Conquerors of the Sky

by Thomas Fleming

  “Dimwits?” Dick said.

  “Congressmen,” Adrian said. “The hearings are about to begin.”

  A few days later Church subcommittee staffers arrived with subpoenas for Buchanan’s overseas records. Dick naturally warned Cliff. He brushed it off with a shrug. “It’s not against the law. How come it’s any of their business in the first place?”

  “If they feel like it, they can make anything their business,” Dick said. “If I were you I’d start talking to our lawyers.”

  The lawyers did not have much to offer. Since no one was being accused of a crime, they could not advise Cliff or Adrian to take the fifth amendment. Cliff was reassured to learn Adrian was going to be the first witness.

  “I’ll just follow his lead,” Cliff said.

  Dick flew to Washington with Cliff a month later. The hearings were held in one of the Senate’s cavernous paneled chambers, with batteries of microphones on the witness table and TV cameras whirring on the sidelines. Adrian sat down in the central chair at the table opposite the senators and they went to work.

  “Mr. Van Ness,” Senator Church said in his best Eagle Scout manner. “Would you tell us about Buchanan’s overseas payments?”

  “We never made any while I was chief executive officer,” Adrian said. “If we’ve made any in recent years, they’ve been without my knowledge.”

  “You have had no connection with the company since you retired as president?” the Creature sneered.

  “Only as a stockholder—and board member.”

  “Aren’t you chairman of the board?” Senator Church asked.

  “At the moment, yes. But the title gives me no executive authority. I’ve been living in Virginia since I retired. Which would make it rather difficult to run a billion dollar corporation in California, even if I wanted to.”

  “Your innocence is much too studied for my taste, Mr. Van Ness,” growled the Creature, who had, if possible, grown uglier with age.

  “That is your problem, Senator, not mine,” Adrian said. “I am proud to say that except for a few parking tickets, I have never been convicted—or even investigated—for any crime. My reputation—and the reputation of the Buchanan Corporation as far as I know it—is spotless.”

  “We have evidence to the contrary before this committee!” the Creature roared. “Millions of dollars in what you call overseas payments were nothing but bribes. Bribes to foreigners!”

  “I know nothing about it,” Adrian said.

  There was a lot more sparring, in which Adrian steadfastly denied everything. Mockingly, he wondered if the Creature knew that it was not a crime for an American businessman to persuade foreigners to buy his products by sweetening the deal with some extra dollars. He recounted memories of his days as a merchant banker in London, when douceurs were regularly used to guarantee or enhance overseas investments. He discussed the foreign policy of the Roman empire, which for three hundred years included the fine art of buying friendship with hostile tribes on its borders.

  Again and again, when it came to specific details he referred the senators to the next witness, Buchanan’s current president, Clifford Morris. The hearings adjourned for lunch with the solons in an exasperated mood.

  Adrian, Cliff, Dick Stone, and Mike Shannon taxied to the exclusive Cosmos Club, which Adrian had joined when he came to Washington. He had reserved a private dining room so they could confer without eavesdroppers.

  The waiter had barely poured their drinks and departed when Cliff snarled: “Do you think you can get away with this act?”

  “I hope so,” Adrian said.

  “Don’t we have records of how you and the Prince operated in the fifties and sixties?”

  “The IRS only requires you to keep records for three years,” Adrian said. “When Dick computerized everything in nineteen seventy-six, all that material was obliterated.”

  “Is that true?” Cliff asked Dick.

  Dick nodded. “Why wasn’t I told?” Cliff roared.

  “You’ve never had the slightest interest in anything that mundane,” Dick said.

  “I’ve still got news for you, Adrian. I’m not going to be anyone’s fall guy,” Cliff said. “If I go, you’re going with me.”

  “I don’t think you mean that, Cliff,” Adrian said. “I think you care more about this company—even about me—than that threat implies. If you reveal we’ve been doing these naughty things for decades, it would destroy our image. Newspapers would print vicious cartoons of planes soaring over rainbows with bags of money in them. No bank in the world would loan us a nickel. We’d be out of business.”

