Read Conquerors of the Sky Online
Authors: Thomas Fleming
Conquerors of the Sky (75 page)
“Hey, it's not that bad. Women have been doing this for a long time.”
“I'm not women.”
“You seem to be forgetting what this means to us.”
“What does it mean? You've gone right on making your dirty deals, building your rotten planes. What kind of a future will this baby have with someone like you running the country?”
Cliff was very tired. He had flown in from London two days ago and spent most of the next two days and nights conferring with Dick Stone and Dan Hanrahan on preparations for the protest. The CEO thought he deserved a few words of sympathy, maybe even praise from someone, especially Angela. He liked the rueful way she admired his executive skills and simultaneously damned them. It corresponded to the way he often felt about himself. Instead of sympathy, he was getting left-wing drivel.
“I wish I was running the fucking country! I'm mostly trying to keep our heads above the goddamn mess people like you and Lenin Jr. have created over the last ten years.”
“You bastard,” she said. “You're standing there in your Hong Kong tailored suit pulling down three hundred thousand a year and he doesn't have a cent. He gave up his career, his life, to try to change this country and people like you have made him a laughingstock. I'm proud I tried to help him. I'm going to go on trying to help him. We're not going to quit because you can outwit a simpleton like Jacob Woolman.”
“I'm not going to quit either. I'm not going to quit loving you.”
That had always worked in the past. Angela's anger had invariably evaporated into tears. But tonight the words thudded against the wall behind her like wet wads of paper. She barely noticed them. Alarm shivered Cliff's nerves. Was another woman going to turn on him?
“I'm serious!” she said. “I'm beginning to thinkâ”
Her face went from rage to terror in a blink. “Oh my God!” she screamed as the first labor pain struck.
“Call the doctor!” Cliff roared to the rockers in the living room. “Get my car!” he shouted to Lenin Jr.
The baby arrived three hours later. It was a boy, making Cliff wonder if his
luck was turning. Within the hour he was dancing him around the room in his arms, crooning to him while Lenin Jr. watched from the doorway, his smile not quite so smarmy. Angela watched too, barely smiling.
luck was turning. Within the hour he was dancing him around the room in his arms, crooning to him while Lenin Jr. watched from the doorway, his smile not quite so smarmy. Angela watched too, barely smiling.
“Isn't this worth it?” Cliff said. “Even worth putting up with me? What are we going to name him?”
“Not Charlie. I don't want him to know anything about him. How he died, why weâ”
“I didn't expect Charlie. How about something nice and neutral like Frank?”
“After Frank Buchanan, the designer of the BX?” Lenin Jr. said. “I hope not.”
Cliff stifled an impulse to kick him in the stomach. “Honey, I've got to get back to New York. Do you understand?”
Angela said she understood but she seemed to be looking at Lenin Jr. when she said it. In New York, the Saudi sheik turned out to be an Iranian with an unpronounceable name who wanted ten million up front to “reassure his contacts.” Cliff told him to get lost and headed for Washington, where a lot of things were happening that dropped Angela and their nameless child to the bottom of his list of worries. The 1976 presidential campaign was gathering steam and it was time to collect endorsements from the candidates on the BX bomber. Gerald Ford was no problem. The Republicans had revived the plane and it had virtually become part of their platform.
The Democrats were another matter. Remnants of George McGovern's routed peace-now unilateral disarmers were all over the place, pretending that 1972 never happened and the war in Vietnam was Nixon's fault. The Democratic front-runner, Jimmy Carter, was an Annapolis man with no built-in fondness for the Air Force. On the contrary, he had undoubtedly heard endless diatribes at the Naval Academy about how the blue suiters had tried to take the Navy's planes away from them.
Nevertheless, after immense wheedling and all-out pressure from key members of the House and Senate Armed Services Committees, Carter endorsed the BX before he got the nomination. That temporarily stifled rumblings from the Creature, Proxmire, and their ilk who were hungry for another attack on the plane.
Cliff called Angela every night. He begged her to bring the baby to Washington. She refused. Her stitches were agony as she had predicted and the baby screamed all night, every night. After the Republican convention, there was a political hiatus and Cliff flew to California determined to settle a few things. He had decided to insist on marrying Angela to give his son a father. He was not going to put up with any more advice from Irv or Arnie or Sid or Lenin Jr. about anything.
