“You risk your life every time you fly a plane like the Warrior,” Billy snapped.
“Oh?” the Senator said. “I thought this was a breakthrough design, the plane of the twenty-first century, twenty-five years ahead of schedule. Now you’re telling us it’s radically unsafe?”
“No, sir,” Billy said. “But it’s a very hot plane. You have to know what you’re doing.”
“And you—or your father-in-law—nevertheless maintain that this radically unsafe vehicle can become a supersonic airliner? You’re asking us to fund a plane that would risk the life of every passenger—every taxpaying passenger?”
“Sir,” Billy said. “I wish you’d stop trying to put words in my mouth.”
“I wish you would learn a little respect for the civilian arm of this government, Lieutenant Colonel McCall,” the senator shouted.” I wish the Air Force could find someone with a reasonably objective view of this plane. What can we expect to learn from a special pleader like you?”
Don’t answer him, Cliff Morris thought. That was the only way to deal with the Creature. You had to let him dump garbage on your head and hope that you won the sympathy vote.
Cliff was shocked to find himself rooting for Billy. Wasn’t that what any man would do, watching another man getting creamed by this piece of political slime? Yet last night he and Sarah had drunk to the possibility that Billy would fall on his face in these hearings.
Cliff watched Billy struggle to control his rage. He had flown 113 missions in two wars to defend the land of the free and the home of the brave. He had seen several hundred friends die in burning or exploding planes to make the world safe for democracy. Now the senator was telling him he did not respect or understand it.
“Senator,” Billy said. “Senator—sir—the supersonic airliner would be a different plane. It would be a descendant of the Warrior, which is ready to operate as a bomber. There’s a whole range of problems that need to be solved before we can create an airliner. We can learn a lot about them from producing the Warrior.”
“Tell me, Lieutenant Colonel McCall, will you be promoted to full colonel if the Warrior gets funded?” the senator sneered.
“I have no idea, sir.”
“That’s all we need to hear from you.”
“Sir—I have a prepared statement. I haven’t gotten one word of—”
“Leave it on the table. It will be inserted in the record.”
Cliff and Sarah rode back to the Shoreham Hotel with Billy and Victoria and Dick Stone. “That son of a bitch,” Billy said. “That son of a bitch.”
He did not even look at Victoria. She patted his hand and said: “Daddy thinks you handled him very well.”
“So do I,” Sarah said, with cool concealed malice. Billy glared at her and for a moment Cliff wondered if he understood the whole game.
Cliff looked out at the massive government buildings along Pennsylvania Avenue, so formidable, so majestic, until you knew what happened inside them. “We thought he was on our side,” he lied. “The White House told us he’d protect us from the Republicans on the committee. But he must have made a deal with McNamara. They’re going to move Wright Patterson Air Base to Iowa. Maybe throw in the Air Force Academy.”
The Warrior, the first plane to cruise above mach 3, the breakthrough to hypersonic flight, was dead. Cliff told himself it would have happened even without Billy McCall’s flagellation. That had simply been the coup de grace, a gratuitous insult to an already expiring victim. The McNamara ploy of a cheaper alternative, the F111, was not the only reason. The billions Kennedy was asking for missiles and spaceships to the moon and a bigger army and navy had Congress much too edgy to think seriously about the bomber. The tide had been running against Buchanan for a good year.
At their suite, Billy poured himself a full glass of Inverness and drank it down before the rest of the party arrived. Victoria watched, not saying a word. But her eyes swam with tears. “I’ll be in our room,” she said.
“Don’t wait up,” Billy said.
“Let’s go shopping,” Sarah said cheerfully. “Cheer ourselves up.” She and Victoria walked out arm in arm. Sarah’s guile was breathtaking. Cliff could hardly believe his dreamy-eyed idealistic little WAAF had turned into this ultimate doubletalker.
The party—or the wake—was going to be an all-male show. Adrian arrived with General Curtis LeMay and the usual squadron of lesser generals. LeMay poured himself a glass of Inverness almost as deep as the one Billy had consumed. “Let’s drink to a great plane, ruined by our gutless wonder in the White House.”
