Conquerors of the Sky

by Thomas Fleming

  “She’s in despair,” Dick said. “She lives in a state of despair.”

  “She sure as hell doesn’t act that way.”

  “That’s one of the interesting things about despair. I’ve been reading up on it. It’s totally different from depression. It’s liberating. Once you give up all hope, you’re free to do anything.”

  “Women are nuts,” Cliff said.

  “Maybe we’re the crazy ones. We just happen to be running the show,” Dick said.

  Each day before Cliff hit the congressional trail, he called Sarah in Los Angeles. Each day he heard loneliness eating away the feelings they had rediscovered the night of Kennedy’s inauguration. It was very confusing and upsetting. He was here in Washington because Jack Kennedy had broken his promise to build the Warrior. Covertly, he was helping the Kennedys sabotage McNamara to build a plane that the secretary of defense, theoretically Curtis LeMay’s commander, had canceled. It was double-crosses inside double-crosses, with a touch of mutiny.

  Maybe Dick Stone was right. Maybe they were the crazy ones. But the plane had to fly. Everything depended on it. Every day, Adrian Van Ness was on the telephone reminding him of that fact.

  Sometimes Billy McCall flew in to join Cliff and Dick Stone to see a congressman or senator who was into airplanes and wanted to talk to the famous test pilot. At the end of the day they regrouped in Cliff’s room at the Shoreham Hotel and considered how to entertain themselves for the evening. Frequently Mike Shannon joined them and recruited some girls from his little black Congressional liaison book for fun and games.

  In his head, Cliff resisted and regretted the idea in advance. But it was impossible to explain without getting a sneer from Billy and squawks of disbelief from Shannon and mocking smiles from Dick Stone, who seemed to take savage pleasure in watching him go along with the gang. At times Cliff almost believed Dick knew he did not want to do it and was forcing him to play the game by Kennedy rules in revenge for Amalie.

  Sometimes, in bed with one of Shannon’s stable at the very moment of climax, Cliff would be seized with drunken regret. He would whisper a plea that he wished Sarah could hear: I’m sorry. At other times he remembered the night in Lima and exulted in the impersonality, the virtuosity of the fucking; it was a defiant throwback to his bachelor youth.

  Meanwhile, Mike Shannon was assuring him that they were making excellent progress in their double-cross campaign on Capitol Hill. More and more congressman and senators were starting to wonder if McNamara knew what he was doing when he canceled the Warrior. Mike was in there pouring subtle salt on the tails of the more difficult birds. General Curtis LeMay also had a swarm of lesser generals and colonels working at it.

  Then came the morning Cliff opened his copy of the Washington Post to find the front page black with disastrous headlines. President Kennedy had tried to overthrow Fidel Castro. The expedition was a fiasco. The attacking force was barely 2,500 men and their only air support were some World War II Douglas Invader bombers that Castro’s jets shot down in about twenty seconds.

  Cliff called Mike Shannon to find out what happened. His voice shook as he told the story. “Adlai Stevenson talked the president into canceling the air support for those poor bastards. The plan called for a squadron of Navy jets to go in there and blow Fidel’s planes away. All he had were some T-Thirty-three jet trainers. Without them, the Invaders could’ve bombed the shit out of Castro’s troops and turned the whole battle around.”

  Shannon ranted on about the influence of Stevenson and his circle of “fucking idealists” in the Kennedy administration. Cliff had more important things on his mind. “What does this do to our hearings on the Warrior?”

  Shannon told him to forget about the Warrior for a year. It would take them at least that long to regain their leverage with Congress. “We’re still spending ten million a month on those cardplayers and crapshooters in California,” Cliff said.

  “Give me a couple of days. I’ll find something for you.”

  Shannon set up a lunch with Carl Vinson and a congressman from Iowa, whom Mike called “the Creature.” He turned out to be the man who had stood beside the second Starduster’s grave and blamed it all on the FAA and bad propellers. The eighty-year-old Vinson was sympathetic to Buchanan’s plight in a courtly if somewhat fuzzy way. He told the Creature to get out the current list of defense projects and see if there was something in it for Buchanan.

