Harry’s letter did not arrive until two weeks after the conversation with Tom. He wrote from RAF Deenthorpe, his base in Great Britain, where he was flying a B-17 in the Eighth Air Force. The letter was long, well reasoned, temperate, but still laden with resentment for the way his father had handled things. One clue was in an offhand attempt to be facetious; Harry noted that as both his mother and Madeline had names beginning with M, there would be no need to change the monograms on the bath towels. The feeble attempt at humor hurt Vance more than the more thoughtful arguments.
Both boys said that they knew he was seeing someone and neither admitted to a concern about the age difference. It seemed to him that her presence in the house was the problem, and that was totally imponderable. Madeline insisted that they were dissembling.
“Darling, as clever as you are, you miss the point entirely. Age is the problem. I am supposed to become their stepmother, and I’m not much older than they are. They resent it.”
After Harry’s letter, Madeline came straight to the point, as she always did. It was a quality that Vance had loved but was beginning to fear.
“They probably assume that I’ll take advantage of you for a few years and then leave you for a younger man. That’s what anyone would think.” If Vance and Madeline were on better terms she would probably have made a joke about it, saying, “That’s what I think, too,” or something similar. But things were too serious.
His second error was the question of marriage. Madeline pleaded that they should not marry until after the war and not even then until she and his sons had had a chance to become acquainted. On that she had said, “Why rush things? Your sons are at war, in a dangerous profession. Let’s not add to their worries. I don’t think they mind if you have a girlfriend—they know you are a vigorous, healthy man. They’ll probably boast to their comrades about you—as long as I’m not your wife and their stepmother.”
Vance also worried about a younger man attracting her, but it was not the time to admit it. Still, he was too wildly jealous to contemplate delay. He had never been more than mildly jealous of Margaret, who in her youth used to flirt harmlessly at parties just to see his color rise. It never occurred to either of them that they would ever part. Then he remembered that one time he had reacted jealously—a young wise guy named Bill Lear had patted Margaret on the bottom at a party. Vance saw red and belted him, to everyone’s acute embarrassment.
But with Madeline, he was sharply aware of their twenty-year age difference. It galled him every time he looked into a mirror, especially when he noted the incipient paunch. He was certain that sooner or later she would meet someone younger, better looking, and, though he hated to admit it, more potent than he and that this new young love would sweep her off her feet. Every time he left on a trip, he was miserable, certain that someone would steal her away. He had insisted on setting a date, and she had at last agreed, asking only that they wait until December. Since then the very word “marriage” triggered an argument.
He wondered why he had challenged her. She had so much common sense and worked so hard. At Consolidated she had swiftly risen from a runner chasing parts on the factory floor to an employee in Reuben Fleet’s office, where her language ability was put to full use. Her English was flawless and she picked up the American idiom at once. Most of her work now dealt with foreign sales. Consolidated PBYs were being used by many other countries and were even built under license in the Soviet Union. Her fluent Russian had proved to be especially effective in dealing with the dour Soviet representatives.
Vance had become so profoundly convinced of her intelligence that he often discussed things with her that he would never have broached with Margaret. Madeline was not mechanically inclined, but she was able to pick up on the thread of his technical problems and discuss them objectively. She was a godsend in preparing his reports, correcting his grammar and spelling as she went.
There was no argument yet this morning. On awakening, they had made love as usual, not ardently but conjugally, familiarly, and at length. It had been wonderfully satisfying, but even now he was stirred as she emerged from the double doors to the kitchen, almost totally enveloped in the old pink-checked bathrobe that she invariably wore in the morning. Sated as he was, he was moved by the thought of her naked body beneath the robe, still warm and wet from the shower, and made an unkind but inevitable mental comparison. Margaret had in time grown a little heavy. Madeline was petite, just under five feet, four inches tall and weighing 110 pounds. Her figure was perfect, with small but perfectly formed breasts, a flat stomach, and a tight, flat bottom that he reflexively caressed whenever she was within reach. And as practical and hardworking as she was, she never forgot that she was a woman, always being carefully made up, whether in the morning or late at night. Even as she approached now, he noted that the bathrobe was open at the top just enough so that he could catch the curve of her bosom. It was no accident.
Slipping her arm around his neck, she kissed him on the cheek. “Shall we eat out here, or do you want to come into the kitchen? I have a fire going in the fireplace.”
He nodded toward the kitchen, dropped his arm around her body, and pressed her to him as they moved side by side to the double doors, as happily as if they didn’t have an argument brewing.
They ate quietly for a while, her bare foot reaching under the table to rest on his ankle. After he had refused a third cup of coffee, she began the fight as formally as a matador entering the bullring, a question serving as her cape. He responded with his formulaic answers, knowing he would lose, hoping only that she didn’t demand his ear at the end.
“Have you decided what you are going to tell your sons?”
“They will be your sons, too. I’m going to tell them that we will be married in December, and that you will live here until then. It is crazy to maintain two places, and unpatriotic, too; there are lots of people who would love to have your apartment. This is wartime, we are adults, and to hell with what people think, even my own sons.”
