Conquerors of the Sky (82 page)

Authors: Thomas Fleming

BOOK: Conquerors of the Sky

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“But these things happen in the aircraft business. One of the fathers of flight, the German, Otto Lilienthal, summed it up on his deathbed with a famous phraseâsacrifices must be expected. That's our mottoâit's every planemaker's motto. We'll find out what went wrong and fix it so it won't happen again. We'll have another prototype of the BX ready to fly in a month or so.”

They went out on the terrace, arm in arm. A mile or two at sea, a green plane was doing stunts. Loops, barrel rolls, immelmans. Writing his artistry on the blue dome of the sky. Sarah's heart almost stopped beating.

“That guy can fly,” Cliff said.

“We'll be doing the same thing soon.”

“I'm not that good,” Cliff said.

“Yes you are,” Sarah said, and almost believed it.

DESTINIES

Throughout the day, while the uproar over the crash of the BX swirled around him, part of Dick Stone's mind was elsewhereâwith Sarah in the house at Palos Verdes, trying to imagine what was happening between her and Cliff, realizing ruefully that he could not do it. No matter how well you knew a couple, there was a zone of intimacy they alone had experienced.

At other times he traveled to San Juan de Capistrano to ask an old woman a crucial question. For some reason he postponed it, although disappearing for a couple of hours might have been the best way to handle the maddening mixture of condescension and scorn that descended on the company from the media and Washington.

The Creature and his cohorts in Congress churned out a sickening mixture of jokes and sneers about the crash of the BX. Editorial writers and TV anchors rushed to wonder if anyone in the American aircraft industry knew what they were doing, citing a dozen other failed programs.

Apotheosis,
Adrian Van Ness whispered. It was perfect on-the-job training for a man who might soon become chief executive officer of an aircraft company. The media and the politicians were proving once more that Adrian was right in his cold-eyed assessment of them. Still Dick delayed his trip to San Juan de Capistrano. He found himself wondering if he really wanted to be CEO of this shot-up machine. Buchanan was an updated version of the
Rainbow Express,
staggering home on one and a half enginesâwith no one praying them in.

That night, pacing his lonely house in Nichols Canyon, Dick told himself if Sarah failed with Cliff, he would step aside and let the Big Shot and the wreck go down in flames together.
Apotheosis,
Adrian whispered. Somehow it had a mocking sound. As if he was telling him to stop kidding himself.

At 8 A.M. the next morning when Dick arrived bleary-eyed for work, his secretary handed him Cliff Morris's letter of resignation. With it was a note from Sarah. “It's your turn, Navigator.”

It was time for his trip to San Juan de Capistrano. Following Hanrahan's directions, Dick found Madame George in a comfortable cottage a block from the semi-restored mission. She was a withered chip of a woman but her mind was clear. Of course she remembered Adrian Van Ness. And Richard Stone. And Amalie Borne.

“Dear Amalie. She was both the best and the worst of my girls,” she whispered in her husky baritone.

“She told me a storyâthe night I met her,” Dick said. “She said she was Jewishâraised in Schweinfurt.” He choked out the rest of it, feeling like he was in a plane coming out of a 13 G dive that was turning his body and brain to mush.

“I know the whole story. She told it to me in 1945.”

“Was it true?”

“Absolutely. I was in Schweinfurt myself for most of the war. A forced laborer imported from France. When the Reich collapsed, I met Amalie there, roaming like a wolf girl in the ruins. I went to her so-called protector and forced him to give me all the cash he hadâor I would tell the Americans what he had done to her.”

Madame George lit a cigarette. “I told the Americans anyway. The money got us to Paris. But Amalie. Dear AmalieâI tried so hard to help her forget the past, to live in the present, surrounded by beauty and loveâ”

Tears streamed down Dick's face, turning the room, the husky-voiced old woman, into a blur. “I loved her,” he said.

