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Authors: Thomas Fleming

BOOK: Conquerors of the Sky
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As usual, Sarah Chapman Morris awoke an hour before dawn. She lay in bed, watching the windowpane grow gray. Around the house stretched the southern California desert, arid mile after mile to the Salton Sea and Death Valley. It was a landscape as different from the green flowering England of her youth as nature—or the imagination—could devise. The aridity, the emptiness corresponded exactly with her state of mind and soul.
Thirty-six years. Thirty-six years since Sarah Chapman walked down the aisle of the country church outside Rackreath Air Base arm in arm with Captain Clifford Morris, the handsome American bomber pilot, whose indifference to religion dismayed her devout Catholic mother. Her brother Derek, flying fighters for the RAF, had asked in his brutal way how she could marry anyone from the “Bloody 103rd” bombardment group. Did she have some peculiar desire to become a widow?
Sarah put on a dressing gown and padded through the silent house to the room that had been her husband's study. She pressed a button on the desk. Along the wall to the right of the terrace doors, concealed lights illuminated an immense painting of a B-17 plowing through flak-infested skies, spewing bullets from its turret and tail and waist guns at German fighters. Beneath the cockpit window was a crescent rainbow with a plane soaring above it. At least once a day, Sarah stared at the painting as if she needed to convince herself that her life was not a dream.
On the empty dest was a letter from Adrian Van Ness.
Dear Cliff:
We have weathered the worst of the scandal without losing a single contract. This is a tribute to your reputation within the aircraft industry and in Congress. Alas, the same thing cannot be said for the Buchanan Corporation. Over the years we have acquired enemies in the press and in Washington, D.C. who are still pursuing us. The other day I heard from one of our closest Pentagon friends that our chief tormentor in the Senate was threatening to start a new round of hearings to explore our “continuing culpability” because we have, he claims, displayed not a single sign of repentance for our sins. I am sure you realize more negative publicity would make it impossible for us to obtain the financing we so badly need.
For thirty years you have demonstrated a readiness to work, to serve, to sacrifice for Buchanan. Can I ask you to consider an ultimate sacrifice, your resignation?
I have told Dick Stone you might want to discuss the terms of your retirement. He has orders from me to be even more generous than he would be under ordinary circumstances.
Regretfully,
Adrian
The bastard, Sarah Chapman Morris thought. The corrupt ruthless brilliant bastard. She should have known it was coming. She should have known Adrian Van Ness would send her a copy of this letter. It was exactly what a master of forethought would do. He was trying to stir pity in her forlorn heart.
A crash. The wind was blowing a shutter or a door somewhere in the house. Sarah padded through the rooms full of sleek chrome-and-glass furniture. The noise was coming from one of the patio doors. She stepped outside and let the cold desert wind cut into her flesh for a long minute. A plane was coming over the Funeral Mountains, beginning its descent to Los Angeles. The way she and Cliff had arrived thirty-four years ago.
The passengers would soon be looking down on the awesome sea of lights, the forty-six square miles of a city that was not a city, a vast collection of canyons and arroyos and flats and seacoast in search of an identity, with Hollywood in the center of it, infecting everything with its amoral hedonism.
No. That was the old Sarah talking, the once proper English girl with her devotion to spiritual ideals. That woman was dead. As obliterated as the test pilots who smashed their experimental jets into the desert floor at 2,500 miles an hour. Miss Sarah Chapman was gone into some region where souls occasionally communicated with the living. Now she was a semi-divorced American wife named Ms. Sarah Morris shivering in the desert wind beneath a starry California sky with the blank black bulk of the mountains looming in the night a few dozen miles away.
They had all come so far.
Was the distance the human equivalent of losing your soul—or finding it? Sarah pondered that question for another thirty seconds as the jetliner descended, wingtip lights blinking. In a few more minutes the landing headlights would come on and it would resemble a prehistoric creature, a pterodactyl or some other monster plunging out of time into man's exhausted mind.
She hated planes.
Was that true? She had always loved the idea of planes. Maybe she just hated what men did to make and sell them. That thought led to eighty-three year-old Frank Buchanan in his shack above Tahquitz Canyon. To memories of yesterday's soaring session in his sailplane,
Rainbow's End
. My God, how she loved those motorless hours in the sky with him! Almost as much as she loved the hours of reminiscence she had mined from his shy, reclusive soul.
