In another flash Cliff saw Sarah mounting him. He saw the delight in her eyes, the pleasure of being on top, in control. Was that where the current had been carrying him? She was no longer his magic princess. He was here to regain another kind of current, the sense of being a man among men, even if they were writhing in defeat. A man who fucked beautiful women for consolation. Cliff began drinking the Inverness.
Night and day blended with music and laughter and a trip to Malibu Point, not far from the mouth of Las Tunas Canyon, where Cliff and Billy demonstrated the art of riding killer waves and several designers who tried to imitate them almost drowned. Cassie was also very good on the board. “How about riding something else for old time’s sake?” Cliff said.
“Sure,” she said, smiling past him at Billy.
After a lot more Inverness, Cliff and Dick joined the designers in a vow never to work another day for Buchanan Aircraft Company. Cliff was pretty sure no one would remember it when they sobered up.
Much, much later, Cliff was on a bed with Cassie. She was telling him he was better than Billy while his hand roamed her auburn pussy making her laugh and sigh. They tried it in every position and she liked it more and more. He was so drunk he could keep it up forever. Finally she was on top, crying Oh Oh Oh with each thrust.
In a flash Cassie changed from a laughing, drunken dream girl riding up and down on Cliff’s equipment to Sarah with sadness in her eyes. In another flash Sarah went from sad to witchy, to the snarling, whining, jealous wife of a year ago. Who had done it? Who had switched the reel and changed this movie from a farce to a possible tragedy? Who had changed Cliff Morris from a drunken bachelor to a louse of a husband?
Frank Buchanan was standing beside the bed, telling Cliff to go home, it was all right for a bum like him to live this way but Cliff had a wife, children. Behind Frank, Dick Stone stood in the doorway with a frown on his face. Was he sore about Cassie? Was he telling him to listen to Frank?
Frank. There was only one thing to do. He had to confess what he had done. He had to tell him. Cliff shoved Cassie aside and sat up, almost weeping. I looted the files. I gave them to Adrian. Without telling you. But another face in the doorway stopped him before he could speak.
“Pops is right,” Billy McCall said, his arm around Madeleine. They were in bathing suits, just back from another swim at Malibu Point. “You got to man the home front, Big Shot.”
“Home front?”
“While we bachelors go fight another goddamn war.”
Billy flipped on the radio beside the bed. An announcer began babbling about an invasion of South Korea by North Korea with thousands of tanks and planes. American planes were trying to help the South Koreans. President Truman had announced the United States was going to support them with everything in its arsenal.
Madeleine and Cassie started to cry. “Come on,” Billy said, putting his arm around both of them. “It isn’t so bad. I can’t wait to fly a jet in combat.”
“We don’t have a decent jet fighter,” Frank said. “Nothing that can handle MIGs, if the Russians come into the war.”
“Get to work, Pops,” Billy said. “Don’t let Califia jinx this one.”
To everyone’s astonishment, Frank started to weep. “I’ll try, Billy. I’ll try,” he said.
Cliff drove home in a daze to find an enraged, almost hysterical wife. “Where have you been? I called your office and they said no one had seen you for two days.”
“I was with Frank Buchanan. He’s coming apart over the Talus cancellation. I was trying—”
He realized the impossibility of telling Sarah the truth. She would forgive nothing—neither the betrayal of Frank Buchanan nor the betrayal of her with Cassie.
“Trying what?” Sarah cried.
“Honey, listen, calm down. You’re upset about this thing in Korea. Unless it turns into World War Three I’m not going to get drafted. A war’s good for the plane business. We’ll do okay. We’ll be fine.”
“I’m not upset about the war. I don’t care whether you go or stay,” Sarah said.
“In that case maybe I’ll go,” Cliff said.
“I take it back,” Sarah said. She clung to him, sobbing. “Oh, Cliff, I need you. I need you so much.”
It was the first time she had ever used that word, need. It made Cliff wonder what had happened to his wife during the two drunken days he had been trying to regain his manhood.
