Conquerors of the Sky (54 page)

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Authors: Thomas Fleming

BOOK: Conquerors of the Sky
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“When I drop my hand, pull up the nose and cut the airspeed,” Frank said. “That's what the pilot probably did in Iowa when he hit clear air turbulence.”
The wind whooshed through the big gray tunnel for another minute, the miniature Starduster bouncing in the turbulence. Frank's hand dropped, Billy jerked the model's nose up and cut the airspeed fifty knots on his toy throttle. Before their appalled eyes, the small Starduster suddenly shook like a bone in the mouth of an angry dog. Thirty seconds later—Cliff was timing it on a stopwatch at Frank's orders—both wings snapped off.
Frank switched off the wind. It died away like the moan of an angry ghost. “Whirl mode,” he said.
“What is it?” Adrian said. He looked as if he were barely breathing.
“An extremely rare type of flutter. Two physicists wrote a paper on it in 1938. I'd forgotten it like everyone else until the wings started coming off.”
Even Billy McCall, who thought he could handle anything he encountered in the sky, was aghast. “Why, Frank?” Buzz McCall said. “Why didn't it just damp out like it would on any piston plane?”
“Because the Starduster has turboprop engines,” Frank said. “Those turbines are spinning at thirteen thousand revolutions a minute. The propellers are turning at a thousand. The whole thing is a giant gyroscope. The moment a jolt broke or bent one of those weakened struts, the engine started to wobble. That started the propeller wobbling and the whole vibration was transmitted to the wing, which was built to flutter at three vibrations a second. Whirl mode, for some reason, slows down from ten to five to three cycles per second. The moment both the wing and whirl mode got to three per second you got—”
“Dynamic coupling,” said Frank's favorite designer, Sam Hardy.
“Exactly,” Frank said. “What happens when a high musical note breaks a glass tuned to the same vibration level.”
“Dynamic coupling,” Buzz muttered. He shuffled out of the wind tunnel building like a man who had suddenly aged twenty years.
“It's not your fault,” Frank called after him. “It's not the fault of anyone who built the plane. It's the sort of thing that can happen when you play God with other people's lives—and call a plane crash-proof.”
“That's not true!” Adrian Van Ness cried, backing away from Frank as if he were some sort of supernatural being. “I've never done anything that wasn't for the good of this company. I've lived for this company! Are you going to listen to me or this madman?”
Billy McCall was smiling, enjoying Adrian's terror. Buzz McCall was gone—wiped out by believing whirl mode was a curse Tama had put on him. The rest of the executives, mostly designers, swayed in the firestorm of emotion between Adrian and Frank Buchanan. Someone had to take charge. It was like flying the
Rainbow Express
over Germany. You had to be a leader whether you liked it or not, whether you believed in what you were doing or thought it was mostly insanity.
Cliff Morris knew he looked like a leader—and he knew how to act like one. In that compressed room, with an explosion about to blow the company apart, he was the only man with some faith in the future. He still believed in the Starduster. It was Tama's gift to him. It had already given him a new sense of manhood.
“Wait a minute!” he roared. “Wait a minute! We've got a problem to solve. This isn't a courtroom. It's not the Spanish Inquisition either. Let's all go back to our offices and sit down and try to solve it! It's either that or start looking for other jobs.”
“He's right,” croaked a perspiring, trembling Adrian Van Ness, his eyes full of gratitude. That was the moment Cliff knew he was on his way to becoming president of Buchanan Aircraft.
Hatred—he was surrounded by hatred, Adrian Van Ness thought, staring into the darkness at 3 A.M. the next morning. The idea steadied him. Hatred was a force, a kind of airflow. He would use it to soar above the haters on wings of guile.
Insomnia added a dry, cold clarity to Adrian's mind. He had sat at the dinner table last night and confronted Amanda's mindless hostility. He remembered the moment of decision, when he had ordered the nail driven into her brain. Did this woman—or any other woman or invisible spiritual entity in the universe
have the ability to harm him? No, Adrian decided. Although the world was frequently incomprehensible, he did not believe it was controlled or even occasionally manipulated by invisible powers.
