Magnolia Gods (River Sunday Romance Mysteries Book 2) (25 page)

“Naturally I was very excited when Wall came into my office in 1942. At that meeting I was impressed with his sincerity. All that I had heard about him, his horse trading and his untrustworthiness, did not seem apparent or important.

“He talked about me, about my past exploits with seaplanes, especially when I raced with Jimmy Doolittle. He had heard about my difficulties in finding support for steam research. He said that my work was a standing joke among the manufacturers, a threat he said, that many engineering departments used on their younger engineers, the threat that they would be sent to Philadelphia to work with Captain Lawson if they did not produce elsewhere. He said that he had spent enough years in industry to know that the project that others laugh at was probably what he should look at for his company.

“It was hard for me to dislike him. In time, we regarded him as a good friend. He said all the right things to me and my people to encourage us. He told me that he had come to look at the Giant Boat and we showed him some of our dream designs. Since the only other interest we received in those days was from Navy procurement officers who begrudged us even the money to buy mineral oil for our boilers, Wall was like a savior.

“Of course we gathered around and all talked at once to try to keep him interested. No one thought in those days of what he might want from us in return. All we could think of was what he could do for us. He listened and showed great interest in our design problems, asking questions and telling us that we should be proud that we had continued the research.

“Wall became a regular visitor. The only person who did not like Wall was my secretary Becca. From the first she suspected he was not what he purported to be and that he would be a traitor to our project, sell its secrets to someone else and otherwise destroy us. She never could get along with him and in those days, I crossed it off to an unfortunate personality conflict between the two of them. She and I understood each other though, in other ways, and she was so valuable to the project with her clerical work, ordering parts, that kind of thing, that I simply avoided conflict and made sure she was sent elsewhere when Wall came around.

“Good things began to happen. The first was a complete surprise. Keep in mind that it was almost impossible to get parts for any kind of creative work. I came to work one morning, and found a Navy pilot waiting in my office. As a matter of fact he was trying to get a date with Becca when I walked in.

“’I got a plane to deliver to Captain Edward Lawson. You him?’

“I followed him down to the pier where sitting in the water was a brand new Catalina flying boat. He showed me the factory invoice. It indicated that the plane was consigned to me to use in the Giant Boat project.

“Back in my office, it wasn’t long before I got a call from Bernie Wall.

“’Do you like the PBY?’ he said, in his careful tone, as if the cologne he wore were able to come through the telephone line.

“’Yes,’ I remember blurting, as if I was a kid receiving a new bike for Christmas.

“’You’ll have more coming next week.’

“He was right. A set of matched steam turbines arrived, for us to install in place of the radial gasoline engines that were on the Catalina.

“Wall called, ‘You like your new turbines?’

“Before I could answer, he continued, ‘I’ll take the old engines and try to get some of Aviatrice’s corporate money back. You just get her to fly with the turbines.’

“We went to work with every minute we could spare. Every design element for steam propulsion that we had conceived now went to paper and then to installation. We had all the equipment we needed. Wall had given us everything. We had to design the steam generators and the condensers and had to figure out how to control the variety of pressures to make the unit work flawlessly. Keep in mind, we were competing with very advanced piston engines and the early jet turbines that were just coming into existence. Of course, at the same time, we were doing our regular assignments too.

“Not long after we began making our first flight tests, I began to lose, one by one, my assistant engineers. In the crunch for men with technical skills, which is what I was told by higher ups, they were reassigned to combat status. Their lives ended quickly after that. They were sent to the Pacific, and I got word that they were killed in sea battles. This horror was just months before the atom bomb attacks and the end of the war. Before they were killed, Wall tried all he could to get them back but to no avail. He and I both spent precious hours telephoning everyone we knew in the Navy trying to get those orders changed.

“With what I know about Wall, I suspect that he had them sent out on purpose. While I doubt that he knew they would be killed, he was perfidious enough to take the chance that they would be killed. His purpose, I think, was to leave me the lone remaining expert, the sole engineer who knew the final secrets of the plane and the only one with whom he would have to deal.

“Wall knew in advance what I did not know. The Navy didn’t want steam research. That was made clear in the months after the war when the Navy administrators endlessly made sure that I knew that all my time had to be documented. No time was to be allotted to steam plane research. Yet this very recalcitrance on the part of the Navy to adopt new ideas, was exactly what Wall was counting on, only I did not realize this at the time.

“The Magnolia Whispers was a remarkable seaplane. Using new types of steel and aluminum we had not known in the early days, we built a plane with a very low power to weight ratio, one that was competitive with internal combustion alternatives. The plane had steam generators or what the reader may think of as boilers, several of them in the wings near the turbines. The condensers, a special design that was the result of our years of testing, were hundreds of times more efficient, and were built in the wings like small radiators below the turbines and out along the wings. Water and fuel were distributed throughout the plane fuselage, wings, and hull so that weight was balanced. When she flew, the steam system developed far more power with less weight than the old radial engines it replaced. One day I noticed in flight that I quickly left behind a comparable normally powered Catalina, almost as though he were standing still! I think the other pilot must have thought I had jet engines in my wings. The use of multiple boilers provided redundancy in case of generator or boiler failure so that steam from only part of the steam generators could keep the plane flying at full speed for an extended time. The boiler piping was so simple that leaks would only affect a small amount of steam production. The plane was silent, and although we once touted the advantage of silence in attacks, it provided little advantage in the new days of radar. It was still a boon to land based airfields where the noise of planes approaching was becoming anathema to local residents. Another feature was the capability of reversing the propellers which gave the ship a powerful ability to land in small spots. Also, due to the instant nature of steam power, Magnolia Whispers had the ability to take off on short runways without waiting for power to climb to take off revolutions as in internal combustion power plants. Of great importance, the steam plant could operate on non-explosive mineral oil fuel which made the plane a lot safer. All in all, the plane had significant value compared to internal combustion or jet powered planes. On top of that, it was easy to operate. I could fly it by myself.

