Conquerors of the Sky

by Thomas Fleming

  “What about the transport? We can’t do both,” Adrian said.

  “We’ll sign the contracts for it and you can go to work on it the day after you deliver the four hundredth B—Twenty—nine.”

  “I thought you needed the transports for the invasion of Japan,” Frank Buchanan said.

  “There won’t have to be an invasion if we can deliver the kind of stuff we laid on Tokyo a couple of nights ago,” Crockett said. “We put three hundred and twenty-five Supers over the city, each with six tons of incendiaries. We burned out the whole goddamn joint. Take a look at these pictures.”

  He pulled some reconnaissance photos from his desk. Tokyo was a moonscape, with a random steel-and-concrete building such as the Imperial Hotel isolated by endless blocks of charred ruins.

  “How many civilians did you kill?” Frank Buchanan asked.

  “Hell, I don’t know,” the general said, missing the hostility in Frank’s voice. “The Nips claimed eighty-four thousand but the Russian embassy estimated it at twice that. The temperature on the ground hit twelve hundred degrees fahrenheit. The last planes to bomb said there were whole streets that’d turned to red hot sludge.”

  The general smiled fondly at the photos. “We’re gonna make these bastards cry uncle without sendin’ a single Navy ship anywhere near the coast. The GIs and Marines can just play volleyball all day on Saipan or wherever and leave the war to us.”

  Air power, Adrian thought. They were all part of the mystique. The planes they built were put into the hands of men who were using them to settle an argument that had started twenty years ago.

  “Do you call incinerating a hundred and sixty thousand civilians war?” Frank Buchanan roared.

  “Jesus Christ, Frank,” the general said. “Who’s side are you on? Didn’t these bastards bomb Pearl Harbor?”

  “I don’t believe there were any women or children aboard those battleships!” Frank shouted.

  General Crockett’s lip curled. “This here’s war, Frank. It sort of separates the men from the boys and girls.”

  Adrian seized Frank Buchanan’s arm in a decisive grip before he could bellow a reply. “I don’t believe this is the time or place for us to debate these difficult questions,” he said. “None of us here are responsible for the decision to bomb Japan. As far as I’m concerned, speaking as the president of Buchanan Aircraft, we’re ready to go to work on those B—Twenty—nines the moment you get us the blueprints.”

  Crockett glanced at the reconnaissance photos of Tokyo for another moment, then banged the drawer shut. “Okay,” he said. “We’ll get ’em to you.”

  Back in General Mellow’s office, Adrian braced himself for a lecture on diplomacy. Instead, Mellow whacked Frank Buchanan on the back. “I’m glad somebody told off those bomber maniacs,” he said. “There’s a lot of us in the Air Corps who don’t agree with what they’re doing. When you try to discuss it, they pull that men against the boys and girls crap.”

  Adrian decided this was a good time to ask the general’s advice about getting Cliff Morris rotated home from Europe. Frank glowered but said nothing. “Hell, that shouldn’t be hard,” Mellow drawled. “Damn fool shouldn’ta been allowed to go over twenty-five missions in the first place. Most pilots’re so strung out by that time they start takin’ off with the flaps down and landin’ with the wheels up.”

  Frank continued to glower while the general made a call to a friend in operations. “They’ll check his file,” he said. “Now—about my transports—I want a hundred of them by June and I don’t care how you do it. Those bomber blowhards aren’t goin’ to make the Japs surrender. Down in War Plans they’re talkin’ about invadin’ Kyushu in September and the casualties are estimated to be five hundred thousand men.”

  “We’ll see what we can do,” Adrian said. “Buzz McCall has pulled off a lot of miracles for us. I think he can handle this one.”

  “How is that son of a gun?” the general beamed. “Still got a cock as long as a windsock?”

  Adrian nodded. “Unanimous testimony of the entire female work force. Cliff Morris is his stepson, by the way.”

  On the way to the airport, Frank reopened the argument against bringing Cliff home. “Buzz will go wild when he hears about it,” he said.

  “I did it as a personal favor to Tama,” Adrian said.

