“All of which are based on experience,” Amalie said.
“If you come to New York, give us a call, Dick,” the Prince said. “We won't be there often but we'd enjoy seeing you. Especially if the circumstances are as pleasant as they are today.”
Dick knew he should say something equally ironic. But he looked at Amalie and said nothing. “This new supersonic planeâwill it be ready soon?” the Prince asked.
“According to rumor, yes,” Dick said.
“Business will be brisk. I hear the British and the French are working on one. And the Russians. If they can steal someone's plans.”
“But not the Italians?”
“Lately our talent seems confined to cars.”
“And women?” Amalie said.
The Prince smiled. Dick was mute. All his feelings for this woman were being aroused again, after he had struggled so long to banish them. She was boldly inviting him to visit her in New York, converting the Prince into her mouthpiece. What did it mean?
“Now you may buy me that coffee you offered when we met downstairs,” she said.
“I'll call room service, darling,” the Prince said.
“No. You have your usual long distance calls to make. I can't be witty while you're talking business. Didn't you notice that in South America?”
The Prince shrugged. “Pay no attention to anything she says, Dick.”
In the lounge, Amalie ordered Coffee Amaretto. “He's so charming. And so disgusting,” she said.
“Why don't you leave him?”
“I dislike complicated decisions.”
“I still have that note you sent me.”
She smiled, her eyebrows lifting. “It was a deft ending to our story, don't you think?”
“It wasn't a story.”
“Dear Dick. Dick. It was.”
“What do you mean?”
“I'm not Jewish. I'm Polish. I worked in Schweinfurt as a forced laborer throughout the war. I met Madame George there. She was in the same precarious situation. We agreed that if we survived, we would arrange to live splendidly after the war. She conceived the idea of telling men stories to enliven our friendships. I was practicing on you. It worked rather well, you must admit. I passed it on to Madame and another girl has used it on a Jewish banker from New York with great success.”
“You're lying.”
“I wish I was. I would have long since hired a writer to tell it to the world. It might make more money than that simpering little goody-goody, Anne Frank.”
“I still think you're lying.”
She shrugged. “Think what you please. Tell me what Adrian Van Ness is like.”
“He's very shrewdâand he doesn't have a moral bone in his body.”
“Does he have a mistress?”
“Not at the moment, as far as I know. His wife's had some sort of breakdown. He devotes a lot of his time to her.”
“Is he generous?”
“Yes, on the whole.”
“I dislike your reservations. I prefer simplicity in a man.”
“Why are you so interested?”
“I'm at his disposal when I'm in New York. I suspect it may turn out to be the other way around. When he is in New York, I'll be summoned from Paris, Rome, wherever I happen to be.”
“Why? Are you and the Prince separating?”
“No. He simply can't afford me any longer. His wife has been speculating on the Paris Bourse. She's mortgaged a great many of her estates and has no cash to spare. He depends almost entirely on Buchanan for his livelihood these days.”
“He's selling shares in you!”
“You put it crudelyâbut I suppose it's true. I'm an asset. I suggest impossible dreams to men. They believe your planes fly without crashing.”
“Will you be in New York soon?”
“Tomorrow. I have no intention of going to South America again. I found their food atrocious, their wine abominable, their men vile, their women pathetic. The whole continent is drenched in the despairing knowledge that they're doomed to perpetual inferiority to the Yankee colossus. I found myself believing you Americans may rule the world in spite of your naïveté.”
“I'll see you in New York, next week.”
“I'll make you miserable.”
“I'll make you happy.”
Did he really believe it? Was he ready to betray Cassie Trainor, abandon his all-American girl for this mocking elusive woman who clutched sadness to her being like a second skin? Dick was catapulted back to his first fantasies of what it would be like to bomb Germany. He had imagined himself hunched over his maps, giving the pilot headings in a calm, intense Hemingwayesque voice. Reality had been horrifically different. His heart had pounded, his voice had croaked and trembled.
Was it a warning? Perhaps. But the plane was already in the air. He was on his way to a strange country on a mission of redemption, not destruction. Wouldn't that make a difference?