“Wall had begun to show his true purpose. He claimed the plane for his company since the Navy seemed to have no interest in it. To me, this meant all our work would no longer belong to the United States. As a Navy officer my work had always been done for the benefit of the country. During the war this was not a question, but now I worried about what was going to happen. Moreover, Aviatrice stood to make great profits from this work I had done willingly for my country. I had not planned to make Wall rich.

“I worried that the plane would be taken away from my laboratory. I made sure that I monitored her storage myself. When it was not inside the hanger, it was carefully locked at the pier or on the tarmac. When the plane was outside only a few men came near it and they were unaware of what it was. I fueled the plane myself.

“On top of this the atom bomb had been exploded. I realized that Wall had considered nuclear power all along and had seen our Giant Boat, our Magnolia Whispers, as a potential atomic airplane, our steam system something that could be powered by the fuel of nuclear energy rather than our old fashioned mineral oil. This would not have bothered me during the war. However, I realized he had been scheming to use our work as a new weapon and, with his sales skills, to sell it to any nation with money. The use of this new type of bomber would be a great risk to peace in the world, a great destabilization.

“June 29 1946

“I was sure that Bernie Wall had changed for the worse. He came often to my lab ranting about how evil the Nazis had been, trying to impress me with his plans, to convince me to follow him, to give my engineering knowledge to his business empire. After what he had seen and experienced in Europe, he said he didn’t want to end up like the German leaders, to which he was apparently comparing himself. He knew how to take power and said he didn’t intend to make mistakes like that unfortunate country had. He felt he had learned not to overextend himself, not to aggravate powerful enemies, not to lose any war, as he put it. He was more aggressive. He no longer joked about anything. He was efficient, cold like steel. To my mind, listening to him rave, I knew Bernie had lost his perspective and had become like the people he had helped destroy. He used to talk like a man who had dreams of excellence. He now talked about building up his own treasure, his own empire in Aviatrice. He had fooled all of us, except, of course, Becca. What had made him into such a beast, I shall never know but I suspect it was the evil that he had seen. It had taken over his mind. He had been tainted and could never regain the purity, the naiveté that he needed to be the truly beneficent man that we mistakenly thought him to be. It was as though the Biblical Satan had shown Bernie all the empires of the world and he had succumbed to the temptation. I do think he had met a woman in London that he talked of for a few days, and then strangely never mentioned again. When I asked about her, his face showed the pain that I became accustomed to in this man, the lines of anguish in his face. He had apparently been betrayed by her. Perhaps that experience had something to do with turning him into the beast he became.

“After he returned the last time from London, he brought along a new man who was to be my assistant. Hiram Jones. A Navy man, but not really. In fact, I suspect Hiram will quickly become a civilian engineer working closely with Aviatrice to build steam aircraft for the future. He’s a panicky kind of fellow without much flying experience but a tremendous regard for Bernie Wall, a loyalty that Wall must admire. Bernie wasn’t like this in the old days. He wasn’t the type to admire sycophants. With his new goals and personality, he seems to need that unquestioning loyalty. Hiram snapped to attention in front of me as he was being introduced and I swear I thought I noted a little of our former German enemy in this man’s manner, almost to the click of the heels of his boots.

“Hiram smashed around the lab. I gave him some simple tasks to do, mostly with the catapult programs. He could not get into trouble there. I kept the steam plane as far away from him as I could. Hiram wasn’t a good engineer. I watched his frustration. He would walk around the room, waving his hands in the air, because he could not understand simple concepts. He did not have the capability to understand the designs. The only one who could understand was Wall and I made sure he did not have the new drawings. I waited and hoped that Wall would change back, become his old self again, which seemed to be a better person than he was now, be worthy of the new designs because I could not righteously give them to him just so they would become part of his treasure.

“Becca, my secretary, of course, as usual saw right through Hiram. She could not stand to be in the same room with him and he knew it. He, in turn, did not like her and I feared what would happen to her if I was not around. I told her to play stupid if she had to in the future, so that he could not get her information. Becca did not understand the designs but she knew where everything was and I wanted her to keep that to herself.

“June 30, 1946.

“My thoughts today were of my wonderful wife. I had arranged to get her some tickets to New York. I thought that we should get away for a few days, if only I could get her to leave the farm. She never came up to the quarters at the Naval Factory anymore. It was as though she had found some security on our Maryland farm that I could not share with her, or perhaps it was the same security that I found flying over the ocean in Magnolia Whispers. At any rate, I thought that New York would be a good way for us to begin these next few years now that the war was over.

“It seemed only a short time since the day when we were in the small River Sunday hospital and my son was born. I prayed at the time that he would follow the land as she had and not take up airplanes and the problems of the world as I have. Of course, I hoped that he would not ever be in war. As noble as my Navy career has been, it has taken me far from my home and my family and cost me much more than just time. It cost me the comfort of all those years of closeness and love that a family could have been for me. These purposes in life, these quests, rob the stuff of life. They take over like a drug and demand all my energy.

“July 2 1946