Conquerors of the Sky

by Thomas Fleming

  Minutes later, the radio erupted with battle language. “Honchos at six o’clock,” Billy said. Honchos were MIG pilots who wanted to fight. Everyone was sure they were Russians. Two days ago, Billy had shot one down and proved it. When the pilot ejected, he lost his helmet and his blond hair streamed in the wind.

  Then came the fragmented cries and shouts of combat.

  “Break left, Black Leader. Honcho on your tail.”

  “Break right. I got him. I got him.”

  “Reverse and pick us up at three o’clock!”

  Frank was in the swerving, diving, twisting Sabrejet with Billy, feeling the terrific force of 5g turns that can wipe out a man’s mind like a blow on the head, swiveling his neck 360 degrees to see MIGs diving on them at seven-hundred miles an hour, cursing the Sabrejets’ inability to outclimb a MIG or outturn him above 25,000 feet. Tormented by the exhaustion of taking this high-speed punishment day after day, while the Communists had enough pilots to send fresh teams into the air.

  For Frank, worst of all was the knowledge that he could have given Billy a better plane if he had not thrown his heart and soul and the entire Buchanan design department into the dream of the flying wing. He denounced himself as a self-indulgent poseur. He was here to make amends, to find out from the pilots themselves what they needed to restore American superiority in the air.

  Frank listened, hungry for the sound of Billy’s voice, as the dogfight ended as abruptly as it began. The overall commander for the day’s operations reported: “Flights reforming and returning—all MIGs chased across the Yalu.” Then Billy came on reporting a rough engine. “I think I’ve got part of a MIG in there,” he said. “He blew up only about two hundred yards ahead of me and I flew right through the debris.”

  With calm efficiency, he climbed to 40,000 feet and told everyone to relax. He was only eighty miles from the base now and could glide in if the engine flamed out.

  Frank hurried to the control tower to watch the squadron land. Billy’s wingman, a twenty-two year old from Georgia, did an exultant victory roll before getting into the landing pattern—announcing he had gotten his fourth MIG. Billy had shot down eleven. In a few minutes Billy appeared overhead, coasting serenely, a silver sliver against the blue sky. Behind him came two other pilots making deadstick landings. In five minutes everyone was on the ground, heading for the operations room for a debriefing.

  Frank limped after them on his bad leg and listened as Billy described a new MIG tactic. Usually the Communist pilots stayed high to take advantage of the MIG’s superiority above 25,000 feet. The Americans had grown used to looking for contrails left by jet engines in the thin upper air. Today the Communists had positioned another squadron well below the contrail height to pounce on the Americans while they were watching the higher trails.

  “From now on we’ve got to keep some sections low,” Billy said.

  “Does that mean we get one day off every fifth week instead of every fourth week?” his wingman asked.

  “It means you’re getting up tomorrow to run three miles instead of two.”

  The pilots ran every day. Like prizefighters, they had to stay in shape to handle the pounding of the g forces. Billy’s wingman was notoriously reluctant to take any exercise.

  The briefing over, the celebration began. They had downed four more MIGs today. Billy’s victory raised his score to twelve—one of the highest of the war. They piled into jeeps and headed for the Korean capital of Seoul, twenty miles away. Frank rode beside Billy, remembering Buzz driving at the same reckless speed to the bars and brothels of Toul in World War I. Planes changed but pilots remained pilots.

  Two hours later, in a smoky nightclub known as the Mocambo, Frank heard far more about the Sabrejet and air-to-air combat than he could get in an official briefing. “We need a plane that can let us hunt them instead of the other way around,” Billy said.

  “We can build one—but it’ll be tough to fly,” Frank said. “The wings will have to be even thinner than a MIG’s. It’ll be a flying gun platform, pure and simple, like the MIG.”

  “Why don’t we have one right now? I thought that’s what we were trying to put together in the White Lightning.”

  “We were—but the Air Force wasn’t enthusiastic. Americans are always trying to combine everything in one plane. An interceptor close support attack heavy bomber that can fly around the world without refueling.”

