High Flight

by David Hagberg

  “That was my first reaction,” Kennedy said. “But I don’t think we can safely dismiss the possibility that he’s right. Not any longer.”

  Kilbourne sat forward. “What is it, David? What’s happened?”

  There was no truly innocent person, Kennedy thought. Any company this large was bound to have a few skeletons in its corporate closet. But they were about to get a tough lesson in hardball politics this morning.

  “This meeting is strictly off the record. If what I’m about to share with you gets out, we could all end up in a hell of a lot of trouble.”

  “Then why tell us?” Soderstrom asked sharply.

  “Because we’re going to have to make a decision whether or not to continue with something I think we need to save this company.”

  No one voiced an objection, not even Soderstrom.

  “Kirk McGarvey learned from his sources in Washington that a Japanese submarine attacked and sank a Russian naval vessel in the Tatar Strait just north of Hokkaido.”

  “Jesus Christ,” Kilbourne said softly.

  “There’s been nothing in the news,” Soderstrom objected.

  “Not yet,” Kennedy said. “But the story was confirmed by the Russians.”

  “I don’t believe this,” the financial officer protested, but Vasilanti cut him off.

  “Go ahead, David.”

  “This happened a couple of days ago, but I waited for McGarvey to get back from Moscow to say anything, because I didn’t have a clue what it meant, and I was hoping he would have something new.”

  “Does he?”

  “We won’t know until he gets out here tomorrow. Under the circumstances we didn’t think discussing this on the telephone was very wise.”

  “All this may be well and good, but what does it have to do with us?” Topper asked. He was of medium height and thin. “Aren’t we in the business of making and selling airplanes?”

  “Yes,” Kennedy said, answering him. “A business that a Japanese group may want to destroy.”

  “We don’t know that for a fact,” Soderstrom cautioned.

  “No. Which is why McGarvey went to Moscow to offer the Russians the wing panel factory in exchange for information. He’s asked the Russian Secret Service to spy on the Japanese for us. They’ve agreed.”

  “Jesus Christ,” Kilbourne repeated himself, but Soderstrom and the others were struck dumb.

  “What effect the Japanese attack is going to have on our deal, or on relations between our country and theirs remains to be seen, but for the moment we need the information to stay alive.”

  Vasilanti grinned wryly and shook his head. “The fat is in the fire now.”

  “We’re talking about treason,” Kilbourne said. He was a burly man whose shirt sleeves were usually rolled up to the elbows.

  “I disagree, Newt,” Kennedy said. “We’re not spying on the U.S., nor are we giving the Russians anything we shouldn’t be giving them. We’ll get the proper export licenses from Washington to share our wing-section technology.”

  “I wondered why Howard wasn’t in on this meeting,” Soderstrom said a little peevishly. Howard Siegel was Guerin’s general counsel. “You can’t sit there and tell us that we haven’t already broken the law just by approaching the intelligence agency of a foreign government. And spying on Japan? Hell, they’re our allies! At the very least we could be hit with industrial espionage.”

  “What do you suggest?” Kennedy asked, McGarvey’s warning coming back to him.

  “I don’t know. But it sure as hell doesn’t include hiring the Russians to spy for us.”

  “What if it meant the survival of this company, Jeff?”

  “If Washington padlocks our door because we’ve broken the law, there won’t be any company.”

  “What if more of our airplanes are brought down?” Kennedy asked. “Have you thought about the people who were killed, who might be killed?”

  “There’s no hard evidence to that fact, David. The NTSB found nothing. Even if it was true that the Japanese sabotaged that plane, there’s nothing we can do about it. If another one goes down, however, and we can prove a Japanese group was behind it, then we’d have a leg to stand on.”

  “In the meantime more people would be dead, and we’d probably be ruined,” Kennedy said. He and McGarvey had hashed over this same argument days ago, and this time around it still sounded unreal.

  “Then so be it, but for now our hands are tied.”

