Saving the Queen (33 page)

Tom Oakes told Blackford he thought it would be more tactful not to introduce his son to the North American brass until
after
the exhibition.

“There's always the chance they'll turn you down—you just can't tell. It's a lot harder on them if they've just finished socializing with you. Did you know I was a judge once at a Miss America contest? I'm telling you, poking Miss Alabama on Friday night, and disqualifying her on Saturday night, was one of the toughest things I ever had to do.”

“Dad, I take it the moral of that story is that we're supposed to feel sorry for you, not for Miss Alabama?”

“I never went to Yale, Blacky, so I can't answer those high colonic ethical questions.” He grinned at his son, left the tip, and they walked,
High Noon
style, to the hangar.

It went well. Very well. And when he had finished the final loop and brought the plane within feet of the brass, there was spontaneous applause. Blackford looked not unlike Lindbergh emerging from
The Spirit of St. Louis
, his father thought, only maybe even handsomer. Black shook everyone's hands, and they sauntered off to a reception, followed by a showing of an extensive documentary on the design, manufacture, versatility, and prospects of the F-86 Sabre. At six, Blackford whispered to his father: “Dad, I've got a date at eight I can't break, so I'll just slip away. I'm going to be tied up tonight, but I'll be here tomorrow.” They were interrupted by a North American engineer who informed them that the Hawker-Hunter Committee had just designated Viscount Kirk to fly their flagship. “Chap said over the phone his performance was unbelievable,
unbelievable.
” Blackford said good, he was pleased it would be someone he knew. “I'll be here tomorrow at ten for the tandem work with Kirk.”

“Make it nine-thirty, son.”

“Okay, Dad.”

His father pressed his son's hand with that special pressure he felt Blacky earned for turning in a performance that did justice to the supership, and credit to his father.

There was just time for a bath at home, and a change of clothes, and a scribbled, long-overdue paragraph to Sally.

Blackford, ready to leave, said, “Joe, I assume I'm to go where I'm going without you.”

Joe looked unhappy—professionally unhappy. “I don't know, Black. My orders were to stick with you.”

It was only four forty-five, so Black suggested Joe use the telephone and ring whatever number it was he took his orders from and ask.

He did so, and Blackford could hear the grunts. “I'm to go with you as far as Brompton Road and Beauchamp, southwest corner, then you're on your own. When they're through with you, they'll call me and I'll go and meet you at that corner at the time they say.”

They hailed a cab, and Blackford, about to deposit the letter in a postbox, suddenly found Joe's iron grip on his wrist. The voice was tender, but firm.

“Sorry, Blackford, orders.”

He took the envelope gently from him. “No letters mailed till after tomorrow.”

Blackford, fighting to subdue resentment, barely succeeded in doing so. In the cab he said, “You bastards are primarily watching me, not guarding me.” Joe shrugged his shoulders.

So, in effect, did Black.

“See you, Joe,” said Blackford, waving his hands when they had reached Brompton Road at the specified corner. He was mildly surprised to see Singer Callaway there, whom he knew better than to greet, walking instead by himself to Walton Street and turning the corner. The door opened for him, stayed open a few seconds, and Singer followed him in.

“You people are making me feel creepy,” Blackford said, taking off a blazer and dropping it on the sofa. “It makes me feel good you're not sure I can get from Brompton Road to Walton Street without armed surveillance. And that I can't post a letter to my girl until Rufus or President Truman or whoever allows it.”

Singer smiled. “It's just that animal magnetism of yours, Blacky—we can't leave you alone.”

Rufus's solemnity brought Blackford, wordless, to the same sofa he had sat on for so long on Friday.

“Good evening,” Rufus said.

“Good evening,” Blackford said.

Rufus looked at Blackford and said, “Do you know anything about me?”

“No, sir, not much.”

