Conquerors of the Sky (61 page)
Read Conquerors of the Sky Online
Authors: Thomas Fleming
His lifestyle simultaneously deepened and disguised his loneliness. His good looks had weathered well. There were bleak Gary Cooperish lines in his face and skeptical wrinkles on his brow. He remained irresistible to women of all ages. His enthusiasm for flying them had not significantly diminished. A certain boredom, a first cousin of loneliness, was beginning to bother him. He told himself it was just getting to be a long time between wars.
The problem that made Billy's loneliness hard to bear was his anger. It lurked beneath the surface of his relaxed cocky manner, revealing itself in sarcasm and occasional flashes of temper. But it was always there in his personal sky like a blue storm swirling off the jet stream, invisible until it struck.
“Let's think about it,” he said. “Let's fly together first and think about it.” Victoria fled to Frank Buchanan. He was the invisible third in this explosive equation. Victoria had, like most women, found his honesty, his spontaneity, his love of poetry, irresistible. She had confided her feelings about Billy to him and he had urged her to be bold, to be a modern woman and speak first.
That night, Frank too was boycotting the congressmen. He sat in his stateroom sketching a design for a supersonic airliner. “It didn't work!” Victoria cried. “All he wants to do is give me a ride in the Warrior. He's treating me like a teenager!”
“That's a very significant first step. Be patient. You're just like your mother. You expect miracles on demand.”
Did Frank find secret savage satisfaction in encouraging Victoria Van Ness? Unquestionably. But he was also thinking about Billy, whom he continued to love without reservations, a fathering love that grew stronger as Buzz McCall receded into negligibility in both their lives. What could be more marvelous (and more savagely satisfying) than the prospect of Billy retiring from the Air Force as a general in five or ten years and becoming president of Buchanan Aircraft with the backing of the majority stockholder, his wife?
Frank made sure that the Warrior had a busy schedule in the coming week. The big plane was being used in an Air Forceâfunded research program called HICAT, an acronym for High Altitude Clear Air Turbulence. Everyone from NACA, the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics (forerunner to NASA) had become seriously concerned about the discovery of clear air turbulence in the stratosphere. If a supersonic plane was going to be developed, the location and magnitude of this menace had to be explored. It was bad enough to hit CAT at low or medium altitudes in a prop plane. Hitting it in a supersonic jet would magnify the impact a hundred times. It was the difference between a car going over a bump in a driveway and a bus hitting a boulder on a high-speed highway.
Frank had absolute confidence in the design integrity of the Warrior. So he did not have the slightest qualm about assigning Billy to investigate one of the toughest problems confronting supersonic flights over the North Pole, a phenomenon called the Polar Night Vortex, which contains winds of up to 380 miles per hour. It also tends to have sudden seasonal drops in temperature of as much as forty degrees, creating awesome windshears. Meteorologists using pictures from weather satellites and data from sounding rockets had been able to locate this jet stream in a general way. Billy was ordered to cruise close to it and see what sort of HICAT he encountered. The Warrior was loaded with gear to monitor its force and the impact on the plane's surfaces.
“I gather Victoria Van Ness has spoken to you about flying in the Warrior,” Frank said. “She won't be able to do it once it goes back under Air Force control. Why don't you take her up on the next flight?”
“Won't her father have a goddamn fit?” Billy said. “This is sort of dangerous, Pops.”
“Her father doesn't have to know about it.” Frank paused to let Billy absorb the message he was sending. “You don't need a beautiful woman for a wife. It usually complicates things.”
That afternoon, Billy invited Victoria on the flight. The next morning, she arrived at the Mojave field almost an hour early. Billy matter-of-factly found her a flight suit. “Did you tell your father where you're going?” he said.
“No. I hope you don't feel compelled to file a report.”
“I never feel compelled to do anything,” Billy said.
