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Conquerors of the Sky

Page 62

by Thomas Fleming


  “I didn’t stop,” Dick Stone said, his leaden voice betraying the lie.

  They were lying on the bed in her Waldorf Towers apartment, after making love for the last time. Dick had come to New York determined to demand a final yes or no. Before he could speak, Amalie had told him she did not want to see him again.

  “What is wrong with your whole country?” she said, clicking on the TV set from the switch on the night table. “I begin to think you are more hysterical than the Italians, more corrupt than the English, more grandiose than the French, more militarist than the Germans, bigger liars than the Russians.”

  On the television screen a sheriff’s posse and state troopers in Selma, Alabama were attacking Negro marchers with whips and clubs and tear gas. It was the spring of 1965. John F. Kennedy had been dead eighteen months. Lyndon Johnson had been elected president in his own right by the biggest majority in American history and proclaimed the Great Society—a swarm of federal programs that would give citizens of all ages and colors and creeds equal opportunity, equal housing, equal education, equal health care. He was discovering some serious unk-unks in this grand design.

  “I still love you,” Dick insisted. It was true. He was just redefining the word again, as they had defined and redefined it from the beginning. Love had become virtually identifiable with lust, with the compulsion to have this woman whenever he was near her. Only regret differentiated it from whorehouse fucking.

  “But there’s no joy in it, no daring anymore. Nothing forbidden. We’re like a married couple, Stone. It’s too disgusting to tolerate any longer.”

  She switched channels. Helicopters whirred over a green jungle to disgorge helmeted South Vietnamese troops beside a rice paddy. Johnson was determined to prove he was just as tough on communism as Jack Kennedy. He was putting more and more men and planes into this confusing war. He had another thirty thousand troops suppressing a Communist uprising in the Dominican Republic.

  “Your ridiculous ideas about love were driving me crazy, Stone. You should have done what Adrian Van Ness suggested, fucked me with lies on your lips. I would have adored that, when you finally told me.”

  “I couldn’t do it. I’m not one of Nietzsche’s Übermenschen. Sometimes I think you really want to be fucked by a Nazi. Nothing else really excites you.”

  “What a fascinating idea. You’re not as unoriginal as I thought, Stone.”

  The insults, the diatribes about America, about his personal shortcomings, had become more and more violent since Kennedy’s assassination. Gone was the aura of the woman who slept with the most powerful man in the world. Adrian, sensing Amalie’s isolation, or perhaps acting on revengeful advice from the Prince, had demanded she surrender all the incriminating papers she had stolen or face immediate cancellation of their agreement. A tearful Amalie had handed the documents over to Dick—after Xeroxing them and mailing them to Madame George. The Prince called a week later and told her that Madame George had turned the copies over to him. Henceforth, Amalie was simply another Buchanan employee.

  “Richard, Richard,” she said, rolling over on top of him. “Can’t you believe me when I say that the only way I can prove my love is by saying good-bye?”

  “I don’t believe you. I don’t accept it,” he said, redefining both words. He believed she was both proving her love and punishing him for failing to protect her from Adrian. He accepted it as the price he was paying for his freedom but in a deeper part of his soul he rejected it as unbearable.

  “You’re as incomprehensible as the rest of your country. I wish I never left Europe. I understood Europe. Here nothing makes sense except money and a sort of blind desire. You all want to fuck but none of you care.”

  Dick was seized for the thousandth time with a yearning to know if she was Jewish, if the first story was the true one. But now he was afraid of the truth. He wanted to escape this woman. She was destroying him.

  “Shannon says I must come to your magnificent capital tomorrow. There’s a senator who yearns to meet me. I told him it was out of the question.”

  Mike Shannon had become Buchanan’s field commander in the struggle for the supersonic airliner. He disliked Amalie. She transcended his Irish-American imagination in too many ways.

  “Why can’t you go?” Dick asked.

  “I have nothing to wear. My clothes are falling apart from endless dry cleaning. Either you double my allowance or I’m going back to Paris. Even if I starve, at least it will be in a city I love.”

  “You’re getting fifty thousand dollars a year for clothes now.”