General LeMay held forth for an hour on the frauds and follies of John F. Kennedy. The Bay of Pigs and then the Berlin Wall, which neither Truman nor Eisenhower would have tolerated for ten seconds. The Cuban missile crisis, which passed up a perfect excuse to get rid of Castro and instead left the bearded blowhard with a guarantee that we would never invade his miserable island. Now Kennedy was committing just enough men to South Vietnam to get us involved in a first-class war—but not enough to end it decisively.
Mike Shannon struggled to defend his fellow Irish-American. But even he found it rough going, after two and a half years of slashing around Washington. He talked about the enormous pressures on a president. All right, JFK was not King Arthur or Lancelot; he did not even approximate a white knight. But he was trying to do the job. He wanted the bomber. But McNamara had stolen the Defense Department from the White House. The ex-automaker and his Harvard Business School doubledomes sat across the Potomac like an arrogant baron and his retainers telling the president to get lost. It was bewildering but probably true.
Adrian Van Ness turned to Curtis LeMay. “General, after two and a half years we’ve got two supersonic bombers that we can’t afford to fly again and pieces of another ten lying around the Mojave desert. We’ve got McNamara’s auditors breathing down our necks every time we turn around to make sure we don’t make a personal telephone call on the contract.”
“I know, I know,” LeMay said. “But you’re still on the inside track for the SST.”
“Right next to Boeing and Lockheed,” Adrian said. “Do you think they’re going to let us walk away with it?”
“Fuck ’em all,” Billy McCall said and poured himself another glass of Inverness.
“Haven’t you had enough of that?” Adrian said.
Billy looked at him for a long moment, then chug-a-lugged it and walked out.
Adrian sighed. “I’d like more than a place at the supersonic starting gate. We deserve some sort of guarantee that we’ll receive special consideration. We’ve already spent fifteen million dollars of our own money on the Warrior. We’ve supplied our peerless leader with some very charming late-night entertainment. I think you ought to remind him of all that, Mike.”
“If I did that, the only thing you’d ever get in the air would be a kite,” Shannon said. “Who do you think you are, Brazil or some other semi-independent country? You don’t know how to deal with Irish-Americans, Adrian. You never threaten them. You keep reminding them they owe you a very big favor.”
They flew back to California, where Adrian laid off ten thousand workers and sold the assorted pieces of the ten follow-on Warriors for scrap. Frank Buchanan tried to be philosophic. He had become convinced since the Russians shot down Lockheed’s spy plane, the U-2, at 70,000 feet with an antiaircraft missile that the Warrior was probably obsolete anyway. Those huge engine ducts would leave a signature a foot high on a radar screen.
“From now on,” he said, “We have to build stealth into our planes. We have to make them invisible to radar.”
Not without relish, he reminded everyone that the Talus never appeared on Air Force radar screens when it was being tested. A flying wing was the ultimate stealth bomber. But he presumed Adrian did not have the guts to revive the plane.
Frank was busy designing the ground-support plane Cliff had urged them to produce. Frank called it the Thunderer, a somewhat blasphemous reference (in his mind) to John the Baptist. “Wh
en this fellow drops his payload,” he said, “whoever’s on the other end will think it’s the second coming.”
It was unusual for Frank to sound so bloodthirsty. He was worried about the situation in Vietnam, where the Army, deprived of its airplanes since the creation of the Air Force in 1948, was trying to get back in the air with helicopters. Frank thought the helicopter was a lousy way to support troops on the ground. It was too vulnerable to antiaircraft fire and it couldn’t drop bombs. He showed Cliff the armor plate he was weaving around the stubby thick-bodied plane on his drawing board. “This thing will bring our kids back alive,” he said. “And it can carry more bombs than a World War II B-Twenty-nine.”
At home, Cliff discussed something even more important from his point of view: Billy McCall. His career in the Air Force was finished. If the Warrior had come through, Billy would no doubt have jumped to general in a year and been on his way to command of SAC. But now he was an aging bomberjock who had failed to deliver. Cliff was inclined to think they could stop worrying about Billy. Sarah disagreed. Every day she warned him the danger was greater than ever. Now Billy was certain to retire from the Air Force and join the company.
