Aces (52 page)

“What are you smiling about?” Blaize grumbled.

“Can’t a girl smile?”

“Hmph,” he said, and went back to sulking.

It was close to seven o’clock by the time they got back. The plant’s parking lots were empty, and the night guards were on
duty at the main gate. They recognized Suzy’s car, and waved her through. She drove to the main building. Blaize had the door
of the car open before she’d come to a full stop.

“Suze, I—I guess, this is good-bye, then,” he mumbled, not looking at her.

She watched, dumbstruck, as he got out of the car and walked quickly—almost ran, it seemed—through the entranceway of the
building.

“Dammit!” Suzy swore. “He never even looked back! Dammit!” She put the Jaguar into reverse, backed around in a tire-screeching
turn, and then rocketed forward down the drive, toward the main gates.

He never even looked back! She wasn’t going to let him get away with that!

“Dammit!” She stepped hard on the brakes, geared down into second, and wrenched the Jag hard left. Her smoking back tires
sprayed gravel as she made a U-turn and roared back to the entrance where she’d dropped off Blaize. She skidded to a stop,
shut the engine, kicked open the Jag’s door, swung herself out of the car, slammed the door shut, and strode into the building.
She took the elevator to the design floor. It was quiet here. Everyone had quit for the day. She hurried down the corridor
to Blaize’s office. His door was closed; she opened it without knocking.

Blaize was seated at his drafting table, his head in his hands. He looked up at her with a bleak expression as she came in.

“Please, go,” he began.

“Shut up, and listen to me!” Suzy said, furious. “I’m not going to let you martyr yourself over what happened this afternoon!
Or maybe I will let you! I haven’t decided yet! But you’re definitely not going to be rid of me until I’ve given you a good
piece of my mind!—”

“Excuse me…” she heard her father say. He was standing in the doorway behind her. He looked at her, and then at Blaize. “Forgive
me for interrupting… Blaize, I could come back?…”

“No, Herman,” Blaize sighed. “That’s quite all right. Suze was just leaving… Weren’t you, Suze?”

“You don’t have to go, honey,” Herman quickly told her, coming into the office. “This will take only a minute.” He laughed
uneasily. “Actually, Blaize, I think it would be better if my daughter stayed. That way maybe you’ll keep your lid on when
you read this.”

Suzy looked on as her father handed Blaize an envelope. She watched Blaize open it, unfold the official-looking sheet of stationery,
and skim its contents.

Blaize turned white.

“What is it?” she asked fearfully.

“It’s from the office of the RAF Air Chief Marshal,” Blaize whispered before her father could reply. “It seems that I’ve been
commissioned into RAF active service, as a captain…”

“Congratulations,” Suzy said dryly.

“But that’s not all the letter says, Suze,” Blaize continued, glaring at her father as he spoke. “It goes on to say that per
the request of Herman Gold, relayed to British Air Staff through Sir Alfred Black, president of Stoat-Black Air Works, I’ve
been assigned until further notice to GAT, in order to continue scientific experimental work herewith deemed essential to
Britain’s national interest.” He crumbled the letter in his fist. “Goddamn you, Herman! You lied to me!”

“I did no such thing. I kept the deal I made with you. In exchange for one month’s work I did secure you passage on a diplomatic
flight.”

“But it was all a charade!” Blaize accused. “You tricked me into staying, and used the extra month to push through this nonsense!”

“That nonsense, as you put it, are your official orders,” Herman replied. “As an officer and a gentlemen you are expected
to obey them.”

“Damn you! You know I have no choice in that matter!” Blaize muttered.

Suzy turned her face away from Blaize, afraid that she was unable to hide the joy she was feeling over the fact that now they
would have more time together. If Blaize saw her expression he might misunderstand, and think that she was taking pleasure
in Daddy’s having outmaneuvered him.

“As for tricking you,” Daddy was saying, “I did what I felt I had to do, for the greater good. I happen to feel that your
work here on the turbine takes precedence over your desire to see combat. That letter proves that your RAF superiors agree
with me. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’ll leave you two to whatever it was you were discussing.”