  Cliff took one look at the list and almost started to palpitate. It was a preview of what the Air Force, the Navy and the Marines were going to buy for the next five years. Skimming it, Cliff saw a hundred-million-dollar Navy request for ninety antisubmarine planes. The aircraft had to be big enough to carry a couple of tons of electronic gear, fast enough to get out to the deepest part of the ocean in a hurry, and slow enough to all but hover over the trouble spot.

  “We’ve got a commercial plane that fits that description as if it was designed for it. The Starduster.”

  “One of them crashed in my district!” the Creature said. “We can’t send our boys in blue out to sea in an unsafe plane.”

  Cliff labored to point out that the redesigned Starduster had been flying for two years without a crash. The Creature continued to agitate. Finally, Chairman Vinson said: “Down, boy. Let’s have a couple of admirals decide how safe it is.”

  The Creature departed and Carl Vinson poured Cliff a glass of the best bourbon he had ever tasted. “Don’t pay any attention to that fellow,” he said. “He ain’t worth a cup of warm spit. But he knows how to get elected and you’ve got to deal with him.”

  Vinson sipped his bourbon and studied Cliff with eyes that were no longer fuzzy. “Son,” he said, “don’t ever be ashamed to ask for money to build a good plane. This is the richest country in the world. Also the most thoughtless, wasteful, foolish. No one can imagine the United States of America losin’ a war. But I can ’cause I come from a country that lost one. My Daddy fought for the Confederacy. He used to sit and talk by the hour about how sure they were that the pusillanimous Yankees could never lick ’em.”

  Congressman Vinson poured himself more bourbon. “You know how much this country spends on alcohol?”

  Cliff shook his head.

  “Ten billion a year.”

  “On cigarettes?”

  Cliff shook his head.

  “Seven billion a year.”

  “On hair spray and cosmetics and jewelry?”

  Cliff shook his head.

  “Seven billion a year.”

  On and on went the list of trivialities on which Americans spent billions, Vinson scribbling down the numbers and sipping his bourbon. Finally, without benefit of an adding machine, he added it up: fifty billion dollars a year.

  “That’s why it don’t bother me much to spend a couple of hundred million on a good plane.”

  The next day, Cliff got an urgent call from the Creature. He said he had found new evidence that the Starduster was still unsafe. Cliff raced to the Congressional Office building in a cab, taking Dick Stone along for a backup.

  In his office, the Creature announced he did not really have any hard evidence. In fact, his mind could easily be changed. “I’ve been hearin’ rumors about a certain tall dark beauty Jack Kennedy’s sneakin’ into the White House. French. She does things only the French know how to do. How about fixin’ me up for a night with her?”

  Cliff contemplated the congressman’s sallow, wide-pored cheeks with their overlay of five o’clock shadow. His chest was sunken; his wrists had odd bony knobs. He brushed at a cowlick and grinned expectantly.

  “I wish I could do it,” Cliff said. “But she’s gone back to Europe. I think Jackie got wise to her. Jack told her to get out of the country for six months.”

  In the corridor, after hearing the congressman whine ominously about the Starduster for another ten minutes, Dick Stone said: “Thanks.”

  “Forget it,” Cliff said. “We’ve got old Carl Vinson on our side. He tows that asshole around so he
won’t have to keep taking out his glasses to read the fine print on things.”

  Within two weeks, a team of admirals flew to Los Angeles to look at the Starduster. Within another month, Buchanan had the contract and Cliff and Dick Stone were splitting a fifty-thousand-dollar bonus. Cliff decided to fly home to celebrate. Dick preferred New York—and Amalie. He really had a bad case. Cliff gave him Buzz McCall’s old lecture about not letting any woman get to you but it was a waste of breath.

  Poor Buzz was not a very good example for anyone these days. He got drunk at lunch and stayed that way in his back office, where a few old loyalists visited him pretending to ask his advice, trying to make him feel like he was still in charge. Adrian kept talking about firing him but he was afraid Frank Buchanan would quit with him. Frank still blamed the Starduster crashes on Adrian. He said Buzz was an innocent victim.

  Cliff boomed into Los Angeles aboard a 707 feeling ten feet tall about the bonus and the new career for the Starduster. The kids greeted him with yells of glee. Sarah’s smile was more wary. What was wrong now? Out on the patio, he sipped his martini and tried to find out. “You look like you’ve got some news you don’t want to tell me,” he said.

