The Fly Boys Page 8

  Gold winced as he put the car in gear and drove through the opened gate. He felt like kicking himself for forgetting that Luddy had recently been knighted in appreciation for his work in the national interest. Gold had chatted with Luddy a number of times at the conference, but had yet to offer the man his congratulations on his knighthood.

  The road had become a single, paved ribbon through a sea of muddy pastureland. The compound reminded him of the Hoovervilles—the slummy campsites—that had dotted California during the depression. Crowding both sides of the road were parked cars and canvas-sided lorries. Set back were a number of metal trailers—caravans, the British called them. The trailers were painted dark green, but in this damp climate nothing metal lasted for long. The trailers were blotched with rust. They all had gray smoke pouring out of their stovepipe chimneys. The smoke was mixing with the steady rain to form a suffocating haze.

  Now and then Gold glimpsed a face at a trailer’s curtained window, but with the rain falling, the only people he saw outdoors were the armed guards patrolling with leashed attack dogs that went into a lunging, fang-baring frenzy as the MG rolled past.

  He pulled up in front of the only building in the compound that fitted the guard’s description, and got out of the MG. Off in the distance, behind the sprawling, pale green HQ, he could see a number of windowless hangars clustered at the head of a single, concrete airstrip. The airstrip was empty, but then this wasn’t flying weather.

  Gold went up the steps and tried the front door. It was open. He stepped inside a small anteroom with a worn red linoleum floor and dingy white walls. The room was crowded with wooden office furniture and dark green metal filing cabinets, and smelled of coal smoke and wet wool. A young, rather horse-faced woman with dark brown hair was seated behind a desk. She looked up at Gold and smiled.

  “I’m Herman Gold, here to see Sir Hugh.”

  “Welcome, Mr. Gold,” she said brightly, standing up. She was wearing a rust-colored tweed skirt suit, white knee socks, and low-heeled oxfords. She had wonderfully huge breasts that were inflating the front of her ruffled white blouse. “May I take your coat and hat?” As she reached for them, Gold glimpsed the butt of a pistol in a shoulder holster underneath her tweed jacket.

  The woman caught him staring at her chest. “I do hope it’s my gun that has captured your eye?” she said primly, but with a hint of amusement.

  “I’ve always been an admirer of massive firepower.”

  She laughed as she placed his coat and hat in a closet. “If you’ll follow me, I’ll take you to Sir Hugh’s office.”

  Gold followed her down a winding, narrow hallway lit by naked bulbs that had been hastily strung along the ceiling. The building was a warren of doorless cubbyhole-sized offices. Behind a few of the desks were men and women in RAF uniforms, but most of the people were in civvies. Gold wondered if everyone in here was carrying a gun. Maybe that was the secret to staying warm in England: packing heat. Nobody looked cold, damn them, while Gold could see his own breath. He was wearing a dark blue cashmere turtleneck sweater and a heavy wool gray suit over long underwear. Even his black rubber-soled shoes were fleece lined, but his nose was running, his fingers and toes were numb, and it was all he could do to keep his teeth from chattering.

  The woman stopped in front of a plain wooden door, knocked once, and then opened it, standing aside to let Gold enter. It was a large room and slightly warmer, thanks to the ticking coal stove tucked in one corner. There was a braided oval rug taking up most of the scuffed wooden floor, and, against the walls, freestanding steel shelving haphazardly piled with papers and books.

  Luddy was seated behind an oak desk with his back to the room’s single window with its view of the airstrip. On the desk was a telephone, a single, large manila folder, and a fat black cat reclining like a sphinx as it looked at Gold with disinterested, mustard-yellow eyes.

  “Hello, old chap,” Luddy said, standing up. “Thanks so much for coming.”

  Luddy was bandy-legged like a bulldog, and like a bulldog, gave the impression of being shorter than he was wide. He had a closely trimmed auburn beard and a matching corona of shoulder-length brown curls around a high, bald dome. You could take Luddy just as he looked—except maybe exchange his heather tweeds and knee-high cordovan walking boots for Elizabethan-period tights and a doublet—and he’d be just right to play Falstaff.

