Conquerors of the Sky

by Thomas Fleming

  “Bondi,” Billy said. “That’s the name of a beach in Sydney. Not many husbands there. Or wives.”

  Husband. It was the most unnerving challenge Billy ever faced—infinitely more unsettling than exploring the stratosphere in rocket planes or supersonic bombers. Billy responded to it in the only way that interested him, in the only way he knew. He made it dangerous.

  Billy had no idea just how dangerous a sky inhabited by Sarah-Victoria-Amanda would become. No one did. Not even Sarah. For the moment she swooped hungrily above Catalina, a lonely cormorant, feeding on the last shreds of her hateful heart.

  BILE

  Adrian Van Ness vomited his lunch and dinner into the toilet bowl. Pain throbbed in his chest. His head pounded. Ruined whined in his soul in a new more menacing way. Was he having a coronary? It had been a day of shocks—the worst day in his life. It made his discovery of his mother’s infidelity, even the stock market crash of 1929, seem insignificant.

  First had come a report from Cliff Morris on the ferocious struggle for the Warrior bomber. Congress, defying Secretary of Defense McNamara and his whiz kids, had voted a hundred million dollars to build another ten copies. It was a compromise, far short of a commitment to the billion-dollar program General Curtis LeMay had wanted. The secretary was still using the power of his office and the mathematical wizardry of his aides to try to kill the plane.

  Then Morris delivered the shock. It was of earthquake proportions. McNamara, with the Kennedys’ approval, was abolishing the cost-plus contract. In all future Defense Department contracts with airframe and engine companies, the contractor would have to deliver his product within the limits of his original estimate—and pay any cost overruns out of his own pocket.

  This amounted to a whole new way of doing business, piling on a military aircraft design the same gut-wrenching risks that a new commercial plane required a company to swallow. For something as experimental as the Warrior bomber, it meant betting the company three or four times over if future testing revealed unforeseen problems—the unk unks almost every plane contained.

  “Can’t you talk to your boy wonder from Massachusetts?” Adrian shouted.

  Wretchedly, Cliff Morris confessed his mounting disillusion with the Kennedys and the whole Democratic Party. “It’s a can of worms and no one knows what happened to the lid. I think maybe Jack left it under Marilyn Monroe’s bed. One thing’s for sure, most of the time he doesn’t pay attention.”

  “He’s paying attention to Amalie Borne. She’s been to the White House five times. I’m paying her bills in New York and he’s getting all the action,” Adrian snarled.

  Cliff’s only vestige of good news was a report that the Pentagon, in line with JFK’s drive to beef up conventional forces, was looking for a new close support plane, something subsonic with a high-load capacity and plenty of endurance. Maybe Frank Buchanan had something in his files from the Korean War that they could wrap around a jet engine.

  “What about a new transport—something really big?” Adrian said. Attack planes were small, compact, and cheap. The current one being used by the Navy was a Douglas job called Heinemann’s Hot Rod, after their chief designer. It was so small pilots claimed you did not strap into it—you strapped it on.

  “I’m working on it,” Cliff said. “But LeMay is so in love with our goddamn bomber he doesn’t want us to think about anything else. He’s going down fighting on the thing and there’s nothing we can do but go with him.”

  All this was only a prelude to the ultimate shock. Adrian had come home for dinner at 8 P.M. to find Amanda in an unusually cheerful mood. Most of the time she either ignored him or glowered sullenly and asked questions about the “accident” that made it so difficult for her to remember many things.

  “For once I have some good news,” she said.

  “Oh?” Adrian said.

  “Victoria is going to be married.”

  Adrian felt five, perhaps ten years older in ten seconds. Struggling for aplomb, he sat down, tossed a leg over his knee and said: “Who’s the lucky fellow?” He half suspected he was hearing a fantasy from Amanda’s damaged brain.

  “Billy McCall. I told her I was a little disappointed that she was marrying a man whose profession was bombing people—but on the whole, considering how dim I thought her chances of marrying anyone were, I think it’s good news, don’t you?”