With the Warrior gone, Adrian became more and more obsessed with the supersonic airliner. He called it their declaration of independence. He quoted figures from Dick Stone that made everyone feel like they were on cocaine. The worldwide market for the plane was worth ten billion dollars. Unfortunately Buchanan was close to the limit of their resources. They needed a massive injection of government money.
Every time Cliff went to Washington, he called the White House to remind Mike Shannon about the Big Favor. He brought along a suitcase full of data on the wind tunnel tests of Frank Buchanan’s latest design. The figures demonstrated that their SST could go as fast as the Warrior—at least 2,200 mph. This was some six hundred miles an hour faster than the plane the British and French were building. He naturally omitted some of the more unnerving problems they had not yet solved, such as duct rumble, which would terrify even the hardiest passenger.
Then there was the sonic boom, the noise a jet made when it went through the sound barrier. The Air Force was flying Scorpions over places like Oklahoma City and then sending in teams of researchers to find out how many people were bothered when God seemed to be cracking a giant whip in the sky. The answer seemed to be quite a few—especially when windows shattered and babies woke up screaming and cats and dogs went zooey.
A true patrician, Adrian dismissed these problems as trivialities—like noise complaints near airports. People would get used to booms—or they would find a way to eliminate them. Cliff was not so sure. He could see someone like the Creature using the boom to beat their brains out. Of course, even the scummiest senator could be persuaded by a determined president. But Jack Kennedy did not seem very determined.
As 1963 ran down, the promise of the Big Favor dwindled with it. From the White House came only silence. On June 4, 1963, Juan Trippe, president of Pan American, announced he was taking an option on six Concordes—the name the British and French had given their SST to conceal the immense amount of wrangling behind the scenes. The news drove Adrian Van Ness slightly crazy. He urged Cliff to read all about the Profumo scandal in England. A call girl named Christine Keeler was wrecking political careers and threatening to bring down the government. Once more Adrian talked about menacing the Kennedys with Amalie Borne. Once more Cliff talked him out of it.
At midnight on June 5, 1963, Cliff’s phone rang. His daughter Elizabeth walked into the study where Cliff was plowing through more SST reports and said in a dazed voice: “It’s President Kennedy.” At eighteen, Liz was in search of idols and had found one.
“Hello, Cliff,” said the rich Boston baritone. “You’ve been a very patient fellow. I think I’ve got some good news for you. Can you come to Colorado Springs tomorrow? I’m speaking at the Air Force Academy graduation. I think you’ll be interested in part of the speech.”
“I’ll be there, Mr. President.”
“Good. Good. How’s that beautiful doll—what’s her name?”
“Amalie?”
“Yeah. Can you bring her along?”
“Sure.”
“I think she’ll be an improvement on anything we could pick up in Colorado Springs, wouldn’t you say?”
Cliff called Amalie Borne in New York. She was very difficult. She wanted a special fee beyond the money Buchanan was paying her. She demanded a private plane. Cliff conceded the fee but balked at the private plane. She finally agreed to meet Cliff in Denver the following morning at 10 A.M. From there they would fly in a Buchanan company plane to Colorado Springs. Dick Stone and his accountants could worry about how much it cost them later.
The next day, Cliff sat beside Amalie and Mike Shannon in the fifth row of the presidential party, looking out at forty thousand people packing Falcon Stadium. In the near distance loomed the snowcapped Rockies. Directly in front of them sat 493 young men, the fifth graduating class of the Air Force Academy. At the microphone, after some preliminary jokes and a somber review of the perilous world in which the graduates would serve, John F. Kennedy said: “Neither the economics nor the politics of international air competition permit us to stand still. Today the challenging new frontier in commercial aviation is supersonic flight. In my judgment the government should immediately commence a new program in partnership with private industry to develop a supersonic transport superior to that being built in any country in the world.”
The majestic setting matched Cliff’s soaring hopes. Ten billion dollars in sales, here we come! He was making triumphant love to Sarah. He was getting drunk with Frank Buchanan and Billy McCall, telling them, especially Billy, that he was in charge of the company’s future now. He could junk Sarah’s dirty campaign to ruin Billy. He did not have to be afraid of him anymore.
