Shannon had seen the Vatour in Aviation Week, noting its resemblance at the time to the Boeing project and to the B-47, but he had not seen the other two aircraft anywhere. One, the Trident, had, like its Boeing predecessor, two jet engines on the wingtips. The Baroudeur was a small interceptor that had dispensed with a landing gear—it was catapulted into the air and landed on a skid. But the shocking truth was that all three were similar to the earlier Boeing experimental designs that he had worked on.
Schairer spoke. “Vance, these are not just coincidental look-alikes. We’ve had the full-scale aircraft analyzed, and they are identical dimensionally to our experimental studies. They have the same airfoils; they are powered by engines of about the same power. There is no question that they derived anywhere but from our studies.”
Shannon looked at him. “I worked on all of these projects, George; you know that. You don’t think I sold them to the French, do you?” As he spoke it began to dawn on him.
“You didn’t, George, but Madeline did. She didn’t sell them. She was an intelligence agent for the French government from the day she met you. She still is. We’ve confirmed this; we’re not guessing. Madeline was a spy and we think you must have been careless with security.”
Emotion choked, Shannon waved his hands and sat down in the chair by the table. Schairer, almost as affected as Shannon, brought him a glass of water, spilling it in his anxiety. He wiped the water up with his own handkerchief and went back to the silver decanter to refill the glass.
Vance was slumped in the chair, the enormity of the deceit crushing him. He mumbled to himself, “So that was it. Twelve years of lying, twelve years of sex, all wrapped into this debacle. How could she have done this to me?”
Schairer heard him, knew it was an involuntary cry for help, and didn’t answer. Then he said, “Vance, we are keeping this quiet, for now at least. I don’t think any real harm has been done. These aircraft are either dead ends or already obsolescent. And France is nominally a friend. I just hope to God that no Soviet prototypes show up with a Boeing background.”
Shannon had never before felt so weak and helpless. No matter what the problem, there had always been a way out, over the side with a parachute, if necessary, but some way. He had been sandbagged.
“I hate to do this, Vance, but we’ve got to sever our relationship. I know you didn’t know anything about this, but I have to hold you responsible for Madeline getting this material. I just hope this is it, that nothing else crawls out of the woodwork. And, we have to report this to the Air Force. I don’t think they will prosecute you, but you can be damn sure they’ll be asking you some embarrassing questions.”
Shannon nodded.
“Vance, are you in any shape to tell me how you think this happened? We can go over it tomorrow, if we have to, but Bill Allen knows about this, and he’ll be calling me any minute. It would be better if we could at least explain how it happened.”
Vance waited a moment to be sure he had his voice under control. “There’s only one way it could have happened, George. I took material home to work on, but I always kept it locked up. If she was smart enough to fool me for twelve years, she was smart enough to figure out the locks. She could have had access at night, after I’d gone to sleep, or even sometimes over a weekend, if I was off on another job. The material was never top secret—rarely secret. I think most of the information on these planes was not even classified by the government. But it was proprietary, of course.”
Schairer was nodding his head. “Vance, we had a pretty complete inventory done. You had checked out all the material you had, and you are right—none of it was classified; it was all proprietary. But that’s bad enough. It’s incredible; we’ve relied on you for your judgment for what, twenty years now—and you made this fundamental miscalculation. I’m really sorry, Vance. You know that.”
Vance nodded, his throat too dry to speak.
“Now this is important, Vance. Do you have anything else from Boeing in your files at the present?”
He croaked, “Nothing but backup material on this de Havilland project. Nothing classified, nothing proprietary.”
“You won’t mind if our people take a look?”
“Of course not, George.”
The next three weeks passed in a nightmare of interviews and what amounted to cross-examinations by Boeing and Air Force Office of Special Investigation personnel. Vance kept expecting the FBI to show up, but they never did. The worst of it was that he was sworn to secrecy. He could not tell Jill or his boys or anyone else. He made up excuses to stay in Seattle that did not fool Jill for a moment. Then Vance had astounded her when he came in without any notice on the morning of September 23, with Higgins and a young, polite OSI man from the Air Force. He showed them into his office, opened up all the locked files and the safe, and went out to Jill, hugging her.