  “Shut up, for God’s sake,” Adrian snarled and stormed upstairs in search of his daughter.

  He found Victoria lying on her bed, staring dreamily at the ceiling. “Is it true?” he said.

  “We love each other,” she said. “We spent the weekend on Catalina together.”

  “It’s a mistake,” Adrian shouted, losing all his vaunted self-control.

  “I thought you’d feel that way. That’s why I didn’t discuss it with you.”

  “The man’s a mental vacuum. All he can talk about is planes.”

  “He talks about them wonderfully. Better than you, Daddy. Better than anyone. Haven’t you watched the way those congressmen listen to him? He’s authentic. Real—in a way most men can’t even approach.”

  Adrian heard the reminder that he needed Billy if he had any hope of getting a billion dollars to build the Warrior. But he still could not control his chagrin. “It’s romantic nonsense. Sleep with him for six months if you want to—you have my permission. But don’t marry him.”

  “I told you—I love him.”

  “I heard you—and I hope you heard me. Most love is an illusion. Give it six months either to solidify—or dissipate.”

  “We’re getting married as soon as possible.”

  “Why? Why such an idiotic rush?”

  Victoria sat up and glared at him with Amanda’s eyes, full of her old ominous intensity. “Otherwise I’ll lose him. And if you keep talking this way—you’ll lose him too. I’ll see to it.”

  Adrian was meeting his willful match. Stunned but still frantic, he retreated. “How did this happen? I have a right to know.”

  She told him everything without reserve, including Frank Buchanan’s role. Adrian saw it all in the worst possible light, of course. He was ashen, trembling, by the time she finished. “I thought you loved me,” he said. “I thought you at least loved me.”

  He was really saying, how could you betray me to my enemies? But he had never explained how or why Frank Buchanan was his enemy. Victoria heard the words as an old-fashioned reproach for deserting him.

  “I do love you!” she cried. “But you can’t expect me to stay ten years old for the rest of my life. Besides—”

  Victoria was about to tell him how much she loathed the way he did business. But she saw how wounded he was already and let pity deflect her anger into a more ordinary reproach. “Do you really expect me to be your creature indefinitely? To wait until you’re ready to dispose of me to the man of your choice? Some superannuated character like Prince Carlo?”

  “I never dreamt of such a thing.”

  What had he dreamt? Finally Adrian was forced to confront the halfway house in which his fears and his hopes had trapped his fatherhood. He had confessed too much to hold his daughter’s admiration and not enough to win her forgiveness. Wretched, wretched, a wretched performance for a man whose gift was forethought.

  Adrian flushed the vomit down the toilet and stumbled back to bed. In the doorway of her bedroom stood Amanda in a long ruby night robe, her russet hair streaming down her back. She smiled and said: “My poor husband. Can I get you anything?”

  For a moment Adrian struggled with a terrifying inrush of fear. Was this woman in touch with some sort of supernatural power that enabled her to inflict pain and disappointment on him? Were all women in some profound way enemies to a man’s deepest hopes? Rationality trembled in a swirl of terror. Adrian fled to his room and called Kirk Willoughby. He came to the house and found nothing physically wrong with Buchanan’s anguished President.

  The next day, Adrian retreated into acquiescence, even into apolog
y with Victoria. He had no other choice. He struggled to welcome William Craig McCall as his son-in-law. He tried to impose reason—his word for control—on the situation.

  “What are you going to do? Where are you going to live?” he asked his daughter, as wedding plans went forward.

  “That’s up to Billy,” Victoria said.

  “You’re going to be an Air Force wife? Have you seen the houses they live in on most bases? You’d have more room in a Starduster.”

  “I remember Mother telling me we were never going to be rich, that I should adjust my expectations to realities. I was very proud of her for asking me to do that. It made me feel grown-up, serious.”

  “Are you going to have children?”

  “Not right away. Billy doesn’t want any—as long as he’s test-flying.”

  “You don’t fly forever, even in the Air Force. It would make much more sense if he retired and came to work here. He could do it in stages. He could be the air force manager for the Warrior program, assuming we get the contract—and then transfer to the civilian side.”