She nodded, growing silent. He and Margaret had rarely argued, but when they did, it was at the top of their respective voices. Madeline withdrew into a quiet, impassive, and totally unnerving reserve, remaining icily courteous, never raising her voice, and somehow creating an air of menace that frightened him, not of physical harm but of the possibility that she would suddenly leave him forever.
It was a winning psychology, and he had already decided to surrender. They sat silently for a quarter of an hour. He pretended to read a magazine. She stared out the window, motionless. He hated this familiar pattern, his own private series of Munichs, but the thought of her leaving sapped his will.
With a sigh, Vance moved to her side, raised her chin in his hands, and said, “You win. Keep the apartment. I’ll deed this place over to the boys, and find somewhere else for us to stay. And if you don’t want to get married in December, we’ll wait.”
She moved slightly, slipping her robe from her shoulder. Abundantly grateful, Vance reacted as a teenager might, throwing off his robe, gathering her to him, easing her out of her chair. He would be totally unaware of the cold tile floor until his rubbed-raw knees began to ache much later in the day.
August 4, 1944, RAF Manston
Laughing like truant schoolboys, Stanley Hooker and Frank Whittle tumbled out the back door of the stately Rolls-Royce. Whittle stopped to catch his breath. The fresh air was intoxicating. He had just spent six long months in the hospital, confined with exhaustion and a crippling eczema, trying to recover from overwork and the grinding pain of seeing the British government seize his invention, his company, and his patent. He had labored to create the jet engine for more than a decade, and when he had succeeded beyond all doubt, his firm had been nationalized. The government had offered him the option of accepting a token payment of one hundred thousand pounds for his life’s work or seeing the firm simply shut down. He accepted the money reluctantly, conscious of his shareholders but bitter that all he had done should be given
so little regard. Most of all he was fearful of what engine companies, unfamiliar with turbines, would do to his masterpiece. He had already seen the Rover company muck about, ruining what he had done.
Despite the fact that his firm, Rolls-Royce, had benefited from Whittle’s research and the government’s decision, Hooker was totally sympathetic. He knew that Whittle was a genius who had succeeded where everyone else had failed, that his engines had given impetus to the development of new engines at several firms in Great Britain and the United States. They had forced creation of totally new jet aircraft types at Gloster, de Havilland, Bell, Lockheed, and elsewhere. Yet there was nothing Hooker could do now but attempt to sustain Whittle in his time of need. He had arranged this carefully planned trip so that the now almost fragile officer might see the first combat fruits of his endeavors.
The ride to the field with Hooker and the anticipation of seeing his engines in action against the enemy had buoyed Whittle’s spirits for the first time in months. Hooker kept them up with a constant stream of anecdotes about the antics of the leftist Minister of Aircraft Production, Sir Stafford Cripps, which were all the more amusing because they were true.
Manston was home to No. 616 Squadron, the first to be equipped with Gloster Meteor F.1 twin-jet fighters, powered by Rolls-Royce Welland engines, the production versions of Whittle’s W.2B jet. Wing Commander Henry Wilson greeted them and took them for an immediate tour of the flight line, where seven Meteors stood wingtip to wingtip, supplementing the squadron’s standard-issue Spitfires.
The Meteors had entered combat on July 27 but were still waiting to draw their first blood against the flood of German buzz bombs that flowed from Occupied Europe. Winston Churchill and the few top Allied leaders who had access to the Enigma reports had immediately recognized the gravity of the threat, for Hitler had authorized a program that would fire eight thousand of the flying bombs against England every month, beginning in January 1944. The Germans had not reached this goal because a mammoth bombing campaign—sometimes as much as 40 percent of all Allied effort—was directed against factories known to manufacture the components of the weapon and the “no ball” sites from which they were launched. These sites were long, narrow concrete ramps, surrounded by a few buildings and a compass rose, all pointing like malignant fingers to the heart of London. The buzz bombs were catapulted along the track until they reached a speed that would sustain their pulse-jet engines as they headed for Great Britain.
The extensive bombing had delayed the first combat launches until the night of June 14 and vastly reduced the number of weapons and of launch sites available for use. Great Britain had become spoiled, accustomed for the last three years to dishing out punishment to Germany, not receiving it. Now it seemed as if the blitz bombing of 1940 and 1941 had returned, and the unexpected loss of civilian lives to German air attack in mid-1944 was bad for British morale.
While Whittle was in the hospital, his doctors had tried to sequester him as much as possible, keeping all bad news from him, and letting him learn of big events, such as the D-day invasion, only after their success had been confirmed. He was especially eager to learn about the new weapon because it was jet-propelled.
Wilson brought them into an austere office on the flight line and showed them a provisional drawing of the buzz bomb.
“The Germans call it the V-1 for ‘vengeance weapon number 1.’ They have another one, the V-2, but it is a rocket-powered ballistic missile. They haven’t fired it yet, and when they do, I don’t see how we will stop it. But we can stop the V-1.”
