Conquerors of the Sky

by Thomas Fleming

As usual Amanda was wearing a dress with a ruffled collar that concealed the scars she had inflicted on herself long ago. The collar combined with her heavy-lidded eyes, her sullen mouth, her slightly pointed chin, to justify the nickname Mike Shannon, the Buchanan Corporation’s Washington manager, had given her: the Queen of Spades.

  Adrian turned his head to escape his wife’s nasty smile. Outside the small octagonal window beside his seat was a blue sky shot through with glaring light. The dulled roar of two Pratt & Whitney jet engines surrounded him. They were cruising at 547 miles an hour nine miles above the Atlantic Ocean. In front of them dozed two of the most powerful politicians in Washington. Adrian had taken them to London to support his plea for British cash to keep Buchanan airborne.

  The stratosphere’s blue dome arced upward in a slowly deepening hue until it became the velvety black of space. Adrian thought about the men Buchanan had sent up that arc in rocket planes and in jets, probing the boundaries of flight. In memory’s glaring light, Billy McCall swaggered out to the needle-nosed rocket plane, White Lightning, his smile disguising his fear—and his rage. Billy had assumed this feat assured him mastery of the other vehicle on which he loved to soar—the American woman. But there he collided with unknowns—and unknown unknowns—he had never encountered in the sky.

  Up here in the stratosphere, the upper air that pilots call light country, Adrian found it easy to contemplate the ironies of four and a half decades in the aircraft business. Irony seemed normal in the stratosphere. Below, in the troposphere, where humans lived their daily lives, detachment was not so simple.

  Unfortunately, men and women had to live in the troposphere. Outside the Argusair’s tilted windows, the stratosphere’s temperature was 210 degrees below zero. Winds were tearing along the jet’s wings and fuselage with the force of seven hurricanes. A man or woman could survive for only a few convulsive seconds in that icy oxygenless world. Inside the Argusair, thanks to the wizardry of late-twentieth-century technology, Adrian and Amanda and the two politicians sat in seventy-two-degree comfort and safety.

  For a moment this physical security was unbearable to Adrian. What if he spun the aluminum wheel that locked the Argusair’s pressurized cabin door and sent Amanda and the politicians and himself spewing into the stratosphere? The pilots, sealed in their cockpit, would survive to tell the story. Would Dick Stone—and one or two others—read about it with guilty eyes?

  What nonsense.

  The ironist at the center of Adrian’s soul regained control of his vehicle. He smiled at his antagonistic wife. “I was dreaming we were back in California,” he said. “On the porch of Casa Felicidad. You were kissing me.”

  “Why were you saying ‘stop it’?” Amanda asked.

  “Frank Buchanan was there, shaking his fist at me.”

  “You’re lying, as usual,” Amanda said.

  Needles of pain shot through Adrian’s chest. For another moment the ironist’s hands trembled on the controls. In recent years Adrian found it more and more difficult to laugh at the unrelenting hatred underlying Amanda’s gibes. Last year he had developed angina pectoris, a convulsive knotting of the heart muscle, not unusual in men his age. Adrian wondered if it was a reaction to Amanda’s malevolence. Kirk Willoughby, not a believer in psychosomatic illness, dismissed the idea.

  Adrian gulped two pills, nitrogen and some exotic new anticoagulant his heart specialist had prescribed as an alternative to surgery. Lighting a small black Havana cigar against the doctor’s orders, he checked to make sure the politicians were asleep and began dictating a letter to Dick Stone:

  “I saw the Chancellor of the Exchequer and half the bankers in London over the past seven days. At first none of them was inclined to lend us a cent in the aftermath of the bribery hearings. I told them we were about to purge ourselves by offering a public sacrifice for our sins. They instantly understood the charade—which they perform regularly for the electorate—and grew attentive. The senator and the congressman virtually guaranteed some kind of government loan to prevent our demise. With the chancellor, I put on my boldest face and told him if he wanted to get aboard a hypersonic plane, His Majesty’s Government had better be prepared to commit a hundred million pounds a year to engine development at their sacred entity, Rolls-Royce. Let me state here my grave doubts about this terrifyingly risky improvisation you’ve added to my psychodrama. Nonetheless I hope we can raise a glass a year from now and say we’re still glad we make planes for a living.”