Sleep was out of the question now. In the bathroom, Sarah washed her face and studied herself in the mirror by the dim glow of the night light. She looked ghostly as well as ghastly. Maybe she had become Miss Sarah Chapman again. Maybe she had died and was starting to relive her life, backwards. But Adrian's letter to Cliff mocked that silly idea. The letter was like a gaff in her flesh, flinging her forward into time again.
Sarah padded into the sunken living room and pulled a video at random from a rack beside the television set. She shoved it into the VCR and sat down. A stubby-winged, thick-bodied plane hurtled toward her on the television screen. She almost cried out.
“The Wild Aces,” growled a gravel-voiced narrator. “They take the fight to the enemy. They hit him where it hurts.”
It was a video of a film Buchanan had made to help sell their ground-support plane, the Thunderer. The narrator told why it was the best plane the U.S. Marines had ever bought for the money, his voice rasping against the rising beat of a frenzied orchestra. The Thunderer could carry more bombs, more hardware than anything the enemy could put in the sky. It could carry two-hundred-and-fifty-, five-hundred-, thousand-pound bombs. It had a twenty-millimeter cannon that fired 600 rounds a minute. It had Shrike missiles that could demolish the enemy's surface-to-air missile sites. That was the Thunderer's job. To come in low and get those SAM sites to make things safe for the bombers following them.
Sarah sat and watched the pilots getting into their G suits. She prayed she would not see her son. She no longer thought God was listening but she prayed anyway. It did no good. They all looked like Charlie. They were all young and cheerful and had short hair and strong jaws and firm, proud American mouths.
Sarah watched them climb into their cockpits and put on their shiny plastic helmets and clamp the oxygen masks on their faces. She watched them taxi down the runway, shove the throttles forward and vault into the sky, flame spewing from their afterburners.
“Taking it to the enemy,” roared the narrator. Sarah watched the bombs explode on bridges, rail yards, factories, on what the narrator called troop concentrations but looked like trees and farms. The bombs burst and burst, sometimes
leaping up in great orange gushes of flame, usually mushrooming into serrated puffs of earth and exploding dust.
Click. The screen went dark. Susan Hardy stood beside it, a blur against the gray desert dawn. “Are you crazy?” she said. “Are you trying to drive yourself crazy?”
“Maybe,” Sarah said.
Her fellow pilgrim, with the burning passion for peace in her eyes. Sarah had traded her life as the wife of the chief executive officer of the Buchanan Corporation for exile with this woman. Susan was her oldest American friend. She had divorced her unfaithful husband years ago. She had led Sarah into the exhilarating bewildering worlds of the women's movement and the peace movement.
Without turning on a light, Susan sat down on the couch beside Sarah and kissed her on the cheek. “You're trying to accept it, aren't you? The whole thing. But that's the wrong way to go. Acceptance is just another word for surrendering to the bastards.”
“Yes,” Sarah said automatically. She no longer agreed with Susan but it was too exhausting to argue with her.
“Once and for all you have to ask yourself—what, who do you love,” Susan said.
“I'll do that,” Sarah said.
“The right answer is you love yourself. You are the most important person in your world.”
Susan retreated to her bed. Sarah sat on the couch and watched the sun tip the Sierra's peaks with fire. Was I ever in love with anyone? she wondered. Was I really in love with a dream of glory, a destiny in the sky? Was I as drunk with the beauty, the terror, the mystery of planes as all the rest of them?
The telephone rang. Who in the world could be calling at this time of day? She walked into the hall to answer it. “Sarah?” Dick Stone said. “Adrian Van Ness died of a heart attack about four hours ago. I think it's time you came home. Cliff needs you.”
Trailing the extension cord, Sarah stumbled back into the living room and sat down on the couch again with the phone in her numb hand. The fiery light was spilling over the Funeral Mountains. In the nearer distance, it created an aureole around a Joshua tree. The giant cactus seemed to be thrusting its prickly stumps into the glowing air in a silent hallelujah. Or was it a desperate plea?
And you don't? You don't need me?
cried the ghost of Miss Sarah Chapman somewhere in her married mind. The ghost wanted to shout those words into the phone's white mouthpiece. But Sarah only sat there staring at the Joshua tree, deciding to let the ghost write the whole story. She would tell it objectively, with the crystalline clarity of the stratosphere, tell it without so much as a whimper of an I, an echo of an ego. She would tell everything she had learned in England and America, in Los Angeles and in the Mojave and on the ridge above Tahquitz Canyon.