  “Where the hell did those Russian meatheads get that beautiful MIG airframe, Pops?”

  “The same place we got the design for the Sabrejet—from the Germans. They’re the ones who proved you needed a swept wing to get a plane above five hundred miles an hour.”

  “What about the engine?” Billy’s wingman asked. “I thought we made the best engines in the world. But those MIGs can just run away from us anytime they feel like it.”

  “The British make the best engines,” Frank said. “The MIG has a Rolls Royce Nene. The Labour government sold fifty-five of them to the Russians in 1946.”

  “That wasn’t too smart, was it,” Billy said.

  “The British are in a state of mental and spiritual collapse,” Frank said. “They’ve canceled one brilliant airplane after another since World War II ended. They didn’t have a plane to put the engine into.”

  Korean bar girls swarmed around them. The wingman was telling one how he shot down his fourth MIG. She smiled and ordered champagne for both of them. Everyone but Billy had a girl. He glowered at the wingman, who was using both hands to demonstrate the way he dove, upped his flaps and got his MIG as it roared past him.

  “I’ve lost two wingmen so far. I’m gonna lose him too. He doesn’t take it seriously up there. Sometimes I think flying these jets should be limited to old crocks like me, Pops. The goddamn things are so fast, they respond to the slightest touch. And there’s no sound. The noise is all going the other way. You start to think you’re indestructible, like Superman.”

  “Maybe it would help to have a plane that makes the pilot concentrate on staying alive.”

  Billy nodded. “I like that idea. Then we got to figure out what to stay alive for. The land of the free and the home of the brave? Seems to me nobody back home gives a shit whether we’re living or dying out here.”

  “Some of us do, Billy. More than you’d think, from the newspapers.”

  Billy pondered their images in the bar’s cracked mirror. He and Frank both looked shattered into a hundred pieces. “How can this be happening, Pops? Explain to me why we’re out here with fifty planes fighting the other guys with five hundred and fifty?”

  “It’s an old American tradition, to disarm after every war we fight.”

  Billy looked saturnine. He was no longer a boy. He was still a flier, still convinced flying was the only worthwhile thing a man could do. But fighting this war had turned him into a man who was angry at his country. That was a far more dangerous anger than the anger at God that had occasionally flared in his soul in New Guinea. Frank felt the same anger permeating his own soul, inflaming his mind, clouding his judgment.

  “If I get through this thing in one piece, I’m gonna do everything I can to make damn sure this doesn’t happen again,” Billy said. “I’m not gonna salute and say yes, sir to the politicians. I’m gonna say fuck you, sir. I’m not the only pilot who thinks that way.”

  “Maybe we can team up. If we can design some guts into Adrian Van Ness.”

  “How are things back at the Honeycomb Club?”

  “Not the same since Madeleine quit. They’ve got a new manager—a dyke who bullies the girls. They don’t stay long enough to get to know them. Doc Willoughby’s campaigning to close it. He says it’s wrecking half the marriages in the company. Where did Madeleine go, anyway?”

  Billy ordered another Scotch. It was rotgut stuff, made in Japan. “Good old Madeleine,” he said. “She was something.”

  “Where did she go?”

  “You really want to know?”

  “Why shouldn’t I?”


  “Makes me look like a heel, Pops.”

  “Why?”

  Billy called for a pen and scribbled an address. “Go ask her.”

  Frank hailed a pedicab and the grunting driver dragged him along the freezing avenues to a narrow alley near the city’s central market. Frank knocked. The door opened and there stood Madeleine. But it was not the smiling glossy-haired glowing woman who used to greet him at the Honeycomb Club. This Madeleine wore a face dulled by alcohol and unhappiness. “Frank!” she said. “What are you doing out here?”

  “Trying to help win this stupid war.” He held up the scrap of paper. “Billy gave me your address.”

  She invited him into a tiny apartment, barely warmed by two laboring space heaters. Moisture oozed from the walls. Dirty dishes and pots filled the sink. “I followed him out here,” Madeleine said. “I love him. I thought he loved me. Instead he gave me a thousand dollars and told me to go back on the next plane. I haven’t done it. But the money’s running out.”