“There is no reason why you should. There is every reason why you should not. I don't talk about myself, but I am going to do so to you, very briefly. I was in general charge, during World War II, of keeping hidden from the Germans the knowledge that we had broken their most secret code. I was in specific charge of misleading the Germans into believing that the invasion of Europe would occur in the Calais area. In order to discharge these duties, I made every day a decision that I knew would cost at least one man his life. On one occasion I made a decision that cost many men their lives. I retired from this work, gratefully, after the war was over. I soon realized it wasn't really over. I was called back by General Eisenhower and Allen Dulles because in their estimation the problem in which you are involved is the most delicate diplomatic-security problem they have ever run into; certainly it is the worst I have ever run into. It is, quite simply, unique: because the Queen of England is about all that is left of this diminishing empire, and the destruction of her reputation could mean something very like the dissolution of the Commonwealth. The damage already done is staggering. The information the Queen has given to the Soviet Union via Viscount Kirk cannot mean less than a five-year acceleration in the Soviet hydrogen-bomb program, and that acceleration means that the history of the last part of this decade, and of the next, will be changed, to the disadvantage of millions of people. We know now how to staunch the lesion—we have only to get rid of Kirk, and that is done easily. What cannot be done easily is to protect the Queen from any possibility that the story of what she did will ever become known—even to her own Prime Minister.”

“What do you want me to do?” Blackford asked, with just a trace of impatience.

“I want you, tomorrow, to effect the death of Kirk even if, in order to do it, you have to end your own life.”

Blackford stood up, pale. Rufus watched him with a searing intensity. The next few words would govern Rufus's instructions to the Sabre weapons expert waiting, alone, at the hangar at Barrington.

“Would I have a
chance
?” Blackford asked. “Or are you talking kamikaze stuff?”

“You would have a chance.”

Rufus gave his plan.

Blackford, lying flat now on the couch, his eyes fixed on the ceiling, paused when Rufus was done, and then, after a long interval, said almost listlessly, “Okay.”

Rufus got up, walked over to Blackford, and shook his hand.

“You understand, I can't let you out of our sight from this moment on. I don't need to explain. You'll sleep upstairs, and dinner will be brought in.”

Black was out of wind, and, catching Singer's gesture, followed him out, and up the stairs to a bedroom-sitting room. Singer said, “There isn't any reason not to have a bottle of wine, so I've ordered it. All I want to know is: Do you want me here for a while, or gone?”

“I'd like you here,” Blackford said, and so for an hour, sharing a bottle of wine, they spoke about matters grave and trivial. Blackford came desperately near to telling Singer, whom he liked and trusted, that his willingness to sacrifice for the Queen was motivated by something more even than his willingness to protect her kingdom. He almost smiled as he wondered what
that
variable, entered into the complex mind of Rufus, would do to affect the morning's plans?

The morning papers carried extensive descriptions of the forthcoming duel. There were reports and features on the military, the economic, and the psychological impact of a clear victory by one or the other plane. Commentators warned that such a clear victory was unlikely, that all that the experts would probably be left with would be merely suggestive. Still there was much excitement, and though the feature story on Peregrine Kirk was extensive and included several pictures of him taken during the war, and during the celebrated 1948 Olympics, the offsetting feature on the American pilot was necessarily spare. It had even proved necessary to wirephoto a picture of him from New Haven, Connecticut, where he had recently graduated from Yale as an engineer, because he could not be located at his flat in London, and it was assumed that he was away from the city, resting.

The big social news was that the Queen had announced, in plenty of time to record her decision in the Court Circular, that she would be going out to Farnborough to view the exhibition (she cautiously declined to call it a contest), and that although of course she was very pleased that her second cousin and old friend Viscount Kirk was flying the Hunter, she had in fact met Mr. Oakes, the American, and wished him good luck with his own country's airplane.

Although air shows in England are popular pastimes, they do not occur in the month of January, but suddenly the thirty-mile trip to Farnborough became the thing to do, and by noon the traffic on the southwest highway was clogged. The police estimated that, whereas not more than a few hundred people, most of them official guests, had been expected, now there would probably be as many as ten thousand spectators.