  He was daring Frank to tell that to Buzz. Frank seemed impressed by the revelation, which suggested Adrian and Tama were seeing a lot of each other. That was exactly what he planned to do, Adrian decided. See a lot of Tama. In fact, every luscious inch of her.

  Frank, Buzz, and the rest of the company plunged into a frenzied effort to get the B—29s and the SkyLord into production, on top of the five hundred fighter bombers that General Newton Slade, happy with his Santa Monica real estate, had ordered on the same manic schedule. Adrian approved hiring another ten thousand workers if they could find them. That would give Buchanan a payroll of 101,000, making it the largest aircraft company in the world.

  A week later, Adrian and Tama drove south across the San Gabriel River past the rambling white Pio Pico mansion, home of California’s last Spanish governor. They followed Route 101 through the thick forest of oil derricks in Santa Fe Springs, Fullerton and Brea to the village of San Juan Capistrano. Tama had chosen it without explaining why. They rented a suite in a white—walled inn overlooking the ruined mission.

  “I was born here,” she said. “I used to walk with my mother in the mission grounds. My mother was Mexican. Does that bother you?”

  “No,” Adrian said.

  Adrian began undressing her. He was full of triumphant desire. He thought of Beryl, of old sorrow, and dismissed it. He was beyond sorrow and regret now, the ultimate man of substance, with this beautiful woman eager to give herself to him.

  Would she betray him too in some way? He could not imagine how. Tama let him lead her to a sunken tub where he bathed her as if she were an expensive toy. She was as beautiful as Beryl Suydam in a more ample American style. The dark triangle of hair below her belly was incredibly smooth and fine. Her olive skin gleamed when water flowed across it.

  On the bed, after he had patted her dry, she responded to his kisses with sighs and cries that filled him with dark music. She was like an instrument he was playing, a kind of cello that emanated desire and a thousand deeper more intricate wishes. His hand found the little tip of love. She closed her eyes and trembled, her lips parted, the red edge of her tongue beckoned him.

  “Are you really—or is it just—to even the score?” she whispered.

  “What score? What are you talking about?” Adrian said.

  “Amanda—and Frank.”

  Every imaginable kind of music vanished. A dozen memories coalesced. Hanrahan asking Adrian if he had to report personal misconduct. Hanrahan’s amputated arm and Frank Buchanan’s extraordinary interest in amputees and Amanda’s devotion to them. Frank’s abrupt silence when Adrian compared his tirade against bombing civilians to Amanda’s monologues.

  “Adrian,” Tama said. “I thought you knew.”

  Of course she thought he knew. Everyone in Buchanan Aircraft knew. Why not the president? The presumption was completely logical, especially for Buzz McCall’s wife. Why would she think his marriage was any different from hers?

  No, that was too crude, the question had been asked out of that sea of secret sorrow that flowed through every woman, that invisible web of yearning for ideal love they wove around every man, even when their own minds mocked the idea.

  “Adrian,” Tama sobbed. “I didn’t think anything could hurt you. You’re always so calm, so aloof.”

  Women. Women. Adrian stumbled to his feet and stared out at the ruins of San Juan Capistrano. The crumbled walls were an image of his self. Behind him there was a thud of footsteps and Tama had her arms around him. “Adrian, Adrian,” she whispered. “You don’t know how much it means. You cared. You really cared. I’ve never met a man who cared that way. Not a man like you.”

&
nbsp; He shook his head. It was hopeless. He was fated to be tortured by women. Tortured and mocked and humiliated like ruined Robert Van Ness. Not even success protected him.

  “Now we can really begin,” Tama whispered.

  She turned him, faithless, passive, to meet her kiss. Nothing happened, of course, as she revolved her gleaming black pussy against his inert stump. He was an amputee. Why couldn’t she see that? Why didn’t she leave him alone with his misery?

  Tama did not seem in the least surprised or disappointed or offended by his plight. She led him back to the bed, step by step, her tongue deep in his mouth and drew him down on top of her. Then the slithering began, the coiling and uncoiling of that sinuous body, that electric tongue as she traveled up and down the moonscape of Adrian’s flesh and finally took the still indifferent stump in her mouth. Around and around the doleful little snout her tongue revolved.