  “I’m not sure that’s a good idea. I’d rather see him work for some other aircraft company.”

  “You’re not being realistic. Each company has a different personality. This is the one he knows. Where he has friends—”

  Victoria struggled to trust the secretive, subtle man she called Daddy and thought of as father—an infinitely more awesome word. Adrian struggled to control his anger. Neither succeeded. “I think you’ll find he needs protection for a while at least,” Adrian said.

  “That’s ridiculous!”

  “Pilots are like athletes, very naive about the world outside their planes. When you spend your life in the military, that only adds to the naïveté.”

  In one of those bizarre but all too common repetitions, Adrian was sowing doubts about Billy deep in Victoria’s psyche in much the same way his mother had undermined Amanda. Victoria felt the doubts as wounds, inflicted in revenge. Her mother, listening in the distance, let her outspokenness run rampant as soon as Adrian left for work.

  “Isn’t he perfectly hateful?” Amanda said. “I’m sure he was this way before my accident. I can’t remember exactly why I hated him but now I’m sure I was right.”

  HEART OF DARKNESS

  Outside the window, Saint Elmo’s fire flickered along the wings of the Pan Am 707 as they approached Africa. Dick Stone found himself wishing it was a real fire, not one of nature’s electrical stunts. Beside him, Amalie Borne read Elle, the French fashion magazine, relentlessly tearing out page after page of dresses she intended to buy in Paris.

  It was insane, his doomed irresistible love for this woman. By now he had embezzled over three hundred thousand dollars from Buchanan Aircraft to buy her dresses and diamond necklaces and gold bracelets. The withdrawals were carried on the books as extraordinary overseas expenses, part of the millions handed over to the Prince and other agents. Buchanan’s auditors had long since accepted these expenses as perfectly legal under American law. There was no immediate danger of being caught.

  For someone with Dick Stone’s conscience, punishment was almost superfluous. He was his own accuser, judge, and victim. He seldom slept more than four hours a night. He rarely looked at another woman. His airline and aircraft friends at the Villa Hermosa called him the hermit. Cassie Trainor wrote him sarcastic letters from Oxnard. Dick wrote evasive replies to Cassie and long letters to Amalie, full of bad imitations of Heine, or meditations on America and Europe, desperately trying to explain what was happening to him—while compounding the disaster.

  In return, Amalie wrote him savagely detailed descriptions of her visits to the Kennedy White House, each as demeaning as her original encounter with JFK in Los Angeles. She told him, without moderating a phrase, how important this was to her career in Europe, where Kennedy, after his 1961 visit to Paris with Jackie, had become a near-mythical figure. Madame George had a waiting list of over twenty cabinet ministers, bankers, industrialists, generals, who were begging for a chance to escort her to Cannes, St. Moritz, Amalfi. But she stayed in New York, because she loved Richard Stone—and was certain her price would continue to rise.

  By now Dick had learned to deconstruct the word love, to see how strangely Amalie dealt with its elements. Sacrifice was part of love, was it not? She sacrificed money, fame, for his sake. But the arrangement was strictly temporary. Next week or the week after, love might end as abruptly as a sleeper awoke from a dream—or a nightmare. Forever was not part of Amalie’s love, except as a possibility. It was not exiled from the palace but it was not permitted in the throne room either. Forever watched wistfully from a dim alcove, awaiting a summons that might never come.

  Fidelity was an exile in the strictly literal sense. But it was allowed to reenter the country under an assumed name, to travel in a dozen different disguises, all designed to wrench the heart. Fidelity sidled onstage as a thought at moments when obscene acts were being performed. It slithered past as a sigh when the bedroom plunged into lonely darkness. It pirouetted as a robed, hooded dancer while headwaiters bowed and Chateau Haut-Brion was poured.

  Desire was never an exile but postponement was its constant fate. Love was not sovereign in Amalie’s world. It was a deposed queen without offspring or supporters, a creature for whom tears were shed, fealty pledged—without the slightest hope that these rituals would achieve anything significant. The world was ruled by darker powers. These could only be propitiated by deception, endless, perpetually charming deception.

