Read Conquerors of the Sky Online
Authors: Thomas Fleming
Conquerors of the Sky (74 page)
But Ms. Sarah Morris's bitter lips were sealed against testaments of possible love. Dick Stone's lips, hands, heart, were equally encased in that unwritten law scorched on the male brain stemâthou shalt not seduce your best friend's wife. Trapped, sealed, condemned to pirouetting in separate space capsules through the long gray years unto eternity. So there was nothing else to do but murmur meaningless words about how grateful she was to be asked to Charlie's enshrinement and slink back to her desert abode, her Gaza where she waited, eyeless, for the chance to bring down the temple in the name of her mserable revenge.
Cliff Morris stood at the window of his corner office in Buchanan Aircraft's El Segundo headquarters watching thousands of protestors massed on the company's airfield at twilight, each carrying a lighted candle of peace. Inside the main factory building sat a gleaming white prototype of the BX bomber.
“I still think we should call out the National Guard,” Cliff said. “These assholes could attack the planeâdestroy it.”
“That's exactly what I'm hoping they'll do,” Dick Stone said. “But we won't get that lucky.”
“Is it worth it, Dick? All this strife, this hatred?” Frank Buchanan said.
“Yes,” Dick said.
“Do you agree, Cliff?” Frank asked.
“Yeah,” Cliff said with minimal enthusiasm.
He did not like the way Dick Stone had taken charge of this crisis. He did not like the way Dick had taken charge of almost everything in the day-to-day operations of Buchanan. But there was not much he could do about it. Adrian Van Ness had made Dick executive vice president.
“We can't back down now. Among other things, we can't afford it,” Dick said.
It was the brutal truth. In Washington, for the third year in a row Adrian Van Ness had won a billion dollars from Congress to keep the BX alive. That was not enough to build more than the prototype but it had provided Buchanan with desperately needed cash. Unfortunately, Adrian had been unable to talk the Air Force into swallowing the five-hundred-million-dollar cost overrun on the Colossus. That cloud of red ink still loomed over the company. Last year their high-performance fighter, the SkyDemon, had lost the fly-off with General Dynamics F-16, leaving behind it another pool of red ink deep enough to drown them.
Meanwhile, Cliff flailed around the globe frantically searching for orders for his baby, the widebody commercial jet, the Aurora. He had been able to sell 30 to the Japanese with bribes even the Prince would have considered excessive. He was now working on the Egyptians and other national airlines in the Middle East. There the bribes were certain to be even more stupendous. Almost everywhere else, Lockheed was making him look silly with their own highly developed grease machine. So far Cliff had orders for a paltry 120 copiesâleaving him and the company up to their ears in another deluge of red ink.
There were times when Cliff wondered if some kind of curse, some evil spirit, began pursuing the company the day he became CEO. Any hope of selling the Aurora domestically vanished when the Arabs created OPEC and raised oil prices into the stratosphere in 1973. The airlines' profits vanished in a swirl of hydrocarbons. Then a careless pilot flew an Aurora into a Florida swamp, killing everyone aboard and triggering a swarm of multimillion-dollar lawsuits.
Nixon, the president who had revived the BX bomber, was gone along with his landslide. Gone too was Vietnamâin Communist hands, abandoned by a Congress who had ignored President Gerald Ford's pathetic cry, “Our friends are dying!” But the BX had survived, thanks to heroic lobbying by Adrian, Mike Shannon, and Buchanan's Washington staff. They had beaten back the onslaughts of the Creature and the other critics of the Military Industrial Complex in and out of Congress.
This year, the nation's 200th anniversary, the critics had changed their tactics. One of the Creature's staffers, a Quaker named Jacob Woolman, decided the BX was the perfect issue to revive the noble emotions of the antiwar movement. He had organized a national crusade against the plane, which was cresting tonight beneath their windows.
A Buchanan helicopter rose from the roof of the main building and hovered over the crowd. From its open doors fluttered thousands of pieces of paper. The demonstrators picked them up and read them by candlelight. It was a statement signed by Cliff, welcoming them to Buchanan Field and assuring them that there were no police or National Guard troops anywhere near the premises.
