Conquerors of the Sky

by Thomas Fleming

  “He’d been a setup for a long time before that,” Sarah said, her eyes swimming with angry tears. She had been very successful at not thinking about that night for a long time.

  “Not the way he was after that night. We were working on him—kidding him out of it. After that Angela wrote the script. It led straight to the hearings, in case you’re interested. She and her friends supplied the information that started the senators sniffing around.”

  “What else should I know?”

  “Cliff was going to take Adrian, the whole company down with him—until Adrian told him he knew about the Rainbow Express. After that, he was a willing victim.”

  “Some victim!”

  “I know. We high-minded types want our victims refined of the dross. Archetypes. Most victims are like Cliff. They deserve quite a lot of what they get. But not all of it.”

  “Now you expect me to follow through with the charade—for the good of Adrian Van Ness’s company?”

  “Maybe there’s a better reason. I’m convinced Cliff went through with those hearings mainly because he couldn’t bear the thought of you finding out what happened over Schweinfurt. That’s a clue—no more than that, I’ll admit—to what he still feels about you.”

  “You want me to love him!”

  The word shimmered and whirled between them like an explosion, showering them both with regret. Sarah was sure this man felt the same wish, the same hope—and he was thrusting it aside. For what? A corporation? A plane? He was asking her to do the impossible.

  Dick fussed with his eggs. “I’m the last guy in the world with the right to use that word.”

  “Why, Dick?”

  “Things have happened to me too.”

  He began talking about Amalie Borne. Dazedly, Sarah heard the anguish at the heart of the story—and what else he was telling her, perhaps inadvertently. Sarah was not the woman of his secret dreams. She was something else, not to be mocked or derided, no; perhaps even worthy of desire. But not an ultimate desire, eliciting reckless adoration, total commitment.

  “Did you ever tell Cassie about Amalie?” she asked.

  He shook his head.

  “Sounds to me like you can’t take your own advice about the truth, Navigator. Telling it—accepting it—forgiving it.”

  “It’s myself I can’t forgive!”

  He almost roared the words. Again she saw his ferocity, saw how formidable he could be when necessary. Adrian had chosen well. Cliff never had this inner anger, this readiness for ruthless combat.

  Dick went back to talking about the company. He made her understand their peril. Buchanan was drowning in red ink. She was their improbable savior. The irony was almost too rich. Why didn’t she simply laugh in his face and tell him how glad she would be to see the BX, all the planes, spin down into that red flood?

  Before she could answer that question Dick Stone was talking about another plane, more daring, more innovative than anyone had ever built. He called it the Orient Express. It would be a hypersonic transport carrying passengers across the Pacific and around the world at 3,500 miles an hour, flying at 120,000 feet. Sarah listened, mesmerized by the fire in his gray eyes.

  He was one of the creatures of the sky. Billy McCall’s blood brother. She was eighteen again, walking down a country lane with swaggering Cliff Morris, in love with pilots.

  God, God, God, he had her, he had her believing again in the beauty, the magic, the mystery of flight.

  “I’ve discussed it with our new chief designer, Sam Hardy. He thinks it may not be as expensive as it sounds. For some crazy reason, the problems with shock waves and vortexes are mostly just below and just beyond the sound barrier. The faster you go the cleaner the whole thing gets. Imagine giving average people a chance to see how the world looks from a hundred-and-twenty-thousand feet?”

  “When will it fly?”

  “I’m not sure. It’ll take all the money we get for the BX and everything we can borrow.”

  “Betting the company again.”

  “That’s what it takes to sell planes for a living.”

  “Where’s Cliff?”

  “I don’t know. In your house in Palos Verdes, probably.”

  “I’m not sure I can do it.”

  Dick looked at his watch. He had a six-billion-dollar corporation in El Segundo waiting to devour him. “There’s something else you should know. The BX prototype crashed last night. We’re going to announce it this afternoon. If you get a chance, remind Cliff that the night Charlie died, we talked about building it together as a sort of memorial to him—and Billy McCall.”

