Conquerors of the Sky

by Thomas Fleming

  “We can’t wait, Mr. Buchanan. Congress is ready to vote some real money for a new strategic bomber now that the Russians have an atomic bomb. If we sit around waiting for the perfect plane the stupid bastards will forget all about the problem.”

  The Russians had exploded their first atomic bomb two months ago. This breakthrough had demolished most of Frank Buchanan’s resistance to turning his plane into a weapon.

  “I’ve been telling the general what a hell of a plane he’s got,” Billy McCall said. “I’ve applied to fly her in the next round of tests.”

  “I’ve been talking to your current test pilot,” Scott said. “He makes this thing sound like the second coming.”

  “Correction,” said a voice from the hall. In came Moon Davis, Buchanan’s rotund chief test pilot, zipping up his flight suit. He was getting pretty old to be testing planes but Buzz would not let anyone talk about retiring him.

  “I didn’t say anything about the second coming,” Davis protested. “I just told the general how this plane came into being. The Lord said unto Frank Buchanan, make me a vehicle swifter than the sun and lighter than the wind. And the dawn of a new age of flight began.”

  Buzz grinned nervously. “They say enthusiasm wins wars, General.”

  “So I’ve heard,” Scott said. “But it doesn’t pass appropriations. Let’s get to work, gentlemen.”

  They climbed into a pair of jeeps and rode down the flight line to the Talus. She squatted in the glaring desert sun, simultaneously real and unreal. The tail was a minuscule fin, the fuselage was nonexistent. The plane had become a huge wing, two hundred feet from tip to tip. In the center a cabin bulged like a thyroid eye.

  Cliff invited Dick Stone aboard to see the interior. Contrary to appearances, there was an amazing amount of room inside. The cabin was big enough to house a ten-man crew, with bulky radio and radar equipment, a bombsight and other war-fighting gear without the slightest crowding. Behind the compartment there was ample space for bomb racks.

  “I’ve flown in it,” Cliff said. “It’s the greatest experience I’ve ever had in the air.”

  The most terrifying experience was closer to the truth. The plane had slewed and yawed all over the sky. Frank had yet to solve a lot of the stability problems.

  Moon Davis came aboard with his copilot and flight engineer and Frank Buchanan. They went over the tests they planned for the flight. “Let me add something to impress Scott,” Davis said. “He’s out to kill this thing, Frank.”

  “That may be—but we aren’t ready to do anything spectacular,” Frank said. “I want to solve some of these problems with the engines and their position on the wing. We may have it wrong. I suspect they’re underpowered. I wish I’d stuck to my hunch and insisted on using jet engines. But Adrian and everyone else screamed about costs so much—”

  Cliff sensed Moon was not listening to Frank’s plea for caution. They debarked and Davis warmed up the engines. The whole plane vibrated as he shoved them to full throttle. Satisfied, he taxied to the runway.

  Down the long concrete ribbon Moon whizzed to lift off in one of the sharpest climbs Cliff had ever seen. The Talus made a B-17 look like an overloaded dromedary with wings.

  “How do you like that, General?” Cliff said.

  “Not bad,” Scott said.

  “It’s got eight tons of iron in the bomb bays,” Cliff said. “We’re trying to simulate the real thing.”

  General Scott grunted.

  At about five thousand feet, the huge aluminum creature leveled off and banked sharply to the left and right as it roared over the base. It was an eerie sensation, seeing it in the sky.

  “If we flew it over L.A., they’d evacuate the city,” Cliff said. “They’d be sure the Martians were coming.”

  “I’d be the first guy on the freeway,” Dick Stone said.

  Davis proceeded to put the Talus through a series of dives and climbs and banks. He cut two engines on the left wing and flew perfectly straight and level. He cut two on the right wing and duplicated the performance. “It could fly on two engines from here to New York,” Cliff said.

  Moon shoved the throttles to full. The Talus streaked for the distant mountains, wheeled and came back across the air base at top speed. “Four hundred miles an hour,” Buzz McCall said. “With underpowered engines. The B-Thirty-six’s max speed is four hundred and sixteen—with ten goddamn engines.”

  Convair’s B-36 was the Talus’s chief competitor. It was a totally unoriginal plane, an overgrown World War II bomber.

