Conquerors of the Sky

by Thomas Fleming

  “I wasn’t going to hurt you, Adrian,” Amanda said. “I only wanted to tell you I found Mrs. Welch upstairs, passed out—and there’s not a scrap of food in the house.”

  BOOK TEN

  MESSAGES

  Dozing on the couch in his office after his return from his visit to the BX bomber, Dick Stone could have sworn he heard a voice whispering: apotheosis. He awoke with a violent start and lay there, slowly absorbing the fact, the reality, the event.

  Adrian Van Ness was dead. The telephone call he and Cliff Morris had received last night in the board room was not imagination, not wish or nightmare or conjecture. The Buchanan Aircraft Corporation was swirling around him like a huge ungainly space vehicle with no one at the controls.

  Apotheosis, the voice whispered again. It was time for him to find the gold beyond his rainbow, maybe to begin paying the price Adrian and others had paid to make the flight. With the help of his tireless Japanese secretary, Jill Kioso, who had apparently slept on the couch in her office, by noon Dick had called every member of the board of directors and told them Cliff Morris was going to resign and asked them to support him as the next Buchanan president. He read them portions of Adrian’s last letter to bolster his case. Most of them agreed without much enthusiasm. Several said they wanted to hear from Cliff too.

  Next Dick called the heads of Buchanan’s divisions, aerospace, missiles, electronics, assuring them there was no cause for panic, he was in charge and was not going to let Adrian’s death alter the company’s course in any way. Here the reaction was much more positive. He worked more closely with these men than Cliff; they trusted him. Dick spent another hour telling the same story to chief designer Sam Hardy. Without him, there would be no hypersonic plane in Buchanan’s future.

  Hardy almost applauded when he heard Cliff was leaving. Sam still resented Cliff’s cracks about his negative sex appeal from the Honeycomb Club days. There was no loyalty crisis in the Black Hole—although Hardy’s moodiness could eventually become a problem.

  Around five P.M. Dick’s secretary laid a sheaf of incoming telephone calls on his desk. Most were from Buchanan supporters in Congress and friends in the aircraft industry. On top was a memo from Dr. Kirk Willoughby, reporting his inconclusive meeting with Frank Buchanan. That was bad news. Dick was going to need Frank’s support, especially if Cliff found a backer who wanted to keep him as president. Such a man would only be interested in one thing—dismantling Buchanan for a quick profit, an idea that might also appeal to some members of the board.

  “Dan Hanrahan’s on the phone from Virginia,” Jill Kioso said.

  That was the call Dick was waiting for. “Everything’s under control. I’m here in the house. I’ve got the contents of Adrian’s safe. It’s not that much—barely fills his attaché case. They’re shipping the body from the hospital to a crematorium in Los Angeles. I’ll bring Mrs. Van Ness back on the plane with me.”

  “How is she?”

  “Fine. All she talks about is Frank Buchanan. I’m glad I came here for that reason alone. You can’t let a reporter anywhere near her.”

  “We’ll handle that.”

  “We’re catching a ten A.M. plane. In case Frank’s interested.”

  “I’ll cell him if he calls. We can’t call him. He’s disconnected his phone.”

  “There’s one problem I can’t handle without a truck. Mrs. Van Ness showed me a secret room off Adrian’s study. The bookcase revolves and you’re in this little alcove. There’s a trunk in there, full of gold. I guess it was Adrian’s way of steadying his nerves when he bet the company on a big one.”

  Dick heard Adrian saying: I wanted to be a man of substance, forever beyond the reach of ruin. “Can anybody else find the room?”

  “Not likely.”

  “Leave the trunk there for the time being. We’ll get Shannon to move it out when things calm down.”

  Six hours later, Hanrahan strode into Dick’s office with the attache case in his hand. “Here’s the goods. Mrs. Van Ness is at the Bel Air with my wife. They’re old friends.”

  Dick opened the attaché case, not knowing what he would find. On top were a dozen photographs of Victoria at all ages, from babyhood to her wedding day. Why did Adrian keep them in his safe? Probably because he could not bear to look at them after her death.

