Authors: Thomas Fleming

Conquerors of the Sky (64 page)

BOOK: Conquerors of the Sky

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With the Warrior gone, Adrian became more and more obsessed with the supersonic airliner. He called it their declaration of independence. He quoted figures from Dick Stone that made everyone feel like they were on cocaine. The worldwide market for the plane was worth ten billion dollars. Unfortunately Buchanan was close to the limit of their resources. They needed a massive injection of government money.

Every time Cliff went to Washington, he called the White House to remind Mike Shannon about the Big Favor. He brought along a suitcase full of data on the wind tunnel tests of Frank Buchanan's latest design. The figures demonstrated that their SST could go as fast as the Warriorâat least 2,200 mph. This was some six hundred miles an hour faster than the plane the British and French were building. He naturally omitted some of the more unnerving problems they had not yet solved, such as duct rumble, which would terrify even the hardiest passenger.

Then there was the sonic boom, the noise a jet made when it went through the sound barrier. The Air Force was flying Scorpions over places like Oklahoma City and then sending in teams of researchers to find out how many people were bothered when God seemed to be cracking a giant whip in the sky. The answer seemed to be quite a fewâespecially when windows shattered and babies woke up screaming and cats and dogs went zooey.

A true patrician, Adrian dismissed these problems as trivialitiesâlike noise complaints near airports. People would get used to boomsâor they would find a way to eliminate them. Cliff was not so sure. He could see someone like the Creature using the boom to beat their brains out. Of course, even the scummiest senator could be persuaded by a determined president. But Jack Kennedy did not seem very determined.

As 1963 ran down, the promise of the Big Favor dwindled with it. From the White House came only silence. On June 4, 1963, Juan Trippe, president of Pan American, announced he was taking an option on six Concordesâthe name the British and French had given their SST to conceal the immense amount of wrangling behind the scenes. The news drove Adrian Van Ness slightly crazy. He urged Cliff to read all about the Profumo scandal in England. A call girl named Christine Keeler was wrecking political careers and threatening
to bring down the government. Once more Adrian talked about menacing the Kennedys with Amalie Borne. Once more Cliff talked him out of it.

At midnight on June 5, 1963, Cliff's phone rang. His daughter Elizabeth walked into the study where Cliff was plowing through more SST reports and said in a dazed voice: “It's President Kennedy.” At eighteen, Liz was in search of idols and had found one.

“Hello, Cliff,” said the rich Boston baritone. “You've been a very patient fellow. I think I've got some good news for you. Can you come to Colorado Springs tomorrow? I'm speaking at the Air Force Academy graduation. I think you'll be interested in part of the speech.”

“I'll be there, Mr. President.”

“Good. Good. How's that beautiful dollâwhat's her name?”

“Amalie?”

“Yeah. Can you bring her along?”

“Sure.”

“I think she'll be an improvement on anything we could pick up in Colorado Springs, wouldn't you say?”

Cliff called Amalie Borne in New York. She was very difficult. She wanted a special fee beyond the money Buchanan was paying her. She demanded a private plane. Cliff conceded the fee but balked at the private plane. She finally agreed to meet Cliff in Denver the following morning at 10 A.M. From there they would fly in a Buchanan company plane to Colorado Springs. Dick Stone and his accountants could worry about how much it cost them later.

The next day, Cliff sat beside Amalie and Mike Shannon in the fifth row of the presidential party, looking out at forty thousand people packing Falcon Stadium. In the near distance loomed the snowcapped Rockies. Directly in front of them sat 493 young men, the fifth graduating class of the Air Force Academy. At the microphone, after some preliminary jokes and a somber review of the perilous world in which the graduates would serve, John F. Kennedy said: “Neither the economics nor the politics of international air competition permit us to stand still. Today the challenging new frontier in commercial aviation is supersonic flight. In my judgment the government should immediately commence a new program in partnership with private industry to develop a supersonic transport superior to that being built in any country in the world.”

The majestic setting matched Cliff's soaring hopes. Ten billion dollars in sales, here we come! He was making triumphant love to Sarah. He was getting drunk with Frank Buchanan and Billy McCall, telling them, especially Billy, that he was in charge of the company's future now. He could junk Sarah's dirty campaign to ruin Billy. He did not have to be afraid of him anymore.

That was the way it went for that magical summer of 1963. Everyone and everything seemed to coalesce. Adrian Van Ness cheerfully ate his words and raised Cliff's salary. The Navy issued a request for bids on a new attack plane and were dazzled by Frank's Thunderer. Sarah grew passionate in bed with a man who was going to leave Billy McCall so far behind in the race for Buchanan's presidency the famous pilot shrank to toy soldier size.

