Conquerors of the Sky

by Thomas Fleming

  Back in his office, Stone regained his executive instincts. He had been running the day-to-day operations of the Buchanan Corporation for almost a decade while Cliff sold their planes around the world. He decided Mike Shannon was not the man to put in charge of safeguarding Adrian’s papers. Grabbing the telephone, he told the night operator to get him Daniel Hanrahan.

  In sixty seconds, the sleep-heavy voice of Buchanan’s security chief was on the line. Dick told him what had happened. “Mrs. Van Ness. Is she all right?” Hanrahan asked, instantly wide-awake.

  “As far as we know,” Dick said.

  “Can you spare me a plane to get to Virginia?” Hanrahan said.

  “I’ll spare you a SkyDemon. You’ll be there before you’ve started.”

  The SkyDemon was a jet fighter-bomber that could hit 1,600 miles an hour. “Roll it out,” Hanrahan said. “I’ll be there in a half hour.”

  Dick punched the phone again and told the operator to get medical director Kirk Willoughby. In a moment, Buchanan’s chief physician was on the line. Stone told him what had happened. Willoughby groaned. “I knew that goddamn anticoagulant wasn’t working. I wanted him to have open heart surgery.”

  “Why the hell didn’t you insist on it?” Dick snarled.

  “You know Adrian. He always had the final say. He decided the unknowns were about the same in both routes.”

  “You should have decided that for him!”

  “Calm down, Dick. Adrian wasn’t your father.”

  The words froze the telephone in Dick Stone’s hand. Willoughby had nailed him. He was feeling filial, he was grieving for Adrian Van Ness. While his real father babbled passages from the Torah in a nursing home in New York.

  Was it a reaction to Cliff Morris’s barely disguised delight? Stone knew Cliff had several reasons to hate Adrian Van Ness. Cliff had almost as many reasons to mourn him. But hatred was a more powerful emotion. That was why Cliff had to be stopped.

  “He wasn’t your father either,” Dick said. “But we all owe him enough loyalty not to bad-mouth him. It won’t do the company any good, for one thing. That’s what we have to worry about now. The company.”

  “Has Cliff heard the news?”

  “That’s why I’m calling you. I’m the new CEO. Cliff’s resigning. But he may not go quietly. Get your ass out of bed and into a helicopter. I want you to talk to Frank Buchanan before dawn. Make sure he’s on my side.”

  Dick Stone punched the phone again to rouse the night operator. “Get me a Hydra and a pilot. I’ll be leaving in five minutes.”

  “Mr. Morris just asked for one too. There’s only one pilot on duty.”

  “I’ll fly my own.”

  Dick slammed down the phone and sat there, appalled by his recklessness. He had a pilot’s license but that did not mean he was qualified to handle a Hydra. He had received a thorough checkout from Buchanan’s chief pilot only a week ago. But going solo was still close to insanity.

  The plane was out on the runway. Buchanan’s chief mechanic, an ex-Navy aviation machinist named Kline, was giving it a final checkoff with another mechanic. “Where you headed, Mr. Stone?” Kline asked. “I got to file a flight plan.”

  “Dreamland. Notify the usual characters so they don’t blow me away.”

  “I got you, Mr. Stone.”

  Dick buckled himself into the pilot’s seat and studied the controls for a moment. Okay. Ready to go on a wing and a prayer, even if no one was interested in prayers from Dick Stone. No one named God, anyway.

  He applied the power to the rotors and rose vertically into the night sky. In two minutes he was roaring north above the coast highway at 1,500 feet. Flight! It always aroused fierce exultance in Stone’s throat.

  Behind him he left a half dozen Dick Stones. The fugitive from Jewish New York enjoying a different shiksa each night at the Villa Hermosa with the Pacific’s surf rumbling in the distance. The lover prowling the lobby of the Bel Air Hotel in search of a woman who did not exist beyond her ability to torment him. The husband whose embittered wife drunkenly accused him of loving planes more than people.

  Past, gone, obliterated, Stone told himself. The future was the only thing that mattered. The past was a junkyard of false hopes and naive dreams. He was flying above it, beyond it into a new dimension.

