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Authors: Thomas Fleming

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“Oh?” Dick said.
Korda leaned forward in a suavely confidential way, though there was no need to worry about being overheard. “We might find some of the research your designers and engineers invested in your supersonic bomber, the Warrior, quite useful. Compression lift could be invaluable in a new fighter-bomber we're developing.”
“No doubt,” Dick said.
“You might even persuade your chief designer to give us some personal help. I understand he's quite fond of you.”
“I'm quite fond of him too,” Dick said. “I'm even fonder of the United States of America. They have first call on Frank Buchanan's mind—and my loyalty.”
“We could enable you to be extremely generous to Miss Borne—”
“You must be hard of hearing,” Dick said. “Or do I have to translate the word loyalty into Hebrew?”
Back at the hotel, Amalie blended innocence and mockery. “I don't understand you, Stone. I thought I was giving you a chance to resolve all your conflicts. You could be a free American primate, beating your chest and cavorting with me in our various bedrooms and a loyal Jew on the side—with a reasonable amount of money in the bargain.”
Was it another redefinition of love, the worst imaginable burden she could invent? Or was she testing him in some subterranean way to see if he was
worthy of the truth? Dick struggled to control a vortex of emotions: rage, regret, shame. “You don't seem to understand. You don't want to understand—”
The mocking eyes never wavered. “I've always thought my problem was understanding too much.”
In New York, Amalie persuaded him to stay overnight to cure his jetlag. He had never seen her so amorous. The next day, Dick flew on to Los Angeles, exhausted and appalled.
She was a whore. She loved him. She was a whore. She loved him.
The sentences rebounded crazily in his head for the entire flight. He tried to tell himself her mockery of love simultaneously affirmed it.
He had barely arrived in his office when his secretary told him Adrian Van Ness wanted to see him. He found Buchanan's president standing by the window watching an antisubmarine version of the Starduster taxiing out for takeoff. There were dark pouches under his eyes. Adrian was starting to look old.
“How was Africa?” Adrian said with forced jauntiness.
“I only saw twenty-four hours of it.”
“How many of those were devoted to Amalie Borne?”
“A few,” Dick said, deciding it was foolish to lie if Adrian already knew Amalie had spent the night with him. Had the Prince in his pique played tattletale?
“We've got some problems with her,” Dick said.
“I'm not surprised, considering the encouragement you've been giving her. Women are unstable creatures, Dick. They're particularly prone to fantasies of power.”
Adrian watched the new Starduster climb into the blue sky. “Let's talk about the money first. There seems to be three hundred thousand withdrawn from our Swiss account on your signature without any authorization from me.”
“I used the money to buy presents for Amalie,” Dick said.
The words dangled in midair in the quiet office for a long moment. What did he feel? Dick wondered. Fearful? Was he looking at a prison sentence for embezzlement? To his surprise—and dismay—he realized his dominant emotion was relief. He had just shed an intolerable burden.
Quizzical wrinkles sprouted on Adrian's brow. “A not entirely objectionable policy—if she can help us get Kennedy to deliver on the Warrior and the supersonic airliner. Is that all there is to it—a desire to keep our princess happy?”
“You obviously know everything. Why don't you just fire me and get it over with?” Dick said. “I'm in love with her. I probably would have stolen twice that if you hadn't caught me.”
Adrian seemed to find the criminal language offensive. “The Swiss reported the first fifty thousand. I asked Hanrahan to have you watched,” he said.
“I'll clean out my desk and go quietly,” Dick said. “I'll sign an agreement to pay it back over the next ten years.”
“Don't be ridiculous,” Adrian said. “You're not the first man who lost his head over a beautiful woman. I've done it myself. The important thing is to learn a lesson from it. To learn something about yourself—and about women.
