Top Gun (12 page)

Knowledge is power.
Junior loan officers had access to the bank’s files, so Campbell made it a practice to stick around after closing in order
to study up on Western Pacific’s most important clientele—the real VIPs—just in case the information should ever come in handy.
From having read Herman Gold’s file, Campbell knew that Gold was here at the bank to see the bigwigs about getting some extensions
on his considerable loans. Campbell also knew that Gold was going to be turned down, because Gold Aviation was in tough financial
straits. This was no surprise to Campbell. He had seen Herman Gold’s type before. Gold’s first and only love was airplanes.
He was an innovator, a creative entrepreneur. Dreary day-to-day details were the bane of Herman Gold’s existence and always
would be. Campbell was willing to wager that Herman Gold had never even balanced his personal checkbook, never mind his company’s
ledgers.

The bank did turn down Gold’s request, and that night Campbell let Herman Gold stew in his own juices a while before telephoning
him at the Gold residence, using the unlisted number that he got out of Gold’s file. Campbell did some fast talking and managed
to win himself a meeting with Herman Gold for the next day, in order to make his
real
pitch….

“You know about airplanes, but you must put your company on a more businesslike footing,” Campbell told Herman Gold on that
sunny Tuesday morning in August 1925. They met in Gold’s rough-hewn office, on the top floor of the Santa Monica waterfront
warehouse that in those days housed the fledging company. “You and your staff have the ideas, but ideas need organization
to turn them into reality,” Campbell argued. “I’m suggesting that I come to work for you as CEO of your company in order to
supply that organization. I can run the air-transport side of the business for you. I can straighten out your books, control
your expenditures, and keep track of your billing. I can supply you the firm foundation Gold Aviation needs to reach the heavens
on the wings of your revolutionary airplane designs.”

Herman Gold laughed appreciatively at that last line, as Campbell had thought he would the night before when Campbell had
been endlessly rehearsing this spiel.

“The first thing we do is set up a holding company for the airplane-manufacturing division and the air-transport line,” Campbell
continued. “We could call it Gold Aviation and Transport.”

Herman laughed a second time. “GAT, huh?”

“GAT.” Campbell nodded.

And the rest, as they say, was history….

The first thing Campbell did after coming to work at Gold Aviation was to get the firm some much-needed interim relief from
its creditors. Next, Campbell convinced Herman to take GAT public. Herman retained a 35-percent controlling interest and Campbell
used his bank contacts to borrow the money to buy 3 percent. The remaining shares were offered to the general public, bringing
in a little over a hundred thousand dollars.

A hundred grand,
Campbell now thought, laughing to himself, looking around his office.
A hundred grand was chicken feed these days. It was less than half a year’s rent for the office space here at Agatha Holding,
but back in 1927 it had seemed like all the money in the world….

And back in those days, that hundred grand had been enough to get built Herman Gold’s first airplane design, the G-1 Yellowjacket
mail plane. The United States Post Office and the private air-transport industry ended up buying about a zillion G-1s, and
that cash flow funded the other airplane designs and allowed the company to buy the original patch of Burbank desert on which
it now stood.

Thanks to Tim Campbell, the rejuvenated Gold Aviation and Transport was flying high, and by then Campbell and Herman Gold
had become solid friends. It turned out that Campbell’s and Herman’s origins were very similar. Herman Gold had been born
Hermann Goldstein in Germany. An orphaned Jew, Herman had also endured a hard childhood on the streets of Berlin. During the
First World War, Herman served as a fighter pilot, flying with the Red Baron and becoming an ace. After the war, Herman immigrated
to America, where he’d worked as a truck mechanic and a barnstorming pilot before a dangerous stint flying booze from Mexico
to California during Prohibition earned him the startup capital to establish Gold Aviation.