  Dick had renounced, once and for all, his desire to know the truth about her past. She had forced him to capitulate, to accept her as a woman who seized the foreground of his vision and held it by her force and guile and affection and disdain and lust and beauty and intelligence and indifference and concern and laughter and tears.

  A dozen, two dozen more words could be added to that sentence without exhausting the catalogue of Dick’s love. The words and their multiple meanings trooped over the green horizon into Africa, as the big plane roared up the mouth of the Congo toward Brazzaville. The Prince was there, awaiting them and the money Dick had in his briefcase. Pontecorvo and Cliff Morris had sold eighty-two Stardusters in sixteen African countries.

  En route to California with the orders, Cliff had eaten dinner with Dick and Amalie the night before they left New York. The former commander of the Rainbow Express talked about his adventures flying in Ethiopia, the Congo, and other countries with pilots who had trouble reading the English words on the dials. As usual, Cliff omitted the Prince’s role in his triumphal progress.

  Clearly seeing a rival on the horizon, Cliff devoted much of their dinner to sarcastic comments about Billy McCall’s imminent marriage to Victoria Van Ness. He tried to make marrying the boss’s daughter the equivalent of moral turpitude. Dick, his brain sodden with Amalie Borne, barely listened.

  Amalie announced she was coming with Dick yesterday as he was packing his suitcase. “Why?” he said, resisting the idea of the Prince regaining her.

  “There’s no need to worry about sharing me with him,” she said. “Didn’t I tell you he’s impotent? Some say the Gestapo gelded him. Others think his mother is responsible. Still others say he prefers six-year-old choirboys, like his ancestor, Pope Innocent.”

  As usual, Dick capitulated. He could not stop her from flying to Brazzaville with her own money. Now they were circling above the mixture of squatters’ shacks and gleaming white skyscrapers that constituted this typical African capital. They drove down roads that were narrow causeways through seas of mud to the Intercontinental Hotel, where the Prince greeted them with his usual cordiality.

  “Ah, Stone,” he said. “Never did I dream that the Santa Claus of my life would turn out to be Jewish. I risked my life a great many times to save Jews from the Germans. Do you think you’re my reward?”

  “Perhaps.”

  “But what have I done to deserve this?” he said, seizing Amalie by the arms and spinning her
around. She was looking spectacular in a gray black-belted Dior suit with a pleated skirt.

  “There’s nothing in heaven or on earth you could do, dear Carlo,” she said. “Haven’t you read your St. Augustine? We can’t merit God’s grace.”

  “I’m a Pelagian by trade,” he said. “In other times I would have been burned at the stake before the age of thirty.”

  “Not merely for your beliefs,” Amalie said, letting him kiss her on the cheek.

  “And the money, Stone. This time it’s been carefully counted by our Swiss literalists?”

  “Yes,” Stone said, never sure when the Prince—or Amalie for that matter—was taunting him.

  “The commander of the Nigerian Army is in town. He would love to meet the uncrowned queen of the American White House,” the Prince said.

  “Tell him I’m vacationing—and Stone here is my CIA escort—with orders to kill anyone who so much as looks at me.”

  “That could lead to Stone’s disappearance, Amalie dear. Is that what you’re trying to arrange?”

  “Why should I even think of such a thing?”

  The Prince shrugged and opened the inevitable bottle of Moet et Chandon. “Perhaps then you plan to poison me and decamp with the money?”

  Amalie laughed. “I can make twice that in the next year.”

  In spite of the air-conditioning, which was at Arctic level, Dick discovered he was bathed in sweat. Amalie had not come here for a vacation, he was sure of that much. The Prince was equally sure of it. He was as alert, as coiled, as a duelist with a rapier in his hand.

  They drank champagne and the Prince discussed Africa. He said it was not much different from Calabria, where his family had owned vast estates until Mussolini confiscated them. He predicted a hundred years of anarchy and chaos in the wake of the departing Europeans. Planes were the only hope of binding the continent together. The totally corrupt governments would never manage to build roads or rail lines.