  “What’s the ceiling?” Scott said. “Have you solved that problem?”

  “Watch.”

  Moon Davis was climbing now, a steady remarkably steep climb, until he was the size of a butterfly in the glaring azure sky. “Leveling off at thirty thousand feet,” Davis said over the radio that stood beside the hangar door.

  He banked, dove, climbed in the near stratosphere, where thin air frequently caused stability problems for standard-shaped planes. “Now, General, to show you what this plane can do, watch closely,” Moon said.

  Down came the Talus in a series of spirals until it was about five thousand feet above the air base. Davis leveled off and began doing stunts. Chandelles, rolls, it was dazzling—until he tried a loop. “No!” Frank Buchanan cried.

  Over the vertical the huge plane came and down in a dive. Now, Cliff thought, now, pull it out. Davis tried. But the left wing crumpled under the forces he had unleashed, the motors ripped free and the Talus slid into a roaring whirling spin that sent it into the brown desert with a stupendous explosion and a fireball of flame.

  “That wasn’t on the checklist!” Frank cried. “Why in God’s name did he think he could loop a thirty-ton plane?”

  “Goddamn it,” Buzz said. “Goddamn it.” He said it about a hundred times as the fire trucks clanged across the dry lake bed to spray foam on the wreckage. There was no hope for Moon Davis or his crew. It would be a miracle if they could even identify the bodies.

  Flying back to Santa Monica, everyone was glum. Buzz poured Inverness and they drank a toast to Moon. “He put some great planes in the air,” he said.

  Buzz took responsibility for the crash. “I told Moon to try it,” he said. “We had to do something wild to get their attention.”

  “It was partly my idea,” Billy McCall said. He had hitched a ride to Santa Monica with them. “I want to fly it, Pops.”

  He smiled mockingly at Cliff, who could hardly object to Billy as a test pilot now. Ordinarily he would have done everything short of assassination to keep him out of the project. Cliff wondered if he had just seen his career explode and burn on the desert floor. He heard himself telling Dick Stone that if the Talus succeeded he was a hero and if it failed he was a bum.

  “What happens now?” Dick asked.

  “We’ve got another prototype almost ready to roll out,” Frank Buchanan said.

  “You’ll keep testing?”

  “Of course we’ll keep testing. You can’t let these setbacks throw you,” Frank said.

  “I haven’t seen a plane yet that didn’t kill at least three pilots,” Buzz said.

  “Sacrifices must be expected?” Cliff said.

  “Exactly,” Frank said, pleased that he remembered the phrase.

  Include me out, Cliff thought. But how? They landed at Buchanan Field in the dusk. Billy hitched a ride to the Beverly Wilshire Hotel with Buzz. No doubt he had some beautiful piece waiting for him there. Cliff got into his car and thought about driving home to tell the story of the crash to Sarah. There would be the usual dumb questions, then plaintive wifely sympathy, maybe some symphonic sex at bedtime.

  Nuts. He wanted Scotch, he wanted fucking, fucking, fucking until the anger and frustration and fear drained out of him. There was only one woman who could give that to him. Cliff shoved a coin in the pay phone outside the main hangar. “Hello, Cassie?” he said.

  SOARING LESSON

  Sarah Morris was dressing for Buchanan’s annual Ch
ristmas party, the major social event of the company year. She should be brimming with Dickensian cheer. But Christmas in California, with the temperature at seventy-five, was too bizarre to foster the traditional impulse to God bless everyone. That meant cheer depended on one’s inner resources, on words like love and faith. At the moment, Sarah was very low on these emotions.

  Sarah had completed Tama Morris’s program to redesign her English daughter-in-law as an American wife. She had lost fifty-eight pounds and was keeping her weight at 110 with heroic dieting. But the program was a failure in the romance department. That was the main reason for Sarah’s lack of Christmas cheer. A perfunctory performance in the bedroom once a week or so was still the most she could expect—and Cliff seemed to think she should be grateful for that. Several times recently she had to remind him that ten days or two weeks had passed without a touch or a kiss. Meanwhile there was a steady supply of evidence that other women were getting plenty of both.