  “Why the hell should I let you put me out of business?” Cliff raged.

  “I’m not at all sure that’s going to happen,” Adrian said. “For one thing, I’ve supplied the committee with a lot of information that makes it clear we’re not alone in making off-the-books overseas payments. If there’s one executive who can survive this scandal, it’s you. Who else can match your war record? Forty-nine missions over Germany. I’m sure our board of directors will back you without reservations.”

  Cliff gulped his drink, unconvinced. “It’s a gamble, I admit,” Adrian said. “But I don’t see any other sensible way to deal with it. Do you really want to put the whole company at risk for the sake of petty revenge? Especially when your big mouth got us into this mess?”

  He told Cliff where the Creature had obtained the original evidence to start the investigation. Cliff cursed and poured himself another drink.

  “There’s one more thing I might mention,” Adrian continued. “Another more personal reason why you might want to protect me. All these years, I’ve protected you from a scandal that could have destroyed you any time it was leaked to the press.”

  “What the fuck are you talking about?” Cliff said.

  “During World War II I got a call from a general I did several favors for—Newton Slade. He told me the Red Cross in Geneva had reported a complaint from the German government about a B-Seventeen with a rainbow on its nose that faked a midair surrender over Schweinfurt, then shot down the German pilots who were escorting it to a nearby airfield.”

  There was total silence in the dining room for a full minute. “General Slade quashed the matter as a personal favor for me,” Adrian said. “He sent me the papers. I’ve saved them all these years. I had a feeling they might be useful someday.”

  Adrian smiled at Dick Stone and Mike Shannon. “A little example of forethought.”

  Loathing, that was the only emotion Dick felt for Adrian Van Ness, sitting opposite him in that elegant dining room with the memories of Schweinfurt and other raids clotting the air until it was almost impossible to breathe. Dick wanted to snarl a curse in Adrian’s face, urge Cliff to tell the whole truth and damn the consequences. But everything Adrian had said about the consequences of the truth was true. They would be out of business. His vow to those workers in Palmdale would be aborted. But the worst pain would be inflicted on Sarah Chapman Morris. Why did he know that? Why did he still remember the adulation in her blue eyes that day beside the smoking ruin of the Rainbow Express?

  Dick said nothing. He let Cliff think he agreed with Adrian Van Ness. In a certain sickening sense he did agree with him. Cliff accepted his silence as a final verdict. He poured himself a full water glass of Scotch.

  “Okay,” he said. “I’ll play your lousy game.”

  The hearings resumed that afternoon with Cliff in the witness chair. The Creature began with a right cross. “Mr. Morris,” he said. “According to our records, you paid two hundred and twenty million dollars in bribes to interested parties overseas in the past three years, all carried on your books as extraordinary expenses. Could you explain what that term means?”

  “Senator,” Cliff said. “I resent you calling those payments bribes. I see them under a variety of headings—gifts, payments for special services, agents’ fees.”

  The senators began going through the transactions, one by one, asking Cliff wryly, w
hen he denied the bribe, exactly what he thought the word’s special services or agent meant. The Japanese example was particularly ripe. He had paid millions to a front man for the ruling party, a minor right-wing political zealot, who had a record of virulent anti-Americanism—the last man that an American company would hire as an agent.

  The solons wanted to know all about the special services for which Cliff had paid millions in the Mideast. “Were they the world’s most expensive hoochy-koochy dancers?” one senator asked.

  Cliff was soon begging for mercy. “I’m not an authority on linguistics,” he pleaded.

  “But you’re a walking encyclopedia on how to bribe people,” the Creature chortled. “You ought to write a book on it.”

  The audience roared with glee. Another senator asked Cliff about the various code words used to conceal payments. The word for consultant was haywire. “Why did you choose that word?” the Creature asked.

  “We let the computer pick it out at random,” Cliff said.

  “I’m glad to hear at least your computers have a conscience,” another senator said. He outscored the Creature on the laugh meter with that one.

