Conquerors of the Sky

by Thomas Fleming

  It had worked, it had broken Billy’s spell. By now it had become a ritual. But it could not free Dick Stone from Amalie Borne’s spell. She was always there in the shadows, mocking his attempt to be a macho American lover.

  Lately he had begun to imagine him and Cassie as two lovelorn robots in a science fiction movie, two machines who had accidentally acquired the ability to love each other. He thought of his penis as a piston operating with the same methodical frenzy displayed by the gleaming metal rods in the Aero Commander’s growling engines. They were parts of the plane, extensions of technology, not two fleshy warm caring bodies and souls.

  Insanity. He had only seen Amalie Borne once in the last three years, at the 1957 Paris air show. Again their eyes had met across a crowded room. But this time Dick read the enormous sadness in them. She had left for Rome the following day without speaking to him.

  Why was he being haunted by a woman who disdained him? Amalie answered the question with a mocking sigh: Never ask me how.

  Cassie was above him and Dick had both his palms pressed against the hard teats of her coned breasts, while the engines pounded between his shoulder blades. He raised his head and rotated his tongue on the teats. Cassie bit the bone and flesh on his shoulder. The blue sky stared in both windows. Off to the left and right he could see the propellers whirling. He put both hands on her firm smooth rump and moved her up and down. Her tongue slithered up his neck and into his mouth. He breathed the perfume of her auburn hair, the sweet deodorized smell of her flesh. “Dick, Dick,” Cassie cried. “I wish it could last forever.”

  There was a romantic answer to that question. Will you marry me and make it try to last almost as long as forever? But Dick could not say the words. Did Cassie expect them, want them? Money was not a problem. He was now the assistant treasurer of Buchanan Aircraft. Cliff Morris had rescued the Starduster from red ink by selling two hundred copies in South America. Cliff thought he could do almost as well in the Middle East. The design department was in a frenzy, working on a top-secret supersonic bomber. The Lady of Luck might not give a damn but she was smiling on Buchanan Aircraft.

  He came and came and came and Cassie cried out with joy and raked her nails across his chest. There was still a delicious blend of desire and animosity in their lovemaking. She was still a creature to be tamed, mastered. She still resisted surrender—which made it so much sweeter when she came.

  Sighing, Cassie put on her slacks and blouse and Dick got his pants and shirt back on and they flew north along the Santa Cruz coast to the Santa Lucia mountains, with the Hearst Castle sitting in the middle of their huge rocky faces like a rich child’s toy. They had flown all over California in the last three years, seeing it from the air in all its immensity and splendor. From Muir Beach, a sliver of white sand between dragon’s jaws of green crouching headlands to the great Central Valley with its stupendous swaths of fruit and vegetable farms to Death Valley’s narrow wasteland.

  He was heading for their favorite site—the winding serenity of the Russian River as it descends between green hills to the sea at Jenner in Sonoma County. Soon they were swooping over it at 1,000 feet. “It’s what heaven must look like,” Cassie said.

  “I thought you didn’t believe in heaven anymore,” Dick said.

  “That changes my mind,” Cassie said, gazing down at the looping ribbon of water.

  For a moment Dick wondered if this was more important than the love they had just consummated on autopilot. He had shared his ownership of California from the air—the word ownership kept forcing itself into his mind—with this woman. Could he ever do it with anyone else? Amalie Borne? That might be a betrayal of Cassie far worse than sexual infidelity.

  They landed at the small airport on the outskirts of Palo Alto and Cassie helped Dick tie down the Aero Commander. They drove to a roadside restaurant in Cassie’s 1950 Ford and discussed her future. She was going to graduate in four months. What did he think she should do? Could he get her a job at Buchanan?

  Again the unspoken question dangled between them. “You might be better off at Douglas or Lockheed. If you’re set on the aircraft business.”

  “Why?”

  “The Honeycomb Club. People remember you.”

  Instantly, he hated himself for saying it. “Is that what’s wrong? Is that what’s worrying you?”

  “Nothing’s worrying me.”