  It almost worked. He almost stopped hearing Amalie Borne whispering his name.

  A dozen miles further up the coast Dick shoved the Hydra’s throttle to full and in less than five minutes he was whizzing over the San Gabriel Mountains into the empty immensity of the Mojave Desert. He roared over Edwards Air Force Base where Billy McCall and Buchanan’s other test pilots had risked their necks in new planes. For a moment all of them—the planes—flew in Dick Stone’s mind. He marveled at the way they made men delirious with pride and pleasure and snuffed out their lives as inexplicably and as unpredictably as a woman broke a man’s heart.

  In an hour Dick was far up the Mojave, where the California desert met Nevada. Ahead of him was Dreamland, a base whose exact location was known only to a few hundred Air Force officers and aircraft executives. From the air it was an innocuous setup, a scattering of hangars with no planes visible. It looked like an abandoned airport, a place old pilots and plane lovers visited in their nightmares. Dreamland was where the Black Programs, the planes that would protect America in the twenty-first century, were tested.

  The desert was turning from gloomy night to graying dawn. In a few minutes the first glow of the rising sun crept over the Sierras. Runway lights clicked on and an air controller in an invisible tower said: “Good morning, Mr. Stone. You are cleared for landing on runway two. Wind from the east at twelve knots.”

  The sensible thing to do was switch to the tilt rotors and make a helicopter descent. But Dick Stone had found out a long time ago that in the aircraft business the sensible thing was often the wrong thing. There were people watching him land and most of them—99 percent of them—would not land the Hydra that way when there was 4,000 feet of runway waiting for it. Unlike its competitor, the Osprey, the Hydra’s propellers were not too big for a conventional landing. Why not show off—and demonstrate the aircraft’s flexibility? It was an unbeatable argument.

  Dick could hear Billy McCall telling him thirty-seven years ago: Any asshole can get a plane in the air. Getting it back on the ground is the real trick. Sweat oozed down Stone’s chest as he cut his airspeed and lined up the Hydra for a propeller landing. Down, down, flaps lowered, altimeter reading—the tilt rotors on the wings made it a very unforgiving plane to handle. Whump. It was a heavy-footed performance. But he was on the ground, taxiing toward the nearest hangar.

  Major General Anthony Sirocca, the burly commander of Dreamland, was waiting in front of the operations building. They were old friends. “We got a flash from Washington about Adrian,” Sirocca said, as they shook hands. “Is it true?”

  “I’m afraid it is.”

  “Anything suspicious about it?” asked Tom Guilford, the gaunt six-foot-six Buchanan vice president who had spent most of the last three years at Dreamland. His wife had divorced him a month ago, adding two more emotional casualties to the history of the aircraft business.

  “We don’t know yet,” Dick Stone said. “We don’t know a goddamn thing except he’s dead.”

  They walked to the operations building, where Dick gratefully accepted a cup of coffee. Sleeplessness was beginning to suck life out of his brain. “We’ll be having a special board meeting soon. I thought it might be a good idea to give the bankers a firsthand report on how things are going up here.”

  Tony Sirocca’s bushy brows rose a fraction of an inch. He knew that was not the real reason Dick Stone was here. Tony heard things over the military grapevine. He knew a lot about Buchanan’s financial problems. “Things couldn’t be better,” Sirocca said. “We’ve got ourselves a hell of a plane.”

  “You’re just in time for a demonstration,” Guilford said. “She’s coming in from the Canadian border in ab
out fifteen minutes.”

  In the checklist on Buchanan’s executives Dick Stone carried in his head, Tom Guilford acquired a bundle of white points. He had understood the purpose of the visit the moment he heard about it.

  They walked down the concrete walled corridor, freshly painted Air Force blue, to the communications center. At least thirty men and women sat before consoles. The officer in command of the room, a brisk blond major named Wallis Thompson, gave Stone a cheerful hello.

  “How’s it going?” he said.

  “We’ve got every kind of radar in the book out there looking for him, including a whole fighter wing. Not a trace,” she said in a throaty voice that made Dick consider inquiring about her next leave. But the business at hand swiftly sidetracked this erotic impulse.