  “No,” Vasilanti said. “We’ll not stand by idly if there’s even the slightest chance that people might get hurt flying our equipment. The company be damned, we’re talking about human lives here.”

  “You can have my resignation,” Soderstrom said, but Vasilanti slammed his open palm on the desk top.

  “I don’t want your goddamned resignation. You’re a fine executive, Jeff. But you’re a bean counter, not an airplane man. This isn’t strictly about money now.”

  Soderstrom shrugged. “You asked for my opinion, and I gave it. I think this course of action is wrong. But you can override me.”

  “Which I’m going to do this time,” Vasilanti said gently.

  His older brother had died on the Bataan death march in the Philippines, and he’d never lost his hatred of the Japanese. It affected his dealings with them as a businessman. But this time Kennedy didn’t think the old man’s hatred was his entire motivation.

  “There is one point that we’d better think about this morning, and that’s the press conference,” Kennedy said. “Might not be such a good idea.”

  “Why?” Vasilanti asked.

  “If it’s true that we’ve been targeted by the Japanese because of the 2622, going public with it might goad them into some kind of action before we’re ready for it.”

  “You mean before we’ve gotten any hard intelligence from the Russians,” the CEO said.

  “Exactly.”

  “We wouldn’t be so dependent on Moscow, in that case,” Vasilanti said bluntly. “And the fight would be out in the open. I’m going to override you too, David. We’re not going to sit around waiting for them to make some move against us. We’re going to take the fight to them.”

  “How?” Socrates asked. He was short, beefy, and very dark, but his voice was soft.

  “By showing them what Americans are capable of doing.”

  “And daring them to do something about it,” Soderstrom said, half under his breath, but everyone ignored him.

  By a few minutes before noon, when the Guerin helicopter touched down at Test Facility One outside Gales Creek, the snow had tapered off. A lot of media people had made the twenty-five-mile trip from Portland to the huge center. Anything Guerin did was big news in the region. And the unveiling of a new airplane, even though it was incomplete, was the biggest news. It translated into more jobs for a sagging economy.

  The governor and other VIPs would be invited to a separate, and more elaborate, unveiling ceremony in a few weeks after the jetliner passed her first FAA trials. Today’s event was strictly for publicity.

  Test One was a sprawling complex of hangars, concrete bunkers, and assembly halls, some that enclosed dozens of acres in which prototype commercial jetliners were assembled, and one very wide fifteen-thousand-foot runway that ran northwest-southeast along a narrow valley between the mountains. The test pilots hated the place because of the numerous unpredictable wind shears and rapidly accelerating downdrafts and the frequent bouts of very bad weather. But, as one old hand wryly observed, “Guerin Airplane Company’s test pilots are the best in the world. They have to be in order to survive Gales Creek.”

  Saul Edwards, Facility One’s operations manager, and Larry Weaver, the P/C2622’s chief readiness mechanic, met the chopper in the lee of the prototype hangar and escorted Vasilanti and the other Portland brass inside. The television crews were getting set up, but they were kept at a distance from the airliner by a rope barrier and a half-dozen uniformed security people.

  “Just a moment,” Vasil
anti said, stopping just inside the door.

  The sight of a new airplane that had never flown before, state of the art so far as its designers and manufacturer could make it, was cause for awe and pride in any airline executive’s breast. But this time they’d made more than a few strides, and they knew it. They had pushed the envelope over the horizon. It was unthinkable to allow Japan, or any other country, to take what they had accomplished here. Boeing’s tour de force of the sixties and seventies, the humpbacked whale 747, had consisted of four-and-a-half million separate parts. The P/C2622 had nearly eleven million. When Vasilanti had first seen Socrates’s engineering proposals, he’d borrowed a line from one of the 747’s production managers. “We’ll call this one the Savior,” he said, “because every time I see it, I’m going to say, ‘Jesus Christ.’”

  “It’s a big sonofabitch, all right,” Edwards agreed.

  “That it is,” Vasilanti said.

