“All the principals know who I'm working for.”
Kennedy was silent for a beat. “When did you get back?”
“This morning,” McGarvey said. “They agreed.”
“The whole package? Both sides?”
“Everything. They're expecting our first team in the next few days.”
“This is happening pretty fast,” Kennedy said, cautiously. “What about their part?”
“They'll provide the site, the materials, and the construction crews, supervised by your people. They'll provide
all
the technical help they can.”
“When can we start exchanging information?”
“Soon,” McGarvey said. It was possible that Guerin's phones were tapped. There was no use taking unnecessary risks.
“No ⦠trouble?” Kennedy asked. “No snags, or last-minute demands on their part?”
“None,” McGarvey said.
“You should come out here. Al Vasilanti wants to meet you, and there are a number of things you should know about us.”
“I'll be free tomorrow.”
“Good. In the meantime Al has called a press conference at Gales Creek. I think he's going to unveil the new airplane.”
“That's not such a good idea, David,” McGarvey said. “It could push the opposition into making a move now.”
“I think that's what he wants,” Kennedy replied. It sounded as if he wasn't very happy about the decision. “He's up for the fight, and I think he wants to get it over with.”
“I can understand that, but try to stall him if you can. Tell him that we'll be better equipped to put up a fight after we get some hard intelligence.”
“He's called a council of war in his office for about two minutes from now. I'll do what I can.”
“See you tomorrow,” McGarvey said.
Â
They met in the old man's office. The walls were adorned with paintings of some of the most famous commercial aircraft in the history of aviation, among them Ford's corrugated-skin Tin Goose, Douglas's DC-3, Boeing's 707 and 747, and Guerin's 422 and 522âtwo of the biggest-selling airplanes ever.
At seventy-seven, Alfred Vasilanti had been witness to a lot of aviation history, jumping into the industry with both feet after graduation from Harvard in 1941. Two years later he bullied his draft board into granting him an exemption because he was working in a critical industry. Not because he wanted to avoid the war, but because, as he put it, “I knew damned well I could do more to beat the Nazis and the Japs by designing and building good airplanes than by shooting at the bastards.” He'd always played it close to the hip, and as a result his staff meetings were lively affairs.
The aircraft business bred contentious men, and a few women, who held strong opinions and were willing to go to the mat for them. Odd ducks. Eccentric geniusesâ
“squirrels.” These were the people Vasilanti surrounded himself with. As a result, the company was successful. There wasn't a national airline in any country, except Russia, that didn't fly Guerin equipment. Airplanes, he liked to point out, that except for their Rolls-Royce engines were one-hundred percent American designed and manufactured.
Kennedy was the last to arrive. The old man motioned him to his place next to George Socrates, vice president of design. The second generation Greek-American had designed and built his own two-seater rag-wing monoplane in his father's Kansas garage in 1946. He was only thirteen years old, and legally still too young to get his solo license, but he learned to fly at the town's grass-strip airport. He never became a great pilot, but he maintained that in order to design them you sure as hell better know how to fly them. He quit high school at the age of fifteen and enrolled at Kansas State University, breezing through the aeronautical engineering program in two years, after which he went to work for Cessna Aircraft Company as the youngest engineer on staff, or on the staff of any other airplane company so far as anyone knew. Since then he'd worked for every major airplane company in the U.S. designing or helping to design everything from sea planes to helicopters, and from sport aerobatic biplanes to Guerin's 322, 422, 522, and finally the P/C2622âthe culmination of his life's work. He was the most respected man in the industry and could walk into any airplane design facility in the world and get a job, no questions asked, for practically any amount of money he wanted.
On Socrates's right was Newton Kilbourne, Dominique's older brother and vice president in charge of new product development and prototype manufacturing. He'd come to the aircraft industry from Detroit, where he'd started on the Ford plant's assembly line out of high school. Within the first month, realizing that being nothing more than a “wrench” wasn't good enough for him, he went to night school, finishing in six years with degrees in mechanical engineering, electrical engineering,
and business administration. When Vasilanti hired him eight years ago Kilbourne was vice president in charge of manufacturing the Taurus automobile. His transition to airplanes was simple. One day he was building cars, and the next he was building jetliners.
Next to Kilbourne was Gary Topper. Topper, vice president in charge of sales, was an industry “squirrel,” but his high jinks were tolerated because he sold airplanes A former Air Force jet jockey, he'd worked for American, Pan Am, and Northwest before coming to Guerin four years ago at the age of thirty-seven. He'd been hired as a test pilot, but at a commercial air show in Buenos Aires he'd come in over the grandstands doing 400 knots in a Guerin 522 ⦠upside-down, something even Socrates said was impossible for a commercial jetliner that size. Everyone was so impressed (some of them angry, but all of them impressed) that they placed their orders for the airliner with the pilot who could pull off such a stunt.
Beside him was his exact opposite, Jeff Soderstrom, Guerin's chief financial officer. A former Citibank vice president in charge of international commercial loans, he was accustomed to dealing with figures in the billions. But he was an arch conservative from a solid family, and Guerin's oftentimes precarious financial position drove him up the wall. It was the reason Vasilanti had hired the man. “We need someone to keep our feet on the ground.”
“We have a lot of work to do this morning, so let's get to it,” Vasilanti said when Kennedy was seated. “I've scheduled a media briefing for noon at Gales Creek. We're going to show them the 2622. And we'll let them climb aboard and take as many pictures as they want.”
“So that's what this is all about,” Kilbourne groaned. For the past two weeks the rush had been on to hang the aircraft's subsonic engines and the temporary cowling approximating the aerodynamic shape of the single hydrogen-burning hypersonic engine not yet ready from Rolls-Royce. “You ought to have your head examined.”
“Save it until you hear everything,” Vasilanti growled.
“David, give us the background on the Japanese problem ⦠the entire background, including Kirk McGarvey's recommendations and actions. Is he back?”
“He's in Washington. He said it's a go.”
“Back from where?” Soderstrom asked.
Kennedy looked at him, still not sure that this was the right thing to do. But he understood the old man's thinking and it was hard to fault it. “Moscow.”
“You're still thinking about putting a wing assembly plant in Russia after everything I've shown you?” the CFO asked. “When they collapseânot if, but whenâwe'll be out a billion dollars we can't afford to toss away.”
“We can't afford not to do it,” Vasilanti said sharply. “Go ahead, David.”
“I'll go over the details later, but simply put we think there may be a grain of truth to the rumors we've heard about a Japanese move to buy us out for our HSCT research.” The acronym stood for High Speed Civil Transport, the next generation of commercial aircraft.
“We know that,” Soderstrom said. “We're keeping a close watch on the market.”
“We also think that they mean to do whatever it takes to drive our price per share to a favorable level by destroying the public's confidence in our equipment.”
“Come off it, David. Don't you think this Japanese paranoia has gone far enough?”
“I don't know, Jeff. But the question remains that the American Airlines O'Hare crash in '90 might have something to do with the Japanese.”
“Doesn't it seem coincidental to you that our troubles began
after
McGarvey was hired?” Soderstrom asked. “He may be, as you say, a bright and conscientious man, but considering his background, mightn't he be seeing boogeymen?”
Kennedy glanced at Vasilanti who sat impassively for the moment.
It's your show, you deal with it.
“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.”