  “Jackie Kennedy spends that in a month.”

  “I’ll talk to Adrian. Meanwhile, go see the senator. He’s very important at the moment. If he votes the right way, you too will be able to fly supersonically.”

  “And you’ll make ten billion dollars.”

  She rolled off him and lay on her back, staring at the blue ceiling. “I don’t need you any more, Stone. I need a man who doesn’t care about me. Who doesn’t care about himself. Who doesn’t care about anything. A man who does reckless acts because they’re always preferable to cautious ones. Because he’s compelled to risk himself again and again. Is Cliff Morris such a man?”

  “No,” Dick said.

  He put on his clothes, shoved one of her silver-backed white brushes through his hair and walked to the door. Amalie did not look at him. She continued to stare at the empty ceiling. Dick closed the door until he could no longer see her.

  “Good-bye, Amalie.”

  “Good-bye Stone.”

  Six months later, Dick sat in his car beneath Chimney Rock, a great steep-sided pinnacle of weathered stone in the coastal mountains north of Los Angeles. There was not another car, another human being, in sight. He put his arms around Cassie Trainor and kissed her gently, firmly.

  “How about it? Are you ready to get married?” he said.

  He had flown up to the Oxnard School the week after he said good-bye to Amalie and began trying to regain his all-American girl. It had not been easy. Cassie was as beautiful as ever. Her auburn hair still seemed to emanate sunlight. She stood as straight, her figure was as slim and firm as a twenty-year-old, thanks to a fierce program of jogging, swimming, and tennis. But some of the spontaneity, the vivacity had been replaced by thoughtfulness. She was a reader and a thinker now.

  Nevertheless she responded to his invitation to try to turn back the clock. She too wanted to regain some of that mocking stewardess who had cut loose in Manhattan Beach a decade ago. But it was mostly the other Cassie who emerged as the woman he was marrying. Now she talked back to him, not about whoriness and the Honeycomb Club but about his literary taste and political opinions.

  Cassie persuaded him to reread Faulkner and Hemingway and admit her fellow southerner was superior. She read aloud from her favorite southern poet, the long-forgotten James Bannister Tabb, who blended some of Poe’s music with a priestly tenderness. Cassie knew who she was in relation to the rest of the country: a southern woman who could live anywhere in America. Dick found himself attracted in an unexpectedly intense way.

  For six months they had spent their weekends exploring what Cassie called “lost California,” particularly in the mountains that look down on State 1 as it twists along the rugged coast below Oxnard. It reminded her of the empty landscape around Noglichucky Hollow in Tennessee.

  They drove east along Route 58 to a hundred-year-old saloon at Pozo, with tractor seats for bar stools. Through fields of barley ablaze with fireweed, the farmer’s enemy, they searched for the ruins of Adelaida, a town that no longer existed. Past stands of oaks and meadows sprinkled with wildflowers they roamed the Los Padres National Forest. Dick found Cassie’s desire to share this scenery profoundly touching. It was a kind of statement of the loneliness she had felt when he had more or less abandoned her in Oxnard.

  Now he was asking her the question that he had been unable to ask because Amalie Borne’s shadow loomed between them. He told himself these six month
s had banished Amalie’s presence. He was in love with this thoughtful American woman he had helped to create.

  Cassie kissed him in a sad gentle way and gazed up at Chimney Rock for a moment as if she was remembering shadows in her own life. “I wish we’d done it four years ago,” he said. “Why did it take us so long?”

  “Emotional retardation,” Stone said. “I hadn’t quite finished growing from a boy to a man.”

  He had debated whether to tell her about Amalie Borne and decided it would be a mistake. It was more than a little ironic. He had created an educated woman but he could not bring himself to trust her to be mature about the most important relationship in her life. But Amalie had left Dick too bruised, too wounded, for irony.

  The wedding was a small, almost private affair in a white-steepled Baptist church near Oxnard. Most of the guests were from Buchanan Aircraft. Cliff Morris was Dick’s best man. One of Cassie’s favorite students was her maid of honor. Frank Buchanan gave the bride away. Billy McCall and Victoria, Adrian Van Ness and Amanda completed the party.