  “Have you ever been truly glad about anything?” Amanda said.

  The question returned Adrian to the troposphere at sea level, to the real world of gains and losses, fears and compulsions, love and hate. In his weary mind Amanda again became a being with mysterious powers. Angina gouged his chest. He gulped more pills.

  Did he deserve this legacy of stifled rage and morbid bitterness? For the thousandth time Adrian pondered the choices he had made and said no. He regretted many things but he refused to wear sackcloth and ashes for the past. At seventy-nine, he resolutely turned his face to the future and insisted that the past was another country, another time, another life, in which he had done nothing that his household gods disapproved.

  Turbulence. Adrian buckled his seat belt. They were descending from light country through gumbo-thick clouds above Washington, D.C. He plugged the dictating machine into the radio telephone on the cabin wall and pressed a button. The letter whizzed to a satellite launched with a Buchanan rocket and down to Buchanan’s private communications system. In five minutes typists at Buchanan’s headquarters in El Segundo, California, would be transcribing it for Dick Stone’s eyes.

  The Argusair shivered and shook as she encountered the heavy lower air. In the seat in front of him, the senator from Connecticut awoke with a groan. He had gotten very drunk on their last night in London, after the final meeting with the Chancellor of the Exchequer. The exquisite Eurasian Adrian had imported from Singapore for his delectation had demanded double her usual fee.

  Across the aisle from the senator, his counterpart on the House of Representatives Armed Services Committee, a lean, intense Texan who could hold his liquor and his women, laughed and said: “Don’t you throw up on me, you son of a bitch.”

  Lately, the senator was drunk most of the time. Only two weeks ago, Adrian had visited him in his office at 9 A.M. and found him incoherent. The senator’s wife had recently died and he was miserable without her. Adrian was still amazed by the unpredictable ways the goddess of fate threatened the survival of the Buchanan Corporation—and the United States of America.

  Fortuna was the only deity forty years of making and selling planes had taught Adrian to worship. Fortuna and her tormented opposite, Prometheus, whose name meant forethought. From Prometheus had come the gift of fire that had enabled men and women to achieve dominion over the other creatures of the earth—and ultimately to soar above the world and look down on it with exalted or exultant or ironic eyes. In the Argusair’s jet engines were raging flames, kindled, caged, controlled, and directed by man’s transcendent mind.

  Greek, he had become Greek, Adrian told himself, trying to twist his mind away from memories this visit to England had evoked. His British friends had dragged him to the Imperial War Museum, where they had put together a special exhibit to celebrate the fortieth anniversary of World War II. A good part of it was devoted to airpower, naturally. There was an entire room about the Nelson bomber and its accomplishments, with ample credit given to their American friends at Buchanan Aircraft. In one of the final photographs, Beryl Suydam stood beside the bomber she had flown to her doom. Her smile had turned. Adrian’s chest into an excruciating knot. He had gulped pills for the rest of the day.

  From the Argusair’s cockpit came blond, hazel-eyed Elizabeth Hardy, their copilot. “We’ll be landing in about five minutes. How is everyone back here?”

  “Fine,” Adrian said.

  Buchanan had gotten some good publicity (for a change) when they made Ms. Hardy (designer
Sam Hardy’s daughter) copilot of their number one business jet. But tonight, the sight of this beautiful young woman in her trim blue uniform stirred an enormous echoing regret in Adrian’s soul. For a moment he felt hollow, a cave of winds through which meaningless words blew eternally.

  Hardy returned to the cockpit. Adrian could hear the pilot, Jerry Quinn, talking to the air traffic controllers at National Airport, reporting altitude, airspeed, confirming their approach pattern. Visibility was low as usual in Washington, D.C. in December. The senator stirred restlessly. He was a nervous flier. Adrian remained calm. The Argusair had the best instrument landing system in the world, made by Buchanan’s avionics division. It could land at midnight in a Heathrow or Gatwick fog—and find the center of the runway every time.

  With no warning the plane rolled forty degrees to the left and dove straight for the ground. The senator emitted a belch of terror and the congressman, who had flown bombers over Italy during World War II, yelled “Jesus Christ! Outside the window Adrian glimpsed the silver bulk of a commercial airliner hurtling past them in the murk.

