by Wilbur Smith
‘Son of a bitch,’ muttered David as he stood up brushing damp sand from his bare chest, and imagined Barney’s amused chuckle.
‘I taught him good,’ thought Barney, sprawled in the copilot’s seat of the Lear as he watched David ride the delicate line of altitude where skill gave way to chance.
Barney had put on weight since he had been eating Morgan bread, and his paunch peeked shyly over his belt. The beginning of jowls bracketed the wide downturned mouth that gave him the air of a disgruntled toad, and the cap of hair that covered his skull was sparser and speckled with salt.
Watching David fly, he felt the small warmth of his affection for him that his sour expression belied. Three years he had been chief pilot of the Morgan group and he knew well to whose intervention he owed the post. It was security he had now, and prestige. He flew great men in the most luxuriously fitted machines, and when the time came for him to go out to pasture he knew the grazing would be lush. The Morgan group looked after its own.
This knowledge sat comfortably on his stomach as he watched his protégé handle the jet.
Extended low flying like this required enormous concentration, and Barney watched in vain for any relaxation of it in his pupil.
The long golden beaches of Africa streamed steadily beneath them, punctuated by rock promontories and tiny resorts and fishing villages. Delicately the Lear followed the contours of the coastline, for they had spurned the direct route for the exhilaration of this flight.
Ahead of them stretched another strip of beach but as they howled low along it they saw that this one was occupied.
A pair of tiny feminine figures left the frothy surf and ran panic-stricken to where towels and discarded bikinis lay above the high-water mark. White buttocks contrasted sharply with a coffee-brown tan, and they laughed delightedly.
‘Nice change for you to see them running away, David,’ Barney grinned as they left the tiny figures far behind and bore onwards into the south.
From Cape Agulhas they turned inland, climbing steeply over the mountain ranges, then David eased back on the throttles and they sank down beyond the crests towards the city, nestling under its mountain.
As they walked side by side towards the hangar, Barney looked up at David who now topped him by six inches.
‘Don’t let him stampede you, boy,’ he warned. ‘You’ve made your decision. See you stick to it.’
David took his British racing green MG over De Waal Drive, and from the lower slopes of the mountain looked down to where the Morgan building stood four-square amongst the other tall monuments to power and wealth.
David enjoyed its appearance, clean and functional like an aircraft’s wing – but he knew that the soaring freedom of its lines was deceptive. It was a prison and fortress.
He swung off the freeway at an interchange and rode down to the foreshore, glancing up at the towering bulk of the Morgan building again before entering the ramp that led to the underground garages beneath it.
When he entered the executive apartments on the top floor, he passed along the row of desks where the secretaries, hand-picked for their looks as well as their skill with a typewriter, sat in a long row. Their lovely faces opened into smiles like a garden of exotic blooms as David greeted each of them. Within the Morgan building he was treated with the respect due the heir apparent.
Martha Goodrich, in her own office that guarded the inner sanctum, looked up from her typewriter, severe and businesslike.
‘Good morning, Mr David. Your uncle is waiting – and I do think you could have worn a suit.’
‘You’re looking good, Martha. You’ve lost weight and I like your hair like that.’ It worked, as it always did. Her expression softened.
‘Don’t you try buttering me up,’ she warned him primly. ‘I’m not one of your floozies.’
Paul Morgan was at the picture window looking down over the city spread below him like a map, but he turned quickly to greet David.
‘Hello, Uncle Paul. I’m sorry I didn’t have time to change. I thought it best to come directly.’
‘That’s fine, David.’ Paul Moran flicked his eyes over David’s floral shirt open to the navel, the wide tooled leather belt, white slacks and open sandals. On him they looked good, Paul admitted reluctantly. The boy wore even the most outlandish modern clothes with a furious grace.