Amanda was counterbalanced by his daughter Victoria. Her presence reminded him of Buchanan's first breakthrough to prosperity. If there was such a thing as luck, she was his talisman of good fortune. He told her nothing about the crisis at the company, of course. But he drew strength from her plaintive sympathy for his public woes with the Starduster.
Philosophy aside, Frank Buchanan had demonstrated Adrian's pilot error theory was nonsense. Their design was responsible for killing 120 people. They, not the airlines, could be liable for all the damages in the pending lawsuits. If this information in its present version got out, they might be headed for the nearest bankruptcy court. As a crucial first step he had to regain Frank's support for the plane.
He summoned Cliff Morris and Dick Stone to his office. “Do you agree with Frank—that I'm responsible for the Starduster's crashes?” he asked.
They both shook their heads. He discounted Cliff's sincerity, although he was grateful for his support. He had sentimental ties to Frank and was, like most salesmen, a believer in luck. Dick Stone's negative was the one Adrian valued. He was a fellow believer in the intellect's cold unillusioned view of the world.
They discussed how to persuade Frank Buchanan to fix the Starduster's fluttering wing. Cliff volunteered to talk to him. Before the end of the day he was back with good news. Frank was ready to cooperate. “He even came up with a name for the redesign program—Project Rainbow.”
“How much will it cost?” Adrian said, ignoring the gibe in Project Rainbow.
“He's discussing it with Dick Stone right now. It'll be damn expensive, you can be sure of that.”
The success of Project Rainbow required someone who did not get drunk at lunch and stay ossified for the rest of the day. Adrian hired an executive from North American and put him in charge of the engineering department. Buzz McCall sat in his office, a ghost of the swaggering son of a bitch who had intimidated everyone for two decades.
At Dick Stone's suggestion, Adrian decided to let Bruce Simons tell the whole truth about Project Rainbow. Bruce called in TV and newsreel cameras to film the one hundred Stardusters in service as they flew to Buchanan Field and had their motors stripped and wings rebuilt. Simultaneously, Adrian told Buchanan's lawyers to negotiate a settlement with the airlines, accepting a 50 percent liability in the damage suits. The costs were terrifying but the Scorpion was still in production and bankers were impressed by Project Rainbow's boldness.
The CAB demanded a few more trips to the Sierra Wave to convince them that whirl mode was under control in the Starduster's redesigned wings. They declared Project Rainbow a success and lifted the speed restrictions on the Stardusters already in service. There were celebrations in the engineering and design departments. But Adrian, reading the memorandums from salesmen in
the field, did not join them. In spite of Bruce Simons's heroic publicity effort, the public refused to fly on the plane.
Nevertheless, Adrian pressed grimly ahead. He hired a half-dozen veteran plane salesmen to push their troubled product. He sent Cliff Morris and Bruce Simons out to support them with hoopla and advice. They soon grew weary of hearing “yes, but” from airline executives when they swore the new Starduster was worry-free and certain to regain the public's affection. The coup de grace was American Airlines, which had an option to buy another forty copies. They canceled the order and refused to talk to anyone from Buchanan.
In desperation, Adrian himself flew to New York and joined Cliff and Jim Redwood in a final plea to American's boss, C. E. Smith. Adrian brought Dick Stone with a briefcase full of cost projections to prove how many millions the Starduster could save, compared to a jet. He even borrowed Billy McCall to give the airline brass a chance to shake the hand of a famous test pilot and hear him describe what the new Starduster could do. They arrived at American's headquarters equipped with a motion picture camera and screen, to show Smith some of Billy's adventures on the Sierra Wave.
Adrian knew they were licked when they walked into Smith's office and confronted glowering red-faced Bill Horton, the airline's resident son of a bitch. “C.E.'s had to fly to Tulsa,” Horton growled. “What the hell have you got in mind? You look like you're ready to show me
Gone with the Wind
.”
“We want to prove the Starduster is not gone with the wind, Bill,” Adrian said.