  Jerry Quinn pulled the Argusair out of its dive and gasped over the intercom: “That idiot should have been a thousand feet above us.”

  Amanda’a smile mocked forethought; it derided his plane’s infallible instrument landing system, its computers that made it almost impossible to stall, its aerodynamic grace. Again angina pierced Adrian’s chest. He gulped pills and the pain subsided.

  The Argusair’s landing gear came down with a reassuring whir. They were in their final approach, the engines shrill as the fire scream became more audible at this lower speed. Thud. They were on the ground, the engines howling a final protest at their return to this alien element.

  The senator and the congressman departed, thanking Adrian for their free ride across the Atlantic and the several thousand dollars’ worth of hospitality the Buchanan Corporation had bestowed on them during their week in London. Adrian said he hoped to see them soon in Charlottesville.

  Onto the plane bounded Mike Shannon, Buchanan’s man in Washington. He kissed Amanda’s hand and called her “Your Majesty”—unaware that there was a grisly irony in the title.

  “Any good news?” Adrian said.

  Shannon shook his head. “They’re not going to let up on us. I think it’s time to drop the guillotine on Cliff.”

  Shannon was in on the purification ritual. But he did not like it. He and Dick Stone did not like it—or Adrian Van Ness. They had made that very clear. Adrian was indifferent to Shannon’s opinion. But Dick Stone’s judgment on him was like a hair shirt. Why couldn’t he see how necessity and history exculpated everything?

  With a final mock obeisance to Amanda, the Irishman vanished into the dusk. In ten minutes the Argusair was over Charlottesville for another landing, this time without heroics. While Elizabeth Hardy taxied to the terminal, Jerry Quinn emerged from the cabin, apologizing again for the near-miss over Washington, vowing to file a report with the FAA. He was an angular Californian, so brimming with vitality he made Adrian flinch.

  “This is one terrific plane,” Quinn said. “She handles better than an F-Sixteen.”

  Just out of the Air Force, Jerry did not realize he was reminding his employer of a plane that was making one of Buchanan’s rivals, General Dynamics, three billion dollars.

  Quinn unloaded the Van Ness luggage and they found a porter who wheeled it ahead of them to Adrian’s gray Bentley in the airport’s long-term parking lot. The chairman of Rolls-Royce had given Adrian the car when he chose their engines for the Colossus. Adrian thought of what that monster had cost him. His ironist’s hands trembled on the controls in his mind—and his physical hands clutched the icy wheel convulsively. Memory! It was pursuing him like a wolf pack tonight.

  The engine purred at a flip of the ignition key. Amanda ostentatiously buckled herself into the seat beside Adrian. For several years she had been urging him to hire a chauffeur. She insisted he was getting too old to drive a high-powered car. Adrian ignored her, as usual. He did not like chauffeurs or butlers or any other kind of servant. They tended to learn too much about a man—knowledge that could turn out to be inconvenient in certain situations. A housekeeper was the only servant he permitted—and he replaced her frequently.

  A mixture of sleet and snow began falling from the twilit sky. “It’s below zero!” Amanda said, turning up the collar of her mink coat. Each day at breakfast she told Adrian the temperature in Los Angeles.

  Amanda fretted about their latest housekeeper, Mrs. Welch, who was a tippler. Amanda was sure the refrigerator would be empty, they would have to drive back to Charlottesville for dinner. Adrian let her complain. Mrs. Welch was a dunce, but Adrian liked stupid housekeepers. They were unlikely to notice much.

  Adrian swung up the drive of their estate past a line of bare ancient oaks. “Not a light,” Amanda said, as they drove beneath the portico of the big redbrick mansion. “I wouldn’t be surprised if she’s passed out upstairs.”

  Adrian steered the Bentley into the garage on the left of the house and unloaded the bags. Amanda preceded him up the steps into the kitchen. “Oh, where is that switch,” she said, as Adrian balanced two heavy suitcases on the top step.

  Click. The fluorescent light illuminated the gleaming stainless-steel stove and oven, the walk-in refrigerator, the food processor, and other amenities Adrian had installed, mostly to mock Amanda’s refusal to cook anything more complicated than an egg. He heaved a sigh and let the suitcases thud to the floor. Jet lag seemed to be draining life itself from his thick body. Seventy-nine-year-old men should not fly the Atlantic twice in a week.