  Adrian’s toast was both a wish and a warning: “May the bride realize she’s marrying a man—and an aircraft company.”

  “God help her!” Amanda said.

  Everyone laughed. “I’m not joking!” Amanda said.

  “That’s what makes it so amusing,” Adrian said.

  “I would love to be married to an aircraft company. I can’t think of anything more exciting,” Victoria Van Ness McCall said.

  “When you’re married to the right man, everything is exciting,” Sarah Morris said.

  Even though he was well lit on champagne, Dick sensed an undercurrent of malice in Sarah’s remark. His years of penetrating the mockery in Amalie’s conversation had sharpened his ear for nuances. Sarah’s eyes had a feverish glow. She seemed much too excited for a wedding that was decidedly unromantic. Was she needling Victoria—implying that Billy was the wrong man? Or comparing him to Cliff?

  Whatever was implied, Victoria ignored it. “I found that out long ago,” she said.

  She smiled at Billy. A word from Dick’s struggle with Amalie lurched into his mind: voracity. There were times when he wondered if she had wanted to annihilate him with her relentless reports of her assignations. This was another kind of voracity. For a moment Dick felt sorry for Billy McCall.

  The newlyweds departed for a two-week honeymoon on Maui. They rented a plane and flew to other islands. They drank rum swizzles and swam and played tennis, at which Cassie usually beat her out-of-shape husband. By night they made tender love and discussed their future. Cassie wanted to have children and then think about going back to graduate school to get a Ph.D. in American Studies. She had read the recent best-seller, The Feminine Mystique, but she still thought a family was more important than a career. “You can take the girl out of the South but you can’t take the South out of the girl,” she said.

  The telephone rang. It was Adrian Van Ness. “Dick,” he said. “I hate to interrupt your honeymoon. But I’m afraid you’ll have to consider cutting it short. We just heard from Mike Shannon that Johnson’s going into Vietnam with both feet. He’s committing a hundred and twenty-five thousand men next week and he’ll have four hundred thousand there by the end of the year. The Air Force and the Navy and the Marines are letting bids for a dozen different planes. We need you to help us cost out these proposals—”

  “I’ll call you in the morning,” Dick said, slamming down the phone.

  “Your leader?” Cassie said.

  “If I die and go to heaven or hell, I’m sure Adrian Van Ness will have my telephone number,” he said.

  He was remembering the night the Korean War began. Making love to Cassie with Adrian Van Ness watching in a corner of his mind. Wondering if he could ever deserve happiness while working for Buchanan Aircraft. Amalie Borne’s voice began whispering mockery in that same invisible place.

  “Will you love me even if I’m unfaithful with an aircraft company?” he said, putting his arms around Cassie.

  “I believe that was in the contract,” she said.

  She was still his all-American girl.

  BOOK EIGHT

  HATRED AT WORK

  “We’re out of it.”

  Cliff Morris was calling from Washington, where the Federal Aviation Authority was selecting the winner in the design competition for the supersonic airliner. With the usual help from Mike Shannon, who had numerous friends in Lyndon Johnson’s White House, Cliff had gotten the bad news a month in advance of the announcement.

  “Who won?” Adrian said.

  “Boeing.”

  The one company in the business who did not need the contract. Boeing’s new jumbo jet, the 747, was on its way to dominating the intercontinental commercial market. Its medium-range 727 was equally triumphant in the short and middle distances in the United States. Worse, Boeing’s supersonic design was the one most people in the aircraft business had dismissed. But the Seattle plane maker had Senator Henry (Scoop) Jackson, better known as the senator from Boeing, on their side. Buchanan and Lockheed, the other two supersonic finalists, were among a half dozen California aircraft companies, all busily cutting each other’s throats in Washington. They had no such blunt instrument to get the attention of the bureaucrats.

  “Adrian, that thing is never going to fly,” Cliff said. “Frank says their swing wing won’t work. The environmentalists are already screaming it’s going to pollute the upper atmosphere. The sonic boom means it can only fly over water. Guys like the Creature are going to eat Boeing for dinner, with Scoop Jackson for dessert. They’ll never vote the money for it.”