In his heart Dick already knew the answer. He was rewriting the ethics of betrayal as Adrian Van Ness rewrote the ethics of selling planes. The consequences might be bitter. But he accepted the risk in the name of that elusive word, love.
A gasp ran through the crowd as the great white plane emerged from the main hangar of the Buchanan plant on the edge of the Mojave Desert. No one had ever seen anything like it before, except in science fiction magazine illustrations. It was two hundred feet long and weighed three hundred tons. A stiletto fuselage tapered to a flat span of triangle wing surface set above an engine intake duct the size of a hotel hallway. Head-on it resembled a winged creature out of the dawn of time, craning its beaked head toward the light. Everyone realized they were looking at the most original airplane ever designedâthe BX experimental bomber, the Warrior.
“This one's gonna make history,” Lieutenant Colonel Billy McCall said, throwing an arm around Frank Buchanan.
“It almost made me history,” Frank Buchanan said. Only a few people inside the company knew how much inner agony this creature of the sky had cost their chief designer. He had been profoundly reluctant to build a plane that delivered nuclear weapons. No one but Billy McCall, implicitly reminding Frank of the promise he had made in New Guinea, could have persuaded him.
Thanks to Billy's early warning, Buchanan had a running start on the competition when the Air Force issued an invitation to six aircraft companies to submit designs for Weapon System 151. The requirements for the plane were mind-boggling. It had to be able to fly at mach 3, have a global range, carry 25,000 pounds of poundsâand be able to land on existing runways. Four of the six companies blanched and decided not to bid. Only Boeing and Buchanan competed and they both submitted designs that were so complicated, the Air Force suggested scrapping the project.
At that point, Frank Buchanan discovered an obscure technical paper published by the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics that proposed an aircraft flying at supersonic speeds could belly-slide on the shock wave it was
creating, like a surfer riding just ahead of a big comber. Frank asked for a forty-five-day extension of the competition and lashed himself and his equally exhausted fellow designers into an immense effort to incorporate this principle, called compression lift, into their design. Buchanan won the contract to produce two prototypes.
Adrian Van Ness took one look at the plane and uttered a prophecy of his own. “That's the supersonic airliner of 1965.”
“I was hoping someone would say that,” Frank murmured, looking past Adrian as if he did not exist. He was still unable to speak his name without loathing.
“You better start building a new factory,” said burly square-jawed General Curtis LeMay, head of the Strategic Air Command. “I want two hundred and fifty of these by 1963.”
Two hundred and fifty planes at thirty million dollars a copy was 750 million dollars. With the usual follow-ons for spare parts it was a billion-dollar contract. “Will that fly in Washington?” Adrian asked.
Since the end of the Korean War, each year had seen bruising battles between the armed forces over the shrinking Pentagon budget. So far, the Air Force had won most of the fights. General LeMay reflected this momentum in his answer. “We'll make it fly.”
Cliff Morris did not have the slightest doubt that Curtis LeMay could deliver on this promise. To him and other veterans of the air war over Germany, LeMay was an almost mythical figure. He had devised the tactics that enabled them to survive and frequently flew in the lead plane to sustain their sagging morale. He had crowned his wartime achievements by creating the Strategic Air Command, whose mission was to warn the Russians against any more Korean-type adventures. Currently equipped with subsonic B-52s built by Boeing, SAC's strategy of intimidation seemed to be working. As the year 1960 began, communism was quiescent throughout the world except for some sporadic guerrilla fighting in a remote southeast Asian enclave called Vietnam.
Cliff could see why General LeMay was ecstatic over the Warrior. It could cruise at 2,200 miles an hour at 70,000 feet, giving it an 800-mph advantage over any fighter plane known to exist. It could fly 20,000 miles without refueling, eliminating the fleet of vulnerable flying tankers that the B-52s needed for global warfare. If it was not the ultimate weapon, it was as close as anyone had come to it yet.
“Now all you've got to do is pray your bloody Congress doesn't go missile crazy,” said a weary English voice on Cliff's right.
