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  Proud Generations of Gold

  HERMAN GOLD

  The grand old patriarch faces his twilight years—and his greatest personal triumphs.

  DON HARRISON

  His loyalty made him a faithful servant of the Gold family. His love made him a member of it.

  SUZY GOLD

  After years of painful widowhood, she finds new love and brings fresh hope to the dynasty of Gold.

  STEVE GOLD

  To him, hell was being grounded, tied to a desk. He’d hit the skies any way he could—even if it meant flying dangerous missions in a foreign land.

  ROBERT GOLD

  For the heroic Vietnam ace, the most critical war he has yet to face is the one with his own family.

  ALSO BY T. E. CRUISE

  Wings of Gold: The Aces

  Wings of Gold II: The Flyboys

  Published by

  POPULAR LIBRARY

  Copyright

  POPULAR LIBRARY EDITION

  Copyright © 1989 by Warner Books, Inc.

  All rights reserved.

  Popular Library® and the fanciful P design are registered trademarks

  of Warner Books, Inc.

  Popular Library books are published by

  Hachette Book Group

  237 Park Avenue

  New York, NY 10017

  Visit our website at www.HachetteBookGroup.com.

  First eBook Edition: October 2009

  ISBN: 978-0-446-56708-4

  Contents

  Proud Generations of Gold

  ALSO BY T. E. CRUISE

  Copyright

  BOOK I: 1954–1960

  CHAPTER 1

  CHAPTER 2

  CHAPTER 3

  CHAPTER 4

  CHAPTER 5

  CHAPTER 6

  CHAPTER 7

  CHAPTER 8

  CHAPTER 9

  CHAPTER 10

  CHAPTER 11

  CHAPTER 12

  CHAPTER 13

  BOOK II: 1960–1967

  CHAPTER 14

  CHAPTER 15

  CHAPTER 16

  CHAPTER 17

  CHAPTER 18

  CHAPTER 19

  CHAPTER 20

  CHAPTER 21

  CHAPTER 22

  CHAPTER 23

  BOOK I:

  1954–1960

  * * *

  DULLES ISSUES WARNING ON INDOCHINA—

  Secretary of State Warns That the Rest of Southeast Asia

  May Fall Like Dominoes Under Soviet Domination—

  New York Gazette

  FRENCH/COMMUNIST SHOWDOWN IN VIETNAM—

  French Forces Prepared for Red Assault at Dien Bien Phu—

  U.S. Increases Financial Support to French Military Operation—

  Detroit Telegraph

  GC-909 MAKES MAIDEN FLIGHT—

  GAT Liner Introduces Jet Transport in America—

  Aviation Trade Magazine

  EASTERN BLOC SIGNS WARSAW PACK—

  Iron Curtain Unites Against NATO—

  Washington Star Reporter

  SOVIET LEADER DENOUNCES STALIN—

  Khrushchev Calls for Decentralization of Power—

  Los Angeles Gazette

  AIRPORTS RUSH TO MODERNIZE—

  Public’s Love Affair with the Air Catches Facilities Unaware—

  LaGuardia Airport to Spend $30 Mil. to Accommodate Jets—

  New York Business Journal

  RUSSIANS LAUNCH SATELLITE—

  Congress Calls for Inquiry as Reds Make Great Leap in Space

  Race—

  Milwaukee Sun

  NASA INTRODUCES PROJECT MERCURY TEAM—

  Nation Salutes First Seven Astronauts to Explore Space—

  Miami Daily Telegraph

  KENNEDY WINS MARYLAND PRIMARY—

  Massachusetts Senator Neutralizes Religious Controversy—

  November Race Shapes Up: Kennedy vs. Nixon—

  Boston Times

  RUSSIANS SHOOT DOWN U.S. SPY PLANE—

  SOVIETS DISPLAY WRECKAGE—

  Captured Pilot to Be Charged with Espionage—

  San Francisco Post

  * * *

  CHAPTER 1

  * * *

  (One)

  Gold Aviation and Transport

  Burbank, California

  21 July 1954

  Herman Gold stood with his hands on his hips in the doorway of the acre-sized assembly hangar. The hangar was windowless but cool due to air-conditioning. It was lit to operating room intensity by hundreds of overhead light fixtures. The partially completed, Gold Commercial 909 jetliner prototype gleaming beneath those lights was 153 feet long and 42 feet high, and had a wing span of 145 feet. The jetliner was surrounded by plywood scaffolding from which the technician teams in their turquoise and scarlet company overalls swarmed like gaudy ants busy at some gargantuan, metallic beetle.

