His skull is fractured, his chest is crushed, both legs are broken, his pelvis is smashed. I’ll be amazed if he lives until morning.”

  “He’s not going to die,” Amanda said.

  The look Adrian gave her was loaded with suspicion and dislike. Buzz McCall and others were obviously curious about her passionate concern. She did not try to explain it away. “I want to see him,” she said.

  “I don’t think that would be wise,” the doctor said. “He’s hanging on by a thread. Any disturbance—”

  “I’m not a disturbance. I’m a friend. I will only stay ten seconds. I want to tell him something—that could save him.”

  “Is this some religious thing?” the doctor said.

  “Yes.”

  “All right. Ten seconds,” the doctor said, while Adrian glared.

  Amanda stood beside the bed, trembling. Frank was a virtual mummy, his burned face, including his eyes, swathed in bandages, his chest encased in a cast. Instinctively she seized hi
s hand. He groaned with pain. “Morphine,” he said. “Please give me some more. I won’t bother you much longer. The pain—”

  “Frank,” she said. “It’s Amanda. I promise you, somewhere, somehow, we’ll love each other again.”

  “Amanda,” he said, half-sob, half-sigh.

  Come war or Adrian’s hatred or even the loss of Victoria, Amanda vowed she would create Eden with this man. They would find it somewhere in their California.

  THE GREAT GAME II

  Beryl Suydam stood beside Adrian in his office overlooking Buchanan’s airfield as a green two-engined light bomber emerged from the factory. Adrian had christened it the Nelson in honor of the famous admiral who presided over Picadilly Square on his soot-blackened pillar. “Such a beautiful plane, Adrian,” she said. “I can’t wait to fly the Atlantic in it.”

  “I can’t wait either,” he said. “I have reservations at the most beautiful hotel in California.”

  “That other plane—the pursuit plane Frank Buchanan is working on—that’s the one I’d really like to fly.”

  “We should have a test model ready in about six months.”

  “Marvelous,” Beryl said. “Another excuse to come back. I’ve changed my mind about America. It makes me almost ashamed of the way we broke up.”

  “We were both young.”

  Was the contrition in her silky voice genuine? For the last year Adrian had tried to enjoy a different kind of satisfaction in his meetings with Beryl—the pleasure of deceiving a woman, of accepting her open arms, her inviting thighs, while inwardly a secret sharer laughed coldly. But it had not worked as well as he expected. Instead of a new dimension of power and pleasure, he was constantly listening, looking, for signs of genuine affection.

  “I begin to think you Americans may be the hope of the world. With all your vulgarity, your materialism, there’s an underlying honesty I find moving. Compared to the cynicism of certain other countries.”

  She was talking about her great disillusionment. In August 1939, just as the impending war canceled Beryl’s plans for her around-the-world flight, Joseph Stalin signed a nonaggression pact with Adolf Hitler, enabling the German dictator to invade Poland and start his war with France and Britain with impunity.

  The shock had left fellow travelers and worshipers of the future Soviet style numb. In an outburst of patriotism, many like Beryl joined the war effort. She was in California to ferry one of the new bombers to Britain.

  “Americans can be cynical too,” he said.

  “Are you telling me to stop trying to save the world?”

  “Perhaps. Just concentrate on saving me.”

  “Where is this wonderful hotel?”

  “You’ll see. I’ll pick you up at the Beverly Wilshire at four o’clock.”

  Beryl departed and within five minutes she was replaced by a twitchy, suspicious Colonel George Knightly, Adrian’s original RAF contact, who was at the plant supervising the delivery of the Nelson bombers. With him was the man in charge of British propaganda in California, Adrian’s old friend, Prince Carlo Pontecorvo.

  “I think she’s changed sides,” Adrian said.

  “She’s got some doubts, no question of that. But she’s still sending dear Sergei anything she can lay her hands on,” Knightly said.

  “Are you sure?”

  “I only know what the intelligence boys tell me, old chap. I urge you—indeed beg you—not to lose your head.”

  “Don’t worry,” Adrian snapped.

  “We have two RAF pilots in town who flew against the Germans in Norway,” Ponty said. “Good copy. Can you line up some press coverage for them?”

  “I’ll talk to our publicity director. Tell them to call his assistant, Tama Morris.”

  “These blokes will do more than call her, if they get a look at her. Whew!” Knightly said. “Is she as free with that stuff as I hear?”

  “I wouldn’t know. I don’t ask that sort of question,” Adrian said. The memory of his humiliation at the air ministry made it hard for him to be polite to Knightly.

  “Of course,” Knightly said, dropping his pilot’s persona for his British officer’s decorum. “I just thought she could prove useful in certain situations, depending on her—er—willingness.”

  “I’m inclined to reserve that willingness for the greater glory of Buchanan Aircraft, thank you.”

  “Perhaps we should ask the lady herself?” Ponty said, with a smile. “Or have you staked out a personal claim there too, Adrian?”

  “Not at the moment,” Adrian said, struggling to regain his savoir faire.