  “I hope you’re right,” Adrian said, hearing the desperation in Cliff’s voice. He had spent most of 1966 in Washington in this losing struggle to rescue their plane. Adrian knew how Cliff would translate the comment. If you are wrong you can say good-bye to your hopes of becoming Buchanan’s president.

  “We’ve got the Thunderer. The Navy’s nuts about it and McNamara wants the Air Force to buy it. We’re first in line on this new monster transport. It’s a two-billion-dollar contract, Adrian. They’re ready to go for a new high-performance fighter, to replace the Scorpion. We’re near the head of the line for that too. The Air Force loves Frank’s design.”

  “What else is cooking?”

  “Vietnam is going from bad to worse. We’ll have six hundred thousand men in there by the end of the year.”

  Ruined stopped howling in Adrian’s head. He had chosen well when he put Cliff Morris in charge of Buchanan’s sales. He had become an adept pupil of the Oakes Ames school of political management. Buchanan now operated a virtual hotel on the Chesapeake where Pentagon civilian and military brass mingled with senators and congressmen for weekends of golfing, shooting, and luxury drinking and dining while Cliff and Mike Shannon and a staff of thirty sold Buchanan planes. At crucial moments Cliff injected Amalie Borne into the game with a sense of climax that Adrian himself would find it hard to match.

  But the supersonic airliner. None of the other planes Cliff was talking about meant anything to Adrian compared to the SST. He strode out of his office and took the elevator to the ground floor. Walking swiftly down the maze of corridors, greeted by startled security guards at checkpoints, he reached the hangar where Buchanan’s two-million-dollar SST mockup sat, bathed in overhead fluorescent lights.

  Gleaming white, three hundred feet long, it was a hollow plane, with no wiring, no hydraulics, no engines inside the huge ducts. But it had a full complement of seats, galleys, lavatories, carpets, and other accessories to give visitors the feel of a finished product. They had used the mockup for a thousand publicity pictures. Now Adrian saw it with different eyes.

  It was the Warrior bomber with windows. After some early experimentation with a modified wing, Frank Buchanan had developed a strange indifference to doing more design work on it. Adrian, still in the grip of the illusion of favoritism the Kennedys had created, had not protested. After all, the plane had act
ually flown at mach 3, something none of their competitors could claim.

  Much too late, Adrian remembered Billy McCall’s candid admission to the Senate committee that the SST had a whole range of problems that the builder of a bomber did not have to worry about. Fuel economy, landing speed, the complete elimination of duct rumble, or surge, as the British called it. Frank Buchanan had dismissed Adrian’s pleas to tackle these problems. He insisted they could be dealt with in the testing and production phase when they would not be spending their own money. Besides, he was too busy with the military planes Cliff had just mentioned.

  Behind Frank’s smiling refusal, Adrian now saw another motive: hatred. Frank did not want Buchanan Aircraft to win the competition. He did not want Adrian Van Ness to be able to go to the next meeting of the Conquistadores del Cielo and sit down with Don Douglas and Bill Allen of Boeing and Roger Lewis of General Dynamics as the man who was making the most famous plane in the world, the man whose company’s name was on everyone’s lips.

  Frank Buchanan did not want Adrian Van Ness to go to sleep at night thinking that all around the world, tens of thousands of people were whizzing over oceans and continents in Buchanan Aircraft’s SST. With uncanny malice, Frank was depriving Adrian of his deepest wish, his hungriest hope.

  Hatred. Adrian felt it beating on him, with the glaring intensity of those overhead lights. There was no place he could escape it. At home it confronted him in Amanda’s malevolent eyes, in her relentlessly hostile remarks. It stared at him from his son-in-law’s cold gray eyes. Even Victoria, the one person in the world from whom he expected an exemption, seemed to reflect it in her moody alienation. Was this his only reward for his years of struggle and anguish?

  “Mr. Van Ness? Any news from Washington?”

  It was Terry Pakenham, the foreman who had supervised the work on the mockup. A big thick-necked man with the flushed face of a drinker, he had been with Buchanan since 1946.

 

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