Authors: Thomas Fleming

Conquerors of the Sky (44 page)

BOOK: Conquerors of the Sky

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“Sure.”

“If he does, you'll love him in a special way, won't you?”

“Sure,” Cliff said, growing more and more uneasy.

“You'd be in despair if he were killed?”

“Of course, butâ”

“This was my son.”

“I'm quitting with you,” Sam Hardy said. “We'll start another company.” Dozens of similar declarations swept the Black Hole.

“Let's do some drinking on my expense account before we go,” Frank said.

The designers departed for the Honeycomb Club. Dick wandered into in his office and discovered Cliff was there waiting for him. “Do I get the maximum explanation now?” he said.

“The problem didn't go away. Weâwe never had a chance,” Cliff said.

Dick stared at his blank computer screen. Things began coalescing in his head. “Especially after you gave Adrian all the reports about the stability problems and my upscale cost estimate.”

“Dick. You've got to be realistic. This is a business, not a goddamn experimental flight laboratory. Adrian's traded that plane for a promise of an order for two hundred Excaliburs, redesigned as troop and cargo transports. So Frank's heart is broken for a while. He'll get over it.”

A week ago, a month ago, Dick Stone might have nodded and agreed with these words. But something remarkable had just happened to him. He had become a pilot. He had learned to fly in a plane designed by Frank Buchanan. He had been taught by a pilot who had learned from Frank by the same mystic laying on of hands.

“I'm sorry. I don't like the sound of that. I don't know exactly why.”

“You better learn to like it if you want to keep working for Adrian,” Cliff said. “He wants you to wipe out everything you've got on the computer about the Talus. Then we'll go to work on my files.”

“No!” Dick smashed both his fists down on the desk. “I won't do it. I won't let you do it. Don't you have any appreciation for this plane? What it meansânot just to Frank but to the whole history of flying?”

“I appreciate it as much as you do,” Cliff said. “But I appreciate keeping the goddamn company in business too.”

“I'd rather stand on Hollywood and Vine with a tin cup.”

“That won't be necessary,” Adrian Van Ness said.

He paused in the doorway, smiling sardonically. “Maybe Dick is right,” he said to Cliff. “We'll just pretend to destroy the files. We'll tell the SOBs in Washington we've wiped them out to the last comma. What's another lie in this messy business? We've got an underground vault we built during the war
in case the Japs bombed us. We'll put them there. But you both have to promise me not to tell Frank Buchanan. As far as he's concernedâthe wipeout was total.”

“Why?” Dick asked, not even trying to conceal his contempt.

“You can't trust an emotional basket case like Frank.”

Slumped on the couch, Cliff nodded wearily. Adrian Van Ness turned to Dick. How did he know he was vowing to tell Frank Buchanan the truth? “You agree, Dick? Or would you prefer an actual wipeout?” Adrian asked.

Adrian's smile made everything perfectly clear. He was the man in charge. Dick nodded numbly. Now he knew what Frank Buchanan meant about making noble promises when you worked for Adrian Van Ness.

Was this a second laying on of hands? Not if he could help it, Dick vowed. In his head a voice whispered:
What do you think of California freedom now?

TRIO IN BLUE

She had lost him, Sarah thought, watching her defeated husband slouch across the lawn to his white Buick convertible. The destruction of the Talus had ruined something less visible but far more important between her and Cliff. She had failed to comfort him, reach him, last night as they made love. She was four months' pregnant. But that had not made the difference. She felt a newâor oldâdistance between them, a strange, almost bitter withdrawal to the status of perfunctory husband again.

An hour later, helping Maria hang the wash in the backyard, Sarah was startled by a swooping plane. She looked up in time to see the green Lustra zooming straight up into the blue sky and tipping into a loop that turned into a spin that flowed into a half-dozen snap rolls.

How did Billy know? She watched him inscribe himself against the sky like the rhythmic line of a modern abstract painter. Intricately doubling back on himself, exploding into effervescent heaps of loops, he wrote coded messages in lazy barrel rolls and unbelievably intricate inverted spins. It was painting and music combined in a dance of death-defying skill. She could almost hear the orchestral crescendos as he stood the plane on its tail, its back, its wingtips. She saw him at the controls, gravity pounding at his chest and brain.

Sarah wanted to be with him. She wanted to share the danger and the exaltation. But she knew she could only do it by calling that scribbled number on the card Billy had given her five months ago. He would never call her. He would only send her this coded declaration of his mastery of the sky. A terrible sadness seeped into her soul.

Cliff Morris and Dick Stone spent the day storing the records of the Talus in the underground vault. They did not have much to say to each other. There was no trace of Frank Buchanan or his designers, which added to the sense of desolation as they collected blueprints and reports and stuffed them into boxes.