Everyone looked at Derek Chapmanâand at Cliffâwith an uneasy mixture of dismay and dislike. Cliff found himself wishing there was some way he could make Derek disappear, instantly. He was turning into a hoodoo, an albatross, a walking, talking intimation of bad luck.
Unfortunately, Derek was his brother-in-law. Making him disappear was impossible. Short, stocky, and balding, he seemed an affable, tolerable relative when
he showed up in California, wondering if he could get a job in Buchanan's design department. Frank Buchanan was delighted to hire this son of his old British friend. Derek joined the department in the final stages of the superhuman effort on the Warrior and made some valuable contributions to positioning the canards, the small tail-like wings on the nose that enabled the plane to achieve compression lift.
But Derek's conversation soon gave everyone the creeps. He brought with him from England a tale of woe that sent chills through Buchanan Aircraft. He talked endlessly, bitterly about the way England's aircraft industry had been decimated by the emergence of the missile.
Last year, Russia's German rocket scientists had beaten America's German rocket scientists in a secret race and fired a capsule called Sputnik into orbit around the earth. Nikita Khrushchev, Russia's new strongman, had proclaimed his missiles made American bombers obsolete and the Soviet Union was the number one global power. In the United States, this development had no immediate impact on the aircraft industry, beyond inspiring several companies to set up missile divisions. In England, where budget problems were far more severe, the minister of defense had canceled virtually every advanced aircraft in development, sending a half-dozen companies lurching toward bankruptcy.
It was unthinkable, Cliff told himself. It could never happen in America. A plane like the Warrior represented all Frank Buchanan and his cohorts had learned from the experimental rocket planes, the Talus flying wing, supersonic fighters like the Scorpion, the agonizing research into flutter to rescue the Starduster. When Buchananites looked at the BX's sweeping cursives and sharp obliques, they thought of the test pilots who had died in earlier planes, the designers and engineers who had collapsed with heart attacks or heartbreak when their ideas or their endurance failed them. They felt the pride of creating another leading edge in the history of flight.
The Air Force was equally unenthusiastic about missiles, as Cliff Morris had learned in more than one drunken evening with Billy McCall and his fellow colonels. Hot pilots all, they were horrified by the thought of turning into the silo sitters of the sixties. They had put on their uniforms to fly planes and they refused to believe that a hunk of hurtling metal with a fire in its ass and a computer for a brain could replace them. The Warrior was their answer to the missile.
These were the emotions vibrating through Buchanan Aircraft and the Air Force in the weeks after the Warrior rollout. Billy and a half-dozen other pilots began putting the plane through a series of tests that made everyone more and more euphoric. Never had they seen a prototype perform more precisely on or above its specifications. Heat problems were nonexistent, thanks to the exotic metals such as titanium Frank had used for the skin. At supersonic speeds there was not a hint of flutter or buffet.
Cliff frequently flew with Billy and enjoyed coming home to tell Sarah and the kids that he had been to Chicago or Hawaii and back that day. They got to Chicago in less than an hour, to Hawaii in less than two. Frank gave him a
model of the plane for Charlie. Cliff solemnly swore him not to show it to anyone, because it was still top secret. Charlie loved it, of course.
Sarah watched, unenthused. “Why are you making him a pilot?” she said. “He may not be any good at it.” Charlie did not do well in math or science in school.
Cliff curtly informed Sarah he was not necessarily making the kid a pilot, he might be making him an airline or aircraft executive. “I hope not,” Sarah said.
Since their disagreement in South America, they had been observing a Korean-style armed truce. It frequently broke down, with Charlie often the battleground. Cliff's solution was brutal but effective. He stayed away from home as much as possible, using his new title of sales vice president as his excuse. He spent weeks on the road schmoozing with Air Force contacts in the Pentagon and at Wright Patterson Air Force Base and engine honchos at Pratt & Whitney and General Electric, getting a line on the latest thinking in the field.