“You were not alone,” Madame George said. “Prince Carloâso many others loved her. She could not love anyone in return. It was as if those nights in the attic, the furnaces in the crematoriums had annihilated her heart. All anyone can doâall you should doâis forgive her.”

“I do. I do,” Dick said, wiping his streaming eyes.

Suddenly Jewishness was no longer an unwanted burden, it was part of his history because it was part of his love and that love justified everything, the bombs on German cities and the treachery over Schweinfurt and the embezzled money and the bombers and fighters and attack planes Buchanan built to defend America. His history was part of the pain of all history, pain that only love and courage could confront.

Was this his apotheosis? To be both American and Jewish without regret or shame or hesitation? To be both so passionately they were one thing?

Dick drove back to his house in Nichols Canyon. He walked through the empty rooms thinking of Cassie and the children. A huge corporation was crouched a few miles away, waiting to leap on his back. But he felt incomprehensibly free for the first time in a decade. He was ready to fly to Tennessee and tell Cassie the truth at last. Maybe she would laugh in his face. Maybe not. Whatever happened at tomorrow's board meeting, it seemed almost unimportant now.

Twenty-four hours later, Dick stood in the darkened boardroom of the Buchanan Corporation, finishing his first speech as president. “The hypersonic transportâthe Orient Expressâwill fly people farther and faster than they've ever flown before. It will create the kind of revolution in air travel to the Far East that the subsonic jets have created in Europe. Imagine Japan and China only two hours away!

“But this is not the final installment of my dreams for this company, gentlemen. I have one more to share with you, based on a plane we builtâand mistakenly destroyedâthirty years ago.”

He punched a switch on the slide projector and onto the screen glided a gigantic flying wing. “This is the transport of the future, the airlifter to end
them all. It will be five hundred feet from wingtip to wingtip and it will carry as much cargo as a ten-thousand-ton freighter. We're calling it the Buchanan.”

The screen went dark. The lights came up. Frank Buchanan was sitting next to Dick. “You should have given me some warning, at least,” he said with a sad smile.

Dick squeezed his shoulder and turned to the board. “There's one more thing I want to say. Something that may surprise some of you and even make you reconsider the support most of you have promised me when you vote in a few minutes.

“We've done some things wrong in this company. You know what some of them are. I'm not going to list our sins. I could explain why we made some of these mistakes. The explanation would satisfy most of you. But an explanation is not an excuseâor a license to go on making the same mistakes. I want you to know I think they were wrong and we're not going to do them anymore.”

Dick stepped away from the lectern. “That's it, gentlemen. Those are my dreams and my principles. If you disagree with them, now is the time to stop me.”

The board endorsed Richard Schiller Stone and his program unanimously, while Frank Buchanan smiled his approval. The directors had already accepted Cliff Morris's letter of resignation and voted him the generous pension suggested by the new CEO. Dick thanked them and invited everyone outside for Adrian Van Ness's memorial service.

On the sunny terrace of the headquarters building was an urn containing Adrian's ashes. The clerical and middle-management employees formed a wide semicircle. Beyond them, several thousand members of the day shift stood in their coveralls. A clergyman recited the Twenty-third Psalm. Dick turned to Frank Buchanan and asked him if he would say a few words. It was a calculated risk. Dick had debated it with Bruce Simons and Kirk Willoughby only a few hours ago. Simons had been jittery about it. Willoughby thought Frank would not say anything too outrageous.

Frank limped to the microphone. “Adrian Van Ness's contribution to flight was a special awareness that no matter how high we soared or how fast we flew, we were still flying through history. He tried to help us cope with the tangled tormented past that creates so much of the turbulence in our lives. Sometimes he succeeded, sometimes he failed. But ultimately there was courage in his struggleâcourage we designers and engineers and pilots did not always appreciate. May his courageâand all the other varieties of courage in our skyâhelp us to continue the struggle to solve flight's mysteries and endure its failures and heartbreaks in the years to come.”