  “Hugh, or I guess I should say, Sir Hugh, I haven’t had a chance to congratulate you on your knighthood.”

  “One does that kneeling on one knee,” Luddy observed quietly.

  “Pardon?”

  Luddy laughed richly, holding up his hand and shaking his head. “Just indulging in a giggle, lad. Pay it no mind.” He glanced behind him as the wind rattled the window in its frame. The glass was being pelted by rain. “The weather is so dreadful, Herman! Was it very terrible finding your way here?” he sighed sympathetically, rolling his blue eyes.

  “It was certainly inconvenient, Hugh,” Gold nodded. “What’s with all the soldiers and guns and guard dogs? What do you do out here in the middle of nowhere?”

  “This is where we did all of the important work on our Sky Terrier jet fighter,” Luddy explained. “We want to stay well out of the public eye to guard against the possibility of Jerry seeking us out for a bombing raid. There’s a strict no-visitors policy in effect here. You’ll never know how many arms I had to twist to allow you to visit. That’s why you had to do your own driving, dear man. If we had sent around an official car, it might have been noticed by the others at the conference who are staying at the same hotel. There would have been questions, and perhaps jealous complaints about what courtesies Stoat-Black was extending to you but denying the others. And, of course, having a cab bring you out here was out of the question. The local police have been quite cooperative about enforcing the no-trespassing laws. The public has learned to give the area a wide berth. We’d rather not have a cabbie spoil the status quo with blather about what he’d discovered at the far end of Crowell Lane, inciting the adventurous to come see for themselves.

  “But why all the secrecy in the first place, Hugh?” Gold asked. “Why couldn’t we have met at the Stoat-Black offices in town?”

  “As I said, we’d rather the other Yanks who are attending the conference not know about this little tête-à-tête. They would be very jealous, Herman. It would certainly weaken Stoat-Black’s working relationships with those firms in the future. You’ll understand why in a moment.”

  “Okay, so what’s this all about?” Herman demanded.

  “Our respective futures, dear lad, and the future of commercial aviation.”

  Luddy opened his blue eyes wide to emphasize his melodramatic statement. The cat watched approvingly. Probably taking notes on technique, Gold thought.

  “Stoat-Black believes it has something very special in the works,” Luddy continued. “Something GAT will want to become involved with on the ground floor, as it were.”

  “Another joint effort between Stoat-Black and GAT….” Gold nodded, his interest piqued. “Well, we’ve certainly done well by each other in the past.”

  Gold had first met Luddy back in 1936, when Gold had been in England unsuccessfully trying to sell the British airlines on the GAT Monarch GC-3 airliner. The British airline executives had wanted to buy, but for political reasons they were wedded to their own British-built airplanes, despite the fact that they were slower and more expensive to operate than GAT’s GC series. Gold had found a way around the problem by subcontracting to Stoat-Black the assembly of GAT airliners for British and European markets. The association had turned out to be both pleasant and profitable for both sides. Since then, the two companies had successfully collaborated on a seaplane project for the RAF’s Coastal Command, and a single-engine fighter that had been dubbed the Supershark in England, and the BearClaw in America.

  “Come around beside me,” Luddy said, shooing away the cat in order to spread wide the manila folder on the desk. “I want
to show you the plans for a new airliner, one that will shrink the globe, and in the process render every other commercial airliner obsolete—including your commendable Monarch GC series.”

  Gold scanned the blueprints and then turned his attention to an artist’s rendering of a large, streamlined airliner with four engine pods—jet engine pods—built right into the wings for maximum aerodynamic efficiency.

  “My God, she’s lovely,” Gold breathed.

  “Aye, lad, that she is,” Luddy chuckled appreciatively. “You’re looking at the SB-100 Starstreak, the big bird that will carry Stoat-Black to preeminence in the world of aviation. She’ll carry thirty-two passengers and a crew of six at a cruising speed of five hundred miles an hour, with a range of seventeen hundred miles, and she’ll do it all as quietly as I’m whispering to you now, lad.”