  Next was correspondence with various presidents, none of it especially startling. Then a folder of poems about the beauty and majesty of flight. Dick was astonished to discover Adrian’s name at the bottom of each one. Adrian a poet! That cold-eyed bastard? It was astonishing.

  Then came a series of letters from an Englishman named Tillotson, written in the 1930s, full of encouragement and general business advice. Each began with the words: “My dear son.” There were copies of Adrian’s replies, obviously typed himself, which began: “Dear Father.” Mysteries within mysteries. One of these Dear Father letters was particularly revealing. It was written just after Victoria was born. Adrian told Tillotson how much the child meant to him, how badly he wanted to be a “complete father” even though fate and circumstances had prevented him from knowing one in his boyhood.

  Next came a sheaf of papers from a primitive forties or early fifties copier. It was mostly in German, which Dick had no trouble reading—although many of the words had faded. It was the protest the Germans had filed with the Red Cross in Geneva in 1943, accusing the Rainbow Express of violating the rules of war over Schweinfurt. On top of the first page was a handwritten scrawl from General Newton Slade, telling Adrian he could consider the matter closed.

  Finally there was an envelope with a letter in French thanking Adrian for rescuing her from the “bureaucratic Apaches.” The rest was an apostrophe to the beauty of California. Only southern France could compete with it. The letter was signed “Madame George.” It was dated 1971.

  Apotheosis. This time Dick could have sworn he heard Adrian whispering the word. His mouth dry, his pulse skittering, Dick called Hanrahan and asked him if he knew anything about Madame George. “She’s living in San Juan Capistrano,” he said. “I flew to France and brought her here in 1970. The French cops busted up her operation when she refused to pay them off at double the usual rates. Adrian brought her over to make sure she didn’t decide to write her memoirs. He paid for it out of his own pocket and ordered me never to mention it to you under any circumstances.”

  “Why not?”

  There was a long pause. “It seemed to have something to do with your Jewish conscience.”

  Apotheosis. This time Dick was sure he heard it.

  Dick called in Bruce Simons, their director of public relations, and discussed plans for a memorial service for Adrian. He sketched a speech he wanted to make to the board and told him to get a writer working on it. He called Shannon in Washington to find out what was being said and done in the rumor capital of the world.

  “It’s pretty quiet,” Shannon said. “Carter’s looking worse and worse. The Democrats are starting to pull in their left-wing horns. I think they’ll let us alone—if you can get Cliff to resign. Nothing else is gonna keep the Creature happy. What’s the word on the Big Shot?”

  “I don’t know where he is.”

  “Wurra wurra,” Shannon said.

  Dick ate supper at his desk, talking to chief designer Sam Hardy and the project manager for a new mach 3 high-performance fighter. They showed him slides of incredible vortices on the wings at a high angle of attack and told him how much they were learning about wing loading from the pictures. The research might be very useful in designing the hypersonic airliner.

  He spent the next several hours devouring reports from the missile and avionics divisions. When he looked at the clock on his desk, it was 11 P.M. The telephone rang. Cliff, ready to be reasonable? Dick grabbed the phone with hope uppermost.

  “Stone here,” he said.

  “Guilford—Tom,” said a shaky voice. “We just lost it. The big one. The BX. It went down about eighty miles from here, on a low-level practi
ce run.”

  “I’ll be there in an hour.”

  Dick summoned Sam Hardy from the Black Hole and Public Relations Director Bruce Simons from his bed. Their Hydra pilot got his instructions from the tower at Dreamland and in exactly one hour they descended from the starry sky at the crash site. The desert floor was eerily illuminated by huge searchlights the Air Force had flown in to begin the inevitable investigation. Pieces of the plane were scattered across a mile of desert. Most of them were blackened and twisted into junkyard objects. Only the needle nose, ripped off on impact, had escaped the fire and was relatively intact. It lay on its side like a decapitated head, reinforcing the desolation.

  “What happened?” Dick asked, as General Anthony Sirocca shook his hand.

  “All we know right now is they hit something big. It might have been a bird.”

  A bird big enough to disable a seventy-ton hundred-million-dollar bomber? Dick could almost hear the anti-defense lobbyists chortling.