“If you can do that, you can also sell me some beachfront property in Arizona,” Horton said. “Don't embarrass yourself and me, Adrian. The plane is dead. Kaput. Let me show you something.”
He pressed a button and a movie screen slid down the wall. Another button and onto the screen roared a swept-wing four-motored jet airliner with American markings. “That's the Boeing Seven-oh-seven,” Horton said. “We'll have forty of them in service next fall.”
Five minutes later, the Buchanan team stood on the Avenue of the Americas, beaten men.
Ruined
crooned in Adrian's head. “Gentlemen,” Adrian said, “You are now privileged to experience failure. They say it can be good for the soul. So far my encounters with it have made me doubt that.”
“Adrian,” Cliff Morris said. “You give me some money and support and I'll sell this fucking plane overseas. I'll sell enough to break even on this thing. I swear it.”
“Breaking even was not exactly what I had in mind,” Adrian said.
“It's better than going broke.”
This was the tougher, more determined Cliff who had emerged from the Sierra Wave and saved Adrian from humiliation at Frank Buchanan's revengeful hands. But Adrian doubted his ability to penetrate the maze of a foreign culture to sell a commercial plane overseas. Perhaps teaming him with Prince Carlo was the answer. Ponty could deal with the subtleties, Cliff could provide the hard American sell.
At the 21 Club the young men drank Inverness and Adrian drank Sherry and listened to Billy McCall talk about the problems of the Strategic Air Command, where he was flying a Convair B-58 Hustler. It was the first bomber to hit Mach 2, twice the speed of sound. Billy had nothing good to say for it. The plane had escape capsules that could chop off a man's hand if he was not careful when he ejected. At Mach 2, the skin temperatures reached 130 degrees in the nose, threatening to cook the pilot. To slow down from supersonic to subsonic speeds, the pilot had to transfer fuel to keep the aircraft in balance, a frequently fatal maneuver. In fact, the Hustler had already killed more pilots than the Scorpion.
“After all that,” Billy said, “the goddamn thing is too small. It can't carry enough bombs to do anyone serious harm.”
“What do they need?”
“A supersonic bomber that won't kill pilots and can deliver a real load,” Billy said. “They're going to ask for bids on it in a couple of months.”
“I'm not sure I can interest Frank Buchanan,” Adrian said. “He's vowed never to design another bomber. Can you talk him into it?”
“Sure,” Billy said.
Adrian saw anxiety in Cliff's eyes. Interesting. Cliff did not like Billy's intrusion into the company's business. Adrian filed the insight for future reference. “A supersonic bomber could become the model for the next-generation airliner,” he mused. “It's only a question of time before we go super there too.”
“I don't give a damn what you do in the airline game,” Billy said. “I just want one thing understood. If the politicians try the sort of shit they pulled on the Talus, we fight.”
“Agreed,” Adrian said, mentally reserving the right to change his mind.
“Let's all shake on that,” Dick Stone said.
Disconcerted, Adrian had to shake hands all around. He would have to give Dick a lecture on the need for greater detachment.
None of them realized they were entering a nightmare that would haunt them for the next twenty years. Nor did Adrian Van Ness, smiling hopefully at Billy McCall, foresee he was face to face with heartbreak.
“Hemingway,” Prince Carlo Pontecorvo said, banking the Starduster so that it was practically flying at a 180-degree angle along the flank of Machu Picchu. “I've hunted with him often. He too is haunted by his mother, who cast fundamental doubts on his manhood. It's an extremely common affliction. It requires a man to repeatedly look death in the face.”
Sarah Morris was sure the belly of the plane was grazing the slope of the mountain. She got a swooping glimpse of the ruined palaces of the Inca kings. Her face and other parts of her body turned to rubber and bulged in unpredictable directions as the g forces sucked at them. Below the narrow saddleback on which the lost city stood, precipices plunged to a raging brown river. Around them loomed black snow-streaked mountains waiting to devour the bits and pieces of the Starduster.