Yeah, we were a lot alike,
Campbell now brooded.
Too much alike…

When the Depression hit, GAT, like most of the other big aviation concerns, emerged relatively unscathed. Once things began
to return to normal, Campbell got Herman Gold’s blessing to again restructure GAT in order to raise operating capital. Campbell
split the firm into two companies with separate stock offerings. GAT remained the airplane design and manufacturing concern,
while the newly severed Gold Transport changed its name to Skyworld Airline. Her man Gold kept a controlling interest in both
companies, but Campbell sold all of his GAT holdings in order to buy enough Skyworld stock to be able to wrangle himself the
job of president of the new airline. It was a momentous decision on Campbell’s part. For years, Campbell and Herman Gold had
fulfilled their dreams of being wealthy, but now, for the first time, Campbell felt that he had become Herman’s equal in the
business. In his own mind, Campbell thought he had moved from being Herman’s employee to becoming his partner….

That was when the trouble started.

On Campbell’s desk, the telephone console beeped. Campbell pressed the talk button. “Yes?”

“Mr. Layten to see you,” the secretary announced.

“Send him in.”

The door opened and in came Turner Layten, Campbell’s personal assistant at Agatha Holding. Layten was in his early fifties.
He was pear-shaped, with rounded shoulders, baby-smooth jowls, small gray eyes, and black hair seeded with gray, waxed and
parted on the side. He was dressed in a gray suit, white shirt, and red tie.

Still dressing like a government bureaucrat,
Campbell thought as he watched Layten standing in front of his desk.
Got to get this boy to loosen up, put a little flash in his wardrobe….

“Jack Rosa just phoned to say he still hasn’t heard from Don Harrison concerning the Pont,” Layten began.

“That’s good.” Campbell gestured to his assistant to take a scat.

Layten looked perplexed as he sat down. “Sir, Mr. Rosa seemed extremely concerned that his call to Don Harrison some weeks
ago may well serve to goad GAT into withdrawing its Pont jetliner from the market.”

“That’s bullshit,” Campbell declared. “GAT ain’t never withdrawn from nothing.” Campbell enjoyed Layten’s involuntary grimace
at his use of a double negative. It was part of the fun of being as rich as Midas that you could be as crude as you wanted,
scraping your nails along the blackboard of life, and folks had to take it. “GAT ain’t never backed down when Herman Gold
was running it,” Campbell reiterated. “Don Harrison ain’t about to start now.”

“Yes, sir.” Layten nodded. “But Jack Rosa fears that if GAT
should
withdraw, the reduced competition would automatically drive up the price of the remaining aviation companies’ jetliner offerings.”

“Jack Rosa ought to know better than to fret like an old lady,” Campbell snorted. “He knows I’ve guaranteed that TransWest
will come out of this smelling like a rose no matter
what
happens in the marketplace in exchange for his having made that call to GAT.” Campbell frowned. “But if I’d known old Jack
was going to be such a lily-liver, I would’ve had some other airline exec phone Harrison at GAT to give him the advance word
about Agatha Holding.”

“Sir. why
did
you want Don Harrison to know what we were up to?” Layten asked, looking puzzled.

Campbell laughed. “So Harrison would know who it is about to do him in! I want that boy to
see
GAT tied to the railroad track, to
see
that locomotive bearing down with
me
at the throttle, and for him to know there isn’t a damned thing he can do about it.”

Layten asked, “But by giving advance warning of what we intend to do, haven’t we given Don Harrison time to find a way out
of the predicament we’ve put him in?”

“How?” Campbell demanded impatiently. “How’s he gonna do that, son, you tell me?” Campbell shook his head. “I swear. Turner,
you were in the CIA
too long.
All that slinking around on your belly you had to do, it’s no wonder your balls got rubbed clean off.”

Turner Layten had turned bright red. He cleared his throat, clearly anxious to change the subject. “You’ve never told me,
sir, why
do
you hate Herman Gold so much?”

Campbell was amused. “Why do
you
hate Steve Gold?” he asked rhetorically.

(Two)

“Why do
you
hate Steve Gold?” Mr. Campbell asked.

Turner Layten barely noticed that the man behind the desk was grinning like a wolf as Layten surrendered himself to his ever-constant,
deep, and abiding hatred of Steven Gold….

Layten and Gold met back in 1957, and disliked each other from the first. In those days, Steve Gold was an Air Force lieutenant
colonel, a cocky maverick who thought he could have things all his own way. Layten was just as young, bright, and ambitious,
but he didn’t subscribe to the notion that the way to get noticed was by having a smart mouth and a swagger. Turner Layten
was
proud
to be a team player.