  A haggard Tom Guilford joined them along with the boyish colonel in charge of the investigation. “We’ve found all four motors. There’s parts of a very large bird in one of them,” the colonel said. “It might have been a Canada snow goose. We’ve got a guy who was stationed in Alaska for a while. He says he’d bet on it from the feathers and the size of the feet. Those birds weigh twenty-five or thirty pounds.”

  “Why wasn’t that designed in?” Dick asked Sam Hardy.

  “Snow geese and other birds that size fly at much higher altitudes,” Hardy said. “We designed in resistance to birds of up to nine pounds.”

  “The fucking plane is supposed to go up to seventy thousand feet!”

  “But its mission is low-altitude attack. At high altitudes, if a big bird disabled an engine, there’d be plenty of time to handle the problem.”

  Dick sighed. It was always the same story. Trying to anticipate chance, outwit fate, and save money. For some reason, at least once in every plane, fate—or was it Billy McCall’s Lady of Luck?—wanted to let you know who was running things.

  “We can’t tell the real story,” Bruce Simons pleaded. “They’ll crucify us. A plane with a history like this being knocked down by a goddamn bird.”

  Dick stared stonily at Sam Hardy. He was looking more and more miserable. Leave it to Frank Buchanan to pick a bleeder for his successor. The guy was brilliant but he had Frank’s soft heart.

  “We’ll tell the real story,” Dick said. “Call it a one-in-a-million accident. Let them laugh for a day. Then design in fifty-pound birds. Fucking eagles and vultures wearing armor plate!”

  “It’ll add a hundred pounds to each engine,” Hardy said. “We’ll have to redesign the whole wing.”

  “So redesign it! Call up your wife and tell her she’s not going to see you for the next six months.”

  He turned to Sirocca. “Who was flying her?”

  “That kid who took you back the other night in your Rube Goldberg plane.”

  “I was afraid you were going to say that.”

  They flew back to El Segundo in a miasma of gloom. It reminded Dick of the time the Talus crashed. Were they heading for another chop session?

  “Has Cliff resigned?” Bruce Simons asked.

  “Not yet,” Dick said.

  Dick could see what Bruce was thinking. If Cliff has any brains left, he can wrap this crash around Dick Stone’s neck and let him try to dance with it. After all, Dick was the guy who proclaimed from the balcony of the Mojave factory two years ago that he was not going to let the BX die. Bruce—or Dick—could see Cliff declaiming to the board that he had always been opposed to the plane, he had tried to talk Adrian out of building it, the thing had gotten them a billion dollars’ worth of bad publicity. It was the reason why the senators had attacked him so viciously.

  It was so simple it was almost irresistible. There was only one person who could stop Cliff: Sarah. Again, Dick felt the wrench of inevitability tearing at his fragile hopes. It was becoming more and more impossible to ask her anything else.

  Back in the office, there was a memo from his tireless Japanese secretary on his desk: Sarah Morris called. She would like to see you at 9 A.M. tomorrow morning.

  Hope or ruination? Dick wondered. There was only one thing to do: gamble everything on telling the truth.

  Apotheosis, Adrian Van Ness whispered.

  EXILE’S RETURN

  Leaving the desert behind her in the rosy dawn, Sarah Chapman Morris drove along Interstate 10 past the stupendous rock formations of Joshua Tree National Monument. At times she had the road to herself, making her feel she was the last human being alive on the planet. She turned on the car radio and listened to a woman announcer with a honey-smooth voice.

  “At the top of the hour, the top of the news. President Carter’s budget for fiscal 1980 will include money for an additional six wings in the Tactical Air Force. That’s good news for Southland’s aerospace companies, especially General Dynamics, which produces the F-Sixteen jet fighter.

  “The Buchanan Corporation announced it will hold a memorial service for Adrian Van Ness, former chief executive officer and chairman of the board, early next week. Van Ness died in Virginia two days ago. A Buchanan spokesman said he had not been active in the firm for some years.”

