Roaring Thunder: A Novel of the Jet Age (40 page)

“Well, I figure I ruined the possibility of doing any future work for de Havilland by telling them what I thought. And I cannot decide how to put this to Boeing. If I don’t do it just right, they will think that I gave de Havilland a whitewash. Especially since I really have to tell them what I think, so that they don’t get into the same trouble as de Havilland did.”

He was quiet for a moment and went on. “Don’t get me wrong, they are going to try to outsell the Comet as soon as they get a jet on the market, but they would never want to see a string of accidents ground the Comets. They want people to have faith in jet airliners, and nothing could be
worse for Boeing than having the first jet airliner prove to be a disaster.”

He waited for a moment more and said, “I wish I had been quick thinking enough to tell that to Davies.”

September 18, 1953, Seattle, Washington

Vance hung up the phone. Harry had called, and Anna was in trouble once again. She had been acting strange, and when he flopped down on the couch, his hip had hit a vodka bottle tucked into the cushions. Vance and Harry had chatted a few minutes more on what effect the end of the war in Korea would have on business, but both of them were preoccupied with Anna. There seemed no way to help her. She would stick by AA rules for a while, then slip back somehow into drinking.

Vance glanced at the wall clock—it was almost ten, and he had an appointment with Schairer at 10:30. Boeing was always miserly with their office space, and for a consultant like Vance getting a room with a desk, a clock, a telephone, and a couple of filing cabinets was a coup. Secretarial help was hard to come by officially, but the Boeing administrative staff was so accommodating that Vance got by without a private secretary. He would just take his drafts, pencil-written on yellow legal-size tablets, and Schairer’s wonderfully efficient and quite beautiful secretary Dorothy McCain, would either do them or have them done within the hour.

Vance had been continually corresponding with de Havilland, usually with Ron Davies, who turned out to be a most accommodating friend. Davies had recovered all of his natural British charm and aplomb after the company’s investigators concluded that the breakup of the Comet flying out of Calcutta had been solely due to turbulence and that there was no need to consider grounding
the fleet. He was particularly pleased—as close to bubbling over as a proper English gentleman could get—by the increase in sales. Thirty-five of the Comet 2s with Rolls-Royce Avon engines had been sold to British Overseas Airways Corporation and seven other major foreign airlines. Eleven of the even more advanced Comet 3s, which would have trans-Atlantic range, were already spoken for, five by BOAC and, ominously, three by Pan American.

Vance shook his head. This was exactly what Boeing feared—Pan American getting on board with de Havilland! But the sales figures were not as impressive as the performance figures. By the end of April, the BOAC Comets had flown almost ten thousand hours, carrying twenty-eight thousand passengers. It was making money, hand over fist, early in its first year of operations. But what struck Shannon most was the load factor—the Comet was operating with 80 percent of its seats filled, all the time. This was what was generating the profits, for fuel costs were double that of a piston engine airliner. And it meant that people liked flying in it. Of course; why should they not? It was faster, quieter, and more comfortable than anything else in the air. Boeing had its work cut out for it to beat the Comet.

All of his data had gone into the final report. He was about ready to sign the cover letter when Dorothy McCain popped her pretty head in the door and said, “Can you come see Mr. Schairer?”

“Right away, thanks, Dorothy.” He clipped his cover letter to the report and walked down the hall to Schairer’s office. George, uncharacteristically did rise to greet him but said instead, “Vance, this is Ted Higgins. He heads up our security. I think we have a problem.”

The tone of Schairer’s voice spoke volumes and Shannon knew that somehow he was in trouble. It surprised him to see three models of Boeing experimental aircraft that he had worked on placed on the conference table at
the side of the room. There were photos beside them, but he could not make out what they were.

“What is it, George? Can I help?”

“Vance, I hope so. Mr. Higgins, will you show Mr. Shannon the photos, please.”

Higgins, balding and of medium height, his hair combed over, was obviously ill at ease as he motioned Vance over to the table. In front of each of the Boeing experimental models was a photo of an aircraft with French markings. The aircraft were identical to the models.

“This is the Sud-Ouest Trident, the Sud-Ouest Vatour, and the Sud-Est Baroudeur. They are all new aircraft, making their appearance within the last year.” Then somewhat redundantly, Higgins added, “They are all French.”

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 would 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.