Dick Stone drove slowly home to Manhattan Beach with Cassie Trainor, listening to excited radio newsmen reporting massive tank-led assaults by the North Koreans and the continuing collapse of the South Korean army.
“Are you sore at me?”
“I didn’t particularly like finding you in bed with Cliff.”
“It was seeing Billy,” Cassie said. “I couldn’t help it.” She stared out at the dark ocean for a moment. “He was the one I told you about—the strafer—on Joe’s anniversary.”
She was confessing a wound. But Dick was unable to muster any sympathy. The new war was hardening his emotions. He was back in the 103rd Bombardment Group accepting Colonel Atwood’s announcement that everyone, even Dick Stone, was going to die.
“I’m tired of what you can’t help. Maybe it’s time you started blaming yourself instead of God or fate or whatever the hell you talk to in the sky over Noglichucky Hollow.”
“Maybe you’re right,” Cassie said, gazing sadly out at the sea.
“Quit that goddamn Honeycomb Club.”
“Then what?”
“I don’t know. Go to college, maybe. You can go free here in California.”
“What’s the point? We could all get blown up tomorrow.”
“So what? You go on living the best way you can. You’re not doing that. You’d rather feel sorry for yourself.”
“I’d rather have you feel sorry for me. But all you do is preach me self-improvement sermons,” Cassie said.
“You’ve got a self that needs improving.”
“So do you.”
“I know,” Dick said, thinking of his surrender to Adrian Van Ness.
The telephone was ringing as they walked into Dick’s apartment. It was none other than Buchanan’s president, sounding very impatient. “Where have you been?” he said. “I’ve been trying to get hold of you for hours. Get up here as soon as you can. This war in Korea means we have to move fast.”
Dick roared up the coast highway to Buchanan Aircraft’s headquarters. Adrian Van Ness was in his office with Buzz McCall. They were both looking angry. “The war means we can bid on a contract for two hundred new transports for the Air Force,” Adrian said. “With the Excalibur still in limited production, we’re years ahead of everyone. We can convert it overnight. I want you to go to work on the costs. Buzz will give you the data.”
“Goddamn it, Adrian, there’s more to this than profits,” Buzz said. “Maybe we ought to get the Talus back on the burner. We owe it to Frank to at least try.”
Adrian shoved papers around his desk. “I don’t feel we owe Frank Buchanan anything. He’s disappeared for the last three days. Half the design department has gone with him. The rest of them are sitting down there getting drunk on company time. The man is an anarchist. I should have gotten rid of him years ago.”
“We’re not gonna sell the Excalibur as is,” Buzz said. “The Air Force wants more range and speed. We’ll have to put those new turboprop engines on it. They’re the best thing that’s come out of the jet-engine research. We need Frank to design a wing that can handle those engines. You can’t get along without him, Adrian. As usual.”
For a moment Dick thought Adrian was going to snarl a curse at Buzz. But his voice remained calm. “Then get him back. He’ll listen to you.”
Buzz lit a cigarette. “Adrian, sometimes I don’t think you belong in this business. You don’t know how to gamble. When’s the last time you flew a plane?”
“I don’t know. Nineteen twenty-five, I think. When I left England.”
“You should ha
ve kept flying. That’s the only way to keep the instinct alive. Every time you step into a plane you’re riskin’ something. You’ve got to risk the fuckin’ company the same way. Bet it on something new out there. It’s a sporty game, Adrian. A game for real men.”
Buzz blew smoke in Adrian’s face. “That flying wing turned out to be a hell of a plane. You never should have let those Texas pricks destroy it. We did something rotten when we let that happen, Adrian.”
Adrian’s hooded eyes swung toward Dick. He seemed to be saying something to him. Something very confusing. A kind of plea or apology. The eyes returned to Buzz. “I thought you blamed it on your ex-girlfriend, Califia. The one who wants to kill us all.”
“She’s another reason for fighting back. I can’t stand the thought of a dame jinxing us this way.”
“You really think they have supernatural power?”
“I don’t know whether it’s supernatural. But some of them have power,” Buzz said.
“I guess I should start worrying. She’s writing to me too. Threatening me with all sorts of exotic punishments. Like strapping me to the propellers of an Excalibur and starting the motor.”