  “In a way, I have. Billy McCall is going to marry Victoria Van Ness.”

  For a moment the yard, the blue California sky above them seemed to contract to the cockpit of a spinning plane. How could she sit there smiling in that ridiculous way when she had just told him his career was ruined, his dream of becoming Buchanan’s president was shredded, his life was a smashed burning wreck? Was she glad?

  “Don’t be afraid. We can handle it,” Sarah said.

  Her eyes were unnaturally bright. She looked happy in an odd wild way that Cliff had never seen before. That night in their bedroom Sarah made all the moves. She was as inventive as Cassie Trainor at the crest of her Honeycomb days. “Stay calm, keep your head. We’ll destroy them. I promise you,” she said, as he came.

  They were together again. Cliff could sense a current flowing between them. But it was different from the old soaring tenderness. This current had a dark acrid quality; it cleared the passages, like Inverness Scotch. It would take Cliff a long time to figure out what it was.

  SERPENTS IN THE SKY

  As he came.

  As she came.

  And went. Went went went went

  Out of that familiar bedroom. Away from the soothing sound of the Pacific surf.

  Went went went went streaking over the mountains into the desert. Metempsychosis. The transfer of the soul. It was happening as Sarah came and went.

  She was in the desert becoming another woman. Leaving behind a different woman in her husband’s arms. A soulless woman. Her soul, the source, the vessel of love and hate, her soul had entered Victoria Van Ness. Everything you read and see and hear from that woman henceforth belongs to Sarah, is Sarah. At least, that is what Sarah henceforth wanted to believe.

  With the men and their endless deceptions of themselves and each other, Sarah had merely penetrated their souls, peered dispassionately into the accumulated darkness and confusion. But with Victoria it was entrance, becoming, acquiring. There was no alternative. Otherwise, Sarah could not have tolerated the idea, much less the reality, of Billy McCall marrying Victoria Van Ness.

  It began in the desert, in the doorway of a little shack, not much bigger than the Watch Office at Bedlington Royal Air Force Base where Sarah had talked to pilots in distress. Into the boxy little building she had walked to discover Billy McCall and Victoria Van Ness. Behind Sarah in the desert sun stood a covey of Congressmen and their wives, oohing and aahing at the sight of the Warrior’s winged immensity.

  Sarah had followed Mike Shannon into the shack, unable to resist another encounter with Billy. She was wearing a thousand-dollar violet Dior suit. Her hair had been done, her face and body oiled and massaged that morning at Monsieur Jacques, the best beauty salon on Rodeo Drive. Earlier in the morning the scale had said 110—exactly what she weighed when she broke the altitude record with Billy ten years ago. She wanted him to see all of her, she wanted him to eat another piece of his frozen heart.

  Instead she found him telling Shannon he could not entertain the congressmen and their wives in the Warrior. He was taking a vacation—his first in years. He was going to Catalina Island for the weekend. Billy had turned to Victoria Van Ness and asked her if she liked Catalina.

  Victoria glared at Sarah, a paradigm of defiance, of naïveté, of shame. “I love it,” she said.

  That was when Sarah divided. When the soulless part of her fled back to her bedroom to create inventive sex with her bewildered husband and her soul entered Victoria, became her willful, innocent, angry, driven self on the way to immolation and despair. Turning away in anguish, Sarah’s eyes had found a distant Joshua tree. She had raised her metaphorical arms like that dumb plant and sworn eternal hatred and revenge.

  Is all that perfectly clear? Now we can tell how it happened calmly, consecutively, the way stories are told.

  The romance began aboard the SS Rainbow, the yacht Adrian had bought to entertain congressmen, Air Force generals, airline executives, and other visiting VIP’s in the struggle to keep the Warrior alive. Adrian pressed Victoria Van Ness into service as a hostess. Amanda’s unpredictable, mostly hostile tongue made her an impossible candidate for this crucial task. She was liable to say almost anything about Adrian, the plane, or the country. When she was aboard, Frank Buchanan became almost as unmanageable.