Cliff did not even worry when Victoria talked Billy into quitting the Air Force to become Buchanan's chief test pilot. Adrian Van Ness said he was delighted. Billy's reputation inside the aircraft world would add momentum to their head start on the SST.

Unreeling, like a terrific technicolor movie that went on and on with resounding background music mingling with the roar of jet engines, that was the way Cliff Morris saw his life in the summer and fall of 1963. Even Amalie Borne seemed pleased by another flurry of visits to the White House. Only Dick Stone seemed unhappy about thatâhe was apparently still hung up on the dame.

Cliff took Dick to lunch and told him to marry Cassie Trainor. She was the answer to Amalie. It would give her exactly what she deservedâthe brush-offâand straighten out Dick's muddled love life. For the first time in their lives, Dick admitted Cliff might be right.

Cliff even managed to continue to sell Stardusters overseasâa nice round eighty to Japan, Thailand, Australia, and India. Sarah gave a dinner party to celebrate and invited Billy and Victoria. Mike Shannon did his imitation of the Creature. It was the hit of the evening. By now Mike was practically working full time for Buchanan, talking up their SST as the only one that made sense.

Congress grumbled and yammered about putting up the money for the new plane but there was not much doubt that they would acquiesce, once they shook a few goodies from the White House tree. Adrian committed two million dollars to building a full size mockup, even though Frank Buchanan was still fussing with a lot of details, such as a new double delta wing that would make the plane much safer to land.

On November 22, 1963, Cliff whistled his way up the Hollywood Freeway to the Mojave to take a first look at a test model of the Thunderer. He was standing on the runway in the brilliant desert sunshine, admiring the barrel-shaped plane, when Frank Buchanan walked toward him with a peculiar look on his face.

“Someone just shot Kennedy,” Frank said.

“He's dead?”

“They think so.”

That was where Cliff heard it, with another set of mountains in the distance, reminding him of the golden figure facing the snowy crests of the Rockies, urging Americans to accept the challenge of another dawn of flight. It seemed simultaneously horribleâand just rightâthat he heard it here from Frank Buchanan.

“I've had a feeling from things Dick Stone told me that he was vulnerable to evil,” Frank said. “No one can get away with treating women like disposable spare parts indefinitely. The good spirits turn their backs on that kind of a man.”

Billy McCall came roaring onto the runway in his wife's red Triumph. He hurtled toward them at sixty miles an hour and skidded to a stop in front of the Thunderer. “I just heard it on the radio. Someone shot Kennedy's head off in Dallas. Isn't that the best goddamn news you've heard in a year?”

It was 11:30 A.M. and Billy was drunk. Standing in the violent desert sun, Cliff suddenly felt engulfed by an alien darkness. It did not come from California. It seemed to be spilling over those guardian mountains from the invisible heart of America. It made a mess of the triumphant technicolor movie of his life.

Cliff tried to tell himself Billy was elated because he shared Curtis LeMay's opinion of Kennedy as a fraud. But Cliff could not escape the feeling that Billy's smile also said he knew his half brother's climb to the executive stratosphere had just aborted. His career was in a vertical dive.

Frank Buchanan seemed to sense the old hatred crackling between them. He tried to defuse it. “Let's have a cup of coffee, Billy,” he said. “I want you sober before you fly this plane. Join us, Cliff?”

“No thanks,” Cliff said.

MINDS AND HEARTS

“What is it, Stone, what's wrong? Why did you stop loving me?” Amalie Borne said.

“I didn't stop,” Dick Stone said, his leaden voice betraying the lie.

They were lying on the bed in her Waldorf Towers apartment, after making love for the last time. Dick had come to New York determined to demand a final yes or no. Before he could speak, Amalie had told him she did not want to see him again.

“What is wrong with your whole country?” she said, clicking on the TV set from the switch on the night table. “I begin to think you are more hysterical than the Italians, more corrupt than the English, more grandiose than the French, more militarist than the Germans, bigger liars than the Russians.”

On the television screen a sheriff's posse and state troopers in Selma, Alabama were attacking Negro marchers with whips and clubs and tear gas. It was the spring of 1965. John F. Kennedy had been dead eighteen months. Lyndon Johnson had been elected president in his own right by the biggest majority in American history and proclaimed the Great Societyâa swarm of federal programs that would give citizens of all ages and colors and creeds equal opportunity, equal housing, equal education, equal health care. He was discovering some serious unk-unks in this grand design.

“I still love you,” Dick insisted. It was true. He was just redefining the word again, as they had defined and redefined it from the beginning. Love had become virtually identifiable with lust, with the compulsion to have this woman whenever he was near her. Only regret differentiated it from whorehouse fucking.

“But there's no joy in it, no daring anymore. Nothing forbidden. We're like a married couple, Stone. It's too disgusting to tolerate any longer.”