  At this point in Sarah’s unChristmasy meditation, her husband emerged from the bathroom in his underwear and pulled a shirt from his dresser. He shoved his arms into it, flipped a tie under the collar and began buttoning the neck. “Christ!” he said. “There’s enough starch in this collar to straighten Mulholland Drive.”

  “I keep telling Maria—but it doesn’t do any good. Maybe she wants to make Anglos suffer.”

  “I thought you Brits were good at dealing with the lower orders.”

  “Speaking of shirts,” she said. “The one you wore last night was covered with lipstick. Would you mind telling me how that happened?”

  “Business,” Cliff said.

  “Funny business?”

  “I was out with an Air Force general trying to keep him interested in the Talus.”

  “And you each had one of Tama’s volunteers with you?”

  “Mine got a little drunk. She was practically lying on top of me in the backseat. But I didn’t do a goddamn thing to her. So help me. I don’t fool around with the help. Tama’d give me hell, for one thing.”

  “But if I give you hell it doesn’t matter?”

  “I’m getting pretty bored with it. I’ve told you before—you don’t have to worry about me leaving you. If I get tempted now and then, it’s strictly a passing fancy. Christ, this is the twentieth century. You can’t expect a man to be absolutely faithful.”

  Sarah almost burst into tears. She could not deal with this presumption of infidelity. For a while she had tried to compete with these invisible women. She spent hours studying herself in the mirror, trying to think of new ways to use makeup, change her hair. She prowled the department stores looking for bargains in the latest styles.

  What did she get for this devotion? A demand for less starch in his shirts. Sarah stared at her husband in her dressing-table mirror. He looked ridiculous, the stiff collar making his neck bulge. How, why, had she ever fallen in love with this arrogant playboy?

  Strangling in his over-starched shirt, Cliff drove them at terrifying speed down the Hollywood Freeway and out Santa Monica Boulevard to Buchanan Field, which was already crammed with parked cars. All Buchanan’s employees were invited to this annual bash. The tradition apparently stretched back to 1929 or 1930 when Frank Buchanan had run the company with a lavish optimism the Great Depression had soon dimmed.

  One of the biggest hangars had been cleared, except for the company’s tiny experimental rocket plane, White Lightning, in which Billy McCall had recently set several more records for speed and altitude. It perched on two wheels like a defiant insect. The thin swept wings, the rapier nose, gave it a menacing look, even on the ground.

  Standing nearby in his Air Force uniform was the record-breaker himself. People swarmed around him, slapping him on the back, asking him questions. Sarah had met Billy at these Christmas parties and once or twice at other Buchanan ceremonies. She knew her husband did not particularly like him. Today, that made her all the more inclined to chat with him. Billy was unquestionably one of the handsomest men she had ever seen, almost as tall as Cliff and much younger looking, even though they were roughly the same age. Sarah decided it was the blond hair, the fair skin.

  “Congratulations from your sister-in-law, Sarah,” she said, holding out her hand.

  “I haven’t forgotten you,” Billy said, giving her hand a brief squeeze. “I may be dumb and a little deaf from flying Samsons too close to the water, but I’m not blind.”

  “Is that a compliment?”

  “It’s a fact,” Billy said, smiling.

  “I’ve been following your exploits.”

  “I don’t deserve any credit for them. I just switch on the rockets in this excuse for a plane and go along for the ride.”

  In the distance, a band began to play. There was a wooden dance floor at the far end of the hangar. “Want to risk a fox trot?” he said.

  They moved onto the uncrowded floor to the latest hit, “Mona Lisa.” “That’s you,” Billy said, as the singer began gushing the saccharine words. “Mona Lisa.”

  “Why?”

  “The way you smile. It’s different from most women’s. Sort of wary—and mysterious.”

  “Appearances are deceptive. I’m neither.”

  “It’s a mystery to me how you’ve stayed married to Cliff.”

  “You don’t like Cliff very much, do you?” Sarah said.

  “I don’t like him at all.”

  “I happen to love him.”

  “Come on. You loved a wartime hero. A pilot. Now you’re stuck with a salesman on the make. You must feel like you’ve gotten into the wrong movie halfway through. But it’s not too late. There’s a real pilot waiting to fly you into the wild blue.”