Buzz did not even try to smile. He took Califia seriously. “Can’t security find that dame?” Dick said. In a corner of his mind he was still worried she might be Cassie.
“She’s smart as hell,” Buzz said. “Mails the stuff from different boxes all over L.A.”
“Getting back to the real world—will you talk to Frank?” Adrian said.
Buzz stubbed out his cigarette. “I’ll talk to him. Not for your sake or my sake. Those kids flying World War Two crates over Korea are gonna need some new planes.”
Buzz strode out, slamming the door. It echoed through the empty building as if a bomb had exploded. Adrian Van Ness gazed after him with undisguised hatred on his face. It took him a full minute to control himself. “Get to work, young fellow,” he said with a forced smile. “I’m sorry to ruin your evening. Were you involved in something pleasant?”
“I would have been if you’d called ten minutes later,” Dick said.
Adrian stared at the door Buzz had just slammed. “We don’t have room for sentiment in this business,” he said. “I can be as sporty as Buzz at betting the company. But I don’t think we should do it if we have a safer choice. Don’t you agree?”
This time Adrian was unquestionably reaching out to him, claiming him in some subtle and totally unexpected way. Dick let him know he was not accepting the offer. “I’ll get to work,” he said.
Four hours later, a weary Dick Stone knocked on Adrian Van Ness’s door. Buchanan’s president was walking up and down the office, listening to a mul-tiband shortwave radio on his desk. “This is Mercury Two confirming a red alert,” a deep voice said. “All leaves are canceled. Pilots will report to their duty bases.” The radio added instructions for Air National Guard and Air Force reserve units.
“It’s a real war all right,” Adrian said. “Truman’s sending in a division of infantry. We’ve already started bombing North Korea. What do the figures tell us?”
“Assuming Buzz’s data is correct we can produce two hundred transports at five hundred thousand a copy. We can make as much money on that plane as we could make on the Talus.”
Dick’s cold monotone made it clear he was still on Frank Buchanan’s side. “Put in an expense chit for five hundred dollars for the night’s work,” Adrian Van Ness said.
Dick drove back down the coast highway in the cool final hour of the night, the war news crackling out of the radio like slivers of steel. There were still a fair number of cars and strollers along the ocean in Santa Monica and Venice. In the Villa Hermosa compound in Manhattan Beach, a volleyball game was going strong in the shallow end of the pool, girls against boys. He looked at the tanned lunging bodies, the laughing faces and wondered how many of the men might soon be dying on Korean hillsides, how many of the women might be weeping in lonely apartments.
In his bedroom, he found Cassie prowling up and down like a caged panther, listening to the radio. “Our guys are gettin’ creamed,” she said. She was wearing his dark blue bathrobe, a wedding present from his mother.
Dick flipped off the radio. “The hell with it.”
Cassie eyed him warily. “You feel like it?”
He nodded. He needed her. He needed the touch of a woman’s flesh to defeat the way the new war was restoring the old one to memory. “I’m sorry about what I said in the car. I understand about Joe and Billy. I’m glad you told me.”
“It’s the war. I feel bad about it too,” Cassie said, slipping out of the bathrobe and wrapping her long arms around him.
Suddenly Dick was kissing his ex-wife, remembering what she had meant: life, pleasure, the future, all the things he had consigned to oblivion in order to fly those forty-nine missions without coming apart. He had finally obeyed Colonel Atwood’s injunction to think of himself as a dead man. But it had been a hard order.
Now he finally understood. Nancy Pesin had been the resurrection of Richard Stone. Perhaps first he had needed to be reborn as a Jew before he could resume his American journey. Perhaps he had been too cruel in achieving the second birth. But birth, life was full of pain, some of it necessary.
Oh, woman woman woman. He kissed the tears on Cassie’s tan cheeks, he plunged his hands deep in her thick auburn hair. She was clinging to him, murmuring: “Dick, Dick, I think I love you. Will you let me love you? Will you try to love me? I’ll quit the club. I’ll think about goin’ to college.”
