Roaring Thunder: A Novel of the Jet Age (27 page)

Harry heard his contracts officer gasp—he was giving the farm away on this deal. But there would be other deals in the future, and he wanted to have Cobham on his side.

Four days later, back in the United States, Harry briefed Colonel Boyd on his mission.

“Looks pretty complicated to me, Shannon.”

“It is complicated, the fuel flow rate is too slow, and it won’t work for fighters. But we can stick it on our B-29s and get some experience, and perhaps come up with a better system. Let me show you some rough drawings I made on the trip back. They are crude, but they’ll give you the idea.”

He handed Boyd a sheaf of papers, ashamed at his poor artwork but aware that it told enough of the story to intrigue the colonel.

“See, this is a rigid refueling installation, but it’s still
flexible because it is flown by an operator, and the refueling tube retracts and extends to make it easier to maintain contact. It means that the refueler and the airplane being fueled will have to fly in close formation, maybe thirty or forty feet apart, but we do that every day.”

“How does the operator move this tube—it looks like a crane boom; call it a boom—around?”

“Well, there’s plenty of airflow of course, so he could use two little airfoils, about like a Bonanza’s tail, fastened on the end of the boom. Should be easy to learn to do.”

Boyd nodded his head in agreement. “You talk to your dad about this yet?”

“No, I did not think I should since he’s under contract to Boeing and they are looking into in-flight refueling themselves.”

“Well, I’m directing you to talk to him. There has to be a better solution than Cobham’s—maybe your idea is it. I don’t know anybody better than your dad and George Schairer to decide if it is or it isn’t, but in any case, they can come up with something better if it’s not. I’m not worried about the economics or the competition or the restraint of trade or any other goddamn business problem. I want to have a system where one plane squirts a hell of a lot of gas into another in a hurry. Otherwise there’s no damn point in having jets at all.”

“I’ll give him a call tonight.”

Boyd exploded, “You will not! You’ll get your ass in an airplane and go up and talk to him in person. This is top-secret material, even if it hasn’t been formally classified as such yet. I want you up in Seattle by Monday.”

Anna had been delighted to see Harry when he returned, and he expected her to be upset by his leaving almost immediately for Seattle.

“No, I understand. Business is business. But you can take me out to the O Club for dinner tonight, and maybe stay for a little dancing.”

Even though he was dead tired from the round-trip to England, behind work at the office, and needing to prepare for the cross-country trip to Seattle, Harry agreed. He had been neglecting Anna and she needed to be spoiled a bit.

“Have you heard from Marie?”

“Yes, she’s having one of her spells. She says she was pregnant and lost the baby, but I doubt it. I suspect she’s just looking for sympathy.”

Harry was stunned. He had never heard her talk about Marie—or anyone—with such calculated coldness. “Is there some problem? Is there something I ought to be telling Tom?”

“You can tell him that I lived with her for a long time and now it’s his turn.”

The evening at the Officers Club was much different from their first night. The food was the same, and at first Harry thought it was Anna’s comments. Then he realized that his wife was enjoying herself just a little too much with some of the people. It was clear from the quick, casual conversations with passing people, officers alone and couples, that she was not spending lonely nights at home while he was away.

“Anna, you sure as hell seem to have a lot of friends here. Do you come to the club by yourself when I’m gone?”

“Of course I do! What else am I going to do? Knit?”

“Well, you might get a job. We could use the money, and you wouldn’t be bored.”

“You’re right about that. I’m just wasting time during the day. I’ll see what I can do; there’s always something opening up. But even if I work during the day, I’m not going to spend the nights at home listening to the radio while you are off flying around the world. Don’t you trust me?”

He patted her hand. “Of course I trust you. But I’m jealous, too.”

She laughed and said, “I’m glad you are.” He toyed with the idea of saying something about her having had three Manhattans but decided against it. He had pressed pretty far tonight already.

• THE PASSING SCENE •

Allies use Airlift to offset Berlin Blockade; Pancho Gonzales becomes men’s singles champ. Harry S. Truman wins Presidency in his own right; T. S. Eliot wins Nobel Prize for Literature; Count Folke Bernadotte killed by Jewish terrorists.

CHAPTER NINE

June 30, 1948, Seattle, Washington

Boeing always arranged for its minor-league visitors to stay downtown at the Windsor Hotel, an establishment that walked a fine line between being merely seedy and illegal. The rooms were clean, and in the basement the Tiki Bar featured entertainment every night, including a rotating lineup of amateur and professional ladies who were happy to meet visitors from out of town. The food—steaks and a pretty good take on Trader Vic’s faux Chinese—was not bad, however, and the Windsor was centrally located and cheap. The scanty per-diem-paid military types covered the hotel bill and one or two meals a day, so even the more fastidious guests didn’t complain about the women who wore a shade too much makeup.

Tom had picked Harry up at McChord Field, where he had flown in a T-33, and started back on the long, wet ride from Tacoma to the Windsor.

“Is it always raining like this?”

“Pretty much, but you get used to it, and when it’s not, it is so spectacularly beautiful that you won’t believe it.”

Then they got started on their mutual tales of marital woe.

“I tell you, Harry, I cannot understand it. You remember what a hot little number Marie was before we got married? We damn near had our wedding night on the day we met—and we would have, too, if it hadn’t been for the bodyguard of brothers.”

“You say she’s turned cold?”