‘It’s good to see you.’ Paul smoothed the lapels of his own dark conservatively cut suit and looked up at his nephew. ‘Come in. Sit down, there, the chair by the fireplace.’ As always, he found that David standing emphasized his own lack of stature. Paul was short and heavily built in the shoulders, thick muscular neck and square thrusting head. Like his daughter, his hair was coarse and wiry and his features squashed and puglike.
All the Morgans were built that way. It was the proper course of things, and David’s exotic appearance was outside the natural order. It was from his mother’s side, of course. All that dark hair and flashing eyes, and the temperament that went with it.
‘Well, David. First off, I want to congratulate you on your final results. I was most gratified,’ Paul Morgan told him gravely, and he could have added ‘– I was also mightily relieved.’ David Morgan’s scholastic career had been a tempestuous affair. Pinnacles of achievement followed immediately by depths of disgrace from which only the Morgan name and wealth had rescued him. There had been the business with the games master’s young wife. Paul never did find out the truth of the matter, but had thought it sufficient to smooth it over by donating a new organ to the school chapel and arranging a teaching scholarship for the games master to a foreign university. Immediately thereafter David had won the coveted Wessels prize for mathematics, and all was forgiven – until he decided to test his housemaster’s new sports car, without that gentleman’s knowledge, and took it into a tight bend at ninety miles an hour. The car was unequal to the test, and David picked himself up out of the wreckage and limped away with a nasty scratch on his calf. It had taken all of Paul Morgan’s weight to have the housemaster agree not to cancel David’s appointment as head of house. His prejudices had finally been overcome by the replacement of his wrecked car with a more expensive model, and the Morgan Group had made a grant to rebuild the ablution block of East House.
The boy was wild, Paul knew it well, but he knew also that he could tame him. Once he had done that he would have forged a razor-edged tool. He possessed all the attributes that Paul Morgan wanted in his successor. The verve and confidence, the bright quick mind and adventurous spirit – but above all he possessed the aggressive attitude, the urge to compete that Paul defined as the killer instinct.
‘Thank you, Uncle Paul,’ David accepted his uncle’s congratulations warily. They were silent, each assessing the other. They had never been easy in the other’s company, they were too different in many ways – and yet in others too much alike. Always it seemed that their interests were in conflict.
Paul Morgan moved across to the picture windows, so that the daylight back-lit him. It was an old trick of his to put the other person at a disadvantage.
‘Not that we expected less of you, of course,’ he laughed, and David smiled to acknowledge the fact that his uncle had come close to levity.
‘And now we must consider your future.’ David was silent.
‘The choice open to you is wide,’ said Paul Morgan, and then went on swiftly to narrow it. ‘Though I do feel business science and law at an American university is what it should be. With this obvious goal in mind I have used my influence to have you enrolled in my old college—’
‘Uncle Paul, I want to fly,’ said David softly, and Paul Morgan paused. His expression changed fractionally.
‘We are making a career decision, my boy, not expressing preferences for different types of recreation.’
‘No, sir. I mean I want to fly – as a way of life.’
‘Your life is here, within the Morgan Group. It is not something in which you have freedom of action.’
‘I don�
�t agree with you, sir.’
Paul Morgan left the window and crossed to the fireplace. He selected a cigar from the humidor on the mantel, and while he prepared it he spoke softly, without looking at David.
‘Your father was a romantic, David. He got it out of his system by charging around the desert in a tank. It seems you have inherited this romanticism from him.’ He made it sound like some disgusting disease. He came back to where David sat.
‘Tell me what you propose.’
‘I have enlisted in the air force, sir.’
‘You’ve done it? You’ve signed?’
‘Yes, sir.’
‘How long?’
‘Five years. Short service commission.’
‘Five years—’ Paul Morgan whispered, ‘Well, David, I don’t know what to say. You know that you are the last of the Morgans. I have no son. It will be sad to see this vast enterprise without one of us at the helm. I wonder what your father would have thought of this—’
‘That’s hitting low, Uncle Paul.’