  “That’s not true. We haven’t been honest with each other—in the old way—for a long time. A couple of years. We talk about American history and literature. But never about us.”

  “Maybe there isn’t anything to talk about,” Dick said.

  “Really?” Cassie said. “You mean that?”

  Dick was hating himself, the conversation, more and more. How could he lose control of the situation this way? “We’re not exactly romantic lovers.”

  “Whoever said we were?”

  She had him. All the cards were in her hand. All the pain too. “Look, I don’t mean any of this the way it sounds. I like you a hell of a lot. I wouldn’t have spent all this time with you—”

  “Maybe you’re tired of starring in Pygmalion. Especially now the statue’s startin’ to talk back.”

  “You’ve been talking back since the night I met you. I like it.”

  “But you don’t want to marry someone from the Honeycomb. It wouldn’t fit the executive image. Is that it?”

  “In this business? Are you kidding? It could make me the next president.”

  She did not like that either. Her eyes were bright with tears. A nerve pulsed in her temple. “I guess I’d just like to hear you say you love me.”

  There it was. The trump card of the 1950s, played between the heavy coffee cups and the thick plates of this roadside restaurant in the last year of the decade. “I do. But I’m not sure about the rest of it. Can you give me more time?”

  “Sure.”

  He picked up her hand and was shocked to see how badly she had been chewing her nails. One or two fingers were raw, bitten to the quick. Maybe it was not as easy to become an all-American girl as some coeds made it look at Stanford.

  Three days later, Adrian Van Ness called Dick into his office and told him to withdraw four million dollars from the Los Angeles branch of the Swiss bank in which they had set up a special account during the 1955 Paris Air Show. “The Prince is at the Ambassador. Take it over to him. It’s for the Starduster sales in South America. Carry it on the books under extraordinary expenses.”

  So much for Cliff Morris’s miraculous sale of two hundred planes, which he was celebrating all over Los Angeles, along with his promotion to sales vice president. Something deep in Dick’s nature opposed this way of doing business. But he could not resist the way Adrian took him into the inner circle of the company’s policies. It was a level of trust that no one else had achieved. It was Adrian’s way of saying people like them, intelligent, sophisticated people, understood the way the world worked.

  Dick could not decide what troubled him most, his own inner resistance or the way Adrian Van Ness seemed utterly unbothered by the bribery. Knowing nothing about Adrian’s early commitment to Oakes Ames and his epic example of making ends justify means, Dick fell back on uneasy rationalizations. The money went to foreigners to keep Americans working. Buchanan was not breaking any laws. They were not even losing money for the stockholders—the bribes were merely added to the cost of the planes.

  Dick brooded on these conundrums as he drove to the Ambassador with the four million dollars in his briefcase. At the desk in the ornate lobby, the clerk told him the Prince’s line was busy. He wandered down a corridor full of shops—jeweled Swiss watches, the latest fashions in furs, dresses, shoes. A figure in the dress shop froze him to the deep-piled carpet. A tall woman with a mane of flowing chestnut hair. Amalie Borne.

  Of course it made sense. The Prince was here. Why should he leave her in Europe with the meter running? Dick stepped into the shop. “It’s nice to see some foreigners have a conscience,�
�� he said. “I bet before you’re through with these shops, fifty percent of our lend-lease debts will be settled.”

  She turned, her smile arch—but pleased. “You’re absolutely right,” she said. “But I gather it can’t be done without your assistance. Why aren’t you upstairs? Your arrival has been anxiously awaited all morning.”

  “The line is busy.”

  “He’s on the phone to his wife in Milan or his mother in Rome. He calls them every day.”

  “How admirable. It makes me feel guilty. I haven’t called my mother in six months.”

  “Such schadenfreude. You ought to be ashamed of yourself.”

  “Can I buy you a cup of coffee?”

  “You can do more than that. You can help me carry these dresses to our suite.”

  “I’m not interested in three way conversations.”

  “Why not? They allay suspicions.”