“Sarah?” Dick Stone said. “Sarah?”
She would begin with Adrian Van Ness and Frank Buchanan, the original spinners of the web of profit and loss, betrayal and commitment, exaltation and compulsion that became the years of their lives. She would go back to the moment when men first discovered the omnipotence, the wonder, of the sky and began to explore the meaning, the power, of wings. Only by regaining the illusion of innocence could she hope to explain the stunning inevitability of it all.
She would
control
her
rage
at the
obscenities
they
committed
in the
name
of their
planes.
She would not
lament
the
women
they
mutilated,
the
lives
they
twisted
and
tormented
like the metal they
bent
and
hammered
into
shapes
they
loved
more than their
children.
She would
write
of
love
and
hate
and
despair
with the debonair
courtesy
of the
dammed,
the irony of the
unforgiven,
the blank-eyed
calm
of the angel of
death.
The ghost would live in all the tormented hearts and anguished heads with a phantasm's duplicity, telling the truth the truth the truth about everyone, even about that riven ruin of reproach and regret known as Sarah Chapman Morris.
“Sarah?” Dick Stone said. “Sarah?”
In 1912 Americans were dancing the Crab Step, the Kangaroo Dip, the Chicken Scratch, and the Bunny Hug. The slang expressions of the year were
flossy, beat it!, peeved,
and
it's a cinch
. Movies were attracting five million people a day. An eastern Democrat named Woodrow Wilson was running for president. The U.S. Marines landed in Cuba to restore order. Frank Buchanan did not pay much attention to any of these things. He was too busy being the happiest sixteen-year-old in California, working as mechanic and factotum for his brother Craig, the pilot of a bright green biplane called
Rag Time.
Craig had thundered up to Frank's door in his Harley-Davidson motorcar two years before to take his younger brother to the Dominguez Hills air meet outside Los Angeles. His mother had begged Frank not to go. She did not want him to have anything to do with her swarthy swaggering older son, who had defied her exhortations and admonitions practically from birth. In 1905, at the age of eighteen, Craig had gone off to race motor cars, becoming as famous as Cal Rodgers and Eddie Rickenbacker in that daredevil sport.
Frank had found the invitation to Dominguez Hills irresistible. Craig had said it would be the first air show in the United States. Airmen from France and America were going to fly balloons, dirigibles, and planes. It was going to make California famous for something besides orange groves and sunshine.
On the green mesa between Compton and Long Beach, a crowd of 20,000 swarmed off the big red Pacific Electric Railway cars to see the most miraculous sight in history—men flying through the air. The planes were the main attraction. Balloons were old stuff and dirigibles had been wobbling through the California sky for several years. One had raced an automobile from Los Angeles to Pasadena in 1905 and won.
Frank watched easterner Glenn Curtiss begin the festivities with a flight in his gleaming yellow biplane, the
Golden Flyer,
which had won the world's first
air meet in Rheims, France in 1909 with a top speed of 46.5 miles an hour. The
Flyer
had a tricycle landing gear and a sixty-horsepower “pusher” motor that purred away behind the pilot's back. The crowd roared with excitement as Curtiss circled the field at a height of fifty feet, flying over a half mile and making a smooth landing in front of the grandstand.
Other pilots took to the air in similar machines. They soon demonstrated that flying was not only marvelous—it was dangerous. For reasons no one seemed to understand, planes suddenly slipped sideways out of the air or plunged to the ground nose first. The organizers of the meet did not let these accidents stop the show. Ambulances rushed to haul the fliers from the wreckage of their planes, the mangled struts and wires and fabric were towed out of sight into a nearby ravine—and another plane was in the air, dazzling the spectators again. Only the next day did they learn in the newspapers that the crashed flier was badly injured—or dead.
The star of the meet turned out to be a Frenchman, Louis Paulhan. He performed sharp banks and dives that made Curtiss and other fliers look timid. In eleven days of flying before crowds that totalled 176,000, Paulhan won 14,000 dollars in prize money.