‘I don’t think so, David. I think you are the one who is cheating. Your trust fund is a huge block of Morgan shares, and other assets given to you, on the unstated understanding that you assume your duties and responsibilities—’
‘If only he would bawl me out,’ thought David fiercely, knowing that he was being stampeded as Barney had warned him. ‘If only he would order me to do it – so I could tell him to shove it.’ But he knew he was being manipulated by a man skilled in the art, a man whose whole life was the manipulation of men and money, in whose hands a seventeen-year-old boy was as soft as dough.
‘You see, David, you are born to it. Anything else is cowardice, self indulgence—’ the Morgan Group reached out its tentacles, like some grotesque flesh-eating plant, to suck him in and digest him, ‘– we can have your enlistment papers annulled. It will be the matter of a single phone call—’
‘Uncle Paul,’ David almost shouted, trying to shut out the all-pervasive flow of words. ‘My father. He did it. He joined the army.’
‘Yes, David. But it was different at that time. One of us had to go. He was the younger – and, of course, there were other personal considerations. Your mother—’ he let the rest of it hang for a moment then went on, ‘– and when it was over he came back and took his rightful place here. We miss him now, David. No one else has been able to fill the gap he left. I have always hoped that you might be the one.’
‘But I don’t want to.’ David shook his head. ‘I don’t want to spend my life in here.’ He gestured at the mammoth structure of glass and concrete that surrounded them. ‘I don’t want to spend each day poring over piles of papers—’
‘It’s not like that, David. It’s exciting, challenging, endlessly variable—’
‘Uncle Paul.’ David raised his voice again. ‘What do you call a man who fills his belly with rich food – and then goes on eating?’
‘Come now, David.’ The first edge of irritation showed in Paul Morgan’s voice, and he brushed the question aside impatiently.
‘What do you call him?’ David insisted.
‘I expect that you would call him a glutton,’ Paul Morgan answered.
‘And what do you call a man with many millions – who spends his life trying to make more?’
Paul Morgan froze into stillness. He stared at his ward for long seconds before he spoke.
‘You become insolent,’ he said at last.
‘No, sir. I did not mean it so. You are not the glutton – but I would be.’
Paul Morgan turned away and went to his desk. He sat in the high-backed leather chair and lit the cigar at last. They were silent again for a long time until at last Paul Morgan sighed.
‘You’ll have to get it out of your system, the way your father did. But how I grudge you five wasted years.’
‘Not wasted, Uncle Paul. I will come out with a Bachelor of Science degree in aeronautical engineering.’
‘I suppose we’ll just have to be thankful for little things like that.’
David went and stood beside his chair.
‘Thank you. This is very important to me.’
‘Five years, David. After that I want you.’ Then he smiled slightly to signal a witticism. ‘At least they will make you cut your hair.’
Four miles above the warm flesh-coloured earth, David Morgan rode the high heavens like a young god. The sun visor of his helmet was closed, masking with its dark cyclops eye the rapt, almost mystic expression with which he flew. Five years had not dulled the edge of his appetite for the sensation of power and isolation that flight in a Mirage interceptor awoke in him.
The unfiltered sunlight blazed ferociously upon the metal of his craft, clothing him in splendour – while far below the very clouds were insignificant against the earth, scattered and flying like a sheep flock before the wolf of the wind.
Today’s flight was tempered by a melancholy, a sense of impending loss. The morrow was the last day of his enlistment. At noon his commission expired and if Paul Morgan prevailed he would become Mr David – new boy at Morgan Group.
He thrust the thought aside, and concentrated on the enjoyment of these last precious minutes; but too soon the spell was broken.
‘Zulu Striker One, this is Range Control. Report your position.’
‘Range Control, this is Zulu Striker One holding up range fifty miles.’
‘Striker One, the range is clear. Your target-markers are figures eight and twelve. Commence your run.’