  He let the smiling saleswoman pile three large boxes on his arms and followed her to the elevator. “What sort of a tip can I expect?”

  “If by tip you mean advice—I’ve already given you all I have.”

  In the suite, the Prince was just finishing his telephone call. “Ciao, Mamma,” he crooned. “Ciao.” He kissed the receiver and hung up.

  “I encountered this old friend at the desk when I picked up our mail,” Amalie said. “We met at the Paris Air Show. He took me to Verfours for dinner, saving me from starvation when you abandoned me for some disgusting Germans.”

  “I’m happy to see you again, Dick,” the Prince said. “You have the full amount? Some of our friends in South America are growing rather urgent.”

  “It’s right here,” Dick said, handing him the briefcase.

  The Prince opened it to make sure the amount was correct. The money was in five-thousand-dollar bills. “James Madison has such an engaging visage,” the Prince said.

  “I’ve already counted it,” Dick said.

  “We’re flying to New York today,” the Prince explained. “Then on to Rio. Any mistakes might be inconvenient.”

  “Of course.”

  “I’m taking an apartment in New York. At the Waldorf Towers,” Amalie said.

  “Oh?” Dick said. “I seem to recall you detested Americans.”

  “That sounds just like her,” the Prince said, briskly shuffling through his mail. “She specializes in outrageous opinions.”

  “All of which are based on experience,” Amalie said.

  “If you come to New York, give us a call, Dick,” the Prince said. “We won’t be there often but we’d enjoy seeing you. Especially if the circumstances are as pleasant as they are today.”

  Dick knew he should say something equally ironic. But he looked at Amalie and said nothing. “This new supersonic plane—will it be ready soon?” the Prince asked.

  “According to rumor, yes,” Dick said.

  “Business will be brisk. I hear the British and the French are working on one. And the Russians. If they can steal someone’s plans.”

  “But not the Italians?”

  “Lately our talent seems confined to cars.”

  “And women?” Amalie said.

  The Prince smiled. Dick was mute. All his feelings for this woman were being aroused again, after he had struggled so long to banish them. She was boldly inviting him to visit her in New York, converting the Prince into her mouthpiece. What did it mean?

  “Now you may buy me that coffee you offered when we met downstairs,” she said.

  “I’ll call room service, darling,” the Prince said.

  “No. You have your usual long distance calls to make. I can’t be witty while you’re talking business. Didn’t you notice that in South America?”

  The Prince shrugged. “Pay no attention to anything she says, Dick.”

  In the lounge, Amalie ordered Coffee Amaretto. “He’s so charming. And so disgusting,” she said.

  “Why don’t you leave him?”

  “I dislike complicated decisions.”

  “I still have that note you sent me.”

  She smiled, her eyebrows lifting. “It was a deft ending to our story, don’t you think?”

  “It wasn’t a story.”

  “Dear Dick. Dick. It was.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I’m not Jewish. I’m Polish. I worked in Schweinfurt as a forced laborer throughout the war. I met Madame George there. She was in the same precarious situation. We agreed that if we survived, we would arrange to live splendidly after the war. She conceived the idea of telling men stories to enliven our friendships. I was practicing on you. It worked rather well, you must admit. I passed it on to Madame and another girl has used it on a Jewish banker from New York with great success.”

  “You’re lying.”

  “I wish I was. I would have long since hired a writer to tell it to the world. It might make more money than that simpering little goody-goody, Anne Frank.”

  “I still think you’re lying.”

  She shrugged. “Think what you please. Tell me what Adrian Van Ness is like.”

  “He’s very shrewd—and he doesn’t have a moral bone in his body.”

  “Does he have a mistress?”

  “Not at the moment, as far as I know. His wife’s had some sort of breakdown. He devotes a lot of his time to her.”

  “Is he generous?”

  “Yes, on the whole.”

  “I dislike your reservations. I prefer simplicity in a man.”

  “Why are you so interested?”

  “I’m at his disposal when I’m in New York. I suspect it may turn out to be the other way around. When he is in New York, I’ll be summoned from Paris, Rome, wherever I happen to be.”