The restored wings shuddered, the big engines whined as the palaces and the mountain itself vanished in swirling clouds. Cliff Morris, sitting in the copilot's seat, looked back at Sarah. “How do you like this?” he said.
He's afraid
. Sarah read the fear on Cliff's face with a wife's practiced eyes. He's afraid but he isn't showing it. That's the way men deal with it. “I love it,” she said.
The man who had forbidden her to learn to fly because it was too dangerous was now letting this corrupt aristocrat risk both their lives to sell this abominable plane. The Prince was not cleared to fly the Starduster. But the Prince thought he was cleared to fly anything, ride anything, sail anything, shoot anything, climb anything, love anything. He was the ultimate nobleman, the creature that a thousand years of Europe's civilization had strained and groaned and bled to produce. Sarah loathed him. She hated what he was doing to Cliff. She hated the male arrogance the Prince personified. The Prince and Adrian Van Ness were two of a kind.
I was wrong
, Tama whispered. Wrong about trusting men like the Prince and Adrian Van Ness? Undoubtedly. With the help of Dr. Montague's pills, Sarah had achieved a bitter stability in defiance of them all—Cliff, Billy, Adrian, even her father, that missing person in her life who had done nothing to help her understand men.
“I didn't see
anything
,” Amalie Borne said, filing her fingernails in the observer's seat beside Sarah. She was another example of Europe's decadence. The more time she spent with Amalie and the Prince, the better Sarah understood why England had always remained aloof from the continent, why so many Americans were isolationists.
The Prince banked in a wide circle and dove at the mountain again as if he were determined to commit suicide. He peeled away at the last second, leaving their hearts, stomachs and lungs behind. Sarah struggled to raise her eyelids, to hold up her head, heavy as a chunk of granite, against the g forces. Again she saw nothing but a blur of trees and crumbling walls. “That's much better!” Amalie said.
They flew on to Lima, the capital of Peru, where the Prince allowed Buchanan's assigned pilot to land the plane with the chief pilot of Peru's airline in the copilot's seat. Landings, unless they were in jungle clearings or on crevasse-gashed glaciers, bored him. He lectured them on the history of the place as they looked down on broad white beaches and the sprawling city in the lush splendor of the Rimac Valley, seven miles from the sea. “When the American pilgrims
were sitting down to their first Thanksgiving dinner, wondering if they could survive another year of semi-starvation, Lima was a hundred years old, the capital of Spain's overseas empire.”
What was he telling them? Lima was part of Europe, which entitled him to include it in his personal imperium? Something like that, Sarah was sure of it. She had become sure of a lot of things on this trip.
At Jorge Chavez International Airport they were greeted by a smiling delegation of Peruvian airline executives and their brothers or brothers-in-law in the ruling political party. They trooped through the Starduster exclaiming at its roominess, its comfort. No one said a word about its penchant for crashing. Its reputation as a jinxed plane had failed to penetrate South America.
With the help of the Prince, Cliff was rescuing his reputation as a jinxed executive. From Mexico south to Brazil and Argentina, then over the Andes to Chile and Bolivia and now Peru, he had sold an astonishing 150 Stardusters. It was exactly the sort of plane they were looking for south of the border, where there was not enough money to lengthen airport runways to handle jets.
Cliff had invited Sarah to join him in Santiago for a celebration when they sold their 150th plane. He explained that the Prince was along to impress the South Americans, all of whom doted on European nobility. But Sarah took one look at Amalie and suspected more complex, less moral motives.
That night, on the top floor of Cesar's Hotel, looking down on Lima's ghostly white Plaza de Armas, where Conquistador Francisco Pizarro once strutted, Cliff told Sarah the Prince was also along to dispense bribes to the executives who bought the planes and the politicians who supplied their state-run airlines with the money. There was not a hint of concern or contrition in his voice. He tried to make it sound clever, amusing.
“You could go to jail!” Sarah cried.
“Not a chance,” Cliff assured her. “There's no law against bribing foreigners. Everybody does it. There isn't a country in the world where the guys in charge don't expect a piece of the action when they buy something as expensive as a plane.”