  Somehow she managed to remain calm. The man’s daring was beyond belief. “You might give this to him too. It was in Adrian’s safe.”

  He handed her a worn brown envelope stuffed with papers. “It’s the protest the Germans filed about what we did over Schweinfurt.”

  The thing scorched her hand. Somehow she was hoping Dick had made it up, that Cliff would deny it. Without another word Dick drew her to him for a quick, fierce kiss. “No matter what happens—thank you. Thanks—for everything.”

  For another moment Sarah gazed into those angry gray eyes and saw what she had seen a dozen times before—a wish that somehow fate, life, God, had arranged things differently and he was the man she was going to see in Palos Verdes. Or there was no man in Palos Verdes and he could finally say to her: Skylark—I’m going to get you out of that cage once and for all.

  And she would reply: I’ve been waiting thirty years to hear that.

  Maybe it was enough to know—without ever speaking it—how much love had been possible between them. Maybe, in a certain sense, the love already existed, even though they had barely touched each other beyond the polite kisses of hello and good-bye. At least this last kiss had gone beyond politeness.

  QUESTING

  The Hydra descended from the cloudless blue sky, its tilt rotors whirling. Cliff Morris climbed out and toiled up the slope to Frank Buchanan’s shack. Sweat streamed down his face after ten steps. He had spent the previous thirty-six hours trying to see Angela Perry. His nemesis, Lenin Jr., had stonily insisted she could not come to the phone. Cliff had finally landed on her lawn at 4 A.M. and stalked into the house, ignoring a pistol Vladimir brandished.

  The meeting had been a disaster. Angela not only denied for the tenth time Lenin Jr. had leaked anything to the Creature’s committee, she announced she was going to marry the left-wing ferret and elect him governor of California. She said he would be a better father to their son, now a wispy, scared-looking three-year-old.

  Cliff was devastated by the thought that the boy was going to grow up as he did, with a succession of indifferent or hostile fathers. Angela was certain to change husbands as often as she changed dress styles. He gave Lenin Jr. two years at best—the only consolation he could find in the fiasco.

  That defeat made this visit to Frank Buchanan all the more important. This morning he had called a half dozen members of the board of directors to line up their support. Most of them had been wary, when they were not explicitly negative. But all of them had hesitated when Cliff told them he had Frank’s backing.

  Frank was on the porch, waving, a smile on his wide, weathered face. It was going to be a breeze. Frank loved him. He had always loved him. He had been a father to him and Billy McCall. Their skyfather.

  Cliff had stopped in Palm Springs for a couple of Scotches at the airport bar. Just enough to project confidence in the product. The first law of successful sales. With a product like Clifford Morris, how could he fail?

  “Cliff,” Frank Buchanan said. “What a welcome sight for a lonely old man.”

  Inside the house, Frank gestured Cliff to the cracked, creased leather chair he had taken with him when he left Buchanan for the definitive last time.

  “I’ve got some idea why you’re here. I’ve already heard the news.”

  “I came here to ask your help, Frank.”

  “I can’t imagine what I can do,” Frank sa
id.

  “The board of directors will meet in a few days to discuss the future of the company. Right now it doesn’t look like we’ll have a future. We’re up to our ears in red ink. A lot of the money has gone into funding the goddamn BX bomber. I know you designed it and maybe you don’t like to hear me call it that. It’s a great plane, Frank. But it’s going to ruin us unless we do something drastic. I’ve got an idea that can save the plane—and get us out of the bomber business.”

  “I’ve wanted to do that all my life,” Frank said.

  Cliff leaped out of his chair, propelled by the sheer intensity of his desire. He was back thirty years, selling planes to Eddie Rickenbacker and other vanished titans of the airline business, to Arab sheiks and Bolivian tin mine tycoons. This was the climax of all the sales pitches he had ever made.

  “It’s time someone told the American people the defense industry isn’t a free enterprise. We’re a branch of the U.S. government. Let’s sell the military stuff to Washington and give Congress and the Pentagon direct control of making warplanes. Let them fuck it up. They’ll have no one to blame but themselves.”