  With a fuselage length of four hundred twenty-one feet, it was nearly one hundred feet longer than Boeing’s 747, and with a gross takeoff weight of one million pounds it was a third heavier. It could carry up to five hundred passengers and cargo, cruise above 200,000 feet at speeds in excess of Mach five, and yet take off and land on the same runways as the 747 and make less noise doing it. Nor would it become another Concorde SST that was so expensive to operate that governments had to subsidize its operations. The P/C2622 would be a paying aircraft, because it was designed to be so.

  A muslin shroud completely covered the gigantic airplane. Even so, the twin-tailed, delta-winged configuration was clearly recognizable, as was the fact that this was no ordinary flying machine. This was something special, and everyone in the hangar understood it.

  “Let’s show it to them,” Vasilanti said. He headed across the hangar floor, Kennedy and the others trailing behind him.

  It was a few minutes after noon in West Hollywood. Edward R. Reid paid off his cabby at Wilshire and LaBrea and walked the last four blocks to a small diner on a side street off the main avenue. He wore brown corduroy trousers and an old green sweater under a poplin jacket. He did not stand out, which was what he wanted. In fifty years of making money (his current net worth was around $27 million) he’d become a pragmatist. He would do anything to increase his fortune. It was an aspect of him, a private aspect, that very few people knew or would understand. Even his wife had never suspected this side of him. Early in his career he’d learned that everyone had three choices: They could be poor, they could be middle class, or they could be rich. He’d made his choice and never looked back.

  The first time he passed the diner he glanced in the windows at the half-dozen people eating lunch. None of them seemed suspicious, but he kept walking to the end of the block where he crossed to the opposite side of the street and started back.

  He’d begun making his contacts while still in the Army in West Germany when he’d come across a cache of Nazi-vintage German Lugers wrapped in cosmoline. He’d been sent up to Kaiserlautern to evaluate an old German supply depot outside the city for possible use by the staff judge advocate’s office to which he was attached. The fifteen hundred pistols had been stashed in a section of sub-basement. The week before he’d been in Munich having dinner hosted by a German army legal unit, to which a few representatives from the nearby BND headquarters had also been invited. During the evening he’d spoken at length with Karl Schey, a young Secret Service lieutenant, who’d struck him as being an eminently sensible man. Schey hated what the Nazis had been and what the communists were, but knew enough to suggest that a profit could be made by the man willing to capitalize on the aftermath.

  The evening Reid discovered the pistols he’d telephoned Schey in Munich, told him what he was sitting on, and asked for help selling the cache. Schey agreed immediately, and within twenty-four hours the guns were gone, sold for one hundred dollars each. The next day a package containing $75,000 in cash was delivered to Reid’s Heidelberg apartment by a cab driver.

  Reid kept up his contact with Schey and others whom the German introduced him to, and they made mutual profit. Sometimes he would send items of interest, including intelligence, to Schey, and sometimes it worked the other way. But always there was money to be made.

  A few months ago, he’d gone to Germany to take another look at the German stock market, and while he was there he’d driven to Munich where he and Schey had dinner together. It was like old times. They talked about a wide range of subjects, mostly dealing with the Cold War, now dead, the situation in what once had been the Soviet Union, now chaotic beyond belief, and about the rising threat to the west from Japan, very real.

  “Are you planning something, my old friend?” Schey had asked.

  “I think there’s profit to be made, just like in the old days.” Reid looked over the rim of his brandy snifter.

  “It would appear that they want to buy your country in revenge for Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The Japanese do not suffer their humiliation well.”

  “No,” Reid answered thoughtfully. “Perhaps with the right people something might be done,” he mused. “Someone willing and able to carry out, shall we say, delicate operations.”

  “Someone who afterward you could disassociate yourself from.”

  “Exactly,” Reid said, and Schey smiled.

  “I think I might be able to help. But if he becomes available you would have to team him up with an American group. It would seem more logical to the authorities if your … delicate operation were to be carried out by a Mafia family from Chicago or New York.”