  Knightly departed. Ponty stayed to discuss a dinner he had persuaded Adrian to sponsor at which speakers were to call for repeal of the neutrality act so the United States could directly assist England. These legislative fits of pacifist hysteria had been signed into law by President Roosevelt before war exploded across the globe. Adrian found FDR badly lacking in forethought—a crucial requirement for presidential leadership.

  There were times when Ponty acted as if Buchanan Aircraft was a department of his British propaganda machine. In spite of the finesse with which his old schoolmate handled such matters, Adrian was American enough to dislike the assumption that they were at His Majesty’s service every time Ponty crooked a finger. His affair with Beryl inevitably sharpened this conflict.

  Adrian was a tangle of emotions when he picked up Beryl at the Beverly Wilshire Hotel. With the Pacific rumbling and splashing almost beneath their wheels, they drove down Route 101A to the pink stucco La Valencia Hotel in La Jolla. The inner courtyard was full of fresh flowers in February. Their room looked down on La Jolla cove, one of the loveliest seascapes in California. The Pacific rushed against jagged rocks and cliffs. Beyond the cove, white beaches stretched north and south. La V, as everyone called the hotel, was where Hollywood’s stars and directors and producers took their illicit loves.

  They ate in the dining room overlooking the ocean. A full moon bathed the sea in golden light. Later, as they made love, Adrian found himself loathing the secret sharer who mocked their passionate charade. “I love you,” he whispered, and meant it for the first time since their reunion night in London.

  “I love you too, dearest dearest Adrian.”

  She meant it. As a man who had spent a great deal of time reading nuances of tone and emotion in women’s voices, Adrian was sure he had just heard the real thing. “Let’s put aside the masks,” he said.

  “Masks? What mask? Are you wearing one?”

  Beryl’s elbows were against his chest. She was suddenly a sharp object, even a dangerous one. “Has someone been telling you vicious lies about me? Your friend Mr. Churchill for instance? He’s never forgiven me for my part in the Oxford Oath.”

  “Nothing of the sort,” Adrian said. “I meant—you as a famous flier, me as an aircraft tycoon. I wish we could reach—some new depth. Something that blends the past and the present.”

  He was babbling but it had an unexpected impact on Beryl. She trembled, her elbows withdrew. She pressed herself against him. “Oh Adrian. I wish—I wish that were possible.”

  “Why isn’t it?” he said.

  “Dear dear Adrian.” She spread herself on top him. “I love your awful American need for sincerity”

  “Why is it awful?”

  “Because the world has gotten on without it for centuries.”

  “I’ll accept your insufferable condescension—in the name of love.”

  “Oh do, do. Wait for me. Be patient. I’ll come. Someday, somehow, I’ll come to you the way I was that night at Ravenswood. Hoping, wanting to believe in your indestructible American optimism.”

  For one of the few times in his life, Adrian lost his self-control. “You don’t love Sergei?”

  The silence was thunderous. He lay there watching her make the connections. She began to weep. “How long have you known?” she said.

  “Knightly told me yesterday,” Adrian lied. He cradled her in his arms and offered her more sinceri
ty to mock. “I’ll wait and wait and wait.”

  They drove back the next morning in the sunrise. Adrian was ready to believe the spectacular red-and-gold sky was being displayed only for them, old-new lovers on the brink of profound happiness. He felt triumphant, a conqueror of both women and politics, a master of the great game on his own terms. He was stealing a spy from the Russians, rescuing a patriot for the British-American alliance.

  He dropped Beryl at the Beverly Wilshire and drove to the factory. Tama Morris was in his office, smiling slyly. “Where the hell was Beryl Suydam last night?” she said. “I had three reporters desperate to interview her.”

  “I have no idea.”

  “The doorman at the Wilshire said she was picked up by a balding guy driving a Cadillac.”

  “She’ll be here soon. She’s taking off at noon.”

  “That’s what I told them,” Tama said. “I just wanted to make sure the takeoff might not be delayed for a week or two.”

  “Patriotism before passion, that’s my motto. But don’t quote me,” Adrian said, smiling. He found himself liking the idea of Tama knowing he had a secret sex life.

  Beryl had already checked out the Nelson and flown it a half-dozen times. She stood beside the huge three-bladed propeller on the left motor and talked to the reporters about a woman’s desire to help her country in a time of crisis. She had changed her mind about the war, she said. “I’m changing my mind about a lot of things. I attribute some of it to my seeing America, seeing democracy and freedom in the flesh, here.”

  Adrian smiled and kissed her on the cheek. He posed for a picture with his arm around her. Beryl waved good-bye and climbed into the plane. The big propellers turned, she taxied out and took off for the thousand-mile flight to the airfield in North Dakota, where the plane would be towed across the Canadian border. The field was a dangerous destination in February and Adrian found himself suddenly anxious for Beryl.

  Sleep was impossible for him that night. He called the airport in North Dakota and was told it was snowing heavily and Beryl Suydam had not yet arrived. Two hours later, she still had not arrived. Premonition swelled to dread. Four hours later, Beryl still had not arrived and was now considered overdue.