  Cliff laboriously tried to explain that Buchanan only did what other plane makers, oil companies, ITT, did overseas. He blamed it all on the foreigners who expected the payments. A senator from Delaware asked him if he would condone stealing the designs of a competitor’s plane because an opponent did it.

  “That’s against the law of the United States,” Cliff said. “As I’ve tried to tell you, there is no law prohibiting overseas payments—”

  “Do you or don’t you steal competitors’ designs?” the Creature howled.

  “No, sir,” Cliff said, as the galleries exploded with laughter again.

  Cliff soon became a target of opportunity. “You’ve cheated people who trust you!” another senator thundered. “It reminds me of the crook who was asked why he did such a thing and he replied: who else can you cheat?”

  Boffo. The audience laughed a full five minutes.

  So it went for three gruesome days, while Mike Shannon and Dick Stone occasionally bowed their heads to avoid contemplating the butchery. Each night Cliff retreated to his hotel room and got drunk, rejecting their attempts to talk to him.

  Frank Buchanan called Dick to offer his sympathy and support for Cliff. “Can’t you stop it?” he said. “Why are you letting Adrian make him the fall guy? If it keeps up I’ll fly in and volunteer to tell the whole truth.”

  “Tell Frank it’s for the good of the company,” Adrian said, when Dick reported the call.

  With complete indifference to the careers they were destroying, the senators began reading into the record Cliff’s correspondence with prominent politicians in Holland, Japan, Germany, Italy. Adrian decided this was going too far and told Buchanan’s Washington attorneys, one of whom was a former secretary of state, to extract an intervention from the State Department that brought Cliff’s ordeal to an abrupt halt. No less a personage than the incumbent secretary of state wrote a letter to the attorney general stating that any further disclosure of names would have “grave consequences for the United States.”

  The infuriated senators turned on the other aircraft companies. They roasted Lockheed’s executives over a slow fire. The treasurer of the company could not handle it and committed suicide rather than face the tormentors. As the other companies went on the coals, an embittered Cliff Morris flew back to California. Adrian invited Dick Stone to Charlottesville for the weekend. They sat on the porch in the twilight, gazing at Monticello in the distance.

  “If all goes well, in about three months we’ll persuade Cliff to resign,” Adrian said. “He’ll go quietly, I hope—and the purification rite will be complete. We can go to the banks here and in London and get the money we need to keep us going until Ronald Reagan is elected. He’s given me his solemn promise that he’ll build the BX.”

  Loathing was all Dick felt for Adrian. He could not disguise it. He did not even try. Adrian’s face became florid, his eyes bulged with the intensity of the emotion that seemed to seize him from nowhere.

  “You have to see the situation historically, Dick,” he said. “My great-grandfather, Oakes Ames, was denounced by Congress in 1869—denounced by the same people who took his bribes to build the Union Pacific Railroad—which had a lot to do with winning the Civil War by keeping the West in the Union. Our situation is virtually identical. The same hypocrites who took our campaign contributions and our hospitality are trying to wreck us for five minutes’ worth of publicity, without so much as a passing thought for the planes we’re building to defend the country.”

  It was the final performance of the student of history who had discovered Oakes Ames’s fate on a night of anguish in London. But Dick Stone was too disgusted to understand, much less sympathize with Adrian Van Ness. Instead he heard it as one more betrayal of his shining expectations of the American world he had longed to join after World War II.

  Dick realized Adrian had revealed more of himself to him than to anyone else in his life. Dick still refused to give him his approval. He did not care if it cost him the CEO’s job. Adrian was unquestionably offering it to him. But Dick could not abrogate thirty years of friendship with Cliff, the memories of the Rainbow Express. He still sat in judgment on Adrian. He refused to forgive him for anything—selling out Frank and the Talus, destroying Billy McCall—and now, Cliff Morris.

  “Cliff’s not the greatest human being in the world but he deserves something better than this for a payoff. He evened things for that moment of panic over Schweinfurt with another twenty-four missions. I don’t want the CEO’s job on these terms, Adrian.”