That was the way it went for that magical summer of 1963. Everyone and everything seemed to coalesce. Adrian Van Ness cheerfully ate his words and raised Cliff’s salary. The Navy issued a request for bids on a new attack plane and were dazzled by Frank’s Thunderer. Sarah grew passionate in bed with a man who was going to leave Billy McCall so far behind in the race for Buchanan’s presidency the famous pilot shrank to toy soldier size.
Cliff did not even worry when Victoria talked Billy into quitting the Air Force to become Buchanan’s chief test pilot. Adrian Van Ness said he was delighted. Billy’s reputation inside the aircraft world would add momentum to their head start on the SST.
Unreeling, like a terrific technicolor movie that went on and on with resounding background music mingling with the roar of jet engines, that was the way Cliff Morris saw his life in the summer and fall of 1963. Even Amalie Borne seemed pleased by another flurry of visits to the White House. Only Dick Stone seemed unhappy about that—he was apparently still hung up on the dame.
Cliff took Dick to lunch and told him to marry Cassie Trainor. She was the answer to Amalie. It would give her exactly what she deserved—the brush-off—and straighten out Dick’s muddled love life. For the first time in their lives, Dick admitted Cliff might be right.
Cliff even managed to continue to sell Stardusters overseas—a nice round eighty to Japan, Thailand, Australia, and India. Sarah gave a dinner party to celebrate and invited Billy and Victoria. Mike Shannon did his imitation of the Creature. It was the hit of the evening. By now Mike was practically working full time for Buchanan, talking up their SST as the only one that made sense.
Congress grumbled and yammered about putting up the money for the new plane but there was not much doubt that they would acquiesce, once they shook a few goodies from the White House tree. Adrian committed two million dollars to building a full size mockup, even though Frank Buchanan was still fussing with a lot of details, such as a new double delta wing that would make the plane much safer to land.
On November 22, 1963, Cliff whistled his way up the Hollywood Freeway to the Mojave to take a first look at a test model of the Thu
nderer. He was standing on the runway in the brilliant desert sunshine, admiring the barrel-shaped plane, when Frank Buchanan walked toward him with a peculiar look on his face.
“Someone just shot Kennedy,” Frank said.
“He’s dead?”
“They think so.”
That was where Cliff heard it, with another set of mountains in the distance, reminding him of the golden figure facing the snowy crests of the Rockies, urging Americans to accept the challenge of another dawn of flight. It seemed simultaneously horrible—and just right—that he heard it here from Frank Buchanan.
“I’ve had a feeling from things Dick Stone told me that he was vulnerable to evil,” Frank said. “No one can get away with treating women like disposable spare parts indefinitely. The good spirits turn their backs on that kind of a man.”
Billy McCall came roaring onto the runway in his wife’s red Triumph. He hurtled toward them at sixty miles an hour and skidded to a stop in front of the Thunderer. “I just heard it on the radio. Someone shot Kennedy’s head off in Dallas. Isn’t that the best goddamn news you’ve heard in a year?”
It was 11:30 A.M. and Billy was drunk. Standing in the violent desert sun, Cliff suddenly felt engulfed by an alien darkness. It did not come from California. It seemed to be spilling over those guardian mountains from the invisible heart of America. It made a mess of the triumphant technicolor movie of his life.
Cliff tried to tell himself Billy was elated because he shared Curtis LeMay’s opinion of Kennedy as a fraud. But Cliff could not escape the feeling that Billy’s smile also said he knew his half brother’s climb to the executive stratosphere had just aborted. His career was in a vertical dive.
Frank Buchanan seemed to sense the old hatred crackling between them. He tried to defuse it. “Let’s have a cup of coffee, Billy,” he said. “I want you sober before you fly this plane. Join us, Cliff?”
“No thanks,” Cliff said.
MINDS AND HEARTS
“What is it, Stone, what’s wrong? Why did you stop loving me?” Amalie Borne said.
Conquerors of the Sky Page 61