  Amazing things began happening inside the burnt shell of Adrian’s desire. He found himself imagining a thousand positions from some primeval Kama Sutra—he had never read the famous book itself. He saw himself taking Tama with inexhaustible desire in every imaginable way. He saw his tongue probing the pink flesh beneath the black frond of silky hair between her thighs.

  He could never love this woman. She had no education, no taste, no refinement. But in some profound and triumphant way she was a woman and he would love that womanness, he would mingle his regret and humiliation and success and achieve an approximation of love and an acme of desire. He would be a man of substance with a woman every other man desired.

  Yes, yes, he whispered, as his penis, a stump no more, plunged deep into Tama’s darkness. Yes Yes Yes. A man in spite of all of them. A man with the power to betray and humiliate in turn.

  “Oh, Adrian, love me, really love me.” Tama whispered. “Tell me you do—now.”

  “I do, I do,” Adrian lied.

  The room filled with a triumphant roaring. The 400 B—29 Superfortresses that would soon roll off the assembly line in the Mojave thundered across the Pacific to sow flaming death over Tokyo and Yokohama. Adrian accepted that too. He accepted the life he was living in the middle of the twentieth century. A player of the great game. A conqueror of women and nations.

  LOVE AMONG THE RUINS

  Horns hooted, whistles blew, sirens howled, guns boomed, planes zoomed overhead doing loops. The war in Europe was over. Germany had surrendered. Amanda Van Ness heard the news in the amputee ward of Wainright Army Hospital in Long Beach. Around her, young men without arms or legs, some without arms and legs, expressed little emotion. Europe was not California’s war. In the Pacific, men were still dying aboard ships and on islands where the Japanese continued to resist in spite of two years of defeats. In the skies above Japan hundreds of planes, many of them made by Buchanan Aircraft, dumped tons of bombs on city after city.

  Amanda tried to banish the bombers from her mind as she left the hospital and drove through California’s sunshine to Topanga Canyon. Although gasoline was supposedly rationed, the boulevards were clogged with cars full of whooping celebrators. But Topanga was still immersed in green silence. In five minutes, she was driving up the steep hill to Eden.

  The word had a sad hollow ring now, like the sound of a temple bell in the abandoned monastery of a forgotten god. Amanda prowled the empty rooms, remembering happiness, how palpable it had been for a while. In Frank’s study, she pondered a sketch of the immense transport plane he had designed, with room for two decks of beds for wounded men.

  Frank was somewhere in the Mojave Desert testing a new kind of plane, a bullet-shaped creature that spewed flame from its tail. It had a new engine and a new fuel that might revolutionize flying. He was always somewhere else, even when he was here, lying beside her. His planes flew in his head, sowing death and devastation over half the world. They flew in her head too, sowing devastation on Eden. On their love.

  She tried not to think of the last time they had talked about it, when he came back from New Guinea. He had turned into a different being before her eyes. Darkness oozed from his pores, his skin had seemed to grow swarthy as he roared his memories of the first war at her. How Americans had died flying bad planes and he was not going to let that happen again. Young men like Billy McCall and Cliff Morris deserved a chance to live and if she wanted to think of him as a murderer so be it. He thought of himself as a savior. It was blasphemous and sad.

  She picked up the telephone and dialed her own number. “Victoria? I just wanted to make sure you got home from school in one piece. The city is going slightly crazy over the German surrender.

  “No. You can’t go downtown. It’ll be full of drunken sailors and soldiers.”

  Victoria was fourteen. A very precocious fourteen. The war had vulgarized everything. Crooner Frank Sinatra sold sexual hysteria to every teenage girl in the country. They necked with sailors and soldiers on buses and had sex in the city parks.

  A distant rustle of the temple bell. Go, it said. Go in peace if possible. Eden was over. Treasure its memory. It was never more than a dream, a hope. Now you have to find your way back to Adrian. You’ve abandoned him for almost four years.

  If abandoned was the right word. Adrian was so self—contained Amanda never felt he needed her. Even when he was mourning his English mistress, Beryl Suydam. But Amanda had been indifferent to him for a long time and he knew it. He was uneasy at her independence from him. Recently he had begun making sarcastic remarks about the time she gave to her amputees.