“That does it, kid,” Craig said. “From now on we're in the plane business.” With his usual magnificent self-confidence, Craig introduced himself to Paulhan and soon learned the secret of his acrobatic skills. “It's those hinged sections on the wings. He calls them ailerons,” Craig said. “They keep the ship steady in a turn.”
Craig paid Paulhan five hundred dollars for a week's flying lessons. This gave him a chance to inspect Paulhan's plane and discreetly sketch the design. At night Craig gave lessons of another kind to the Baroness von Sonnenschein, a statuesque blond Viennese who had traveled to America with Paulhan's party. She liked Craig's lessons so much, she rented a cottage in the Malibu Hills and let Paulhan go back to France without her.
Craig and Frank went to work on building an imitation of Paulhan's plane. Frank took a course at the Los Angeles YMCA to improve his woodworking skills and did so well he personally carved the laminated walnut propeller the day before they rolled the plane out of Craig's Santa Monica garage.
Rag Time
had a wingspan of thirty-three feet. The hickory and ash struts were covered with green pegamoid, a fabric made of calico treated with celluloid. Craig had improved the rudder controls and widened the ailerons to give the ship added stability. They put a sixty-horsepower motor developed by a San Francisco automaker behind the pilot's seat and
Rag Time
was ready to fly.
The Baroness was naturally the first passenger. She cried out in French and German as Craig zoomed over the ocean and dipped and banked and dove to within inches of the whitecaps. Later Craig told Frank the exclamations were identical to those he heard at midnight in the cottage in Malibu.
Frank found Craig's attitude toward women confusing. He often came back from a visit to the Baroness and described in vivid detail what they had done,
while Frank worked on
Rag Time
. Then Craig would drink a cup of coffee to sober up, take off his coat and say: “That's all they're good for, kid. The rest is yak-yak.”
Craig completed
Rag Time
's maiden flight with a perfect three-point landing. Frank helped the ecstatic Baroness descend from the passenger seat. Craig winked and said: “Get aboard, kid.”
Down the grassy meadow they raced to soar above the horizon as Craig pulled back on the control stick. Up up they mounted against a strong headwind until the entire coast—the great headlands of Palos Verdes, the flat undulating shore of Long Beach and San Pedro, the wooded crests of the Santa Monica Mountains and the scattering of houses and business buildings called Los Angeles were visible in one magnificent sweep.
It was not simply the vista, it was the sensation of riding the wind that made Frank Buchanan an instant convert to the air age. Flight created a lightness, a happiness in his body and mind that seemed exactly like his mother's description of the soul's journey to the realm of peace and light after death. It was heaven on earth, divinity within the grasp of living men!
Craig was soon flying
Rag Time
all over California, winning prizes at other air meets, including a second show at Dominquez Hills in 1911, where he picked up 450 dollars as the best novice flyer. At that show, the organizers had added something new to the excitement. They staged a mock bombing raid. A detachment of national guardsman hunkered down behind some earthworks and Craig and another pilot dropped smoke bombs on them. The soldiers ran out and surrendered.
The extra seat they had added to the plane was a moneymaker. After William Randolph Hearst took a ride with Louis Paulhan and reported it in his newspapers like the Angel Gabriel announcing the second coming, hundreds of people were eager to fly at five dollars a head. Few pilots were more popular than Craig. With his racing car driver's peaked hat perched sideways on his head, a big cigar clamped in his mouth, he was the essence of heroism on the ground and in the air.
So here it was, 1912. They were on the way to an air show in San Diego. As they climbed aboard
Rag Time,
Frank said: “Can we stop in Santa Ana and see Mother?”
“How many times do I have to tell you to put that crazy woman out of your mind once and for all?” Craig said.
That was not easy for Frank to do. He had spent his boyhood defending Althea Buchanan from the ridicule of her neighbors and his friends. She never sought the messages that came to her in the night, voices of guardian spirits who told her of forgotten wars and evil conspiracies in the blank centuries before history began in books. The English-born pastor of the Church of the Questing Spirit said she was one of the rare few who could communicate directly with the world beyond the grave. But outside the tiny circle of true believers in the church, her gift had brought Althea Buchanan little but scorn and heartbreak.
Craig flew
Rag Time
above the coast highway, telling Frank to get over his
“momma's boyitis.” They were going straight to San Diego. But Frank knew they had to land for gas somewhere. When the village of Santa Ana appeared on the left, he grabbed Craig's sleeve and pointed to it. Cursing, Craig banked over the town and circled the Buchanan ceramics factory, with its beds of blooming flowers between the office and kiln. He landed in a grassy field just beyond it.