  Sarah smiled wanly to herself, remembering how it felt to be an insider, aware of the superficiality of the news. She had spent yesterday disentangling herself from Susan Hardy. It had not been easy. Susan had accused her of desertion, abandoning all their good causes. With Cliff on the brink at Buchanan, now was the time to stick it to him.

  “It’s almost nineteen eighty,” Sarah had said. “A new decade. Time for a change.”

  She angled west on state roads until she reached the San Diego Freeway and joined the river of cars roaring north toward Los Angeles. Trucks lumbered past on the right; red, blue, and yellow sedans and sports cars whizzed past on the left. After thirty-five years, she still found driving in southern California a terrifying experience.

  She zoomed past L.A.’s downtown with its glossy new skyline, remembering the way it looked in 1945—less prepossessing than a medium-sized British city such as Bristol. In another twenty minutes of survival driving, she was on Santa Monica Boulevard, heading for Dick Stone’s house in Nichols Canyon. He had suggested they meet there rather than at company headquarters.

  Dick’s hair had grown completely gray—almost white. But he still had a lot of vitality in his burly body and wide square-jawed face. His features would have driven a woman to despair but they made him look ruggedly masculine. He smiled and kissed her on the cheek.

  “Thanks for coming—and a second thanks for coming early.”

  “Things must be frantic.”

  “You’ve heard the old saying, ‘If you can keep your head while those about you—.’ So far mine’s on my shoulders, I think.”

  He led her into the kitchen and served scrambled eggs and bacon, hot from the stove. They were delicious. “Some career woman would love to marry a man who can cook like this,” Sarah said.

  Dick’s smile was feeble. “How’s Cassie and the kids?” Sarah asked.

  “Tennessee agrees with Cassie. She’s almost cheerful on the telephone. The kids are okay.”

  “Has she married again?”

  Dick shook his head. “Thank God for small favors.”

  “What are we here to talk about?”

  “Cliff. He’s got to resign. If he tries to hang on, we’ll go under. If he goes gracefully, we’ll complete Adrian’s purification rite and borrow enough money to keep us airborne until the next president, Ronald Reagan, gives us ten billion to build the BX bomber.”

  He smiled tentatively. “I was going to use paper plates in case you started to throw things. But I decided to take a chance on being civilized, no matter how barbarous we may sound to your peace-loving ears.”

  “I’m not a protester by nature,” Sarah said. “Where do I come into this sordid picture?”

  Dick avo
ided her eyes. The words came out in chunks, as if each took a special effort. “I’m hoping you can talk to Cliff—as a wife. Convince him—it’s what has to be done. Those hearings—finished him—as an executive.”

  “That’s all he ever wanted to be. You might as well say they’ve finished him as a human being.”

  Dick buttered some toast, then seemed to change his mind about eating it. He moved his plate aside. “I hope that isn’t true. I like to think there’s life after aerospace. I was hoping you felt the same way, after backing away from it for a few years.”

  “I’ve caught a glimpse of it. But has Cliff?”

  Dick took a deep breath. “We’ve been friends a long time. But we’ve never talked on this level. Here goes. Did Cliff ever tell you about certain things that happened—one in particular—aboard the Rainbow Express?”

  Sarah shook her head. Twenty minutes later, she was sitting at the table, the rest of her eggs and bacon cold, the fork grasped in a hand that had lost most of its feeling, attached to a body that was in a similar condition.

  “That’s why you volunteered for the extra twenty-five missions?” she cried.

  She flung the fork across the bare dining room. A bachelor’s room, with nothing on the walls, just essential furniture, a table, chairs, a sideboard. They were all bachelors at heart, essentially indifferent to women, except as commodities, as bodies to screw, as minds to manipulate.

  “Why are you telling me this? Cliff said he did it for me! For England! I’m supposed to love a liar! Why did you volunteer? Why didn’t you let him get court-martialed?”

  “Because I felt guilty about it too. The extra missions were my idea.”

  It was almost a snarl. There was ferocity in his voice. She remembered he had flown those missions too. “I begin to think you’re all in need of a purification rite,” she said.

  “Maybe. But you’re not completely exempt, Sarah. Cliff’s never been the same since the night he got the news about Charlie and you unloaded on him. After that he was a setup for the movie star.”