Victoria sat in the observer's jump seat behind Billy and the copilot, an easygoing Texan who was properly impressed by the boss's daughter. Into the stratosphere the big plane soared while the mach needle climbed up the dial toward 3. There were slight jolts as they went through mach 1 and 2. The loudest sound in the cockpit was duct rumble, which Billy had explained in advance. It was created by pressure fluctuations in the engines as air entered them at supersonic speed. Otherwise, the ride was unbelievably smooth and quiet. The thunder of the huge motors was flung miles behind them as they cruised on the shock waves the nose canards drove beneath the wings.
“Sixty thousand feet,” the copilot said. “Getting close to the top of the ride, Billy”
“Here comes the hard part,” Billy said. “Make damn sure you're belted in, Victoria.”
“Don't worry about me,” she said. “Look at that sun! The horizon!”
The morning sun was a burning white disc, filling the blue-black sky with incredibly intense light. The horizon ahead of them seemed infinite. Billy did not have time to admire the scenery. He was concentrating on leveling off at precisely the correct pitch attitude. A mistake would create weightlessness, a scary phenomenon he did not want Victoria to experience.
They eased into horizontal cruise at mach 3 without losing contact with gravity. Billy explained what might have happened. “That's gonna be one of the problems if they turn this big baby into an airliner. A half degree off pitch and the martinis'll be floatin' against the ceilin'.”
Victoria laughed. “I love that idea.”
“Come to think of it, so do I,” Billy said.
They roared toward Alaska in search of the Polar Vortex. Billy talked to meteorologists in Fairbanks and Point Barrow to find out what they were learning from their weather balloons about the jet stream's current location. His copilot plotted a course to bring them parallel to it for a two-hundred-mile run.
“You can't see this thing,” Billy said. “That's the spooky part of it. It's like playing games with a huge invisible serpent in the sky. Are you belted in real good, Victoria?”
“I'm practically part of the seat.”
“Are you having a good time?”
“The time of my life.”
“Here we go,” the copilot said.
Victoria gazed out the cockpit window at a sky of perfect blue. She had never seen anything as pure, as serene, in her life. But somewhere in its light-filled heart the jet stream coiled, hurling vortices that smashed against the giant bomber with a ferocity that made her face, her neck, ache.
“Put it on autopilot?” the copilot said.
Billy shook his head. The autopilot was one way of dealing with turbulence.
It relieved the pilot of the struggle for control of the plane. But Billy did not trust a spinning gyroscope to do his thinking for him when he was on the edge of the unknown.
It relieved the pilot of the struggle for control of the plane. But Billy did not trust a spinning gyroscope to do his thinking for him when he was on the edge of the unknown.
Suddenly they hit a windshear unlike anything Billy had ever encountered before. It made the bomber pitchdownâthe nose dropped below the horizonâand simultaneously scythed away a column of air a mile wide beneath the wings. The Warrior plunged into a dive that took them over the red line on every instrument on the panel.
“We're hitting mach three five,” the copilot gasped.
“Pull!” Billy shouted, hauling on the yoke with all his strength. The copilot imitated his example. It had no visible effect. They were going straight down, seventy tons of bomber headed for the frozen earth.
Some three miles down, the Warrior hit the bottom of the shear and responded to the controls. “Hang on!” Billy said. The wings rose, the fuselage groaned, the engines “unstarted” with a series of violent jolts as their internal shock waves readjusted themselves to normal flight. The g forces smashed Billy down in his seat and almost tore his brain apart. But he hung on to the yoke.
“Are we going back up there?” the shaken copilot said.
Billy looked over his shoulder at Victoria Van Ness. For the first time it occurred to him that she had not made a sound. Most other woman he knew would have been blubbering and wailing by now. Victoria was smiling. “Are you game for it?” Billy said.
Victoria nodded. They climbed back up to 70,000 feet and completed their jolting two-hundred-mile run along the edge of the vortex. Billy banked the Warrior into a 160-degree turn and headed back to the Mojave. On the ground, Victoria sat in Billy's office while he wrote a report of the flight. As he finished, in charged Mike Shannon.