  Victoria had come home from England a troubled young woman. She was very intelligent but her education had been almost entirely literary. Adrian had supervised it from a distance, trying to keep her mind uncontaminated by the hatred of capitalism that infected so much of British academic life. He wanted her to be a cultivated woman in the tradition of the previous century, indifferent to politics and business. It was an impossible dream and he did not come close to achieving it.

  Instead, he got an amateur poet with an intense interest in business and politics, which she understood in a literary, emotional way, like most British (or American) members of the intelligentsia. Adrian, no longer a member of the intelligentsia, barely noticed this. He was far more satisfied with something else Victoria had brought home—4.5 million dollars from Clarissa’s will.

  Adrian was somewhat nonplussed to discover that there was a clause in the will forbidding Victoria ever to loan a cent of her inheritance to her father. Adrian explained it away (he thought) as an old, long-since-irrelevant quarrel. A father with a company grossing a half billion dollars a year hardly needed to worry about borrowing money. He did not know that while he was at work, Amanda told Victoria the clause proved his own mother did not trust Adrian. It was another proof—Amanda was always looking for proofs—of his hatefulness.

  After five years in England Victoria found herself a stranger in a strange land. Los Angeles in the late fifties and early sixties changed faster in a half decade than most cities changed in a half century. Her friends were scattered; new dances, new music, new styles, pervaded the shops and nightclubs and beaches. Even more disturbing was the discovery that her father wanted her to be his companion, his social colleague, in her mother’s place—as well her mother’s keeper.

  This was not a conscious decision on Adrian’s part. Such things seldom are. He was living from week to week, month to month, like most people, hoping Amanda might somehow become the docile, polite wife he had envisioned when Dr. Farber recommended the lobotomy. Ninety percent of his time and emotions were consumed by the travails of the Warrior and other more mundane crises.

  Buchanan had become a company racked by labor problems. Without Buzz McCall to keep the unions in line, there was a walkout a day on the assembly lines. The engineering department was also in chaos. Many of Buzz’s best people deserted to Boeing and Douglas, who were building the commercial planes Adrian hungered to produce.

  There was no hope of Buchanan penetrating the airline market now. Boeing’s 707s rule
d the transcontinental and transatlantic skies, with Douglas’s DC8s not far behind. Buchanan was trapped inside the military industrial complex—unless the Warrior flew and catapulted them into the lead for the next-generation airliner, a supersonic jet that could cross the Atlantic in three hours and the Pacific in six. The possibility sat inside the angular, beaknosed fuselage of the Warrior. Is it so surprising that a man as driven as Adrian found it difficult to think coherently about his daughter’s problems?

  One of the most frequent weekend guests aboard the SS Rainbow was Lieutenant Colonel William McCall. Senators and congressmen and their aides liked to chat with a man who had flown planes higher and faster than anyone else—and was a Korean War ace in the bargain, with fifteen Migs on his escutcheon. Billy did not enjoy being ogled and verbally pawed this way. The more he saw of legislators swilling Buchanan’s booze and gorging themselves on the gourmet meals served by the Rainbow’s French chef, the more disgusted he became with the government of the United States of America.

  The Rainbow usually cruised off Baja California. Sometimes Billy would fly a Scorpion down to an airstrip the Pentagon, with the cooperation of the Mexican government, had carved out of the rugged desert on that arid peninsula and give the VIPs a demonstration of his readiness to risk death at supersonic speeds, sending the plane spinning, rolling, looping around the sky like the aerial equivalent of a dervish.

  It was hardly surprising that Victoria Van Ness, a lonely young woman with a lifelong fascination for planes, would soon find Billy McCall the most attractive man she had ever seen. He seemed to be all the things her smooth, loquacious, lying father was not. Fearless, dedicated, indifferent to wealth (Frank Buchanan told her a lieutenant colonel made less money than a riveter on Buchanan’s assembly line)—all the attributes an idealist could admire without reservations.

  One night in the spring of 1962, the SS Rainbow cruised serenely through the placid waters of the Gulf of California. In the main cabin, six congressman were dining on pate de foie gras and Alaska king crab. The one even his fellow congressmen called the Creature was drunk and pawing the hapless secretary Adrian Van Ness had assigned as his escort. On deck, Lieutenant Colonel Billy McCall picked out the constellations: the Great Bear, the Little Dipper. A full moon cast a swath of gold from the horizon to the hull of the ship.