We respect your right to protest. In return, we are confident you will respect our property and the millions of dollars worth of tools and equipment used to build planes that defend this country and give thousands of skilled workers jobs.
Dick Stone had written the statement. Dick had assessed the mood of the country and decided conciliation, not confrontation, was the way to go. “Instead of them making us look bad, we'll make them look bad,” Dick said. Adrian Van Ness liked the idea; hardly surprisingâit showed how much Dick had learned from the master of forethought.
The statement was part of the game plan. So was banning the police. Whenever pickets appeared outside their headquarters building, Dick sent them coffee and sandwiches. He had Cliff's picture taken talking to them.
“Don't pay any attention to those lying words,” Jacob Woolman screamed from the platform. Behind him a rock band struck up “We Shall Overcome.” Woolman, still bedecked in sixties love beads, led the crowd through the hymn. A Catholic priest who had become famous during the same tormented decade read one of his poems about a Vietnamese child killed by American bombs. Woolman gave a ranting hysterical speech in which he attacked the Military Industrial Complex of the United States and Israel. He linked the Palestinians in their refugee camps with the blacks in the ghettos and the villagers in Vietnam.
“Did you hear that, Stone? He's attacking Israel. Why don't you go down there and punch him in the mouth?” Cliff said.
“If it gets the Israeli lobby on our side, I'll hug him instead,” Dick said.
Bruce Simons, their public relations director, returned from a tour of the crowd. He grabbed Cliff by the arm. “I found Sarah. She's not going to make a statement, thank God.”
Cliff nodded glumly. Sarah was another reason why he was keeping a low profile tonight. She was down there with the demonstrators, using their son Charlie as her justification. Charlieâand Billy McCall. She said she was doing penance for her sins against them bothâwhatever that meant. Sin was not an idea Cliff understood. It smelled musty, absurd, a word from another century.
She had made no attempt to divorce him after their explosion of mutual loathing the night Charlie died. Somehow that made Cliff feel safe. She was still part of his luck, no matter how badly it seemed to be running. She was still the figure on the runway as he fought to bring the shattered Rainbow Express home from Schweinfurt.
Sarah spent most of her time at their Palm Springs house, which Cliff ceded as her turf. They kept in touch on family matters, especially their problems with their older daughter, Elizabeth, who spent a year in a drug rehab center and another year with her mother putting her mind back together. Sarah had done
a good job with her. Elizabeth was now happily married to the doctor who had rescued her.
a good job with her. Elizabeth was now happily married to the doctor who had rescued her.
Dick Stone told Bruce Simons to make Woolman's attack on Israel the lead in his statement to the press. “Stress how pained we all were because the heroic Israelis fly so many of our planes,” he said.
The roar of airliners landing at LAX kept drowning out the music and the speakers. In about an hour the crowd began to dissolve. By eleven o'clock the protest was over. Everyone agreed by the standards of the sixties it was a flop. Dick Stone telephoned Adrian Van Ness with the good news. He was not very responsive. His voice crackled over the speakerphone on Cliff's desk, sounding like someone from outer space.
“One more trip over Niagara Falls survived,” he said, “Any good news on the Aurora?”
Cliff went into overdrive about the prospects for Mideast sales. The Egyptians, the Moroccans, the Tunisians were in love with the plane. It was a lie, of course. What they loved were the James Madisons in Cliff's briefcase.
“Let me know when love translates into cash,” Adrian said. Panic roiled Cliff's flesh but he concealed it with his usual skill.
Downstairs Dick Stone thanked Dan Hanrahan and his security men for playing the game his way. Trying to minimize his surly performance during the demonstration, Cliff shifted gears. “Good flight plan, Navigator. Feel like relaxing over a drink?”
Dick shook his head. “I've got a date with a couple of union leaders at eight o'clock tomorrow morning.”
Watching Dick trudge back to his office, Cliff thought he saw signs of strain. Several sources had told him Dr. Willoughby had barred booze from Dick's diet and was holding him together with a careful mix of tranquilizers and antidepressants. It had been a year since Cassie divorced him and went back to Tennessee.