“Hello, Miss Van Ness,” he said. “What brings you out to the desert?” They had met on the SS Rainbow. Shannon was a frequent weekend guest.
“A supersonic ride in a top-secret plane,” she said.
“She's some crate, isn't she?” Mike said. “Billy. I've got that load of congressmen out on the runway. Remember I called you about them? Are you ready to go up?”
“Can't do it, Mike. We'll have to reschedule it for tomorrow. Talk to Frank about it.”
“What the hell's wrong?”
“I'm taking a vacation, Mike. The first one in years.”
That was the moment when Sarah Chapman Morris appeared in the doorway. From Billy's point of view the timing could not have been more delicious. In the violent incandescence of the next five minutes, Sarah saw he knew exactly what she was feeling and he was still determined to win their long, mutilating struggle for spiritual supremacy. What he did not know, what he would never know, was Sarah's power to become Victoria Van Ness, to be the secret lover inside her awkward clumsy body, to live in the manic fire of her imagination until she won, won, won!
Two hours later, Billy circled over Santa Catalina Island in his green Lustra. The white twelve-story casino presided over the yachts in Avalon's picture-postcard harbor. The sand of Pebbly Beach gleamed against the blue-black Pacific. The interior valleys were lush with tropical foliage. It was a miniature continent.
“Remember the song?” Billy said. “I lost my heart in Avalon?”
“It's one of my favorites,” Victoria said.
Billy flipped the Lustra into an inverted spin. The island, the sea, whirled inside Victoria's head as if it were being stirred by a giant whisk. “How did you know we were going to pull that bomber out?” he said, as they hurtled toward the water.
“I just knew,” Victoria said, as calmly as if she were riding along Wilshire Boulevard in her red Triumph convertible. “I knew you'd do it.”
“If that shear was another mile deep, no one could have done it.”
“It wasn't,” she said.
Billy pulled the Lustra out at 250 feet and asked for clearance at the island's airport, at the head of a deep canyon northwest of Avalon. The air traffic controller said there wasn't a plane within ten miles. He whipped the Lustra into a 180-degree turn and came in much too fast. He had to burn his brakes to stop before they rolled off the runway.
“That's the worst landing I've made in twenty years,” Billy said. “And it's all your fault.”
Victoria smiled. “Will you to teach me to fly?”
“Sure,” Billy said.
Billy and Victoria spent two days on Santa Catalina Island. Travel writers call it the nearest thing to Shangri-la in California. That would make it the ultimate unreality in a world where realism has never been in large supply. Billy rented a thatched cottage on Papeete Beach, site of a dozen South Sea movies. In those days it included abandoned movie sets, such as the Continental Hotel in which Jean Harlow had played Sadie Thompson.
They made soaring love beneath the palm trees, they swam in the looming surf. Billy flew Victoria with a concentration, an intensity, he borrowed from memories of other women, from the metaphor of their flight together. She was an assignment given to him by the one man who could persuade him to do anything. In his instinctual, intuitive way he sensed the combination of hatred and love in Frank Buchanan's soul that was animating them. Billy saw it as another unknown, another serpent to challenge in the sky of the future. He had the same attitude toward the serpentine realities that awaited them on the mainland.
For Victoria those forty-eight hours of love became the fulcrum of her life. She had no idea love involved such a shocking surrender of the deepest self. Her previous encounters with poetry-quoting Oxford dons and randy fellow students became instantly insignificant. She now belonged to Billy in an absolute way that transcendedâbut did not abolishâher father's will to power and her mother's rage for moral purity.
How Victoria affected Billy is a question that people still debate. Unquestionably he became something different from the Billy McCall who had laid a thousand women without caringâexcept for a few who touched something inside him, usually, as in Sarah Chapman's case, quickly smothered by his anger.
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