The horizon revolved abruptly across the nose of the Mirage, as the wings came over and he went down under power, falling from the heights, a controlled plunge, purposeful and precise as the stoop of a falcon.
David’s right hand moved swiftly across the weapon selector panel, locking in the rocket circuit.
The earth flattened out ahead, immense and featureless, speckled with low bush that blurred past his wing-tips as he let the Mirage sink lower. At this height the awareness of speed was breathtaking, and as the first marker came up ahead it seemed at the same instant to flash away below the silvery nose.
Five, six, seven – the black numerals on their glaring white grounds flickered by.
A touch of left rudder and stick, both adjustments made without conscious effort – and ahead was the circular layout of the rocket range, the concentric rings shrinking in size around the central mound – the ‘coke’ of flight jargon, which was the bull’s-eye of the target.
David brought the deadly machine in fast and low, his mach meter recording a speed that was barely subsonic. He was running off the direct line of track, judging his moment with frowning concentration. When it came he pulled the Mirage’s nose in to the ‘pitch up’ and went over on to the target with his gloved right finger curled about the trigger lever.
The shrieking silver machine achieved her correct slightly nose-down attitude for rocket launch at the precise instant of time that the white blob of ‘coke’ was centred in the diamond patterns of the reflector sight.
It was an evolution executed with subtle mastery of many diverse skills, and David pressed against the spring-loaded resistance of the trigger. There was no change in the feel of the aircraft, and the hiss of the rocket launch was almost lost beneath the howl of the great jet, but from beneath his wings the brief smoke lines reached out ahead towards the target, and in certainty of a fair strike David pushed his throttle to the gate and waited for the rumbling ignition of his afterburners, giving him power for the climb out of range of enemy flak.
‘What a way to go,’ he grinned to himself as he lay on his back with the Mirage’s nose pointed into the bright blue, and gravity pressing him into the padding of his seat.
‘Hello, Striker One. This is Range Control. That was right on the nose. Give the man a coke. Nice shooting. Sorry to lose you, Davey.’ The break in hallowed range discipline touched David. He was going to miss them – all of them. He pressed the transmit button on the moulded head of his joystick, and spoke into t
he microphone of his helmet. ‘From Striker One, thanks and farewell,’ David said. ‘Over and out.’
His ground crew were waiting for him also. He shook hands with each of them, the awkward handshakes and rough jokes masking the genuine affection that the years had built between them. Then he left them and went down the vast metal-skinned cavern, redolent with the smell of grease and oil along which the gleaming rows of needle-nosed interceptors stood, even in repose their forward lines giving them speed and thrust.
David paused to pat the cold metal of one of them, and the orderly found him there peering up at the emblem of the Flying Cobra upon the towering tailplane.
‘C.O.’s compliments, sir, and will you report to him right away.’
Colonel ‘Rastus’ Naude was a dried-out stick of a man, with a wizened monkey face, who wore his uniform and medal ribbons with a casually distracted air. He had flown Hurricanes in the Battle of Britain, Mustangs in Italy, Spitfires and Messerschmitt 109s in Palestine and Sabres in Korea – and he was too old for his present command – but nobody could muster the courage to tell him that, especially as he could out-fly and out-gun most of the young bucks on the squadron.
‘So we are getting rid of you at last, Morgan,’ he greeted David.
‘Not until after the mess party, sir.’
‘Ja,’ Rastus nodded. ‘You’ve given me enough hardship these last five years. You owe me a bucket of whisky.’ He gestured to the hard-backed chair beside his desk. ‘Sit down, David.’
It was the first time he had used David’s given name, and David placed his flying helmet on the corner of the desk and lowered himself into the chair, clumsy in the constricting grip of his G-suit.
Rastus took his time filling his pipe with the evil black Magaliesberg shag and he studied the young man opposite him intently. He recognized the same qualities in him that Paul Morgan had prized, the aggressive and competitive drive that gave him a unique value as an interceptor pilot.