  “Who, may I ask?”

  “You’re dancing with him.”

  “Really,” Sarah said.

  “Really,” Billy mocked. “I can usually get into Los Angeles on a day’s notice. Buchanan and a couple of other companies keep a suite reserved at the Beverly Wilshire, in case they want us test pilots for some publicity. Just call this number—”

  He palmed a card from his pocket and slipped it into her hand. “I’m ready when you are.”

  “I admire your nerve, Major,” Sarah said. “But not your morals.”

  “Think it over,” Billy said. “At the very least, you’ll get even.”

  It took Sarah a moment to realize Billy knew all about Cliff’s romps with other women. Cliff probably bragged about them. The band switched to “That Lucky Old Sun” and Billy swung her into a smooth lindy. Whirling at the end of his muscular arm, Sarah’s bewilderment changed to cool decisive lust. Why not dispense once and for all with her adolescent ideas about love and partnership and see herself for what she really was—a young, attractive, neglected wife who was being propositioned by one of the two or three most famous pilots in America?

  “You’re a beautiful woman, Sarah,” Billy said.

  It had been years since she heard those words from her husband. “You’re a rather handsome man, Major,” she said.

  A big hand seized Sarah by the shoulder and spun her out of Billy McCall’s grasp. “Maybe it’s time I danced with my wife,” Cliff said.

  He put his broad shoulders between her and Billy. “What’s that wiseguy telling you about me?”

  “He’s predicting you’ll be CEO of Buchanan in fifteen years,” Sarah lied.

  “Not if he can help it,” Cliff said.

  For the rest of the party, Sarah felt Billy’s eyes on her. Every time she turned her head, so it seemed, there he was in the middle distance studying her, a small smile on his face. Even when she was talking to Adrian Van Ness, answering as well as she could his offhand but probing questions about how de Havilland Aircraft was doing.

  Beside Adrian stood Amanda Van Ness, wearing a gauzy blue gown out of the 1920s or 1930s. Sarah’s friend Susan Hardy had pointed her out earlier in the party as an example of a born Californian’s total lack of style. “How are Tama’s granddaughters?” Amanda said. “You mus
t bring them both to visit me one of these days.”

  “They’re—fine,” Sarah said, abruptly flung back to her memories of Amanda’s visit. “They’re on their way to being very independent women. Already they ignore everything I tell them.”

  “Good,” Amanda said. She whispered in Sarah’s ear “Its more important for them to ignore their father. They need to consider men superfluous.”

  Adrian Van Ness goodnaturedly asked if Amanda was telling her he had a weakness for English women. Was he aware of his wife’s bizarre opinions? Sarah wondered. Probably. But he ignored them. Sarah could not imagine anything disturbing Adrian’s self-assurance.

  For the third or fourth time her eyes found Billy McCall. He was standing alone, raising a drink to his lips. Sarah felt warmth gather in the center of her body. It was amazing how he could make something that simple an erotic gesture. She grew irked by Adrian’s questions, which presumed her strong interest in English aviation. She was not English anymore. She was completing the process of growing up American. Maybe Billy McCall was her graduation present.

  At home on Christmas Day, confronted by her two daughters and her husband and mother-in-law, Sarah told herself to forget Billy McCall. It was absurd. She was a mother and a kitchen helper, a slavey. The Morrises ate and drank what she and Maria had spent ten hours preparing for them as if they were California nobility.

  Tama congratulated Sarah on charming Adrian Van Ness. “He talked about you for a half hour last night at my place.”

  Tama’s reference to my place made it very clear that adultery was par for the course in Buchanan’s executive suite. But Billy McCall was still out of the question, Sarah told herself, washing a sinkful of dishes later in the night.

  The next morning at 10 A.M. the telephone rang. “This is your friend the pilot,” Billy McCall said. “Just wanted to make sure you didn’t lose that number.”

  She hung up. Out of the question. If Cliff made a single tender gesture, if he made love to her with even a hint of his old wartime ardor, she would forget it.

  Instead, there was another late-night return to the nest reeking of a different perfume and a call around midnight on New Year’s eve explaining that an office party had “gotten out of hand” and he would not be home at all because he was too drunk to drive. In the background she could hear women laughing.