“Vance, you’re in trouble. What is it, income tax? You can tell me.”
The sorrow in her voice broke what was left of his heart. “Honey, I’ll tell you as soon as I can. This should be over pretty soon, and I’ll be home—for good, probably. I’ll tell you all about it as soon as I can. Right now I can’t.” He gestured into the office where the two men were working quietly and efficiently, going through one file after another.
Trying to joke, she said, “It’s not another woman, is it?” Then real fear gripped her and she said, “Is it Madeline? Has she come back?”
He wanted to say, “Yes, she’s come back, but not as you think.” Instead he had to be abrupt, saying, “Stop it. Get off my back. I’ll tell you about it when I get home for good. I can’t tell you now.”
The rest of the time passed slowly in Seattle. The Windsor Hotel, in an unaccustomed fit of largesse, had recently installed television sets in most of its rooms. Vance would watch for hours, drifting off to sleep late at night, and the next day could not recall a single thing he had seen.
The nightmare ended on October 9. He had filled out his thousandth form, signed his thousandth statement, and was given his final check from Boeing. Typically, they had paid him at his full rate through the ninth. There was no final meeting with his friends at Boeing. George Schairer had called him at the Windsor the night before.
“Vance, you understand, we won’t be saying good-bye formally.”
“No going-away party, eh, George? I understand.”
“It has been wonderful working with you, Vance, and I’m sorry this happened. If I have anything to say about it, we’ll work together again. This will blow over; it was really sort of a tempest in a teapot, but security is so tight now that there was nothing we could do.”
“I don’t blame anyone but myself, George. It was my fault, and I’ll take the fall with no complaints. Thanks for all your help in the past, and good luck in the future.”
Vance spent the last night as usual, wondering what Madeline could have been thinking of to betray him so shamefully. It was almost two o’clock in the morning when he realized that Madeline must have thought that she was being totally consistent. She was honest with him in all ways, except for her fulfilling her duties to her government. He had been her cover, and she had treated him well. She had done what she thought was right, from setting up the Capestro girls for Tom and Harry to running Vance’s finances, to hiring Jill, to being a spy and stealing secrets from his safe. As for their sex life, she probably enjoyed it as he did—she couldn’t have been so enthusiastic, so innovative, if she had not. But that, too, had been part of her job, and she had done it well, as she did all things well.
The most ironic element was the communication. He had always felt that much of their attraction for each other was the way they communicated, by voice, gesture, word, and deed. Now he realized, it had been a one-way street—he was communicating with her, but she had not communicated with him.
Oddly enough, it was going to be easy to explain everything to Jill. She would respond happily to anything that ensured Madeline would never enter their lives again. It wou
ld be difficult with the boys, for a number of reasons. It would revive their old animosity for Madeline, and when the news got out, as it undoubtedly already had, it would destroy his business. Maybe Tom and Harry could form their own firm and subcontract to him.
The truth, and he knew it, was that he had probably ruined Tom and Harry’s business careers as well. As large as the businesses had grown in volume, the aviation community was relatively small, and gossip circulated with the speed of light. Within weeks, there would not be anyone in the business who would not know that he had been fired from Boeing on a security lapse. That would carry over and tarnish his sons as well.
Yet in Vance’s innermost being, at his most fundamental level, he knew that he did not hate Madeline. He no longer loved her—she had done too much harm. But he could not hate her. In a way she retained an essential purity of purpose that he admired when he thought she was applying it to their common interests. Now he saw that her purpose was pure, all right, but that it was in the service of her country.