She switched channels. Helicopters whirred over a green jungle to disgorge helmeted South Vietnamese troops beside a rice paddy. Johnson was determined to prove he was just as tough on communism as Jack Kennedy. He was putting more and more men and planes into this confusing war. He had another thirty thousand troops suppressing a Communist uprising in the Dominican Republic.

“Your ridiculous ideas about love were driving me crazy, Stone. You should have done what Adrian Van Ness suggested, fucked me with lies on your lips. I would have adored that, when you finally told me.”

“I couldn't do it. I'm not one of Nietzsche's Ãbermenschen
.
Sometimes I think you really want to be fucked by a Nazi. Nothing else really excites you.”

“What a fascinating idea. You're not as unoriginal as I thought, Stone.”

The insults, the diatribes about America, about his personal shortcomings, had become more and more violent since Kennedy's assassination. Gone was the aura of the woman who slept with the most powerful man in the world. Adrian, sensing Amalie's isolation, or perhaps acting on revengeful advice from the Prince, had demanded she surrender all the incriminating papers she had stolen or face immediate cancellation of their agreement. A tearful Amalie had handed the documents over to Dickâafter Xeroxing them and mailing them to Madame George. The Prince called a week later and told her that Madame George had turned the copies over to him. Henceforth, Amalie was simply another Buchanan employee.

“Richard, Richard,” she said, rolling over on top of him. “Can't you believe me when I say that the only way I can prove my love is by saying good-bye?”

“I don't believe you. I don't accept it,” he said, redefining both words. He believed she was both proving her love and punishing him for failing to protect her from Adrian. He accepted it as the price he was paying for his freedom but in a deeper part of his soul he rejected it as unbearable.

“You're as incomprehensible as the rest of your country. I wish I never left Europe. I understood Europe. Here nothing makes sense except money and a sort of blind desire. You all want to fuck but none of you care.”

Dick was seized for the thousandth time with a yearning to know if she was Jewish, if the first story was the true one. But now he was afraid of the truth. He wanted to escape this woman. She was destroying him.

“Shannon says I must come to your magnificent capital tomorrow. There's a senator who yearns to meet me. I told him it was out of the question.”

Mike Shannon had become Buchanan's field commander in the struggle for the supersonic airliner. He disliked Amalie. She transcended his Irish-American imagination in too many ways.

“Why can't you go?” Dick asked.

“I have nothing to wear. My clothes are falling apart from endless dry cleaning. Either you double my allowance or I'm going back to Paris. Even if I starve, at least it will be in a city I love.”

“You're getting fifty thousand dollars a year for clothes now.”

“Jackie Kennedy spends that in a month.”

“I'll talk to Adrian. Meanwhile, go see the senator. He's very important at the moment. If he votes the right way, you too will be able to fly supersonically.”

“And you'll make ten billion dollars.”

She rolled off him and lay on her back, staring at the blue ceiling. “I don't need you any more, Stone. I need a man who doesn't care about me. Who doesn't care about himself. Who doesn't care about anything. A man who does reckless acts because they're always preferable to cautious ones. Because he's compelled to risk himself again and again. Is Cliff Morris such a man?”

“No,” Dick said.

He put on his clothes, shoved one of her silver-backed white brushes through his hair and walked to the door. Amalie did not look at him. She continued to stare at the empty ceiling. Dick closed the door until he could no longer see her.

“Good-bye, Amalie.”

“Good-bye Stone.”

Six months later, Dick sat in his car beneath Chimney Rock, a great steep-sided pinnacle of weathered stone in the coastal mountains north of Los Angeles. There was not another car, another human being, in sight. He put his arms around Cassie Trainor and kissed her gently, firmly.

“How about it? Are you ready to get married?” he said.

He had flown up to the Oxnard School the week after he said good-bye to Amalie and began trying to regain his all-American girl. It had not been easy. Cassie was as beautiful as ever. Her auburn hair still seemed to emanate sunlight. She stood as straight, her figure was as slim and firm as a twenty-year-old, thanks to a fierce program of jogging, swimming, and tennis. But some of the spontaneity, the vivacity had been replaced by thoughtfulness. She was a reader and a thinker now.

Nevertheless she responded to his invitation to try to turn back the clock. She too wanted to regain some of that mocking stewardess who had cut loose in Manhattan Beach a decade ago. But it was mostly the other Cassie who emerged as the woman he was marrying. Now she talked back to him, not about whoriness and the Honeycomb Club but about his literary taste and political opinions.