That night Cliff called Sarah and told her he would be working late. He and Dick Stone went looking for Frank Buchanan. He was not at the Honeycomb Club. In fact, no one was at the Honeycomb Club. The place looked as if it had been hit by a couple of fragmentation bombs. A tearful Madeleine, wearing slacks and a sweater, told them the designers had started a brawl with the engineers that wrecked the place.

Madeleine said Frank and Billy McCall and a half-dozen designers had left there last night so drunk they could hardly walk but they insisted on driving Frank's Ford. She hoped they were not dead at the bottom of one of Topanga's ravines.

They took Madeleine along and drove to Frank's house in Las Tunas Canyon, several miles north of Topanga. They found their heroes were not dead but were all drunker than they had been the night before, if that was possible. Cassie Trainor and a half-dozen other women from the Honeycomb Club were trying to console them.

Cliff accepted some Inverness and told them he and Dick had stored the records of the Talus against Adrian's orders. “Who knows what'll happen in the next couple of years? Adrian might change his mind. Or a new secretary of the Air Force might decide to go for it,” he said.

Cliff looked steadily at Dick Stone, waiting to see if he would let him get away with the lie. He said nothing. Was he here for the same reason? To regain a few shreds of his manhood?

“Your loyalty is touching, Cliff,” Frank said. “But nothing can alter the fundamental facts. Our plane is lying in pieces in some junkyard in El Segundo or Long Beach. Getting drunk is the only sensible response. Join us.”

He refilled Cliff's glass to the top with Inverness. Across the room, Cassie Trainor smiled at him. She had her clothes on. But Cliff's imagination undressed her in a flash of desire. He was quite certain that if he drank this Scotch and joined the party, Cassie would soon be wearing nothing and so would he.

In another flash Cliff saw Sarah mounting him. He saw the delight in her eyes, the pleasure of being on top, in control. Was that where the current had been carrying him? She was no longer his magic princess. He was here to regain another kind of current, the sense of being a man among men, even if they were writhing in defeat. A man who fucked beautiful women for consolation. Cliff began drinking the Inverness.

Night and day blended with music and laughter and a trip to Malibu Point, not far from the mouth of Las Tunas Canyon, where Cliff and Billy demonstrated the art of riding killer waves and several designers who tried to imitate them almost drowned. Cassie was also very good on the board. “How about riding something else for old time's sake?” Cliff said.

“Sure,” she said, smiling past him at Billy.

After a lot more Inverness, Cliff and Dick joined the designers in a vow never to work another day for Buchanan Aircraft Company. Cliff was pretty sure no one would remember it when they sobered up.

Much, much later, Cliff was on a bed with Cassie. She was telling him he was better than Billy while his hand roamed her auburn pussy making her laugh and sigh. They tried it in every position and she liked it more and more. He was so drunk he could keep it up forever. Finally she was on top, crying
Oh Oh Oh
with each thrust.

In a flash Cassie changed from a laughing, drunken dream girl riding up and down on Cliff's equipment to Sarah with sadness in her eyes. In another flash Sarah went from sad to witchy, to the snarling, whining, jealous wife of a year ago. Who had done it? Who had switched the reel and changed this movie from a farce to a possible tragedy? Who had changed Cliff Morris from a drunken bachelor to a louse of a husband?

Frank Buchanan was standing beside the bed, telling Cliff to go home, it was all right for a bum like him to live this way but Cliff had a wife, children. Behind Frank, Dick Stone stood in the doorway with a frown on his face. Was he sore about Cassie? Was he telling him to listen to Frank?

Frank. There was only one thing to do. He had to confess what he had done. He had to tell him. Cliff shoved Cassie aside and sat up, almost weeping.
I looted the files. I gave them to Adrian. Without telling you.
But another face in the doorway stopped him before he could speak.

“Pops is right,” Billy McCall said, his arm around Madeleine. They were in bathing suits, just back from another swim at Malibu Point. “You got to man the home front, Big Shot.”

“Home front?”

“While we bachelors go fight another goddamn war.”

Billy flipped on the radio beside the bed. An announcer began babbling about an invasion of South Korea by North Korea with thousands of tanks and planes. American planes were trying to help the South Koreans. President Truman had announced the United States was going to support them with everything in its arsenal.

Madeleine and Cassie started to cry. “Come on,” Billy said, putting his arm around both of them. “It isn't so bad. I can't wait to fly a jet in combat.”

“We don't have a decent jet fighter,” Frank said. “Nothing that can handle MIGs, if the Russians come into the war.”

“Get to work, Pops,” Billy said. “Don't let Califia jinx this one.”

To everyone's astonishment, Frank started to weep. “I'll try, Billy. I'll try,” he said.

Cliff drove home in a daze to find an enraged, almost hysterical wife. “Where have you been? I called your office and they said no one had seen you for two days.”