  Gold nodded. “Because she’s jet propelled there’ll be less engine noise, and no numbing vibration the way there is with piston-engine liners. But I don’t see how you can expect that kind of range from those jet engines. How could she every carry enough fuel to feed four thirsty engines for that amount of time?”

  Luddy chuckled. “The secret’s in getting the engines to operate at high altitudes. Every sort of engine operates the same way: by burning a mixture of air and fuel. Up high—let’s say thirty thousand feet or better—the air is thin. Thin air means the engines burn less fuel—”

  “And while the engines might be producing less power at high altitudes, it won’t matter,” Gold noted quickly. “Because it takes less power to move an airplane through thin air!”

  “There you have it, lad,” Luddy said.

  “It’s a swell solution to the fuel consumption problem, all right,” Gold said, “but it brings with it a whole new slew of problems. For example, no pressurized cabin has ever had to withstand the stresses of cruising at those altitudes.”

  “Every problem has a solution.”

  “You’re ready to build this?” Gold demanded. “Now?”

  “No, not now,” Luddy said. “But we have the basic technology, thanks to what we’ve learned putting together the Sky Terrier.”

  “Who would build your engines?”

  “Layten-Reese,” Luddy replied. “The same firm that built the Terrier’s engines.”

  “What’s your projected schedule?”

  “Right now all our resources are tied up in the Sky Terrier. As we begin to see profits, we’ll siphon the money into the Starstreak. From start-up we figure two years of research and development.”

  “Two years alone spent on R&D!” Gold laughed.

  “Maybe longer,” Luddy shrugged. He took a bent-stemmed briar pipe and a brown leather tobacco pouch out of the patch pocket of his tweed suit coat. “We don’t want to rush this, Herman. We don’t want any mistakes. This is to be a commercial airliner—a passenger plane—utilizing new, not completely understood technology. We want to make very sure that all the bugs are ironed out of our prototypes before the actual plane is put into service. We don’t want any doubts on the part of the public concerning safety and reliability.”

  “Of course,” Gold said, thinking back to 1925 and the crash of his German-built, Spatz F-5a airliner. That crash killed ten people and the attendant bad publicity almost killed his fledgling air transport company. And then there was the 1931 Fokker Trimotor crash that killed Knute Rockne, among others, and caused the grounding of all Fokkers, and a tremendous, thankfully temporary, public backlash against air travel.

  “We intend to overbuild the Starstreak,” Luddy said, tamping his pipe. “We want to promote her as the most vigorously tested aircraft in history. Obviously that’s going to require tremendous financial resources. The British government will help with that to some degree, but we’d very much like GAT assisting.”

  “You’re looking for investment capital?” Gold asked.

  “We do want your money,” Luddy began, “but we also want your expertise.” He paused to strike a match and get his pipe going. “Virtually all of Stoat-Black’s design experience has been in building military aircraft. We’ve learned a great deal during the time we spent assembling your Monarchs, but we don’t pretend to have GAT’s experience in constructing commercial airliners,” he finished, exhaling smoke.

  Gold nodded, trying hard not to let it show that he was smarting over the fact that Luddy was lauding GAT’s talent at constructing, not designing airliners. “I need some time to go over these specs before I can give you an answer about whether GAT wants to buy in. And I’ll need to bring other people into the decision-making process. Teddy Quinn, for example.”

  “Of course, Herman,” Luddy said. He closed the manila folder, removed a large brown clasp envelope from a desk drawer, and slipped the folder inside. “This set of plans is yours to take home with you to California.” He handed it to Herman. “Study it at your leisure. I’ll be looking forward to hearing from you. I only ask that you, and any of your staff you may consult with, respect our secrecy concerning the Starstreak project.”

  “I understand,” Gold said. “Thank you for offering GAT the opportunity to consider coming into a partnership with you,” Gold said.

  “No thanks are necessary, Herman. GAT helped put Stoat-Black on the map, and now it’s time for us to return the favor.”

  Meaning you think GAT is a has-been, Gold thought. Luddy, wreathed in an aromatic, blue pipe smoke, was grinning like a Cheshire cat. “I’ll think very seriously about this,” Gold told him.