He arrived to find the Holmby Hills house swarming with photographers.
People
magazine was doing a story on Angela's defiance of conventional morals. She was posing with the love child in her arms, looking more desirable than Cliff had ever seen her.
People
magazine was doing a story on Angela's defiance of conventional morals. She was posing with the love child in her arms, looking more desirable than Cliff had ever seen her.
“What the hell are you doing here?” hissed a voice in Cliff's ear.
It was Lenin Jr. and he was not wearing his smarmy smile.
“Did I hear you right?” Cliff said.
“The last thing she wants is your over-age face in this story,” he said in the same stage whisper. “Get out. Come back in two hours.”
Cliff drove to the office and conferred with Frank Buchanan on some ECPs (Engineering Change Proposals) for a new run of the Colossus. Adrian had persuaded the Air Force to buy another fifty-four copies of the monster. Cliff had lunch with Dick Stone and predicted Carter would win the election and immediately order up the BX, solving all their financial problems with an influx of ten billion dollars.
“I don't like Carter's looks,” Dick said. “That shit-eating smile reminds me of the Creature.”
“It's as good as in the barn,” Cliff insisted. “Incidentally, I'm going to marry Angela. Do you think it will upset Adrian?”
“Not any more than you would if you married Jane Fonda.”
“Angela's not political in that obvious way,” Cliff said.
“The hell she isn't,” Dick said.
Back at the office, Cliff, never inclined to temporizing, put through a call to Adrian and asked him bluntly if he was opposed to him marrying Angela Perry. “I wouldn't dream of objecting personally. But I shudder to think of the board's reaction,” Adrian said.
The board of directors was a bunch of retired aerospace executives who never had a thought Adrian did not put in their heads. Adrian was much too smooth to let Cliff go to them and decry his interference in his private life.
On Cliff's telephone, the red lights and the green lights began blinking simultaneously. His secretary was pressing all the buttons. What the hell was happening? He got rid of Adrian. A second later the door swung open and he found himself face-to-face with Angela, Irv the producer, Arnie the publicity man, Sid the agentâand Lenin Jr. “What's this?” he said.
“This,” Angela said, sweeping past him, “is the conference we were supposed to have an hour ago at my place. Didn't Lee (Lenin Jr.'s real name) tell you to come back in two hours?”
“I've got other things to do,” Cliff said.
“Maybe this is a better place to talk,” Angela said.
Cliff knew exactly what she meant. He could not tell from their expressions whether Irv or Arnie or Sid knew. But the sneer on Lenin Jr.'s face suggested he knew what Cliff and Angela had done in this office to launch their romance.
“I flew out here to talk to youâalone,” Cliff said. He asked Sid and Arnie and Irv if they would like a tour of the plant. “It might give you some ideas for special effects,” he said. He suggested Lenin Jr. go with them and pretend he was visiting Disneyland.
“They're here because I asked them to be here,” Angela said. She positioned herself by the window, looking spectacular in a cream-colored blouse and long blue gaucho skirt. “I agree with you that our son needs a father. I'm prepared to marry you. I think, in spite of many profound disagreements, we could be
reasonably happy. But I have to consider my career, my public image, the expectations I've raised among millions of movie goers.”
reasonably happy. But I have to consider my career, my public image, the expectations I've raised among millions of movie goers.”
It's a script, Cliff thought. She's reciting lines.
“This is especially true in the light of Buchanan's recent defiance of popular protests against your new nuclear bomber. You'd have to give everyone in the movie colony very convincing evidence that you've changed your mind about this and other weapon systems that strike at the hopes and yearnings of millions of Americans still living in poverty. Arnie here has prepared a statement which I'd like you to make at our wedding.”
Arnie, who was about five-feet-nothing, with a completely bald head that rumor had it he shaved daily, fished a piece of paper out of his briefcase and handed it to Cliff with a somewhat nervous grin.
Irv the producer, who was about six-feet-two and vaguely resembled a whooping crane, cleared his throat and said: “There's nothing personal in this, Cliff, please understand that.”
Sid the agent, who had the eyes of a starving piranha in a face that was mostly suet, reiterated this sentiment.