You can make the money back for us in a year by helping us get a grip on our finances. Those Kennedy bastards in Washington have abolished the cost-plus contract. We're going to have to keep track of every screw, every gallon of paint—and somehow restrain the madmen in the design department, led by their resident maniac, you know who. They think nothing of burning up a million dollars in a mock-up they chop to pieces the next day. You're going to have to do more than project earnings now. You're going to have to create a whole cost-control system.”
Dick sat there, numb. “I'm not fired?”
“Dick,” Adrian said in his gentlest tone. “Have you gone deaf?”
The similarity to his conversation with the Israeli made Dick shudder. “I—I can't do any of those things. I can't do anything with her on my mind. I'm starting to hate the company, the whole business, because of the way we're using her.”
“I think you'll soon find it's the other way around, if the Prince is right. He called me last night from Brazzaville. He says Amalie has quite a lot of his correspondence in a safe deposit box, location unknown. It would embarrass a half-dozen governments if she sent copies to a newspaper.”
“She's threatened to do this?”
“She hasn't threatened to do anything yet. She's waiting to see how well you negotiate for her.”
“She told the Prince I was going to do that?”
“She saw it as another way to intimidate him.”
It made sickening, demoralizing sense. There had to be a purpose beyond or behind the fantasy selves, the mockery of love in the very moment of transcendence. The luminous intelligence that transfixed him had analyzed reality and drawn its own bitter conclusions.
“Is she Jewish?”
Dick knew how absurd the question sounded. But he did not care. It suddenly became the most important fact in the world to him.
“Does it matter?” Adrian said.
In those offhand words, Dick saw the cold hard face of reality as defined by Adrian Van Ness. If he was going to accept the salvation Adrian was offering him, he would have to accept it as the only reality.
Ruefully, bitterly, Dick recounted Amalie's Schweinfurt story. Adrian shook his head in equally rueful admiration. “Women are amazing,” he said. “They have the most diabolical imaginations.”
He leaned back in his chair and picked up a stainless-steel model of the Scorpion on his desk. “To get practical for a moment,” he said. “We have to deal very carefully with Amalie. She may still be useful to us with the Kennedys.”
“She doesn't think so.”
“There are many ways to be useful beyond the obvious one. We have pictures of her leaving the White House, for instance. Naturally I hope we never have to use them. It would be very dangerous for us—and for her.”
A new kind of unreality clouded Dick's brain. Was he sitting here with Adrian Van Ness, talking about Amalie Borne as if she was disposable, loseable, like a copy of a plane in a war?
“For the time being, it's important not to alarm her. Go back to New York in a week or so and assure her that all is well. Spend enough money to convince her. But begin trying to find out where she's stashed the Prince's correspondence. That will no doubt take some doing, but it should be enjoyable.”
Adrian was assigning Dick Stone the role he had played with Beryl Suydam. The lover who was not a lover, who was a secret enemy—and still a lover. Dick did not understand why, but he could see that Adrian was enjoying himself.
“Of course I understand it won't be entirely enjoyable,” Adrian said. “It will take a lot of self-control. But I think you can do it.”
Adrian held out his hand. “Do we understand each other, Dick?”
Dick accepted the hand. Adrian squeezed hard, unusual for him. “Thanks,” Dick said.
“Nonsense. It's to our mutual advantage, I assure you.”
Gazing into those subtle eyes, the shy yet shrewd smile, Dick heard that reassurance not once but twice and then three times. Adrian too was an expert at expanding the meaning of words. Mutual advantage encompassed much more than Dick's ability to set up a cost-control system for Buchanan Aircraft. It involved years and years of future arrangements with people like the Prince, in which Dick Stone's acquiescence, his readiness to bury unpleasant costs deep in Buchanan's records, were guaranteed. As he walked out of the office, Dick was no longer a prisoner of love. But he was a prisoner of Adrian Van Ness.
Cliff Morris sat in the oak-paneled committee room beside Dick Stone and Mike Shannon, watching Adrian Van Ness testify before the Senate Armed Services Committee. Adrian had just finished arguing for the survival of the Warrior bomber. He had laid special stress on its future as a supersonic airliner.