“Frigid. But that’s not the worst of it. I think she’s losing her mind.”

“Come on, Tom; not wanting to sleep with you doesn’t mean she’s crazy.”

“Oh, she wants to sleep with me all right; she’s like a goddamn octopus at night, asleep, but crawling all over me. But if I lay a hand on her, getting serious, you know, she wakes up and freezes. But that’s not it. She’s gotten super-religious. Not just being a good Catholic, but praying all the time, and praying in the bathroom, as if it were an altar.”

“Run that by me again?”

“Just that. She’s got a crucifix rigged up in the bathroom, like in every room of the house, but she goes in there and kneels by the bathtub and prays, for hours. If I say something, call her to dinner, try to get her to go out, she just gets up and locks the door. Then when she comes out, she acts almost normal. You’d never know it, if you happened by after one of her prayer sessions. But they are getting more and more frequent. It’s a damn good thing we happened to move into a place with two bathrooms, or I’d be out of luck.”

“Wow. I thought I had problems. Have you had her to a doctor?”

“Not yet. She gets furious if I even mention it. I’ve got to do it, but I don’t want her to be hysterical about it.”

“Have you talked to her family? Her dad, Lou, needs to know about this.”

“Same thing. She says if I complain to her family she’ll
kill herself. I don’t believe she would, but it’s clear she has some mental problems. And to tell you the truth, Lou would probably blame me right off the bat. He’s a nice guy, but when it comes to his family, you know how rigid he is. But the funny thing is, she keeps saying that she is going to leave me and go back to her family. I ask her why, and she just says, ‘That’s what Jesus wants me to do.’ ”

“Well, Lou has to know about this, right away, because if she just shows up on his doorstep, he’ll think you drove her out. Worse, she might hurt herself, or you. I’m really sorry to learn about this, Tom, but I did have a hint from Anna. She said that Marie said she was pregnant and lost the baby, but Anna laughed it off, saying Marie was always being dramatic. Is there any chance that she wasn’t fibbing?”

“There’s no chance that she was pregnant, at least by me.”

“I don’t know much about having babies or losing them, either.”

“And, sad to say, after being married a year, I don’t even know anything about making them.”

Harry laughed. Tom always exaggerated. “Have you told Dad?”

Tom paused to curse at a trailer-truck spraying water from its eighteen wheels like a fire hose and taking up more than half of the well potholed Route 99, before saying, “Not yet. He’s got his own problems with Madeline. She refused to come with him on this trip, even though she loves Seattle. I don’t know what their problems are and he sure as hell is not going to tell us, but it looks like you are the only guy in the family with a woman who’s not giving him problems.”

Harry laughed. “I wish! But I’m not sure I really have a problem. I know Anna is drinking more than I think she should, but I’m a blasted prude as you know. I don’t
think she’d be unfaithful, but she seems to be awfully popular at the Officers Club.”

Tom shook his head. “No, she’s been brought up like Marie; she’d never fool around. She’s just telling you she doesn’t like you being away so much.”

“I hope you’re right.”

They began talking about the prospects of war. A second ring of the Iron Curtain had dropped on June 24, encircling Berlin, already deep within Soviet-occupied Germany. The battered city of 3 million war-torn souls was blockaded by the Soviet Union in an attempt to force the Western Allies—Great Britain, France, and the United States—to leave. The United States, unable to respond on the ground against the thirty Soviet divisions in the area, made a decision to airlift supplies into the beleaguered city. Moscow relished the idea—it had seen the catastrophic failure of the German airlift at Stalingrad, where only a few hundred thousand troops had to be fed. With the railroads, roads, and canals all shut down, they knew it would be impossible to supply the city by air, and welcomed the chance to have the Allies fail.

“Harry, I know this sounds rotten, but I’m thinking about volunteering to go back in the Marines, or maybe even the Air Force, if I can work a transfer. It’s cowardly, but maybe Marie would be better off with her family. I’m obviously the problem, or sex with me is obviously the problem, I don’t know which. Going back into the service might help us both. This Berlin Airlift is a worthwhile thing, if it works, but if it doesn’t the country is going to be calling for experienced pilots again.”

Their father could not get to the Windsor to see them that night—there was an emergency meeting on the B-47 program that he had to attend—but he made arrangements for them both to meet with him at George Schairer’s office in the morning.

The next morning they walked through the Boeing plant,
escorted by a Boeing security man. Vance said, “It’s like a tomb. Four years ago this place was throbbing with B-17s, rolling them out the door, ten, fifteen, or more a day. It’s sad to see all this vacant space.”

George Schairer met them at the door to his Spartan office. He was a prototypical Boeing executive, always immaculately dressed in a good but not too expensive suit, wearing a white shirt and conservative tie, with shoes highly polished. He was balding, with close-cropped hair, and his eyes gleamed with ferocious intelligence behind his rimless glasses. Like Ed Wells, Bill Allen, and the rest of the top Boeing personnel, Schairer was always the soul of quiet courtesy. So although he was expecting to meet only with Vance Shannon, he showed nothing but pleasure on finding that both Tom and Harry were to attend. His voice had a measured metallic sound, and he talked as if his brain were a slide rule measuring every syllable for exactitude.

“Mr. Schairer, you’ve met my boy Tom, but I’d like to introduce Harry. He’s just been to England to work with Alan Cobham on some aerial refueling ideas, and I wondered if you could spare him half an hour to tell you about it.”