“I was with Frank Buchanan. He's coming apart over the Talus cancellation. I was tryingâ”

He realized the impossibility of telling Sarah the truth. She would forgive nothingâneither the betrayal of Frank Buchanan nor the betrayal of her with Cassie.

“Trying what?” Sarah cried.

“Honey, listen, calm down. You're upset about this thing in Korea. Unless it turns into World War Three I'm not going to get drafted. A war's good for the plane business. We'll do okay. We'll be fine.”

“I'm not upset about the war. I don't care whether you go or stay,” Sarah said.

“In that case maybe I'll go,” Cliff said.

“I take it back,” Sarah said. She clung to him, sobbing. “Oh, Cliff, I need you. I need you so much.”

It was the first time she had ever used that word, need. It made Cliff wonder what had happened to his wife during the two drunken days he had been trying to regain his manhood.

Dick Stone drove slowly home to Manhattan Beach with Cassie Trainor, listening to excited radio newsmen reporting massive tank-led assaults by the North Koreans and the continuing collapse of the South Korean army.

“Are you sore at me?”

“I didn't particularly like finding you in bed with Cliff.”

“It was seeing Billy,” Cassie said. “I couldn't help it.” She stared out at the dark ocean for a moment. “He was the one I told you aboutâthe straferâon Joe's anniversary.”

She was confessing a wound. But Dick was unable to muster any sympathy. The new war was hardening his emotions. He was back in the 103rd Bombardment Group accepting Colonel Atwood's announcement that everyone, even Dick Stone, was going to die.

“I'm tired of what you can't help. Maybe it's time you started blaming yourself instead of God or fate or whatever the hell you talk to in the sky over Noglichucky Hollow.”

“Maybe you're right,” Cassie said, gazing sadly out at the sea.

“Quit that goddamn Honeycomb Club.”

“Then what?”

“I don't know. Go to college, maybe. You can go free here in California.”

“What's the point? We could all get blown up tomorrow.”

“So what? You go on living the best way you can. You're not doing that. You'd rather feel sorry for yourself.”

“I'd rather have you feel sorry for me. But all you do is preach me self-improvement sermons,” Cassie said.

“You've got a self that needs improving.”

“So do you.”

“I know,” Dick said, thinking of his surrender to Adrian Van Ness.

The telephone was ringing as they walked into Dick's apartment. It was none other than Buchanan's president, sounding very impatient. “Where have
you been?” he said. “I've been trying to get hold of you for hours. Get up here as soon as you can. This war in Korea means we have to move fast.”

Dick roared up the coast highway to Buchanan Aircraft's headquarters. Adrian Van Ness was in his office with Buzz McCall. They were both looking angry. “The war means we can bid on a contract for two hundred new transports for the Air Force,” Adrian said. “With the Excalibur still in limited production, we're years ahead of everyone. We can convert it overnight. I want you to go to work on the costs. Buzz will give you the data.”

“Goddamn it, Adrian, there's more to this than profits,” Buzz said. “Maybe we ought to get the Talus back on the burner. We owe it to Frank to at least try.”

Adrian shoved papers around his desk. “I don't feel we owe Frank Buchanan anything. He's disappeared for the last three days. Half the design department has gone with him. The rest of them are sitting down there getting drunk on company time. The man is an anarchist. I should have gotten rid of him years ago.”

“We're not gonna sell the Excalibur as is,” Buzz said. “The Air Force wants more range and speed. We'll have to put those new turboprop engines on it. They're the best thing that's come out of the jet-engine research. We need Frank to design a wing that can handle those engines. You can't get along without him, Adrian. As usual.”

For a moment Dick thought Adrian was going to snarl a curse at Buzz. But his voice remained calm. “Then get him back. He'll listen to you.”

Buzz lit a cigarette. “Adrian, sometimes I don't think you belong in this business. You don't know how to gamble. When's the last time you flew a plane?”

“I don't know. Nineteen twenty-five, I think. When I left England.”

“You should have kept flying. That's the only way to keep the instinct alive. Every time you step into a plane you're riskin' something. You've got to risk the fuckin' company the same way. Bet it on something new out there. It's a sporty game, Adrian. A game for real men.”

Buzz blew smoke in Adrian's face. “That flying wing turned out to be a hell of a plane. You never should have let those Texas pricks destroy it. We did something rotten when we let that happen, Adrian.”

Adrian's hooded eyes swung toward Dick. He seemed to be saying something to him. Something very confusing. A kind of plea or apology. The eyes returned to Buzz. “I thought you blamed it on your ex-girlfriend, Califia. The one who wants to kill us all.”

“She's another reason for fighting back. I can't stand the thought of a dame jinxing us this way.”

“You really think they have supernatural power?”

“I don't know whether it's supernatural. But some of them have power,” Buzz said.

BOOK: Conquerors of the Sky

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