• THE PASSING SCENE •
Nasser seizes power in Egypt; U.S. Supreme Court rules against segregation in schools; On the Waterfront wins Academy Award; Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings published.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
December 25, 1953, Palos Verdes, California
Strangely enough, in the nightmare of the business being destroyed, several financial bright spots had emerged. Tom and Harry had never sold the La Jolla house, renting it to a succession of Convair executives over the years, men who needed a comfortable place to stay while their own homes were being built in the constantly expanding San Diego suburbs. Its value had quadrupled and it was free and clear. They hated to sell it now, but if that was necessary, it would bring in a huge sum.
Madeline’s other real-estate investments had done almost equally well, although it was impossible to beat the returns that the La Jolla location generated. The stock portfolios had gained a little, not much, but there was enough money available from selling off some of the smaller, less desirable real-estate parcels that Vance was able to live comfortably and continue to pay Harry and Tom the salaries they had agreed upon. But as far as Aviation Consultants, Incorporated, went, business was kaput. The boys picked up an occasional test-flying job, usually with some local outfit that had all of its money tied up in a prototype that was never going anywhere. It was fun, slightly dangerous, but had no real long-term potential. Without business from major companies, Aviation Consultants was dead in the water.
All three men were driven by a desire to work, not for the financial return but for the sheer pleasure of achieving new goals—and of course for the pleasure of flying. Despite the hard evidence that new aircraft, whether would-be Piper Cubs or would-be DC-3s, were almost impossible to certify and promote, all three dreamed of designing and manufacturing their own aircraft.
They explored a range of possibilities, but Tom had come up with the most provocative suggestion at one of their stand-up lunches in the kitchen, where Jill would put out a spread of goodies—Parma ham, thin sliced roast beef, provolone, onions, roast peppers, sardines, tomatoes, the works—and they would make big, wet dripping sandwiches that they ate over the sink. The impromptu lunches were among the few times that Vance rose up out of his depression to joke a bit.
“Come on, Tom, swallow; don’t talk with your mouth full. I’ve been telling you that for thirty years now.” Vance’s voice was slightly less dispirited than usual, and his sons took it as a good sign, shooting each other a quick glance.
Tom chewed, swallowed, took a drink of his Coke, and said, “What is the one thing missing in the airplane market today?”
Harry answered, “An inexpensive new plane?”
“Come on; be serious. We’ve got little Cessnas, bigger Beeches, and a whole raft of military conversions, Lodestars, B-25s, what have you. They are all piston engine airplanes, and this is the jet age. Why don’t we design and build a jet transport for executives? Something about the size of the Twin Bonanza, or the Cessna 310, but maybe a little bigger, carry two pilots and maybe four to six passengers.”
Neither Harry nor Vance responded at once, meaning they accepted it as a serious suggestion, worth an answer instead of the usual put-down wisecrack.
Vance said, “What engine would you use? That’s the key, getting an engine that will deliver the performance but not be so expensive that you can’t afford to fly it.”
Harry said, “I’ve been following the various companies. You know that little stint I had up with Pratt & Whitney, back in the old days, sort of intrigued me with engines. Problem is, everybody keeps building bigger engines; not much market out there for a little one.”
Tom came back swiftly. “Except General Electric. I know a man there, Jack Parker, and he’s heading up what he calls the ‘Small Aircraft Engine Department.’ Catchy name, eh? But he’s talking about building an engine for an Air Force decoy, the Quail.”
“What’s a decoy?”
“I think the bombers are supposed to carry them; they drop them when they get near the anti-aircraft belts, and the decoy flies ahead of them to confuse the radar. Anyway, the engine he’s developing will have about twenty-five hundred pounds of thrust at the start. That will build over time, of course.”
“Remember Nate Price’s old equation? That means about twenty-five hundred horsepower when it is at cruise—that’s pretty powerful stuff. And you need two engines, for safety.”
Vance spoke, his voice vibrant, sounding like himself. “We’d have to keep it small, under twelve thousand, five hundred pounds, so that the government will certify it for single-pilot operation.”