The statement began with Cliff's apology for having devoted twenty-five years of his life to serving the Military Industrial Complex. It confessed to the American people that Buchanan had devoured millions of dollars to build planes that the country did not need, planes that did nothing but kill people. It specifically repudiated the BX bomber as a “monstrosity” that would only increase the probability of a nuclear war. It ended with a glowing tribute to the way Angela had helped him to confess these atrocious sins and led him to the “altar of love and peace.”
Cliff read the whole thing twice. “Arnie,” he said, walking toward the tiny publicity man. “This is wonderful stuff. It's good enough to eat.”
Arnie responded with a vaguely alarmed smile. He rubbed his shiny pink head, perhaps hoping for luck as Cliff's six-foot-four frame loomed over him.
“That's exactly what you're going to do. Eat it.” Cliff grabbed Arnie by the shirt and jammed the sheet of paper into his mouth, pinched his nose and said: “Chew.”
Arnie started turning blue. “You're killing him!” Angela screamed.
“Down on the floorâeveryone!” Lenin Jr. yelled.
He fell to the rug and curled into a ball. Angela imitated him. Irv and Sid followed, with considerably more difficulty. Sid weighed about three hundred pounds and elongated Irv found folding up difficult.
“You are now confronted with a sit-in to protest the BX bomber!” Lenin Jr. shouted. “We have press releases prepared and our chauffeur is waiting for a prearranged signal to distribute them to TV and newspapers.”
Arnie was chewing frantically but was still turning blue. Cliff let go of his nose and he spluttered pieces of the statement all over the rug. Cliff grabbed him by his collar and the seat of his pants and threw him out of the office headfirst. He did the same thing with Irv, Sid, and Lenin Jr.
Cliff slammed the door and stood with his back to it. “Get up,” he said to Angela.
“Lee predicted you'd be violent,” Angela said. She was starring in her own protest movie, loving every minute of it.
Cliff dragged her to her feet and pressed her against the window. “You can do this here? You can do this to me here?” he said.
“I'm trying to stop you from doing something worse to me. Something you've been trying to do since we started. Ruin my career. Reduce me to your obedient servant.”
Outside an Aurora came whining down in its final glide. Angela was like that plane, an expensive fantasy that proved once more he was a man among men. But Cliff was not going to let Angela humiliate him. His luck might be running all wrong but he was still the pilot who had brought the
Rainbow Express
back from Schweinfurt. He had ridden the Starduster out to the Sierra Wave.
Rainbow Express
back from Schweinfurt. He had ridden the Starduster out to the Sierra Wave.
“Admit you still love me,” Cliff said, standing over her.
“I don't. I've stopped,” she said.
“Bullshit. I told you I'd never stop loving you and I never will. Can you turn your back on that? Can you trade that for the left-wing rubbish you just spouted?”
“It isn't rubbish. It gives my life meaning. You can't give it meaning!”
“I can give it the only meaning that matters!” he shouted.
Meaning.
Cliff stepped back, stunned by the impact of those words on himself. They rebounded from the sun-filled glass like twenty-millimeter shells exploding against his body with the memory of so many other meanings that mattered. Suddenly he was talking to Sarah. He was remembering the year before and the year after Charlie was born. What was he doing, trying to make this woman part of that kind of meaning?
Cliff stepped back, stunned by the impact of those words on himself. They rebounded from the sun-filled glass like twenty-millimeter shells exploding against his body with the memory of so many other meanings that mattered. Suddenly he was talking to Sarah. He was remembering the year before and the year after Charlie was born. What was he doing, trying to make this woman part of that kind of meaning?
“At leastâI thought I couldâuntil you came here and ruined it,” Cliff said. Flabby fists pounded on the office door. “Angela! Are you all right?” Lenin Jr. cried.
Other books
A Thing As Good As Sunshine by Juliet Nordeen
Bombshell by James Reich
Picture Perfect (Butler Island) by Nikki Rittenberry
a movie...and a Book by Daniel Wagner
The Mogul's Maybe Marriage by Mindy Klasky
120 days... by Stratton, M.
Los gritos del pasado by Camilla Läckberg
FOUND (Angels and Gargoyles Book 1) by Brenda L. Harper
Mrs. Darcy and the Blue-Eyed Stranger by Lee Smith
Duncan's Diary by Christopher C. Payne