  “You do that, lad. But just so there’s no misunderstanding, let me say one last thing.” Luddy grew very serious. “It would be grand to have your experts—and funding—but we mean to proceed with the Starstreak, with or without your help.”

  “I understand the situation.”

  “Do you?” Luddy persisted, looking quizzical. “We’re old friends, so I know you won’t take it amiss when I say that it’s no secret that GAT has fallen flat with its own jet fighter project,” Luddy confided as he walked Gold to the door.

  “Hugh, it’s a temporary setback—” Gold started to protest.

  “Herman! You don’t need to trot out the excuses for me!” Luddy patronized. “It’s a natural law, you see! What comes up must come down! GAT has been enjoying grand success for many years now, but no one can forever remain king of the mountain. Now it looks as if it’s going to be Stoat-Black’s turn to enjoy the view,” Luddy said smugly, patting Gold’s shoulder. “Lad, you grab on to our coattails while you can.”

  (Two)

  On his way back to London Gold stopped at a roadside pub for a bite to eat. Inside, the pub was all dark mahogany and polished brass. Gold found a small table near the roaring fire and ordered a plowman’s lunch and a pint of ale.

  He watched a dart game in progress between the locals while he ate. He tried to put it out of his mind, but he couldn’t help thinking about what Luddy had intimated.

  “You’ve fallen flat on your face…. Your day has passed…. GAT had better grab on to Stoat-Black’s coat-tails while it can….”

  At one time in the not very distant past, Luddy’s condescension would have infuriated him, but not these days. Truth was, Gold found himself agreeing with Luddy. GAT was falling fast. His organization seemed to have run out of creativity, and ideas were the lifeblood of flourishing business. How long had it been since he’d felt the enthusiasm—the fire—that had been in Luddy’s eyes when he’d been talking about the Starstreak?

  Gold couldn’t help thinking that the way things looked now, it was only a matter of time until GAT did scrape bottom, unless this Starstreak deal served to somewhat break the fall.

  And that wasn’t just his opinion….

  Gold nursed what remained of his ale as he thought about the last letter he and Erica had received from Steven. The kid was doing really well. In the past few months, Steven’s squadron had taken part in the invasions of Bougainville and the Green Islands, helping the Navy and the Marines to close the ring around Rabaul. Steven was now bet
ter than a double ace, with twelve kills to his credit. Hell, three more and he’d be a triple, Gold thought, proud of his son.

  He wondered if Steven was destined to best his own score in the First World War? Gold had twenty confirmed kills to his credit. He hoped Steven did better. Let him stay alive to best me, Gold thought, rapping his knuckles against the worn, varnished tabletop to insure Steven’s good luck. It could only be a pleasure to have his record broken by his son.

  Thinking about it, it puzzled Gold that with such a high score, Steven was still only a first lieutenant. He’d heard that promotions came fast to successful combat pilots. Gold also wondered why his son never mentioned any buddies he might have made.

  But then, his son had always been a loner, Gold mused. A certain amount of that was good—it showed independence—but too much was bad. A fighter pilot needed friends to protect his back during combat, and to help him blow off tension between the battles.

  What most stuck in Gold’s mind from his son’s last letter home was how Steven had raved about his Thunderbolt fighter. The kid had written that he’d wished Gold could fly the plane in order to experience its raw power. In his letter Steven had wondered why GAT wasn’t building them like that.

  Gold had hidden it from Erica, but God, how it had hurt to have his own son ask such a thing. Gold could read between the lines. What Steven was saying was that he thought GAT couldn’t build a fighter that good.

  Gold paid his bill and left the pub. He got back into the MG and continued on to London. He felt listless and discouraged, sick at heart and almost unwilling to try anymore for fear of suffering further humiliating failure. There was a knack to success. Gold couldn’t shake the gnawing suspicion that his knack had been lost.

  Gold was going to have to face the reality of his situation. GAT might well survive the immediate future by hanging on to Stoat-Black’s coattails, but it looked as if times had changed.

  It looked as if times had passed him by.