Up the freeways Cliff roared to Angela Perry's house in Holmby Hills, his home away from home in Los Angeles these days. A party was in progress as he arrived. There always seemed to be a party in progress. There were the usual nubile starlets in miniskirts and pretty boys in Gucci jeans, dancing to rock music that blasted from the most expensive stereo system in California.
Cliff found Angela in bed, watching the evening news with one of the ex-sixties activists sitting on the floor beside her. His name was Sam something but Cliff always called him Lenin Jr. He had been tear-gassed in Chicago in 1968 and had showed up at all the other right places from Woodstock to Altamont to Kent State to acquire a niche in the Movement's hall of fame. He looked like Pinocchio, except that his nose was not quite as long. He had the same cockeyed eyes and smarmy smile. He also (in Cliff's opinion) thought like someone with a brain made of wood.
Cliff kissed Angela and rubbed her swollen stomach. She was nine months pregnant. “How is he?”
“Restless,” she said.
The child was her idea. She had declared she would have it during that unforgettable Christmas weekend they spent in Washington after Charlie's death. Conception had turned out to be much more difficult than either of them imagined. Angela was in her early forties and Cliff was fifty-two. They had wound up consulting fertility experts and counting sperm and ova.
She had finally conceivedâand Cliff asked her to marry him. Her producer, her publicity man, her agent, were horrified. Marrying a right-wing warmonger would destroy her image. After listening to everyone, including several tirades from Cliff, Angela decided it would be better to have a love child without benefit of a marriage license. It was the in thing to do in seventies Hollywoodâit would enhance her image as a free spirit.
On television a reporter was asking Jacob Woolman why he had attacked Israel in his assault on the BX. “Because Israel is part of the American war machine!” he shrilled.
Cliff grinned. Bruce Simons had done his job. The reporter was an old Buchanan friend, whom they had taken on junkets to the Paris Air Show and other plush ports of call. By the time Woolman stopped denouncing Israel, his movement would be yesterday's news.
“How could he be so stupid!” Lenin Jr. groaned.
“How come you weren't there tonight, hero?” Cliff said.
“I saw no point in playing into your Machiavellian hands,” Lenin Jr. said.
Cliff had made no secret of their strategy. He enjoyed outraging Angela's friends by bragging about the way Buchanan outwitted protestors and congressmen to build warplanes.
“You
are
awful,” Angela said in an unusually weary voice.
are
awful,” Angela said in an unusually weary voice.
Cliff kicked Lenin Jr. in the shins. “Beat it, Vladimir,” he said.
Lenin Jr. slouched out of the bedroom and Cliff lay down beside her. “You'll feel a lot better in a week,” he said.
“Irv said this kid has cost us fifty million dollars.” Irv was her producer.
“Sid's turned down
seven
firm offers for major films.” Sid was her agent.
seven
firm offers for major films.” Sid was her agent.
“Arnie says people are screaming for new stills. It's amazing how fast an image gets used up.”
Arnie was her publicity man.
“You'll be back at work in a month, I'm sure of it.”
“I better be.”
“I've got to go to New York tomorrow.”
“You promised you'd stay for the week! So you'd be hereâ”
“Honey, there's a guy flying in from Saudi Arabia who swears he can sell a hundred Auroras for us in the Middle East.”
“For the usual five million a plane?”
Angela was fascinated by the gritty side of the plane business. She collected stories of corporate corruption to convince herself that her left-wing friends had it right, America was hopeless.
“Maybe six million,” Cliff said. For a while he had bragged about the bribes he paid overseas. But Angela's reaction started to remind him of Sarah. Lately he had kept his mouth shut.
“I want you here all week. You promised me!”Angela said, combining moral disapproval and sheer willfulness.
“I'll fly out the minute I hear you've gone into labor.”
“I've begun to wonder exactly where this relationship is going,” Angela said, her mouth in a Bette Davis pout.
“Honey, you're feeling lousy. Let's talk about it next month. When we've got something to celebrate.”
“You'll have something to celebrate. I'll have stitches. You won't be able to touch me for another two months.”
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