  She started to weep. “What’s wrong with him, Frank? He made me so happy. I thought I made him happy.”

  “You did. You did,” Frank said. “But—”

  What? He did not know what was wrong with Billy. Did flying at mach 2 make some men unfit for ordinary happiness? Was Billy living out his brother Craig’s dictum on women: they’re only good for one thing? Frank no longer believed that. But he had not been able to make happiness with a woman part of his own life. Nor had Billy’s other father, Buzz McCall.

  Was Billy, in that peculiar symbiosis a son can contract from a father, imitating him and Buzz in a deeper, lonelier way? Marrying himself to the Air Force and a struggle to keep it on the cutting edge of flight, while a swelling bitterness demolished his soul?

  “Do you want me? Is that why you’re here?” Madeleine said. “He sends people here all the time. I’ve thrown them all out. But I’ll make an exception for you.”

  Frank took several hundred dollars out of his wallet and crushed it into her trembling hands. “Go home,” he said. “He can’t help it. Bad things are happening up there in the sky. That’s where he lives these days. It isn’t your fault.”

  “I love him, Frank!”

  Gazing into Madeleine’s once beautiful face, Frank Buchanan had a wrenching intimation that this was not the last time he would hear this cry from a woman trying to understand the mystery of Billy’s flight from happiness.

  BOOK SIX

  SCORPION

  Champagne glass in hand, Adrian Van Ness stood in the doorway of the Buchanan Aircraft chalet at the 1955 Paris Air Show watching Major Billy McCall streak overhead in the company’s new supersonic jet, the Scorpion. Around Adrian stood a cluster of Air Force generals and executives from Pratt & Whitney, builders of the jet’s engine. “That almost makes me wish we still had a war in Korea,” one of the generals said. “I’d love to see that thing up against a MIG-Fifteen.”

  Adrian murmured agreement. Everyone declared the Scorpion the most audacious airplane ever built, a marvel of lightweight construction and design. It had already set six world speed and altitude records. It could outclimb, outdive, outturn every fighter plane in the world, sending designers in other companies reeling back to their drawing boards.

  Frank Buchanan had created the Scorpion after spending three months in Korea with Billy McCall and other pilots. Unfortunately, the war it was designed to fight had ended. The Communists had abandoned their plan to unify Korea at the point of a gun. The cold war continued, of course.

  The Scorpion had also set a record for killing pilots. Six had died in the testing process, exploring what happened to an airframe at Mach 2. Many more had died learning to fly her since she became operational. The Scorpion did not tolerate mistakes. The thin, astonishingly short swept wings had inspired some people to call it a missile with a man in it. A pilot who forgot his flaps on a final turn to land never got a chance to correct his error. An engine failure left the Scorpion with the aerodynamic characteristics of a bathtub.

  Although the generals admired the plane, the Air Force was not rushing to buy large numbers of it. Their current order was a puny hundred copies. But Adrian had an answer to that problem: he was selling it to the rest of the free world—with the help of Prince Carlo Pontecorvo.

  Ponty had emerged from World War II as a hero of the underground resistance to Naziism. He had helped organize the continental struggle with British guns and money and finally led one of the most successful guerrilla groups in his native Italy. His book, Code Name Zorro, described dozens of narrow escapes in night drops, ambushes, and near-betrayals.

  While Adrian struggled to keep Buchanan aloft in the turbulent postwar world, Ponty had been absorbed by the fight to beat back communism in Italy and France. He had been a conduit for millions of dollars funneled into the contest by the Central Intelligence Agency to support politicians with the courage to resist Moscow’s collaborators. Now, with the left wing thrown on the defensive by the surging prosperity of the 1950s, he was in an ideal position to become Buchanan’s roving representative.

  Buchanan had brought planes to other Paris Air Shows, of course. It was the preeminent event of the aviation world. Every nation that either made planes or bought them poured into the City of Light for a wild week of partying and dickering and eyeing the competition. Le Bourget Airport became a sort of world’s fair of aviation, with the latest model airframes and engines on display or roaring overhead.