  “Too difficult to control,” Reid said. “But I have someone in mind.”

  Schey nodded sagely. “Where do you see the profit?”

  “On the stock market.”

  “You have a plan after all.”

  “It occurred to me as we talked,” Reid said. “There have been rumors that we might be able to put to good use. We would buy stocks at depressed prices and resell when they returned to normal levels.”

  “If they do.”

  “Oh, they will,” Reid had assured his old friend. “I’ll see to it.”

  Two older women entered the diner. Reid crossed the street in the middle of the block and went in after them, taking a booth in the back. He ordered coffee. A minute later a tall, skinny man who looked to be in his mid- to late thirties, with longish hair and an immense moustache under a beak of a nose, came in, walked directly back to Reid’s booth, and sat down. He wore cowboy boots, faded blue jeans, and a Northwestern sweatshirt under a jean jacket. His eyes looked crazy and there were flecks of spit at the corners of his mouth.

  His name was Glen Zerkel, and he was probably as crazy as a bedbug, but he was good at what he did, which was destroying things, sometimes with people still in or on them, he didn’t much care one way or the other. He’d once headed a small group of terrorists who called themselves Earth Stewards. Their avowed purpose was to save the world and its resources from rape by greedy capitalists so that there’d be something left for future generations. They did this by fraying the cable on a ski lift in Idaho during a busy Thanksgiving weekend. When the lift was carrying a full load, the weakened cable broke, dumping the gondolas seventy-five feet to the ground, killing seven people, and severely injuring fifty-two others. The ski resort, which was “ruining” the pristine mountain environment, went bankrupt, was purchased by a group of courageous investors for ten cents on the dollar, and reopened. They were not bothered again.

  Or by tampering with the engines, and in one case the tail rotor, of the helicopters used for Grand Canyon tours. Three of the machines went down in the same day, killing the pilots and all the passengers and ruining the tour operator’s business. No one had figured who’d profited by that act, but the canyon, if littered, had been “saved” for the future.

  Reid had used Earth Stewards when he wanted a new molybdenum mine shut down. A series of mysterious explosions and accidents did the trick in three months flat, after which one of Reid’s blind subsidiarie
s profited well.

  “It’s really good to see you again, Mr. R.,” Zerkel said. It was the only name he called Reid, although early on he’d done his homework and he knew who he was dealing with. He was crazy, not stupid.

  “How have you been?”

  The younger man shrugged. “Bored out of my fucking skull. Not much has been happening lately.”

  “You’ve been keeping a low profile?”

  Zerkel started to laugh, but something in Reid’s expression stopped him. He nodded instead. “There’s no real heat for the moment, though from what I hear the feds are still poking around Coeur d’Alene.”

  Reid studied the man for a moment or two. He’d thought long and hard about coming out here and making contact again. There were risks. So far as he knew the FBI still had no line on Zerkel, but his source could be mistaken. If the bureau was on to the terrorist they might have followed him here to see who he was contacting. It would make for headlines.

  But if Zerkel had been made, the bureau would have arrested him by now. Or shot him dead. “Mad dogs,” he’d told someone once, “should never be given a second chance.”

  “I have a project for you,” Reid said. “This one is big.”

  “What do you want me to do?” Zerkel asked, his eyes bright.

  “We’ll discuss that later. I want you in Washington tonight. Is there any reason you can’t leave L.A.?”

  “Money,” Zerkel said. “But maybe I don’t want to go anywhere until I know what’s coming down.”

  Nobody in the diner was paying them any attention. The waitress brought Zerkel a cup of coffee and refilled Reid’s cup. When she was gone Reid handed the younger man fifteen well-circulated one hundred dollar bills.

  “I want you at Dulles no later than midnight. A Yellow cab with the roof number 659 will pick you up and bring you out to a place I have in the country.”

  “What if I don’t like what I hear? I’m bored, not suicidal.”

  “You can get out, no hard feelings. Nothing lost. But you’ll like this deal, I guarantee it.”