  “Mrs. Welch? Mrs. Welch?” Amanda called up the backstairs. Her voice echoed through the silent house. Annoying. Adrian did not like Amanda to be right about anything. She gloated over small triumphs for days.

  He lugged the suitcases upstairs and dropped Amanda’s unceremoniously at the door of her bedroom. There were limits to his readiness to play servant. In his bedroom, he flung his bag on a luggage rack and strode into his study. There were no lights flashing on the eight-line telephone on his desk. Good. He did not want to do any thinking without a night’s sleep.

  Adrian poured himself an ounce of forty-year-old port. It was like swallowing silk—or memory. English memories. For a moment he recalled the dream of watching Louis Bleriot fly the channel and the lie he had told Amanda about it. The port turned rancid on his tongue. Both scenarios were metaphors loaded with threats. He was assailed by a terrific wish to somehow outwit time and memory, to shed the burdens of the past. But the ironist at the center of his mind knew time and memory were as inescapable as the thing they eventually became, history.

  Adrian looked around the study, trying to savor the mementos of a long life. There he was, accepting a medal for maximum production of B-17s from FDR. There was Ike, conferring another medal in a private ceremony for developing the first supersonic jet fighter. There was John F. Kennedy only a few weeks before Dallas, haunted Lyndon Johnson, tormented Richard Nixon, each grasping Adrian Van Ness’s hand, each implicitly admitting how much they needed him and his planes.

  The planes were everywhere, beautiful handmade models dangling from wires, full-color photos of fighters in 9 G dives and vertical climbs, bombers roaring over Berlin, Pyongyang, Hanoi, airliners soaring aloft from Bali, Los Angeles, London.

  Beside the telephone on his desk lay a small yellow booklet, with a title in scrolled letters on its cover, Conquistadores del Cielo. It contained the membership list of this exclusive club. When Adrian had invented it in 1935 they had been a long way from being conquerors of the sky. He picked up the booklet and flipped through the pages, recalling names that were no longer there. He had outlasted so many of the hotheads, the macho swaggerers, the dictatorial spouters.

  But the title—was it still ironic? Was the Buchanan Corporation—and Adrian Van Ness—about to become victims of the sky’s eternal indifference to life and death? In a flash Adrian wa
s back in the Argusair remembering how often planes had broken his heart, robbed him of love, left him with nothing but irony’s exhausting consolation.

  Conquistadores del Cielo. The title was pure mockery now. He had conquered nothing, his life had been a series of desperate maneuvers, of hairbreadth escapes and humiliating betrayals.

  It does a man no good to whine, whispered that fathering voice, dim now with years and distance. He was still playing the Great Game, Adrian told himself with growing desperation. Why was that no longer a consolation?

  Knock. Knock. Knock. Knuckles resounded on the door. It was an unusual rhythm, imperious, demanding. Knock. Knock. Knock. Adrian strode to the heavy oak door and flung it open. What he saw in the shadowy hall sent him stumbling, spinning back into the room with a cry of terror on his lips. Queen Califia was standing there, her russet hair streaming, a knife in her upraised hand!

  A bolt of pain tore through Adrian’s chest. The ironist’s hands were ripped from the controls. The room whirled; the vehicle was in a catastrophic spin. Another slash of pain. The anticoagulants—where were they? Adrian clutched the vial in his pocket. He had taken the last one on the plane. The rest were in his suitcase.

  “Help!” he cried.

  His eyes were entangled with the dangling planes, he was on his back trying to focus on the study door. “Help. Please!” he cried.

  Above the house a prop plane began landing at the Charlottesville airport. The motors thundered in the night sky, blending with a voice in Adrian’s head roaring ruined. Both sounds were swallowed by a tremendous whine, as if all the model planes had somehow acquired life-sized jet engines and were diving on him.

  Then silence, the sensation of sinking into a dark pool rimmed with light. Finally a woman’s silken voice whispering: it wasn’t your fault, it wasn’t anyone’s fault.

  Amanda remained frozen in the doorway, her hand raised to deliver another angry knock on the door. She had no idea what she could do to help her husband. When she found the courage to venture into the room it was much too late.