Whittle studied the drawing. No more than a thousand kilogram bomb with simple wings and tail, it was equipped with a pulse-jet engine. He knew the theory—it was jet power simplified to the extreme. Instead of a complicated compressor and turbine system, as in his engine, a panel of shutters at the front of a long tube was sucked open to admit air. Fuel was injected into the incoming air and ignited. The resulting explosion blew the shutters closed, the flames and heat were exhausted out the rear of the jet tube, propelling the aircraft forward, and the cycle was rapidly repeated. Despite its apparent simplicity, Whittle knew that it must have taken an enormous amount of work to make it effective.
Hooker asked, “What kind of speed and altitude do they fly?”
Wilson replied, “It varies, but usually no more than three hundred or three hundred and fifty mph. Some have been clocked at four hundred, but that may be an error. They come over somewhere between fifteen hundred and three thousand feet. They are not controlled in flight; they just fly a pre-set course, using a gyro stabilizer. They have a simple air-log timer that cuts off the fuel at a pre-determined point, and shuts down the engine. That’s why they are not dangerous as long as you can hear their engine running—they’ll keep on going. But if the engine quits—look out below.”
Whittle had flown fighters long enough to know that even at 300 mph, the buzz bombs would be difficult to intercept in a tail chase. If you were not positioned to make a quartering attack from above, they would be an elusive target. If the first attack missed, it would be almost impossible to catch them before their timing mechanism sent them on their fatal plunge.
“The Jerries are methodical, you know, like to keep regular hours and all that. We expect to see a salvo in about an hour. Let me have one of my pilots run you out to a likely spot where you might see them come in—and see us go after them.”
Wilson introduced him to a smiling young blond pilot officer, Richard May, who slid into the front seat of the Rolls to direct the chauffeur, while in the back Hooker and Whittle discussed the pros and cons of the buzz bomb.
“It’s damn ingenious. What else can the fellow do? He cannot put a bomber over England without it being shot down. The bloody things must be cheap to manufacture, a few hundred man-hours at most. I understand that the Germans were planning to fire eight thousand a month at London! Even as inaccurate as they are, that would be devastating.”
Whittle was still working out the engineering details. “I don’t see how they can keep the blasted things together! The vibration must be incredible. The pulse engine is just a tube, a pipe, containing a series of explosions, bang, bang, bang!”
They were still talking when the Rolls slowed down to turn in a freshly made gravel road for half a shaded mile, then came to a stop. They were led to a clearing, not two hundred yards from one of the hundreds of anti-aircraft batteries that had been redeployed from the defense of London to positions on a line that ran along the coast from Beachy Head to Dover, smack across the V-1 routes. A second line of defense was allocated to fighters, and just on the outskirts of London was a third line—a huge balloon barrage. It was an old-fashioned defense, reaching back to World War I, but it was still effective against a low-flying aircraft that charged blindly ahead without deviating from its course.
May told them, “It will be pretty noisy here, sir, but when it quiets down, you’ll know that an RAF fighter is moving up from behind to attack.”
Hooker signaled to the chauffeur, who retrieved a basket from the Rolls’s trunk. Whittle looked on without much pleasure as sandwiches were laid out, a fruit bowl provided, and a bottle of champagne uncorked. He felt as if he had not eaten well for years, and he was ashamed that his once sturdy body had become so frail. Yet the champagne was going down uncommonly well until he dropped the glass when the anti-aircraft battery let loose a wild barrage.
No one had heard the incoming V-1. It passed serenely through the seemingly impassable barrier of anti-aircraft shell bursts and went on; when the battery ceased firing, they then picked up its odd popping sound, as if an old Austin were backfiring continuously. The flying bomb continued on its course until the buzz died away. May handed them binoculars. “Keep a watch to the west, sir. That’s where the fighters will be.”
Hooker yelled, “Frank, here comes another one now.”
They turned to look to the east, and in the distance, still not audible, they saw a tiny cross advancing, a black stream of
exhaust trailing it. Whittle glanced over to the anti-aircraft battery and was surprised to see them standing around, staring as he was. Then he saw why. A Gloster Meteor—it had to be from 616 Squadron—was diving down in a curving approach. They heard the first engine noises as the Meteor settled down, some three hundred yards behind the V-1, to fire.
Nothing happened and the anti-aircraft crew ran to their stations. The Meteor’s four 20mm Hispano cannon must have jammed, and the gunners were going to take over when the Meteor pulled away and the buzz bomb continued on its course.
But both the V-1 and the Meteor continued straight forward, the fighter gaining position, then sliding into formation with its target. With infinite care, the Meteor pilot slipped his right wing under the V-1’s left wing and with a short movement tipped the V-1 up and over. It rolled into a screaming full-power dive to explode not four hundred yards from where Whittle and Hooker now lay facedown, their heads covered, their champagne spilled.
Then they were on their feet, screaming with the same excitement as the gun crew, for the Meteor now appeared low on the horizon, boiling straight for them, so low that it disappeared beneath the distant hedges, reappearing ever closer until it roared right at them, dust curling up behind its headlong rush. They fell to the ground again, and the Meteor pulled away almost vertically up into the sky, rolling as it went.
Roaring Thunder: A Novel of the Jet Age (Novels of the Jet Age) Page 12