Cassie persuaded him to reread Faulkner and Hemingway and admit her fellow southerner was superior. She read aloud from her favorite southern poet, the long-forgotten James Bannister Tabb, who blended some of Poe's music with a priestly tenderness. Cassie knew who she was in relation to the rest of the country: a southern woman who could live anywhere in America. Dick found himself attracted in an unexpectedly intense way.

For six months they had spent their weekends exploring what Cassie called “lost California,” particularly in the mountains that look down on State 1 as it twists along the rugged coast below Oxnard. It reminded her of the empty landscape around Noglichucky Hollow in Tennessee.

They drove east along Route 58 to a hundred-year-old saloon at Pozo, with
tractor seats for bar stools. Through fields of barley ablaze with fireweed, the farmer's enemy, they searched for the ruins of Adelaida, a town that no longer existed. Past stands of oaks and meadows sprinkled with wildflowers they roamed the Los Padres National Forest. Dick found Cassie's desire to share this scenery profoundly touching. It was a kind of statement of the loneliness she had felt when he had more or less abandoned her in Oxnard.

Now he was asking her the question that he had been unable to ask because Amalie Borne's shadow loomed between them. He told himself these six months had banished Amalie's presence. He was in love with this thoughtful American woman he had helped to create.

Cassie kissed him in a sad gentle way and gazed up at Chimney Rock for a moment as if she was remembering shadows in her own life. “I wish we'd done it four years ago,” he said. “Why did it take us so long?”

“Emotional retardation,” Stone said. “I hadn't quite finished growing from a boy to a man.”

He had debated whether to tell her about Amalie Borne and decided it would be a mistake. It was more than a little ironic. He had created an educated woman but he could not bring himself to trust her to be mature about the most important relationship in her life. But Amalie had left Dick too bruised, too wounded, for irony.

The wedding was a small, almost private affair in a white-steepled Baptist church near Oxnard. Most of the guests were from Buchanan Aircraft. Cliff Morris was Dick's best man. One of Cassie's favorite students was her maid of honor. Frank Buchanan gave the bride away. Billy McCall and Victoria, Adrian Van Ness and Amanda completed the party.

Adrian's toast was both a wish and a warning: “May the bride realize she's marrying a manâand an aircraft company.”

“God help her!” Amanda said.

Everyone laughed. “I'm not joking!” Amanda said.

“That's what makes it so amusing,” Adrian said.

“I would love to be married to an aircraft company. I can't think of anything more exciting,” Victoria Van Ness McCall said.

“When you're married to the right man, everything is exciting,” Sarah Morris said.

Even though he was well lit on champagne, Dick sensed an undercurrent of malice in Sarah's remark. His years of penetrating the mockery in Amalie's conversation had sharpened his ear for nuances. Sarah's eyes had a feverish glow. She seemed much too excited for a wedding that was decidedly unromantic. Was she needling Victoriaâimplying that Billy was the wrong man? Or comparing him to Cliff?

Whatever was implied, Victoria ignored it. “I found that out long ago,” she said.

She smiled at Billy. A word from Dick's struggle with Amalie lurched into his mind:
voracity.
There were times when he wondered if she had wanted to
annihilate him with her relentless reports of her assignations. This was another kind of voracity. For a moment Dick felt sorry for Billy McCall.

The newlyweds departed for a two-week honeymoon on Maui. They rented a plane and flew to other islands. They drank rum swizzles and swam and played tennis, at which Cassie usually beat her out-of-shape husband. By night they made tender love and discussed their future. Cassie wanted to have children and then think about going back to graduate school to get a Ph.D. in American Studies. She had read the recent best-seller,
The Feminine Mystique
, but she still thought a family was more important than a career. “You can take the girl out of the South but you can't take the South out of the girl,” she said.

The telephone rang. It was Adrian Van Ness. “Dick,” he said. “I hate to interrupt your honeymoon. But I'm afraid you'll have to consider cutting it short. We just heard from Mike Shannon that Johnson's going into Vietnam with both feet. He's committing a hundred and twenty-five thousand men next week and he'll have four hundred thousand there by the end of the year. The Air Force and the Navy and the Marines are letting bids for a dozen different planes. We need you to help us cost out these proposalsâ”

“I'll call you in the morning,” Dick said, slamming down the phone.

“Your leader?” Cassie said.

“If I die and go to heaven or hell, I'm sure Adrian Van Ness will have my telephone number,” he said.

He was remembering the night the Korean War began. Making love to Cassie with Adrian Van Ness watching in a corner of his mind. Wondering if he could ever deserve happiness while working for Buchanan Aircraft. Amalie Borne's voice began whispering mockery in that same invisible place.

“Will you love me even if I'm unfaithful with an aircraft company?” he said, putting his arms around Cassie.

“I believe that was in the contract,” she said.

She was still his all-American girl.

BOOK: Conquerors of the Sky

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