  The streamlined GC-909 jetliner was Gold Aviation and Transport’s latest and most expensive endeavor, a graceful and lithe silver bird meant to seduce the airlines from their outmoded and aging fleets of piston-engined airplanes. Today, however, Gold was wondering if the 909 jetliner was going to turn out to be his company’s most expensive flop.

  Gold was fifty-five years old, with light blue eyes, freckles, and a wreath of curly, crimson hair around his ears that had long ago thinned on top to strawberry-colored fuzz. He was tall and thin, except for his damned potbelly. He’d been waging war against his paunch for the last twenty years. So far in his eventful life it had been one of the few battles he’d ever lost.

  Gold had been born Hermann Goldstein, in Germany. An orphan, he had grown up in the streets of Berlin but had managed to pull himself out of the gutter by learning a mechanic’s trade. During World War I he had served as an N.C.O. in the Kaiser’s Imperial Air Service. He’d been a pilot, one of the aces who’d flown with Von Richthofen. His twenty confirmed kills had been four more than was necessary in those days to earn Germany’s highest military decoration, the Blue Max, but he’d never received his medal, or any of the honors due him, because he was a Jew.

  Soon after the war he’d made the decision to come to America, where he shortened his name to Herman Gold. He briefly worked as a truck mechanic on New York’s Lower East Side, until a newspaper advertisement led him to a job as a pilot in a barnstorming troupe that was about to tour the country. He eventually ended up in Southern California.

  This was during Prohibition, when an experienced pilot who could fly at night could make himself a great deal of money bringing in hooch from Mexico. In less than a week Gold had earned five thousand dollars, and although he had never been proud that he’d broken the law of his adopted country, it had been that money which had allowed him to start Gold Express, an air transport operation between Los Angeles and San Francisco.

  Gold Express had made its first flight in 1921, and from the start had been a successful enterprise. In 1923 Gold had been able to rent a warehouse on the Santa Monica waterfront. There he established Gold Aviation, an aircraft design firm. In 1925 GAT suffered a string of setbacks, but things improved by 1927. It had been in ‘27, the same year that Lindbergh made his historic flight across the Atlantic, when Gold Aviation sold its first airplane design, the G-1 Yellow-jacket, to the United States Postal Service. The Post Office ended up buying hundreds of the airplanes. It had been that cash infusion that had allowed Gold Aviation and Transport to build on 109 acres in the Burbank desert.

  In the twenty-five years since, GAT prospered. During the ‘40s, flush with cash thanks to its wartime military contracts, the company bought out its surrounding neighbors, including the bordering movie studio, to become a sprawling complex; a vast, manufacturing metropolis that employed thousands on round-the-clock shif
ts to turn out fighters, bombers, and transport crafts for the military and international commercial aviation markets.

  And after all of those years, and airplanes built, and hundreds of millions of dollars spent and earned, you’d think it’d get a little easier, Gold brooded as he watched the men in their overalls fussing over his company’s latest and greatest silver bird. But it wasn’t getting any easier, Gold knew. Aviation research and development costs had escalated enormously. Today, despite GAT’s extensive resources, the company’s future was pinned to the success of this awesome, shiny 909 jetliner, just as that future had been wagered back in 1927, when an exceedingly young and nervous Herman Gold presented his single engine, open cockpit G-1 Yellowjacket to those skeptical buyers from the Postal Service …

  Gold walked through the hangar, and then turned the corner around a line of parts bins to look for his chief engineer Don Harrison. He found Don conferring with several team foremen in the work space that Don had walled off with banks of filing cabinets. Don Harrison was thirty-three. He was tall and broad-shouldered but a little soft around the edge, like a football player who’d been riding the bench too long. He had wide-spaced hazel eyes and thinning blond hair that he wore slicked back from his high, domed forehead. As Gold watched, Don went to one of the filing cabinets, pulled out a scrolled blueprint, and then unrolled the drawing on a drafting table. He pushed his tan, round-framed eyeglasses up from the tip of his nose, and began to move his index finger rapidly across the drawing in order to make some point to the foremen, who nodded.

