Roaring Thunder: A Novel of the Jet Age (16 page)

Tom’s combat status had gained him a plum assignment. He was sent to Eglin Army Air Force Base on exchange duty, test flying captured enemy fighters—a fighter pilot’s heaven. Harry had some catching up to do, and it looked like the war was running out.

• THE PASSING SCENE •

U.S. planes bomb Berlin for the first time; Soviet armies continue their advance; Monte Cassino bombed; Germany occupies Hungary; Wake Island recaptured; Rome captured; first raid by B-29s; D day, June 6 invasion of Europe; Battle of the Philippine Sea destroys remnants of Japanese Navy; assassination attempt on Hitler’s life;
The Glass Menagerie
a big hit; V-1, V-2 vengeance weapon attacks begin; huge Soviet victory on Eastern Front; MacArthur returns to Philippines; Roosevelt reelected to fourth term; Battle of the Bulge.

CHAPTER SIX

March 1, 1944, La Jolla, California

An almost palpable fog blocked the ocean view from their long porch, and to Vance Shannon that seemed perfectly appropriate, right in line with his current run of luck. He had made two important decisions after listening to his inner voice for the pros and cons of each of them and apparently had been totally wrong both times.

If I performed like this for my clients, I’d be in the county poorhouse,
he thought, cupping the mug of black coffee in his hands, and wondered what to do next. From the kitchen there came the rattle of dishes as Madeline began preparing their usual breakfast of rolls, butter, jelly, cheese, and coffee. He could have had his favorite ham and eggs if he had asked, but things were a little delicate at the moment. Madeline had opposed the two
choices he had made. He had overruled her, and she had been correct on each one.

The first was the question of her coming to live in this house. She was against it from the start, saying that Tom and Harry would regard it as an intrusion. They had grown up here with their mother, and Madeline felt her presence would jar them, perhaps even be insulting. She wanted to stay in the little apartment she had rented near the Consolidated plant when she first came to San Diego. Vance had insisted that she move to his far more comfortable home in La Jolla. To his utter surprise, both Tom and Harry had objected. Tom made a long and bitter phone call from Eglin Army Air Base. He was hurt that his father had not told him about Madeline before and very upset that she was staying in the house where his mother had raised them. The conversation ended abruptly when Tom hung up, saying, “I’ll call you later.” “Later” turned out to be almost sixty days afterward.

Harry’s letter did not arrive until two weeks after the conversation with Tom. He wrote from RAF Deenthorpe, his base in Great Britain, where he was flying a B-17 in the Eighth Air Force. The letter was long, well reasoned, temperate, but still laden with resentment for the way his father had handled things. One clue was in an offhand attempt to be facetious; Harry noted that as both his mother and Madeline had names beginning with
M,
there would be no need to change the monograms on the bath towels. The feeble attempt at humor hurt Vance more than the more thoughtful arguments.

Both boys said that they knew he was seeing someone and neither admitted to a concern about the age difference. It seemed to him that her presence in the house was the problem, and that was totally imponderable. Madeline insisted that they were dissembling.

“Darling, as clever as you are, you miss the point entirely. Age is the problem. I am supposed to become their
stepmother, and I’m not much older than they are. They resent it.”

After Harry’s letter, Madeline came straight to the point, as she always did. It was a quality that Vance had loved but was beginning to fear.

“They probably assume that I’ll take advantage of you for a few years and then leave you for a younger man. That’s what anyone would think.” If Vance and Madeline were on better terms she would probably have made a joke about it, saying, “That’s what I think, too,” or something similar. But things were too serious.

His second error was the question of marriage. Madeline pleaded that they should not marry until after the war and not even then until she and his sons had had a chance to become acquainted. On that she had said, “Why rush things? Your sons are at war, in a dangerous profession. Let’s not add to their worries. I don’t think they mind if you have a girlfriend—they know you are a vigorous, healthy man. They’ll probably boast to their comrades about you—as long as I’m not your wife and their stepmother.”

Vance also worried about a younger man attracting her, but it was not the time to admit it. Still, he was too wildly jealous to contemplate delay. He had never been more than mildly jealous of Margaret, who in her youth used to flirt harmlessly at parties just to see his color rise. It never occurred to either of them that they would ever part. Then he remembered that one time he had reacted jealously—a young wise guy named Bill Lear had patted Margaret on the bottom at a party. Vance saw red and belted him, to everyone’s acute embarrassment.

But with Madeline, he was sharply aware of their twenty-year age difference. It galled him every time he looked into a mirror, especially when he noted the incipient paunch. He was certain that sooner or later she would meet someone younger, better looking, and, though he hated to admit it, more potent than he and that this new
young love would sweep her off her feet. Every time he left on a trip, he was miserable, certain that someone would steal her away. He had insisted on setting a date, and she had at last agreed, asking only that they wait until December. Since then the very word “marriage” triggered an argument.

He wondered why he had challenged her. She had so much common sense and worked so hard. At Consolidated she had swiftly risen from a runner chasing parts on the factory floor to an employee in Reuben Fleet’s office, where her language ability was put to full use. Her English was flawless and she picked up the American idiom at once. Most of her work now dealt with foreign sales. Consolidated PBYs were being used by many other countries and were even built under license in the Soviet Union. Her fluent Russian had proved to be especially effective in dealing with the dour Soviet representatives.