“The plane,” Adrian continued, “has won the enthusiastic applause of veteran pilots such as Colonel Billy McCall, one of the first men to break the sound barrier, holder of a half-dozen high-altitude records.”
“Excuse me, Mr. Van Ness,” said the lean hunched senator from Iowa, shoving his sallow face so close to the microphone he seemed to be swallowing it. “Isn't he your son-in-law? Isn't his correct rank lieutenant colonel?”
“Yes to both questions, Senator,” Adrian said, as reporters grinned and several staffers in the seats around them tittered. “Lieutenant colonels are normally referred to in ordinary discourse as colonels—”
“But he is your son-in-law”
“Yes. But Colonel McCall is the sort of man who would only tell the exact truth about any plane he flew. His reputation as a test pilot is the point here.”
“Of course, Mr. Van Ness,” the senator sneered.
It was the Creature. He had run for the Senate in 1962 with John F. Kennedy's reluctant endorsement and won. His venal style—in particular his utter indifference to facts—had not changed an iota. Before the hearings began, he had given Mike Shannon a list of things he wanted in return for his support for the bomber. They included an Air Force base within shouting distance of his hometown, an invitation to be the principle speaker at the Air Force Association annual dinner, and a Buchanan factory in Iowa as big as the one they had promised Robert Kerr in Oklahoma. Shannon urged Cliff to say yes. But Cliff said the package was too much for any freshman senator to ask and with Adrian's approval had said no.
Beside Adrian Van Ness, Billy McCall sat very straight and silent in his blue Air Force uniform. In the front row of the spectators' seats, Victoria Van Ness wore a powder blue suit of almost identical color. It was one of her small ways of stating her devotion to Billy. Beside her sat her secret enemy, Sarah Morris.
They pretended to be warm friends. At Sarah's suggestion, Cliff had adopted the same policy toward Billy. It was not that difficult; since the Starduster days, he and Billy had become wary semi-friends. Behind his back, Cliff sabotaged Billy in large and small ways, according to Sarah's plan. He referred to him as “the son-in-law” in conversation with other executives. He wryly predicted Billy would never put up with marriage and hinted he already was straying from Victoria's bed. Cliff had balked in the negotiations with the Creature because he wanted the senator to come into the hearings angry at Buchanan, even if it risked the future of the Warrior.
The bomber was in trouble for far more serious reasons. Defense Secretary Robert McNamara was showing the Kennedys he had learned to play the Byzantine politics of Washington. With the help of the fighter pilots in the Air Force, who resented the influence of General LeMay and his Strategic Air Command bomber jocks, the secretary of defense was promoting another plane, called the TFX or F-111, a smaller, cheaper supersonic bomber that could double as a fighter. General Dynamics and Boeing had been invited to bid on it and their lobbyists and favorite senators and congressmen were pushing it, creating confusion in the ranks of the Warrior backers.
Lieutenant Colonel McCall took Adrian's place in the witness chair. “Why do you think a plane is superior to a missile?” the Creature asked. “Is it because you'd be flying it?”
“They wouldn't let an old man like me fly a serious mission, Senator,” Billy said. “We've got young fellows with a lot more stamina and brains than I have.”
“The mission this plane would execute would be very dangerous, am I correct?”
“No question.”
“The Russians would do everything in their power to stop it?”
“Definitely.”
“You seem awfully complacent about letting younger men risk their lives while you sit home giving them orders, Colonel.”
“You risk your life every time you fly a plane like the Warrior,” Billy snapped.
“Oh?” the Senator said. “I thought this was a breakthrough design, the plane of the twenty-first century, twenty-five years ahead of schedule. Now you're telling us it's radically unsafe?”
“No, sir,” Billy said. “But it's a very hot plane. You have to know what you're doing.”