  “Why? Are you and the Prince separating?”

  “No. He simply can’t afford me any longer. His wife has been speculating on the Paris Bourse. She’s mortgaged a great many of her estates and has no cash to spare. He depends almost entirely on Buchanan for his livelihood these days.”

  “He’s selling shares in you!”

  “You put it crudely—but I suppose it’s true. I’m an asset. I suggest impossible dreams to men. They believe your planes fly without crashing.”

  “Will you be in New York soon?”

  “Tomorrow. I have no intention of going to South America again. I found their food atrocious, their wine abominable, their men vile, their women pathetic. The whole continent is drenched in the despairing knowledge that they’re doomed to perpetual inferiority to the Yankee colossus. I found myself believing you Americans may rule the world in spite of your naïveté.”

  “I’ll see you in New York, next week.”

  “I’ll make you miserable.”

  “I’ll make you happy.”

  Did he really believe it? Was he ready to betray Cassie Trainor, abandon his all-American girl for this mocking elusive woman who clutched sadness to her being like a second skin? Dick was catapulted back to his first fantasies of what it would be like to bomb Germany. He had imagined himself hunched over his maps, giving the pilot headings in a calm, intense Hemingwayesque voice. Reality had been horrifically different. His heart had pounded, his voice had croaked and trembled.

  Was it a warning? Perhaps. But the plane was already in the air. He was on his way to a strange country on a mission of redemption, not destruction. Wouldn’t that make a difference?

  In his heart Dick already knew the answer. He was rewriting the ethics of betrayal as Adrian Van Ness rewrote the ethics of selling planes. The consequences might be bitter. But he accepted the risk in the name of that elusive word, love.

  BOOK SEVEN

  WAR GAMES

  A gasp ran through the crowd as the great white plane emerged from the main hangar of the Buchanan plant on the edge of the Mojave Desert. No one had ever seen anything like it before, except in science fiction magazine illustrations. It was two hundred feet long and weighed three hundred tons. A stiletto fuselage tapered to a flat span of triangle wing surface set ab
ove an engine intake duct the size of a hotel hallway. Head-on it resembled a winged creature out of the dawn of time, craning its beaked head toward the light. Everyone realized they were looking at the most original airplane ever designed—the BX experimental bomber, the Warrior.

  “This one’s gonna make history,” Lieutenant Colonel Billy McCall said, throwing an arm around Frank Buchanan.

  “It almost made me history,” Frank Buchanan said. Only a few people inside the company knew how much inner agony this creature of the sky had cost their chief designer. He had been profoundly reluctant to build a plane that delivered nuclear weapons. No one but Billy McCall, implicitly reminding Frank of the promise he had made in New Guinea, could have persuaded him.

  Thanks to Billy’s early warning, Buchanan had a running start on the competition when the Air Force issued an invitation to six aircraft companies to submit designs for Weapon System 151. The requirements for the plane were mind-boggling. It had to be able to fly at mach 3, have a global range, carry 25,000 pounds of pounds—and be able to land on existing runways. Four of the six companies blanched and decided not to bid. Only Boeing and Buchanan competed and they both submitted designs that were so complicated, the Air Force suggested scrapping the project.

  At that point, Frank Buchanan discovered an obscure technical paper published by the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics that proposed an aircraft flying at supersonic speeds could belly-slide on the shock wave it was creating, like a surfer riding just ahead of a big comber. Frank asked for a forty-five-day extension of the competition and lashed himself and his equally exhausted fellow designers into an immense effort to incorporate this principle, called compression lift, into their design. Buchanan won the contract to produce two prototypes.

  Adrian Van Ness took one look at the plane and uttered a prophecy of his own. “That’s the supersonic airliner of 1965.”

  “I was hoping someone would say that,” Frank murmured, looking past Adrian as if he did not exist. He was still unable to speak his name without loathing.

  “You better start building a new factory,” said burly square-jawed General Curtis LeMay, head of the Strategic Air Command. “I want two hundred and fifty of these by 1963.”