Overhead, while Frank was speaking, a prop plane began circling. Down, down it spiraled until everyone recognized it as a SkyRanger, Buchanan's first airliner. From its open door showered a rainbow of rose petals.

Dick watched Frank pick up one of the red petals and press it into Amanda
Van Ness's hand. Earlier in the day, he had witnessed their reunion in his office. Kirk Willoughby had examined Amanda and said she was capable of living happily with Frank. Dan Hanrahan had snorted and said he did not need a doctor to tell him that.

A few feet away, Sarah Morris scooped up a handful of petals and flung them back into the sky. She stood on tiptoes and kissed Cliff Morris on the cheek. Dick picked up a yellow petal and imagined pressing it into Cassie's hand. Had they crossed another boundary? Were some of them, at least, beyond the rainbow?

Apotheosis,
Adrian whispered one last time.
You'll make your compromises like I did. If the Orient Express and the Flying Wing turn out to be paper airplanes you'll go to work on the next-generation bomber, fighter, helicopter, dirigible if the Air Force wants it. You'll double the plant capacity and try to do everything simultaneously if you get the orders. You'll probably kill yourself from overwork in the process.

Maybe,
Dick Stone whispered to his American father.
Maybe.

BEYOND THE RAINBOW

The icy desert wind hissed out of the night through the open door of Frank Buchanan's cabin on the slope above Tahquitz Canyon. He sat there, ignoring the cold, pen in hand on the open page of his loose-leaf folder.

A Buchanan helicopter had flown him out to the cabin to clean it out. He was moving to a house in Topanga Canyon with Amanda. On impulse, he had told the pilot he wanted to spend one more night here. The helicopter would return in the morning.

Frank had held Amanda in his arms and the last vestige of his hatred for Adrian Van Ness had been cleansed from his soul. From Amanda had also come a suggestion that had given him new hope for Billy. Previously he had only tried to reach him. Frank had no fears for someone as innocent as Victoria. But Amanda had convinced him that he should try to reach both of them.

“Wherever he is, she's there too,” she said.

Still only silence, except for the wind. “I'm waiting,” Frank whispered.

From the shelf above his head, a book catapulted across the room and struck the opposite wall. It lay on the floor, its pages fluttering in the wind like the wings of a spent bird.

Frank picked it up and spread it open in the lamplight. His fingers were on the last page of Ezra Pound's Cantos. His eyes found the final lines.

Immaculata. Introibo
For those who drink of the bitterness.

The Immaculata! The light beyond the rainbow, beyond Eden, beyond the suns and stars. Billy had reached it with Victoria's help. Soon he and Amanda would be there too, embracing them.

But first there was the Orient Express. One last wing to design. Shakily, Frank's ancient fingers began sketching the ultimate plane.

By Thomas Fleming from Tom Doherty Associates

Remember the Morning
The Wages of Fame
Hours of Gladness
Dreams of Glory
When This Cruel War Is Over
Conquerors of the Sky

This is a work of fiction. All the characters and events portrayed in this novel are either fictitious or are used fictitiously.

CONQUERORS OF THE SKY

Grateful acknowledgment is made to New Directions Publishing Corporation for permission to reprint excerpts from “Canto LXXX” and “Notes for CXVII et seq.,” by Ezra Pound, from
The Cantos of Ezra Pound
, copyright Â© 1934, 1937, 1940, 1948, 1956, 1959, 1962, 1963, 1966, and 1968 by Ezra Pound.

A Forge Book
Published by Tom Doherty Associates, LLC
175 Fifth Avenue
New York, NY 10010

www.tor-forge.com

Forge
^Â®is a registered trademark of Tom Doherty Associates, LLC.

eISBN 9781466821477

First eBook Edition : May 2012

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Fleming, Thomas J.

Conquerors of the sky / Thomas Fleming.â1st ed.

p. cm.

“A Tom Doherty Associates book.”

ISBN 0-765-30322-1 (alk. paper)

1. Aerospace industriesâFiction. 2. Aircraft industryâFiction. I. Title.