In those days, Layten was assistant to Jack Horton, an associate deputy director at the CIA. Back then, the smart money had
it that Horton was being groomed to one day assume the Agency’s directorship, and Horton might well have made it, taking Layten
along with him to the very top, if it hadn’t been for Steve Gold’s meddling in the aftermath of the Mayfly MR-1 spy plane
disaster.

The MR-1 had been Jack Horton’s project from its inception. It was Horton who convinced Herman Gold at GAT to design and build
the spy-plane fleet for the CIA. When it became evident that a war-hero-type Air Force fly-boy was going to be needed to front
the spy-plane pilot-recruitment program, Herman Gold suggested to Horton that his son, Steve, be given the job. The Air Force
was agreeable, so Jack Horton had the CIA borrow Steve, who plunged wholeheartedly into his new assignment.

In retrospect, Layten had to admit that Steve Gold did an exemplary job of convincing top-drawer, young Air Force pilots to
volunteer to fly the MR-1 over the Soviet Union. Steve Gold also did a fine job of motivating those men during their training.
The trouble arose once the MR-1 spy planes began making their flights. The goddamned Boy Scout in Lieutenant Colonel Gold
wouldn’t let the man simply walk away from a job well done. Steve Gold couldn’t leave well enough alone; he had to feel
responsible
for the men he’d recruited.

In 1960, an MR-1 spy plane was shot down over Russia, its pilot captured alive by the Reds. There was a huge international
diplomatic stink over the matter. The United States’ official line was that the MR-1 was nothing but a meteorological research
plane, but the Reds put the pilot on trial for espionage, found him guilty, and sentenced him to ten years. The CIA’s position
on the matter was that the pilot knew the risks when he’d signed on, that he’d been equipped with devices to take his own
life to avoid being captured alive, and that if he’d chosen not to use them that was his business.

Thinking back on it, Layten still believed that the Agency’s position had been sound. The CIA had just been newly installed
in its Langley, Virginia, headquarters and preferred to look toward its bright future rather than the past, and Jack Horton
didn’t want this unfortunate spy-plane business to muck up his record. Accordingly, Horton lobbied hard on Capitol Hill that
it would be in the national interest to put the incident behind the country, to let the imprisoned pilot fade away forgotten.

The politicians seemed willing to go along with the idea. Everything might have gone smashingly…

If it hadn’t been for Steve Gold.

Lieutenant Colonel Gold got it into his head that since
he
had gotten the imprisoned ex-Air Force pilot into this mess by recruiting him, it was up to him to get the sap out of that
Russian prison cell. Gold began lobbying on Capitol Hill to arrange a spy swap. When Jack Horton tried to put a lid on the
idea—and on Gold—the impudent lieutenant colonel went so far as to threaten that he was willing to destroy his own career
by going public concerning all the dirt he had on the spy-plane program. Horton couldn’t take the chance that Gold was bluffing,
so he reversed his stance and began lobbying for the pilot’s release, and a spy swap to free the pilot between the United
States and the Soviet Union was eventually arranged. Trouble was, all that noise Steve Gold had made inspired the Senate Intelligence
Committee to investigate the MR-1 matter. Jack Horton was dragged through the mud, his career destroyed, while Layten himself
suffered taint through association. Horton ended up resigning from the Agency, and Layten found his own ticket to the top
abruptly canceled. Layten lost all the marvelous perks and privileges—
the power
—that came from being Jack Horton’s right-hand man, and was transferred to a dead-end job in the Agency, where it was made
clear to him that he was on the shelf for the duration of his career.

Layten contemplated resigning from the Agency, but he couldn’t. He had nowhere to go. There was certainly no place for him
in his father’s prestigious law firm, nor any position at an appropriate level available to him in the private sector after
the public scouring he’d endured in the press—in the
tabloids,
for heaven’s sake—during the MR-1 investigation. Layten found himself ostracized from his crowd, dropped by his friends,
and only tolerated by his scandalized family.

Layten remained in his dead-end job at the Agency for nine years, daily pushing papers, watching others with less talent pass
him up the ladder, and every second of his life deeply cursing Steven Gold for doing this to him. It was Gold who had caused
him to be plucked from the heights and buried in a windowless cubicle in Data Storage and Records.