  It was time to try to return to his territory, to live within his domain again. It would be difficult at first. Her indifference to Adrian could so quickly turn to hatred. She would risk it for Victoria’s sake. She was another reason for Eden’s decline and fall. Motherhood and Eden did not mix.

  What would happen to Frank? She would go on loving him, of course. Perhaps they could resurrect Eden for a few precarious hours some place, some time. But it could never be here. This place throbbed with the thunder of Wright Cyclone engines, with the crunch of exploding bombs, with the screams of dying women and children.

  On Frank’s design table was a letter from Billy McCall. It described a daring flight across a thousand miles of the Pacific to bomb Japanese ships in Saigon. The letter exulted in the destruction they had wreaked. Billy said he hoped they had a chance to do a similar job in Tokyo harbor soon. He talked about how many Japanese he had killed to even the score for all the men in his bomb group who had died in their wave-top attacks.

  Amanda recoiled from the hatred in Billy’s soul. War had entered his blood— stream. He would bring it home with him. She dreaded what it would do to Frank. Amanda knew why Frank loved Billy. There were no secrets in Eden. He knew about Amanda’s first Eden, the orange blossoms in the dawn. He even knew her temptation to a dream life with Califia, a confession that had disturbed him almost as much as her revulsion at the bombing. She knew about Craig, Frank’s long struggle with his dark spirit.

  Sad how absolute honesty between lovers made love more imperiled. But so perfect, so unstained, for a little while. No matter what happened to her for the rest of her life, she had lived in Eden. She had tasted the forbidden fruit of innocence and hope and now she was ready to be an American wife and mother again.

  Farewell, whispered the temple bell as Amanda closed the door.

  She drove down more boulevards clogged with cars, past sidewalks jammed with cavorting soldiers and sailors. At home, Victoria was on the telephone, telling her best friend, Susan, daughter of a Warner Brothers mogul, what a freak her mother was. “She’s prehistoric. I mean your mother’s living in the nineteenth century but mine’s prehistoric.”

  A pound of lipstick and rouge on her face, Victoria announced she was going downtown no matter what Amanda said. “I’m not going to do anything. I promise you absolutely I’ll be a virgin on my wedding day.”

  “You’re not going anywhere. Invite Susan over here.”

  “She’s going downtown. Her mother’s getting one
of the studio security guards to escort us.”

  Amanda shook her head.

  “Mother, it’s a great historic moment! I want to see it.”

  “It’s a lot of vulgar people doing vulgar things.”

  “They’re not vulgar, they’re happy. Something you couldn’t be if you lived a thousand years.”

  “I’m not that morose, am I?”

  “Yes, you are. I’m going going gone!”

  She left, all but smashing the windows with the slam of the front door. Amanda stood in the silence, helpless. What was going to happen to Victoria if she insisted on making her voracious will her dominant trait? No man would tolerate it.

  Adrian came home for dinner, an event in itself. He was somewhat drunk, even more unusual. “We’ve been celebrating,” he said. “Victory through air power. Planes beat Hitler.”

  “Hurrah,” Amanda said.

  “You don’t agree?”

  “I have no opinion.”

  “Where’s Victoria?”

  “Helping sailors celebrate downtown.”

  “You let her go?” Adrian shouted.

  “I tried to stop her. I’m not a policeman. Perhaps you should hire one for her.”

  “I couldn’t afford it. I’m spending too much money hiring them to watch you.”

  They were in the sunken living room of their Hancock Park house. Adrian had hired a decorator who had chosen California mission furniture. Huge slatted chairs and couches made of dark woods, with red upholstery. Amanda had wanted blue but Adrian ruled in favor of the decorator. It was not a restful room. Not a living room, in Amanda’s opinion. Now it was a trap. The red pillows oozed blood.

  Adrian knew.

  She had wondered more than once what he would do if he found out. Frank had told her there were rumors floating through the company. People were watched and followed all the time to make sure no military secrets were being leaked. Which led, of course, to all sorts of other secrets being discovered.

  “How long have you known?”

  “Years. I let it go on because it kept you quiet and Frank Buchanan happy. Lockheed, North American, have offered him tons of money to switch jobs. He’s a genius.”