  “Problem?” Gold asked, coming up behind Don as the foremen went back to work.

  Don turned around, a weary smile on his face. “Nah, just putting out fires. You know what I mean?”

  “You solve one problem and up pop two more.” Gold nodded, thinking that Don looked beat. There were deep shadows beneath his red-rimmed eyes. The kid hadn’t shaved in a couple of days; his complexion beneath his sparse blond whiskers was pale and his face was drawn.

  “I think you could use some sleep,” Gold said, frowning as he regarded Don’s baggy slacks and wrinkled shirt and tie. “How long have you been here?”

  “Forty-eight hours,” Don said, and before Gold could protest, added, “I’ve been napping in my office.” He turned back to his drafting table. “Don’t worry. I intend to take a nice long rest once this baby gets airborne.”

  Gold flinched. The kid had sounded exactly like Teddy Quinn. For over thirty years Teddy had been Gold’s chief engineer and his closest friend, until Teddy died of heart failure, back in ‘51.

  “You know, Don, that crap about taking it easy in a little while was just what Teddy used to say,” Gold warned.

  “But I mean it.” Don grinned. He winked at Gold. “It just might even be a honeymoon …”

  “You mean you and that Forrester woman you’ve been seeing might tie the knot?” Gold put his arm around Don’s shoulder, hugging him affectionately. “That’s great news, my boy … I’m very happy for you—”

  “Hold on, Herman.” Don laughed. “I haven’t asked her yet…”

  “But you’re planning to, right?”

  “Yep …”

  “Good! She’ll accept. I’m sure of it. You’ve been going with her, how long?”

  “About six months,” Don replied. “I know that’s not very long…”

  “Nonsense!” Gold chuckled. “It’s plenty! I knew my Erica maybe six minutes when I felt in my bones that she was meant for me.”

  “Well, your opinion of Linda means a lot to me, Herman,” Don said quietly.

  Gold smiled appreciatively. He’d been emotionally distraught over losing Teddy, and for a long time Gold had put off hiring a new chief engineer. He’d simply been unable to bear the thought of trying to fill his old friend’s shoes, even though he knew that it was costing his company productivity as GAT’s heart and soul, its R & D department, drifted leaderless. When Gold had finally been able to bring himself to begin his search he’d known that Teddy’s replacement would have to be exceedingly talented to ever have a hope of measuring up to his predecessor. It hadn’t taken long for Gold to discover that if he wanted the best and the brightest to head up his research and development department, there was only one choice: Donald Harrison.

  Gold had kept his promise to Harrison to involve the young man in all aspects of the business, and had been impressed by his versatility. Unlike many talented but technical sorts who couldn’t get beyond their narrow specialties, Don had an innate business savvy; the ability to comprehend the big picture. It hadn’t taken long for Gold to discover that having the young man by his side as a protégé was an asset, not a liability. Since then, a strong friendship had developed as Gold had come to rely on Don as a sounding board as well as a creative source, much as he had relied on Teddy.

  “I must say that Linda seemed like a wonderful girl from the times that Erica and I have gotten together with you two,” Gold said. “Bright, beautiful—a wonderful girl … You know, I never told you, but I met her once some years ago…”

  “Really, how?” Don asked.

  “Oh, she’s a big newspaper reporter now,” Gold said, chuckling, “but when I met her she was just starting out at some wire service, so I granted her an interview…” He paused. “I think she wanted to interview me about how the Air Force was using our MT-37 cargo transports during the Berlin Airlift …”

  “I thought you didn’t like granting personal interviews?”

  “I didn’t then, and don’t now,” Gold replied. “But this one I granted as a favor to my son.”