In Washington Cliff began picking up some very bad vibes on the future of the Warrior. Back at Edwards (formerly Muroc) Air Force Base, Billy McCall bitterly confirmed the rumors. “They're talkin' about junkin' it, just like they did the flyin' wing,” Billy said. “The gutless son of a bitch you've got for a boss will probably go right along with it.”
“Not if I have anything to say about it,” Cliff said, remembering Adrian's pledge.
Cliff reported the bad semi-news to Adrian and was encouraged by his reaction. “We've got to keep that plane alive,” Adrian said. “It represents our chance to take the world commercial market away from Boeing and Douglas when we go supersonic. I'll talk to some people at the White House.”
Adrian had been chairman of the California Business Executives for Eisenhower in both elections. He had some chits to play. A week later, as the big plane roared through a series of high-altitude tests, he telephoned Cliff. “Get all the pertinent data together and reduce it to one page. That's the most Ike ever reads about anything. Be at LAX tonight. We're flying to Georgia to settle the Warrior eyeball-to-eyeball.”
Twenty-four hours later, Cliff sat in a pine-paneled room at the Augusta National Golf Club, listening to Air Force General Nathan Twining, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, tell President Dwight D. Eisenhower why America needed Buchanan Aircraft's Warrior bomber. Beside Twining sat General Curtis LeMay. Behind them was a row of colonels and lieutenant colonels, including Billy McCall.
Adrian Van Ness and Frank Buchanan sat beside Cliff, ready to expand the one-page memorandum on the Warrior's performance envelope, if the president requested it. Dick Stone was also on hand with a briefcase full of financial information. Ike was flanked by his Secretary of Defense, Neil McElroy, and his science adviser, Dr. George Kistiakowski.
McElroy backed Twining with a strong plea for the Warrior, even if it never dropped a single nuclear bomb. He saw enormous possibilities for it as a reconnaissance plane, a military transportâand a commercial carrier. Cliff sensed
Frank Buchanan's tension, as the president listened, deadpan. “I'm allergic to using military funds to develop a commercial plane,” Ike said.
The astonishment on most faces was unforgettable. For a moment Cliff was sure Frank Buchanan was going to ask Ike where he thought Boeing got the 707 jetliner. All you had to do was glance at their military planes to see the connection. Anyone in the room could have told this man, who was supposed to have access to every piece of pertinent information on any subject under the sun, that leapfrogging from military to commercial models and back again was what the American aircraft business had done since its foundation. But the power of the presidency silenced everyone, even Frank.
“Mr. President,” said Air Force Chief of Staff General Thomas White, “We need this plane because we think a flexible defense is basic to the nation's security. A bomber is under the control of a man, not a computer, like a missile. It can be recalled. It can take evasive actions, improvise avenues of attack. It can force the enemy to deploy defenses that absorb a lot of his energy and attention.”
“You've got Boeing's B-Fifty-twos for that job,” Eisenhower said.
“They're subsonic, Mr. President. Their highest speed is six-twenty miles an hour. This plane can go three times that speed! We've got a plane that represents the greatest breakthrough in aerodynamics, in the whole science of flight, in two decades. We can't dismiss it. We can't afford to do that. The morale of the Air Force is at stake here!”
“It's your job to worry about the morale of the Air Force,” Ike growled, his ground soldier's animus showing. “Mine is to worry about the economy, the morale of the whole country. It may be a great plane but a missile can do its job as well or better. That's all there is to it.”
Cliff found himself thinking about Sarah's moral outrage at bribing half of South America to sell the Starduster and half of Europe to sell the Scorpion. Didn't this justify it? There sat the president of the United States, dismissing the greatest plane ever designed by an American. Consigning it to the junkyard. Where did that leave Boy Scout ideas like patriotism, loyalty, integrity? Adrian's attitude was the only one that made sense. You had to survive in this business by making your own rules.
Dr. Kistiakowski, Eisenhower's science advisor, now waded in. He dismissed General White's argument about the virtues of a plane versus a missile. If anything, the plane was more vulnerable. The CIA had recently reported alarming improvements in Soviet radar and antiaircraft missilery. They now had weapons capable of destroying a plane at 70,000 feet, no matter how fast it was going.