Althea Buchanan manufactured plates and pitchers and platters portraying Spanish days in old California. She had no training as a painter. Her designs were primitive but the colors were vivid and the expressions on the faces of her Mexicans and Indians emanated an innocence that Anglos found irresistible. There was scarcely a house in the Southwest that did not have at least one of her creations.
She had come to the sleepy town in Orange County just after Frank was born in freezing Kansas. One of her guardian spirits had told her to seek warmth and sunshine for the infant or he was doomed. Her husband, delighted (according to Craig) to find an excuse to split up, declined to accompany her. She had taken ten thousand dollars from him and headed for California with her two sons, confident that her guardian spirits would guide her when she arrived. They had told her to found the ceramics factory and she had done so with astonishing success.
Althea hurtled toward Frank and Craig, her cheeks streaked with dirt, her red hair cascading in all directions beneath an immense sun hat. Behind her trooped the twenty Mexicans who did the hard labor at the furnaces. Althea was only four feet eleven and at fifty still had the complexion of a sixteen-year-old. Her perpetual youth sharpened the aura of unreality that always surrounded her.
“What is it? Where did you get it?” she cried.
“It's a plane, Madam,” Craig said. He always treated her with mocking courtesy, no matter how much she abused him.
“It's beautiful,” she said, making a wide circle around
Rag Time.
“Does it have a soul?”
“It's a machine, Madam. Machines don't have souls.”
“I've seen a creature like it in a dream,” she said. “Galdur, the tyrant who ruled Palestine a thousand years before the Jews came there, used it to conquer Atlantis.” She glared at Craig. “You were born under the same dark sign. You'll turn this into a death machine!”
She whirled on Frank. “Have you given up your great ambition—to worship this evil thing?”
Frank blanched. She was talking about the project to which he had vowed to dedicate his life until Craig took him to the Dominguez Hills air meet—to prove scientifically the survival of the soul after death.
“I'll never give it up entirely, Mother. But flying is so marvelous. You can't believe how wonderful it is until you try it. Why don't you let Craig take you for a ride?”
“If we crash, you can nag me for all eternity,” Craig said.
“Your pride will be your undoing, Craig. You'll meet the same fate as your ur-soul, Gath.”
According to the Church of the Questing Spirit, every person in the world was an emanation of a handful of primary ur-souls, some of them evil, others good. The world was in perpetual conflict between these agents of light and darkness. If, as in Craig's case, his ur-soul was evil, it required extra effort to achieve the light. Effort he of course declined to make.
“In the meantime, Madam, I hope to enjoy myself,” Craig said. “You should see how excited this death machine makes the girls in Long Beach. Frank is finding that out too, right?”
“Just—by observation,” Frank said, blushing the color of his mother's hair.
“Abominable!” Althea cried. “He's a child of light, an emanation of Mana, the noblest of the ur-souls. That's why I brought him to California. So he would thrive in sunlight. If you corrupt him, you'll wander among the galaxies for ten thousand years, I warn you. Not even Gath will consider you worthy of rebirth.”
Craig laughed. He picked up Althea and announced he was going to give her one of his “Long Beach kisses.” Althea punched at him furiously. “I won't accept your affection. I no longer consider you my son.”
Craig kissed her anyway and set her down with a jolt. Frank saw he was angry. “I knew this was going to be a waste of time,” he said. He climbed back aboard
Rag Time.
“Let's get on to San Diego, kid.”
“Frank, I beg you. Don't let him seduce you with this evil creature,” Althea said. “The spirit should soar without man-made wings! This will only swell men's pride and folly.”
Craig was in the pilot's seat, adjusting his goggles. Frank hesitated, in torment. On one side was adventure, heroism, on the other side, the life of the spirit, the exploration of its mysteries.
“Let's
go,
kid,” Craig said.
Suddenly Frank was almost as angry at his mother as Craig was. Couldn't she see he was a
man
? Craig was right. She was trying to make him a momma's boy for the rest of his life. Women were dangerous.
He spun the prop and leaped into the passenger seat. In a moment they were in the air, climbing to five hundred feet. Frank watched his mother dwindle to a speck in the green field where for a moment she had seemed so formidable.

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