  Roaring toward them across the desert was an immense black plane made not of steel or aluminum but of carbon fiber and epoxy, materials created in the laboratory. Her radical design and the complex counter-radar devices in her belly made the latest version of the BX bomber invisible to the most sophisticated air defenses the minds of men in Moscow or Beijing or Washington could devise.

  Tony Sirocca looked at his watch. “She’ll be overhead in about two minutes.”

  They strolled out a side door and walked to the runway. The rising sun was almost visible over the peaks of the Sierras. The upper horizon was fringed with red. But everyone’s eyes were on the empty desert that stretched for a hundred miles between them and the mountains. Suddenly it was there, a black blur against the brown slopes of the Sierras.

  On she came, a bare fifty feet off the ground, traveling just below the speed of sound. Over their heads she whizzed in a roar that was almost instantly consumed by distance. An incredible sight as she banked far out on the desert and began a landing approach. The minuscule tail, the fusion of wing and fuselage, the beaked nose made her look like a creature from a science fiction movie. A true denizen of dreamland.

  For a moment Dick Stone could only think of the heartbreak this plane had caused so many people in Buchanan Aircraft over the last twenty years. Denounced, junked, revived, reviled. Yet here she was, Frank Buchanan’s last and perhaps greatest gift to the country he no longer loved. Adrian Van Ness’s final triumph. And Dick Stone? Was it his consolation? Or his nemesis?

  The plane lived. But she threatened the life of the company that had created her. Dick Stone was here to see if he had the courage—or the cowardice—to kill her. Take your pick of motives and alternatives. The world into which this plane was flying had become so complex, words lost their meanings, motives wavered and shimmered like air in the desert at high noon.

  Down, down came the black bomber, exhaust pouring from her four turbofan engines. Without a trace of a bump, her tires kissed the runway and she rolled past them. In the cockpit window, the pilot gave them a thumbs up. General Sirocca and Tom Guilford raised their thumbs in response. Dick Stone found his hand high in an involuntary wave.

  Dick took a deep slow breath. He was part of it again, the brotherhood he had joined when he climbed aboard the Rainbow Express in 1942. He had come out here hoping to find a reason to kill this plane. To tell Tony Sirocca and Tom Guilford that the numbers no longer made sense. A company that was running out of money could not keep spending a hundred million dollars a year on a plane that the U.S. government might not buy.

  “There’s only one thing wrong, Tony,” Dick said. “You could paint two hundred of the goddamn things with the red ink she’s generating.”

  “We’ll get some real money for you next year. I guarantee it.”

  “You’ve been guaranteeing that for a long time, Tony.”

  “I’ll get it or I’m out of this uniform,” Tony said.

  “The things we’re learning will change the history of aviation, I swear it,” Tom Guilford said.

  For a moment exhaustion and the emotional side of Dick Stone’s Jewish-American nature overwhelmed him. Guilford was frowning at him like a son who could not believe his father would betray him. He was a sort of son. Dick had picked him for this difficult job. He knew what it had already cost him.

  “It’ll guarantee the survival of the fucking country. That’s what I care about,” Tony Sirocca said.

  Stone sighed. He had heard similar things said about other planes. But this one, with its freight of history and heartbreak, might be the one that deserved the rhetoric.

  “You know me. I like to take a look at things close up,” Dick said.

  “Sure. Sure,” Sirocca said. “I wish you came out more often.”

  “Tom keeps me up on everything. He writes a good report.”

  They walked toward the Hydra that Stone had flown to their impromptu demonstration as the sun slanted tentative red rays across the desert. “Don’t you think it’d be a good idea to let a pilot fly you back?” Guilford said.

  Again, the pain of fatherhood stirred in Dick Stone’s chest. He could not get used to it. He had played a son’s part to Adrian Van Ness and Frank Buchanan for so long. A difficult, combative son. Once—a memory that still filled him with twisting regret—a treacherous son.

  “What do you mean ‘good idea’?” Tony Sirocca said. “It’s an absolute necessity. It’s a miracle this asshole got here without killing himself in that screwy machine.”

  “Go to hell,” Dick said. “I survived three and a half years in the U.S. Army Air Force with generals like you trying to kill me every day.”