“And you—or your father-in-law—nevertheless maintain that this radically unsafe vehicle can become a supersonic airliner? You're asking us to fund a plane that would risk the life of every passenger—every taxpaying passenger?”
“Sir,” Billy said. “I wish you'd stop trying to put words in my mouth.”
“I wish you would learn a little respect for the civilian arm of this government, Lieutenant Colonel McCall,” the senator shouted.” I wish the Air Force could find someone with a reasonably objective view of this plane. What can we expect to learn from a special pleader like you?”
Don't answer him,
Cliff Morris thought. That was the only way to deal with the Creature. You had to let him dump garbage on your head and hope that you won the sympathy vote.
Cliff was shocked to find himself rooting for Billy. Wasn't that what any man would do, watching another man getting creamed by this piece of political slime? Yet last night he and Sarah had drunk to the possibility that Billy would fall on his face in these hearings.
Cliff watched Billy struggle to control his rage. He had flown 113 missions in two wars to defend the land of the free and the home of the brave. He had seen several hundred friends die in burning or exploding planes to make the world safe for democracy. Now the senator was telling him he did not respect or understand it.
“Senator,” Billy said. “Senator—sir—the supersonic airliner would be a different plane. It would be a descendant of the Warrior, which is ready to operate as a bomber. There's a whole range of problems that need to be solved before we can create an airliner. We can learn a lot about them from producing the Warrior.”
“Tell me, Lieutenant Colonel McCall, will you be promoted to full colonel if the Warrior gets funded?” the senator sneered.
“I have no idea, sir.”
“That's all we need to hear from you.”
“Sir—I have a prepared statement. I haven't gotten one word of—”
“Leave it on the table. It will be inserted in the record.”
Cliff and Sarah rode back to the Shoreham Hotel with Billy and Victoria and Dick Stone. “That son of a bitch,” Billy said. “That son of a bitch.”
He did not even look at Victoria. She patted his hand and said: “Daddy thinks you handled him very well.”
“So do I,” Sarah said, with cool concealed malice. Billy glared at her and for a moment Cliff wondered if he understood the whole game.
Cliff looked out at the massive government buildings along Pennsylvania Avenue, so formidable, so majestic, until you knew what happened inside them. “We thought he was on our side,” he lied. “The White House told us he'd protect us from the Republicans on the committee. But he must have made a deal with McNamara. They're going to move Wright Patterson Air Base to Iowa. Maybe throw in the Air Force Academy.”
The Warrior, the first plane to cruise above mach 3, the breakthrough to hypersonic flight, was dead. Cliff told himself it would have happened even without Billy McCall's flagellation. That had simply been the coup de grace, a gratuitous insult to an already expiring victim. The McNamara ploy of a cheaper alternative, the F111, was not the only reason. The billions Kennedy was asking for missiles and spaceships to the moon and a bigger army and navy had Congress much too edgy to think seriously about the bomber. The tide had been running against Buchanan for a good year.
At their suite, Billy poured himself a full glass of Inverness and drank it down before the rest of the party arrived. Victoria watched, not saying a word. But her eyes swam with tears. “I'll be in our room,” she said.
“Don't wait up,” Billy said.
“Let's go shopping,” Sarah said cheerfully. “Cheer ourselves up.” She and Victoria walked out arm in arm. Sarah's guile was breathtaking. Cliff could hardly believe his dreamy-eyed idealistic little WAAF had turned into this ultimate doubletalker.
The party—or the wake—was going to be an all-male show. Adrian arrived with General Curtis LeMay and the usual squadron of lesser generals. LeMay poured himself a glass of Inverness almost as deep as the one Billy had consumed. “Let's drink to a great plane, ruined by our gutless wonder in the White House.”
General LeMay held forth for an hour on the frauds and follies of John F. Kennedy. The Bay of Pigs and then the Berlin Wall, which neither Truman nor Eisenhower would have tolerated for ten seconds. The Cuban missile crisis, which passed up a perfect excuse to get rid of Castro and instead left the bearded blowhard with a guarantee that we would never invade his miserable island. Now Kennedy was committing just enough men to South Vietnam to get us involved in a first-class war—but not enough to end it decisively.