As a convincer, he told her how they had already sold almost a thousand Scorpions to Germany, Holland, Spain, Portugal, the same way. “I still think it's wrong,” Sarah said.
“We're rescuing this plane, maybe the company, from oblivion,” Cliff snarled. “Adrian sent the Prince along to make sure I didn't have another flop on my record. He knows three strikes are out in any game. You want to keep shopping on Wilshire Boulevard? Be nice to the Prince. And Amalie.”
“Does she sleep with them?”
“I don't ask. The Prince handles that part of it. Most of the time I don't think so.”
I was wrong
, Tama whispered. Was she asking Sarah to tell Cliff not to trust Adrian Van Ness? She could see how much the Prince subtracted from Cliff's accomplishment. He could see it too, she was sure of it. But he was telling himself he still deserved most of the credit for the 200 million dollars in orders
they had already rolled up. He had brought her down here to sell her the lie.
They spent the weekend in the forty-room mansion of the suave chairman of the board of Peruvian Airlines, who spoke perfect English and talked nonchalantly with the Prince about Cannes, Antibes, Portofino. The house was in the center of an immense valley, fifty miles from Lima. Cliff made love to her in a bed that looked as if it belonged in the palace of Versailles. He did not even mention the Starduster. He had decided to be indifferent to her disapproval. As his big body crushed her into the mattress, Sarah thought:.
Now I know how it feels to be fucked.
Amanda Van Ness whispered:
humiliated
Cliff did not have the slightest idea what she was thinking. Afterward he cradled her in his arms and talked about moving to a bigger house in Palos Verdes, on the bluffs. In the morning they stood at the window and gazed at the mountain-rimmed valley with its terraced miles of coffee trees. “He owns it all,” Cliff said.
“Why do you have to bribe him?”
“He likes Yankee dollars.”
“Did Amalie sleep with him?”
“Jesus Christ!” Cliff said. “Maybe you better go home. The kids probably miss you.”
Sarah heard the rest of the sentence.
But I won't.
She was swept by confused regret. After the struggle to solve the Starduster's crashes, she had found a new Cliff Morris in her house, neither the sullen playboy nor the husband who sought her advice, but a man who had discovered something inside himself that he liked, in spite of the Starduster's commercial failure.
Sarah had liked this man too. She liked the way he played basketball with Charlie in the yard when he came home from work, the way he was noticeably kinder, more patient with the girls. She realized he had done something that helped him play a father's role, especially with Charlie.
Now he was doing something he hoped Charlie would never do, something he could not admit to him. He had wanted her to know about it—and forgive him. No, more than that, he had wanted her to collaborate with him, rejoice in his clever corruption, his friendship with the Prince and his elegant whore.
I was wrong
, Tama whispered. “Maybe I should get home,” Sarah said. “When's the next flight?”
“I'll find out,” Cliff said.
She was saying no. She was refusing to join him. She might be doing more than that. She was feeling something that had been growing in her since his refusal to let her fly and his cunning misuse of her father's death. She was telling him she no longer cared about his planes.
Where did that leave Billy McCall and his coded messages in the sky? Receding, receding over the far horizon, dwindling to a speck of memory, regret, contempt. She was freeing herself from both these Americans, with their strange ability to turn admiration into its opposite, to turn her inside out, to crush her heart and mind with g forces and contorted appeals for love.
Sarah saw the sadness in Cliff's eyes. And the fear. He hated what she was
telling him. But she also saw the cold resolve. Whatever he had learned out there on the Sierra Wave, he was no longer afraid of his fear, his self-doubt. Maybe he was not even afraid of losing her.
Suddenly Sarah wanted to find out if that was true. She wanted to show him she still cared about the memory of those three months when they had loved each other without reservations, the months that ended with her discovery that she was pregnant with Charlie. She wanted him to know she remembered that time, no matter what she felt about his planes. “I'm sorry,” she whispered.
Cliff stood at the window, staring down the valley toward history-laden Lima. “I am too,” he said.

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