  “After seeing you land tonight, I’m ready to believe you’re indestructible. But why ruin a perfectly good aircraft, even if it’s more or less useless?” Sirocca said.

  General Sirocca was letting Stone know that the Air Force was not happy with the way the Marines, the Coast Guard, and the Navy were salivating over the Hydra. Tony wanted Buchanan to work exclusively for the boys in blue. Dick Stone had no intention of going broke to keep Sirocca happy. He could hear Adrian Van Ness telling him that governments and their departments and branches did not know the existence—much less the meaning—of the word gratitude.

  Did that mean second thoughts about the BX bomber? Maybe.

  Another cup of coffee and ten minutes with the ebullient young major who had flown the BX and Dick Stone was on his way. He dozed in his seat beside the baby-faced twenty-six-year-old Air Force captain who was flying the Hydra after a ten-minute conference with Tom Guilford. The captain was ecstatic at the chance to get his hands on the controls of such a top-secret item. It was making his day, his week, his month, his year.

  Stone nodded and in his mind walked across miles of desert to a woman waiting in the silence. For years now he had found a strange monkish satisfaction in thinking of her there in the arid wastes. She was a kind of sentry, guarding a border that he some day hoped to cross. Now he began to think—to fear—it was going to become another failed dream, another hope that would never fly. Mournfully, while the boyish captain chortled, Dick talked to Sarah Morris.

  If Cliff refuses to leave quietly I can deal with it one of two ways. I can cancel the BX, and stand tall as Buchanan’s rescuer, the man who can make the hard decisions. If I keep the plane, that exposes me to Cliff coming forward as the BX’s executioner, the man with the titanium backbone. He’ll never convince a majority of the board but he may confuse enough people to make us a setup for a corporate raider, someone who’ll carve us up and sell off the pieces. To stop Cliff I’ll need your help. That means I can never ask you for anything else.

  Could he do it? Could he dismiss happiness so finally, so irretrievably? Was this Adrian Van Ness’s last demand, the final requirement of sonship? As he drifted down into sleep, Dick wondered if it was the only way he could reach out to Adrian now, the only way he could say: I’m sorry.

  THE MEDICINE MAN

  In his shack on the slopes of the San Jacinto Mountains, eighty-three-year-old Frank Buchanan lay awake. In his head he was soaring through the desert’s blue sky, while in the front seat of his gull-winged fiberglass sailplane Sarah Chapman Morris
uttered cries that could only be described as erotic. He had begun flying these engineless creatures about a year ago, at her suggestion. It was a uniquely spiritual sensation, riding the winds blowing off the mountains for an hour or two before gravity made its ultimate claim on the body and the airship. Frank always came home feeling renewed, able to endure his creaking physique and the nauseating American world of the 1970s for a while longer.

  What an interesting woman Sarah had become. Frank realized he had rated her much too low because she was Cliff Morris’s wife. He was amused by her insatiable curiosity about Buchanan Aircraft. She wanted to know everything, back to the dawn of time. She said she hoped understanding would lead to forgiveness, a lovely idea. It had not worked for him. Frank thought he understood almost everything about Adrian Van Ness but he still hated him.

  Dozing off, Frank dreamt he was flying a Bleriot Experimental Model 2 biplane over southwestern England. The cranky sixty-horsepower engine pulled him along in the stiff headwind at a satisfying forty miles an hour. Below him in the darkening sky was another BE2 piloted by a man whom he had begun to regard as an older brother. Edward “Teddy” Busk was an ebullient Cambridge University mathematician who had devoted his first-class mind to the new science of aerodynamics. His insights had prompted Geoffrey de Havilland to reposition the wing, redesign the lateral tail and create the first truly stable plane. Not only had Busk shared his ideas with Frank Buchanan and other eager pupils—he had learned to fly as an act of faith in his computations.

  As Frank looked down on Busk’s plane, he saw a twenty-foot ribbon of flame streaming behind him. In sixty seconds, the fabric-covered wings and fuselage were engulfed by livid tongues of fire. As Frank watched, horrified, Busk made a perfect landing on a wide swath of downs called Laffan Plain. It was an ironic tribute to the stability of the BE2—but it did nothing to extinguish the flames.