“Good, good,” he said, unable to respond with love. Was he clinging to his California freedom? He was beginning to think it was an illusion.
As Dick came he saw Adrian Van Ness standing in a dark corner of his mind, smiling at them. Did those hooded eyes contain some sort of supernatural knowledge or power?
No. He was smiling because the war was going to make Buchanan Aircraft prosperous again. From even deeper darkness, a voice whispered this was wrong. It wounded the intensity of Dick’s coming, his taking of Cassie Trainor in the name of many loves. The voice, perhaps also the sum of many voices, wondered if he deserved happiness as long as he worked for the Buchanan Aircraft Company.
WARRIOR
Frank Buchanan stood beside the single waterlogged bomb-pitted concrete runway that constituted Suwon Airfield, his eyes obsessively scanning the icy blue Korean sky. The runway stood in the middle of a sea of mud. Snow and mud intermingled on the hills sloping down to the field. He felt like a man simultaneously living two bad dreams.
One was his own life, full of anguished yearning for Amanda—and snarling hatred for Adrian Van Ness. Buzz McCall and this new war had lured him back to Buchanan Aircraft. But nothing could persuade Frank to talk to Adrian. That partly explained his inability to deal with the rest of this bad dream—the fear that Amanda was drifting into madness. He knew she was the source of Califia’s letters. But he did not know what to do about it. The day before he left for Korea, he had telephoned her. His voice triggered an explosion of rage that left him bewildered and appalled. She seemed to hate him and Adrian with equal ferocity.
The other bad dream was the war in Korea. Unlike the global brawl with Germany and Japan, this was a war about which most of America seemed indifferent. No one gave the men who were risking their lives any glittering slogans, like making the world safe for democracy or fighting for the Four Freedoms. Few reporters got enthusiastic about a struggle that had turned into a stalemate.
Twenty-five miles away, in the front lines along the border of North Korea, a half-million American infantrymen were confronting a million Chinese. Only America’s control of the air had enabled the infantry to survive the enemy’s overwhelming numerical superiority. Relentless pounding by light and heavy bombers had reduced Chinese supplies to a trickle, leaving them incapable of mounting an offensive.
Most of the planes fighting this crucial part of the war were propeller-driven B-29s and B-26s from World War II. But the de
cisive struggle for air superiority was taking place far away, along the Yalu River border between Russia and North Korea. Billy McCall was up there now, leading eight F-86 North American Sabrejets from the 337th Squadron into unequal combat with Russian-built MIG-15s. The jet engine was on its way to transforming air warfare—and the entire world of flight.
Each day, the American pilots took off from Suwon and other fields and flew over the desolate mountains and valleys of North Korea to the Yalu. From there, they could look down on hundreds of MIG-15s, parked in gleaming rows beside 7,200-foot-long runways on their airfields across the river. But the Americans could not bomb or strafe them. That might bring on a wider war with Communist China, the politicians in Washington said. As if a million men trying to kill Americans was not a war about as wide as wars could get.
Frank returned to the 337th operations room to listen to Billy and his friends discussing the situation. First came Billy’s voice: “This is Black Leader. Thirty-six lining up at Antung.”
“Hell, only twenty-four takin’ off at Tatungkou,” drawled another voice, a Floridian who was Blue Leader, head of another squadron.
“It’ll be at least three for everybody,” grunted the nasal New England voice of White Leader. “I count fifty at Takushan.”
Antung, Tatungkou, Takushan were three of the sacrosanct Chinese airfields. They placed the MIG-15s only minutes away from attacking the B-29s and B-26s pounding the Communist supply lines in Korea. If the MIGs got at these World War II planes, it was no contest. Their gunners could not deal with planes flying at 684 miles an hour, armed with .23- and .37-millimeter cannon. It was up to the American jet pilots to keep the MIGs out of North Korea.
Flying from bases two hundred miles away, the Americans never had more than thirty minutes of fuel on which to fight. In all of Korea, they only had fifty Sabrejets to confront an estimated five hundred Chinese MIG-15s. In almost every fight, the Americans were outnumbered four or five to one.
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