  An almost hysterical trill crept into Adrian’s voice. “Cliff’ll be well paid in retirement. Isn’t that better than letting him wind up in some flophouse in downtown Los Angeles?”

  “What if it doesn’t work?” Dick said. “What if Reagan—presuming he gets elected—double-crosses us like every other president since Kennedy?”

  “He might. But it’s still the best gamble in town.”

  They were betting the company again. Dick heard Buzz McCall telling Adrian you had to be a man to do that. He felt the lure, the excitement of risk beating in his blood. But he resisted surrendering on Adrian’s terms.

  “I think we’ve got to offer the banks, the stockholders, something more than a presidential promise, Adrian,” Dick said. “We’ve got to offer a vision—the plane of tomorrow. We’re the ones who can build it. A hypersonic plane that can fly the Pacific in a couple of hours. That’s the kind of plane company I want to run. If you make me CEO, that’s what you’re going to get.”

  “Vision?” Adrian said, shaking his head in bewilderment. “We’re playing for time.”

  Dick ignored the pleading note in Adrian’s voice. “I want seed money for the hypersonic plane as soon as possible. Our best bet is England. You’ve still got clout there. We can promise Rolls-Royce the engine contract as a quid pro quo.”

  “England,” Adrian muttered. “I haven’t been to England for a long time.”

  “Why not?” Dick said in the same brutal uncaring voice.

  “Memories,” Adrian said. “Memories I’ve never shared with anyone.”

  “You’ll have to face them for a week or two,” Dick said, utterly indifferent to what these memories might be.

  “Could you come with me?” Adrian said. “I’ll need a good numbers man.”

  Dick Stone ignored the plea to share the English memories. He was in control now. Adrian had lost all his leverage—moral, psychological, financial. “I’ll give you the numbers on paper,” Dick said. “I don’t intend to let Cliff run the company without me around even for five minutes.”

  Loathing. Dick knew Adrian saw it on his face, heard it in his voice. He would have to live with it. He was living with Amanda’s hatred. Dick was surprised when a plea for sympathy shredded Adrian’s vaunted self-control.

  “Why do I have to do all the d
irty work?” he cried.

  “I seem to recall you telling me it does a man no good to whine,” Dick Stone said.

  FALL OF A CONQUEROR

  Exhausted from a week of nonstop partying and negotiating in London, Adrian Van Ness dozed in the comfortable seat of his Argusair business jet. Instead of dreaming of executive power and glory, he was back on Shakespeare’s Cliff at Dover, watching Bleriot fly the English channel. His mother and Goeffrey Tillotson were there, exclaiming in awe and admiration as the fragile plane clattered over their heads. Geoffrey Tillotson pointed at Dover Castle and began predicting that the plane would make forts and every other weapon of war obsolete.

  He was interrupted in mid-sentence by a passionate kiss from Clarissa Ames Van Ness. She was announcing there was something more important than forts, armies, ships—and planes. They sank to the green grass, wrapped in each other’s arms.

  “Stop it!” Adrian cried. “Stop it or I’ll jump!”

  He teetered on the brink of the white chalk bluff. Below him tiny figures ran along the brown sand. Clarissa and Geoffrey paid no attention to him. They also ignored the stares and titters of the people around them.

  “Stop iiiiiiiit!” Adrian cried and leaped into space, arms spread wide in a pathetic imitation of flight.

  “Wake up.”

  A hand shook Adrian Van Ness’s shoulder. The chairman of the board of the Buchanan Corporation confronted his preternaturally youthful wife. “You were having a bad dream,” Amanda said. Her smile was pleased, even gloating.

  The skin was still taut on Amanda’s fine-boned high-cheeked face. Her auburn hair still retained its youthful color. No one could explain the phenomenon to Adrian. Dr. Kirk Willoughby wondered if it had something to do with reduced brain activity. “Maybe it’s thinking too much that wears us out,” Buchanan’s medical director had said.