Vance had become so profoundly convinced of her intelligence that he often discussed things with her that he would never have broached with Margaret. Madeline was not mechanically inclined, but she was able to pick up on the thread of his technical problems and discuss them objectively. She was a godsend in preparing his reports, correcting his grammar and spelling as she went.

There was no argument yet this morning. On awakening, they had made love as usual, not ardently but conjugally, familiarly, and at length. It had been wonderfully satisfying, but even now he was stirred as she emerged from the double doors to the kitchen, almost totally enveloped in the old pink-checked bathrobe that she invariably wore in the morning. Sated as he was, he was moved by the thought of her naked body beneath the robe, still warm and wet from the shower, and made an unkind but inevitable mental comparison. Margaret had in time grown a little heavy. Madeline was petite, just under five feet, four inches tall and weighing 110 pounds. Her figure was perfect, with small but perfectly formed breasts,
a flat stomach, and a tight, flat bottom that he reflexively caressed whenever she was within reach. And as practical and hardworking as she was, she never forgot that she was a woman, always being carefully made up, whether in the morning or late at night. Even as she approached now, he noted that the bathrobe was open at the top just enough so that he could catch the curve of her bosom. It was no accident.

Slipping her arm around his neck, she kissed him on the cheek. “Shall we eat out here, or do you want to come into the kitchen? I have a fire going in the fireplace.”

He nodded toward the kitchen, dropped his arm around her body, and pressed her to him as they moved side by side to the double doors, as happily as if they didn’t have an argument brewing.

They ate quietly for a while, her bare foot reaching under the table to rest on his ankle. After he had refused a third cup of coffee, she began the fight as formally as a matador entering the bullring, a question serving as her cape. He responded with his formulaic answers, knowing he would lose, hoping only that she didn’t demand his ear at the end.

“Have you decided what you are going to tell your sons?”

“They will be your sons, too. I’m going to tell them that we will be married in December, and that you will live here until then. It is crazy to maintain two places, and unpatriotic, too; there are lots of people who would love to have your apartment. This is wartime, we are adults, and to hell with what people think, even my own sons.”

She nodded, growing silent. He and Margaret had rarely argued, but when they did, it was at the top of their respective voices. Madeline withdrew into a quiet, impassive, and totally unnerving reserve, remaining icily courteous, never raising her voice, and somehow creating an air of menace that frightened him, not of physical harm but of the possibility that she would suddenly leave him forever.

It was a winning psychology, and he had already decided to surrender. They sat silently for a quarter of an hour. He pretended to read a magazine. She stared out the window, motionless. He hated this familiar pattern, his own private series of Munichs, but the thought of her leaving sapped his will.

With a sigh, Vance moved to her side, raised her chin in his hands, and said, “You win. Keep the apartment. I’ll deed this place over to the boys, and find somewhere else for us to stay. And if you don’t want to get married in December, we’ll wait.”

She moved slightly, slipping her robe from her shoulder. Abundantly grateful, Vance reacted as a teenager might, throwing off his robe, gathering her to him, easing her out of her chair. He would be totally unaware of the cold tile floor until his rubbed-raw knees began to ache much later in the day.

August 4, 1944, RAF Manston

Laughing like truant schoolboys, Stanley Hooker and Frank Whittle tumbled out the back door of the stately Rolls-Royce. Whittle stopped to catch his breath. The fresh air was intoxicating. He had just spent six long months in the hospital, confined with exhaustion and a crippling eczema, trying to recover from overwork and the grinding pain of seeing the British government seize his invention, his company, and his patent. He had labored to create the jet engine for more than a decade, and when he had succeeded beyond all doubt, his firm had been nationalized. The government had offered him the option of accepting a token payment of one hundred thousand pounds for his life’s work or seeing the firm simply shut down. He accepted the money reluctantly, conscious of his shareholders but bitter that all he had done should be given so little regard. Most of all he was fearful of what
engine companies, unfamiliar with turbines, would do to his masterpiece. He had already seen the Rover company muck about, ruining what he had done.

Despite the fact that his firm, Rolls-Royce, had benefited from Whittle’s research and the government’s decision, Hooker was totally sympathetic. He knew that Whittle was a genius who had succeeded where everyone else had failed, that his engines had given impetus to the development of new engines at several firms in Great Britain and the United States. They had forced creation of totally new jet aircraft types at Gloster, de Havilland, Bell, Lockheed, and elsewhere. Yet there was nothing Hooker could do now but attempt to sustain Whittle in his time of need. He had arranged this carefully planned trip so that the now almost fragile officer might see the first combat fruits of his endeavors.

The ride to the field with Hooker and the anticipation of seeing his engines in action against the enemy had buoyed Whittle’s spirits for the first time in months. Hooker kept them up with a constant stream of anecdotes about the antics of the leftist Minister of Aircraft Production, Sir Stafford Cripps, which were all the more amusing because they were true.

Manston was home to No. 616 Squadron, the first to be equipped with Gloster Meteor F.1 twin-jet fighters, powered by Rolls-Royce Welland engines, the production versions of Whittle’s W.2B jet. Wing Commander Henry Wilson greeted them and took them for an immediate tour of the flight line, where seven Meteors stood wingtip to wingtip, supplementing the squadron’s standard-issue Spitfires.