The weather was in part responsible. It was like midweek the week before, an equable temperature, with a yellow snap in the air that made you, if you were sitting in one place, wish to rise in order to sit somewhere else; and vice versa. The fledgling television industry was there in force, and of course BBC radio. Both the pilots had agreed, while dressing in the morning, to speak to no one, but the radio and television were busy, beginning at one o'clock, reporting. Kirk, veteran of a hundred equestrian contests, was altogether natural, quietly confident. Blackford, he noted, was nervous; but why should he not be? He was flying, so to speak, in hostile air. And it had already been rumored that his selection was nepotistically contrived. But when they were in the air together, and after they had gone through the first maneuver, Kirk noticed the utter mastery with which Blackford handled his ship. The signals between them were orthodox, following the rules of the same handbook that had governed some of the cheek-to-cheek dancing of the little biplanes at the county fairs a generation earlier. It was the individual exercises, and the mock battle, that would test the men and the planes. The balletic parts were for the visual satisfaction of the spectators.

Forty-five minutes later they were down on the ground, shook hands, and went their separate ways, Kirk to his quarters and the hangar set apart for him, where Hunter officials buzzed about him; Blackford to his own room, where he asked his father if he might be left alone. But he caught the look on Singer's face, Singer having been introduced as a young engineering professor on sabbatical in London, and amended his request to say that he would like Singer to stay with him.

An hour later there was a knock on the door. Her Majesty the Queen would be pleased if Mr. Oakes would join her and Viscount Kirk for a light lunch at the hastily improvised royal quarters, vacated that morning by the division group commander, and dominated now by Queen Caroline as though it had always been her favorite doll house.

“Blackford, what a pleasure. I do hope you are well. But not too well. Are you aware, Blackford, of the dollar drain we poor English are sustaining as a result of your vulgar commercial successes?” She munched on a cucumber sandwich and sipped her tea.

“Well, ma'am,” Blackford said, reviving slightly, “I am aware that the Industrial Revolution that began here germinated quite nicely on American soil.”

Queen Caroline smiled. “Yes, indeed, indeed. Thanks in large part, would you not agree, Mr. Oakes, to the irenic circumstances your industrial gardens enjoyed due to the protection of the British fleet?”

“No doubt about it, ma'am.” Blackford smiled in turn, munching
his
sandwich. “Indeed I had always thought of the British fleet as invincible and was accordingly all the more surprised when, during the early days of the war, it all but disappeared.”

Caroline, though enjoying the exchange, was enjoying it a little less in the presence of a half dozen of her aides, including a gruff retired admiral who was visibly prepared to make Blackford Oakes disappear on the spot. She noticed, also, that Perry was not pleased by the young American's incapacity to be awed by the British sovereign. Caroline broke the tension by saying:

“Was that, after all, the
British
fleet that disappeared at Pearl Harbor?” Her courtiers laughed, and Blackford smiled, and thought back on the haggard state of England on the day of Pearl Harbor, and was thereupon taken in conversation by a general who began to explain to him something about how Pearl Harbor might have been saved which Blackford was prepared to listen to indefinitely, just so long as he didn't have to comment intelligibly. It occurred to him that the finger sandwich he was nibbling might be the last food he would consume on earth, and that made him not only profoundly sad, but suddenly so weak in the knees that he excused himself as if he needed to visit the lavatory, which in fact he did, noticing that the identical impulse had seized Singer who, somehow, from outside the royal parquetry, knew to move toward where Blackford was headed.

A huge loudspeaker had been rigged, and someone was outlining to the crowd the forthcoming events. The voice announced that the pilots and the supporting ground personnel should report to their stations. Blackford returned to the royal enclosure, bowed to the Queen and thanked her for her hospitality, shook hands yet again with Kirk, this time in front of the cameras, and left to put on his flight suit again. And, as he did so, he repeated to himself, for the thousandth time, exactly what he was to say to Kirk, word for word. He thought primly of Mr. Simon and his recommended means for memorizing irregular Latin verbs, running them through the mind on every occasion. Word for word, Black had thought them through, and for every conceivable answer from Kirk, the most appropriate response. Stepping into the airplane, his eyes turned instantly to the red fire-button, immobilized by seals unbreakable by human hands.