  Frank Buchanan dolefully shook his shaggy head. “I talked about doing something like that when they were protesting the BX a few years ago. But Adrian convinced me it was wrong. The French tried it in the thirties. It was a disaster. They practically destroyed their aircraft industry. They didn’t have a single decent plane to fight Hitler.”

  “We can do better,” Cliff said. “NASA put a man on the moon.”

  “NASA buys everything it flies from private companies like us. What would we do with the money, presuming Congress deigns to pay us anything?”

  “We’ll use it to build planes that will make the country and the world a better place. Inexpensive, fuel-efficient commuter planes and cargo planes. Airliners with fly-by-wire avionics that make it practically impossible for them to crash. All the things you talked about doing but never did because you were always designing a new fighter or bomber or transport.”

  But they were beautiful. They were all beautiful planes.

  For a moment Cliff’s antennae glimpsed this response on Frank Buchanan’s face. He was eluding the sales pitch, sliding away into that world of aerodynamic ambition Cliff had never reached.

  Cliff redoubled his intensity, seizing Frank’s arm, deepening, darkening his voice. “I can sell those planes, Frank. That’s what I’m good at. With your name on the designs, we can give Boeing and Douglas a run for the money.”

  “Cliff,” Frank said. “I’m touched—and flattered—that you think my ancient reputation could have any influence on the current boards of directors or the forty-year-old airline executives who buy planes these days.”

  “I’d handle all the details,” Cliff said. “There wouldn’t be any pressure. Not a bit of strain.”

  Not a bit of power, either.

  Again, Cliff caught the edge of the negative response.

  “What does Dick Stone think of all this?”

  “I haven’t discussed it with him. I suspect he mostly thinks getting rid of Adrian is a wonderful opportunity to grab my job.”

  “The last time I talked to Dick, he wasn’t this pessimistic. He told me the boys in the Black Hole were working on a hypersonic plane. He seemed to think it was feasible.”

  “Maybe it was, before those Senate hearings. Now no banker in the world will loan us money. We’ve got to think in terms of survival, Frank. This is a public relations ploy that could save the company.”

  Up and down the cabin Cliff paced, distancing himself now, so Frank would have the feeling that he made the decision on his own, without being overwhelmed. He was putting every twist and turn, every shred and scrap of his experience into this pitch. It had to fly!

  “There are people on the board who’ve been waiting for a chance to disagree with Adrian’s habit of putting us in hock to the goddamn Pentagon. They didn’t have the guts to do it while he was alive. They’ll do it now if you back me up. It isn’t too late. We can change the whole nature of this industry. You know as well as I do that it doesn’t make sense anymore. If it ever did.”

  Cliff stopped. Frank did not seem to be listening. His eyes were not registering any of these ideas. He was somewhere else, listening, speaking to another person.

  “Have you seen—or spoken to—Amanda?” he asked.

  “No,” Cliff said, bewildered, amazed, dismayed by the persistence of love in a man of eighty-three. Who, what would he love when he was eighty-three, if the booze let him get that far? Angela? The idea was ridiculous.

  “Cliff,” Frank said. “Forgive me. But I can’t do it. The Buchanan Corporation is Adrian Van Ness’s company. It was mine for a little while but Adrian made it his creation. I’d feel like a liar—a fraud—if I walked into the boardroom and pretended I wanted to change the way Adrian did things out of some superior wisdom. Much as I loathed some of the things he did, I have to admit that without him, Buchanan wouldn’t exist today.”

  Life drained from Cliff’s face and body. He slumped into the leather chair. Frank barely noticed his collapse. He was thinking about something more important.

  “Dick Stone’s instinct is sound, Cliff. Build for the future. A hypersonic plane! I’d bet the company on that anytime. Buchanan has the know-how, the guts to reach into the next century. I’ve got a few ideas I’ll send down to the Black Hole in a week or two, free of charge.”

  “Where the hell are we going to get the money?” Cliff said.