Harry chimed in, “This would have to be a luxury item, the best interiors, sleek paint jobs, something that would appeal to the movie stars.”
Vance nodded. “There’s a long tradition of that—Wallace Beery always had an airplane, and Robert Taylor, Bob Cummings, and a bunch of them fly. I’ll bet we could get one of them to come in, not so much for finances, but as a name to hang it on.”
Tom walked over and put his arm around Vance’s shoulder, his sandwich dripping on his shirt, and kissed him on the forehead. “Dad, we’re going to name this airplane after the best damn pilot, engineer, and father in the business. This is going to be the Shannon Jet, and you are going to be the front man. We don’t need a movie star; we’ve got you.”
They moved from the kitchen into the office, where Vance shoved aside papers that had not been touched for weeks. He put down a clean sheet of drafting paper, sat down, and began a freehand pencil sketch of a needle-nosed twin jet, with swept wings and tail.
“Looks good, Dad, but you’ve got the engines on the wings—on a plane that size they’d be scraping the ground, sucking up every rock in a quarter-mile area.” Reaching down, Harry rubbed out the low-slung engines, hung much as those on the Messerschmitt 262 had been. Then with a few pencil strokes, not so neatly or as accurately as his father, Harry put the engines on little pylons on top of the wing. “There—you see—they’ll be up where they won’t get any foreign object damage.”
Tom laughed and said, “All wrong, brother dear, all wrong. You’ll deafen the passengers with the engines there, and ruin their view, too. Here’s where the engines go.” He rubbed out Harry’s poorly drawn examples and then very neatly attached the engines on the fuselage, high and to the rear. “Voilà! Mount them here, they are behind the pressure cabin, the wing is clean, you don’t have much noise, and you don’t get the stuff from the tarmac sucked into them.”
Vance was excited now. “Yeah, and it looks good, too. Nothing like it on the market. Never thought pusher engines would come back, but there they are!”
Vance looked at his two sons, saw their expressions, and knew what they had done—conspired together to snap him out of his malaise, to give him a project he could sink his teeth in. Well, they’d done it.
“OK, boys, let’s think about this a bit. I know we don’t have anywhere near the capital to sw
ing this by ourselves, and I don’t want to get a partner so big that he’ll tell us what to do. Maybe we can sell some stock, but I hate to do that, because this will be one risky project.”
Tom said, “Here’s what I think. Let’s go on like we’re doing, trying to build Aviation Consultants back up, bit by bit, and keep working on this idea. We can look around for a factory site, maybe pick up a few guys with ability that might want to invest with us. The main thing is to keep it small.”
Vance nodded agreement. “There is still a whole raft of work to do, on the engineering side and the business side. We’ve got to figure out what airfoil to use, how the airplane sizes out, what it weighs, and so on. Then we have to figure out its operating economics. I think we can find a place to build it, when we are ready to go, and we’ll have no problem hiring people.”
Half an hour later, the two boys left, walking down the curving steps that led to their cars.
“Well, that worked pretty well, Tom. Good idea.”
“Sure. Even if it is totally impractical, and I’m sure it is, it will get him fired up until a real project comes along. He just needs something to apply all his knowledge in a positive way.”
Inside the house, Jill was cleaning up, moaning about the messy floor. “I thought you were going to eat your sandwiches over the sink. Don’t make those wet sandwiches and then walk around—we’ve got a table and chairs, you know.”
Vance picked up a towel and began doing his own mopping up. “They’re really something, aren’t they? Trying to cheer me up, feeding me this pie-in-the sky idea about a private jet airliner. God love them, they mean well, trying to get their old man back on track.”
He stood looking out their kitchen window over the immaculate backyard, idly rubbing the counter with the towel.
“Still, a private jet airliner would really be something, wouldn’t it? And they wanted to call it the Shannon Jet! That’s pretty good. I’d like that.”
Roaring Thunder: A Novel of the Jet Age Page 30