  “Steven knew her?” Don began, and then snapped his fingers. “Of course. We all met in Washington, back in ‘forty-seven, during those hearings on the B-45 bomber.” He shook his head. “Funny, though, I don’t recall Linda ever having mentioned that she and Steve had become friends …”

  “Say, now that you and Linda and Steve are all together again in Los Angeles, maybe you and Linda could fix Steve up with a date?”

  “Somehow I don’t think Steve needs much help in that department.” Don chuckled. “Anyway, his leave is just about up, isn’t it?”

  “Yeah, but it wouldn’t hurt to get him introduced to a nice girl,” Gold murmured. “A girl who’d lure him home more often …”

  He didn’t want to say anything about it just yet to Don, but the other night, over dinner, Steve had brought up the possibility of leaving the Air Force and coming to work at GAT. Gold, though overjoyed over the prospect of at long last getting his only son to come into the business, was doing his best to play it cool concerning the idea. He was worried that if he pushed too hard Steve would back off. It wouldn’t be the first time that had happened between father and son …

  “Well, I think that I’d like to have some private time with Linda before we start double-dating.” Don laughed. “Our romance has been pretty much progressing via the telephone these last few weeks, thanks to the rush work on the 909.”

  “I see …” Gold frowned apologetically.

  Don glanced at Gold. “I know that expression on your face only too well …”

  “I’m afraid the 909 is going to continue to keep you apart from your girlfriend for some time to come.”

  “What’s happened?” Don sighed, removing his glasses to rub the bridge of his nose.

  “I came here to tell you about it directly from my meeting with the delegation from the airlines,” Gold said. “We’ve got a big problem with them concerning the 909.”

  “The airlines reps seemed to like our airplane just fine this morning, when you gave them a tour of the prototype—”

  “They’d still like it fine if the 909 were the only game in town,” Gold muttered. “But it isn’t. The delegation told me that they’d been over at Amalgamated-Landis, where our friend Tim Campbell recently hosted a tour of a plywood mockup of his AL-12’s interior cabin.”

  “Big deal!” Don replied. “Like you just said, it’s fucking plywood! We’ve got a real, metal air
plane, just about ready to fly—”

  “Nevertheless, after his presentation Campbell was able to write some substantial orders for his jetliner,” Gold said. “Those orders he wrote are the orders that we didn’t get today.”

  “I don’t understand it—” Don began to fume.

  “Then listen a minute,” Gold said. “And you’ll understand only too well. Number one, Campbell is building the AL-12 longer and wider than our 909.”

  “That I know,” Don said. “I worked for Campbell, remember? Who do you think did the initial design work on the Al-12?”

  “Number two, the AL-12 is being touted as having transatlantic cruising capability.”

  Don’s jaw dropped. “Herman, that plane was not capable of intercontinental flight when I worked on her—”

  “Well, she is now.”

  “How did Campbell pull it off?” Don wondered, and then frowned. “I should have expected something like this. I should have warned you …”

  “No.” Gold shook his head. “Nobody knows Tim better than I …”

  And wasn’t that the truth? Gold thought bitterly. There was now such bad blood between the two of them that it was hard to believe that there had once been a time when Gold and Campbell had been business partners, and friends …

  Gold met Campbell back in 1925, during the period when Gold Aviation was suffering its setbacks. Gold needed cash, and made the rounds to the banks looking for a loan, but he found bankers’ doors that had once been open to him were now closed.

  Only a junior bank officer named Tim Campbell was willing to talk. Campbell argued convincingly that Gold Aviation was topheavy with creative types; that what was needed was a money man to keep an eye on the fiscal bottom line. Gold, thinking at the time that he had little to lose, hired Campbell, and thanks to Tim the company not only survived but also thrived, eventually going public.

  Campbell became increasingly important to GAT as the corporation’s financial dealings—and the world—became more complex. It was Campbell who expertly piloted GAT through the shoals of the Great Depression, and it was thanks to him that GAT’s air transport division expanded to become Skyworld Airlines. Gold was content to let Campbell run Skyworld, and keep financial watch over the entire company, while he and Teddy Quinn indulged themselves by hovering over their drafting tables dreaming up new airplane designs.