  “I don’t know. We’ve always gotten the money somewhere, somehow. I know you don’t agree with me, Cliff. But I think we’re all under guidance in this thing. We never would have survived this long without some kind of higher protection.”

  Cliff’s exasperation made it clear that he had no faith in Frank’s spiritual universe. “You’re telling me I should I should watch the company destruct to build the plane of Dick Stone’s dreams?”

  “It’s the plane of all our dreams, Cliff. The next plane always becomes the plane of everyone’s dreams. You’ve seen it happen. You know what I mean.”

  “I know what you mean but I’m sick of it. I’m sick of living on the goddamn edge of failure year after year.”

  Frank Buchanan let those words drift up to the dark ceiling. “Maybe you should resign, Cliff, if you really feel that way.”

  Cliff said nothing. Did Frank sense how close he was to despair? There was concern on his face, affection. “You love it, Cliff. In spite of all the disappointments, the heartbreak. You love the planes.”

  Cliff could not respond to this exhortation. His body seemed to be turning into some heavy mushy substance that his bones could not support. His voice sounded like a microphone in an echo chamber.

  “Maybe I do. But they’ve cost me so goddamn much—”

  “They’ve cost us all too much. But if you’re a man you learn to take it.”

  A man. The words evoked so many things Cliff wanted to forget. Buzz using that word as a taunt. Tama telling him that was all she wanted him to be. A man. What did it mean? They did not think you had the stuff that goes into the word, into the gut.

  “Would you say that to me—would you throw me out this way—if Billy was sitting here asking you for help?” Cliff said.

  He imagined the words echoing across the desert, all the way to the house where Sarah lived with her feminist friends. She did not care either. Cliff had failed her test of manhood too.

  “Yes,” Frank said. “I would have said it with far less hesitation. Billy was born to fly. Much as I hate to say it, that seemed to incapacitate him for the rest of life.”

  “Frank—it still stinks. I don’t deserve to go out this way! I’ve sold a hundred and fifty million dollars’ worth of planes for this company! I lost—”

  He could not say the name. He could not invoke Charlie for any deal, however sweet. Frank Buchanan seized his arm. Tears streamed down his lined face.

  “I know what you’ve lost, Cliff. We’ve all
had our losses. Even Adrian. But the planes are flying. That’s the important thing.”

  Cliff struggled to raise his head, his heart to match that apotheosis. But he still wanted the sweet deal, more swaggering years as a man of importance in Los Angeles. If he could not have them, there was Tama’s choice, the disappearance. Maybe it was the way to go. The way to tell all of them what they had done. To leave them choking with remorse and guilt. Dick Stone, Sarah, Angela. Even this man.

  Cliff stared down at the desert, remembering the darkness that had spilled over the mountains with the news of Jack Kennedy’s death. Maybe now it was time to swallow it, to let it swallow him the way it had swallowed Tama and so many others.

  “Don’t,” Frank Buchanan said. “I know what you’re thinking. Don’t do it. For all our sakes.”

  That only made the choice more tempting.

  IS THERE LIFE AFTER AEROSPACE?

  Sarah Morris spent most of the morning driving around Los Angeles. She parked in front of their ranch house in their old development, remembering the pudgy English war bride gorging on sweets until Tama launched her redesign program. She strolled through the faded lobby of the Beverly Wilshire, where the trim American wife had met Billy McCall. She wandered past the opulent shops on Rodeo Drive where she had shopped and charged as Mrs. Clifford Morris. So many lost or discarded selves. Who was she, anyway?

  She called her daughters to tell them what she might do. Elizabeth, no longer in revolt against the establishment—she now had two sons by her San Francisco doctor—encouraged her. Margaret, on her way to being one of the country’s leading Chinese scholars at Stanford, was scathingly negative. She wondered how Sarah could go back to a man who was still a glorified adolescent.

  That afternoon Sarah drove to Palos Verdes, full of doubt and hesitation. She tried to regain the night of mutual surrender with the big playboy who had wept and vowed never to hit her again. But she could not stop remembering the night in Lima when he had fucked her with triumphant indifference to her feelings.