Mike Shannon struggled to defend his fellow Irish-American. But even he found it rough going, after two and a half years of slashing around Washington. He talked about the enormous pressures on a president. All right, JFK was not King Arthur or Lancelot; he did not even approximate a white knight. But he was trying to do the job. He wanted the bomber. But McNamara had stolen the Defense Department from the White House. The ex-automaker and his Harvard Business School doubledomes sat across the Potomac like an arrogant baron and his retainers telling the president to get lost. It was bewildering but probably true.
Adrian Van Ness turned to Curtis LeMay. “General, after two and a half years we've got two supersonic bombers that we can't afford to fly again and pieces of another ten lying around the Mojave desert. We've got McNamara's auditors breathing down our necks every time we turn around to make sure we don't make a personal telephone call on the contract.”
“I know, I know,” LeMay said. “But you're still on the inside track for the SST.”
“Right next to Boeing and Lockheed,” Adrian said. “Do you think they're going to let us walk away with it?”
“Fuck 'em all,” Billy McCall said and poured himself another glass of Inverness.
“Haven't you had enough of that?” Adrian said.
Billy looked at him for a long moment, then chug-a-lugged it and walked out.
Adrian sighed. “I'd like more than a place at the supersonic starting gate. We deserve some sort of guarantee that we'll receive special consideration. We've already spent fifteen million dollars of our own money on the Warrior. We've supplied our peerless leader with some very charming late-night entertainment. I think you ought to remind him of all that, Mike.”
“If I did that, the only thing you'd ever get in the air would be a kite,” Shannon said. “Who do you think you are, Brazil or some other semi-independent country? You don't know how to deal with Irish-Americans, Adrian. You never threaten them. You keep reminding them they owe you a very big favor.”
They flew back to California, where Adrian laid off ten thousand workers and sold the assorted pieces of the ten follow-on Warriors for scrap. Frank Buchanan tried to be philosophic. He had become convinced since the Russians shot down Lockheed's spy plane, the U-2, at 70,000 feet with an antiaircraft missile that the Warrior was probably obsolete anyway. Those huge engine ducts would leave a signature a foot high on a radar screen.
“From now on,” he said, “We have to build stealth into our planes. We have to make them invisible to radar.”
Not without relish, he reminded everyone that the Talus never appeared on Air Force radar screens when it was being tested. A flying wing was the ultimate stealth bomber. But he presumed Adrian did not have the guts to revive the plane.
Frank was busy designing the ground-support plane Cliff had urged them to produce. Frank called it the Thunderer, a somewhat blasphemous reference (in his mind) to John the Baptist. “When this fellow drops his payload,” he said, “whoever's on the other end will think it's the second coming.”
It was unusual for Frank to sound so bloodthirsty. He was worried about the situation in Vietnam, where the Army, deprived of its airplanes since the creation of the Air Force in 1948, was trying to get back in the air with helicopters. Frank thought the helicopter was a lousy way to support troops on the ground. It was too vulnerable to antiaircraft fire and it couldn't drop bombs. He showed
Cliff the armor plate he was weaving around the stubby thick-bodied plane on his drawing board. “This thing will bring our kids back alive,” he said. “And it can carry more bombs than a World War II B-Twenty-nine.”
At home, Cliff discussed something even more important from his point of view: Billy McCall. His career in the Air Force was finished. If the Warrior had come through, Billy would no doubt have jumped to general in a year and been on his way to command of SAC. But now he was an aging bomberjock who had failed to deliver. Cliff was inclined to think they could stop worrying about Billy. Sarah disagreed. Every day she warned him the danger was greater than ever. Now Billy was certain to retire from the Air Force and join the company.
BOOK: Conquerors of the Sky
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