  Adrian returned to the air-conditioned interior of the chalet as Billy McCall began doing a series of stunts over the field that had the grandstands shouting applause. In a sitting room Ponty was watching Billy on closed-circuit television. With him was Frank Buchanan, Buzz McCall, and florid General Heinz Gumpert, second-in-command of the West German Air Force. “I wish we could get him to train our pilots to fly your plane that way—without fear,” Gumpert said.

  “It’s the only way to fly any plane,” said Buzz McCall.

  “Especially this one,” Ponty said.

  Six months ago, Ponty had persuaded the West Germans to buy no fewer than four hundred Scorpions. Harsh necessity had required the victors of the Second World War to rearm Germany. Risk aside, it was painless. They had billions in surplus marks from their miraculous economic revival, enough to buy the west’s latest weaponry.

  Adrian was not especially surprised to learn the deal involved that old reliable lubricant, douceurs. Last month, Ponty had coolly informed him three million dollars should be deposited in a certain Swiss bank. He would withdraw appropriate sums to reward the German politicians and generals who had participated in the decision to buy the planes. The great-grandson of the man who bought up the entire Congress of the United States to build the first transcontinental railroad smiled his agreement. He had brought the money to Europe and dispatched Dick Stone to Zurich to deposit it yesterday.

  Adrian’s daughter Victoria joined them, wide-eyed at Billy’s aerobatics. “He can make that plane do anything!” she cried, as Billy put the Scorpion through a climbing roll with flaps and landing gear extended, no more than a hundred feet above the runways.

  “It’s not supposed to be able to do that,” Frank Buchanan groaned.

  Now twenty-four, Victoria had not inherited her grandmother Clarissa’s regal beauty nor her mother Amanda’s winsome femininity. In low heels, she was almost as tall as Adrian. Her Englishy tweeds, a style he currently favored, made her resemblance to him almost dismaying. Adrian told himself there was something plaintive, even appealing about her homeliness. She made no attempt to disguise it with makeup or high fashion. Far more important to Adrian was her intellectual sophistication. She had spent the past four years at Somerville, one of Oxford’s colleges for women. She had become a good minor poet and had an admirable grasp of English and American history and literature.

  Adrian had sent her to school in England for a number of reasons. The sloppy, sulky postwar California teenager with nothing but pop music and movies in her
head had driven him to outbursts of rage. But the main reason had been his deteriorating marriage—and his affair with Tama Morris. Whole weeks passed without him and Amanda discussing anything more significant than the weather. She never displayed the slightest interest in probing his vague excuses for spending two or three nights a week at Tama’s Malibu cottage. With Victoria at home, this kind of routine would have been unthinkable.

  Victoria was also well on her way to getting her name into Clarissa’s will—something Adrian would never do as long as he stayed in the aircraft business. That was another reason Adrian had sent her to England. Victoria, of course, had no idea that she was a weapon in this lifelong power struggle.

  On the TV screen the Scorpion was replaced by the plane that was creating an even bigger sensation at this year’s show—the jet-powered British airliner, the Comet. It was a sleek swept-wing affair with four Rolls-Royce Avon engines. The pilot made a swooping pass over the grandstand, banked and climbed to 10,000 feet almost as fast as the Scorpion.

  As if it were a cue, Clarissa entered the sitting room. She had let her hair go white, which added a grace note to her hauteur. She wore only black suits and gowns now, heightening the play of light on her proud, lined face. “That’s the sort of airliner you’d have in production right now, Adrian, if you’d listened to me,” she said.

  “I told him exactly the same thing,” Frank Buchanan said, without turning his head in Adrian’s direction. In the five years since the cancellation of the Talus, they had yet to exchange a civil word. Most of the time his chief designer communicated through memos or messages carried by Cliff Morris or Dick Stone.

  “Jets guzzle fuel,” Adrian said. “The flying public has no confidence in them.”

  “I’m looking forward to flying on her,” Clarissa said, as the Comet continued to perform in the sky above Le Bourget.