“So I’m trapped, is that it, Herman?” Blaize demanded.

Her father paused in the doorway. “I took the liberty of having my secretary cancel your flight for tomorrow,” he said evenly,
no hint of triumph on his face, or in his voice. “She also called your landlord, to inform him that you’ve had a change in
plans and that you’ll be keeping your apartment. I’ll expect to see you here, bright and early, tomorrow morning. Good night,
Blaize.”

“I guess Herman Gold lets nothing stop him from getting what he wants,” Blaize growled as her father’s footsteps faded down
the corridor.

That goes double for his daughter
, Suzy thought, but she didn’t say a word. She didn’t have to. She had time.

Gold was meeting with Teddy Quinn, in Teddy’s office. Between them was a coffee table littered with production sheets and
folders containing the paperwork on old and new projects.

The P-6 BearClaw had passed all of the U.S. Army Air Corps tests and was in production. Meanwhile, GAT’s proposal for the
Combat Support One BuzzSaw light attack bomber was in Washington. The dual-engine BuzzSaw would be powered by Rogers and Simpson’s
2000-horsepower radials. Teddy’s people felt confident that she would have a top speed of approximately three hundred and
twenty-five miles per hour, and a maximum range of twelve hundred miles, while hauling a ton and a half of high explosives
in her bomb bay. The BuzzSaw would have a gun turret up top the fuselage, a tail gun compartment, and a half-dozen ports etched
into her nose for forward-firing machine guns.

Officially, no decision had yet been reached by the government concerning the CS-1 BuzzSaw, but Gold’s sources at the Defense
Department had informed him that General Henry H. “Hap” Arnold, the Air Corps chief, looked favorably on the CS-1, which meant
that she was a sure thing to be approved.

“On to new business,” Gold said. “I’ve received a lengthy correspondence from Stoat-Black. It seems they’ve been given the
go-ahead to construct a prototype aircraft for the jet engine being developed by Layten-Reese Motor Works.”

“No shit.” Teddy’s eyebrows went up. “They get good funding?”

“For England.” Gold nodded.

“What else do we know about it?”

“Quite a bit,” Gold replied. “The letter was transported via diplomatic pouch, so they felt they could be explicit about the
details. They say they’re about a year from a prototype. You can read the letter for yourself. The bottom line is they want
to know what we’ve come up with so far…”

“If by that you mean what has Blaize come up with, the answer is not very much,” Teddy said, taking off his glasses and rubbing
the bridge of his nose. “It’s hard for a fellow to come up with bright ideas when he’s expending most of his energy sulking.”

“Come on!” Gold scowled. “It’s been seven months since I had him assigned here. He can’t
still
be angry about it…”

Teddy shrugged. “Maybe it’s not so much anger as bitterness. You know as well as I do what’s been going on overseas…”

Gold nodded. In May, the routed British Expeditionary Force had been more or less successfully evacuated from Dunkirk, thanks
to the protective cover flown by the RAF. Less than a month later, France fell to the Germans, who then quickly turned their
attention to Britain. German bombers sporadically flew raids over London, and RAF Bomber Command had retaliated with a night
raid over Berlin, but the air battle began in earnest on September 7, when the Germans launched a devastating daytime air
attack on London. The city burnt for days. Since then, the Luftwaffe had been rolling in on Britain like the fog. Formations
of hundreds of German bombers and fighters filled the English sky day after day, while RAF Fighter Command valiantly struggled
to defend the country.

The
Luftflotten
, those awesome German air fleets, had the RAF outmanned and outgunned, but the British did enjoy several advantages. RAF
Fighter Command was defending home territory, which meant its planes could remain in combat longer in terms of fuel expenditure.
Also, British pilots forced to bail out could be rescued by their own side, and be back in the battle almost immediately.
The German attackers had to expend fuel crossing the Channel and then had to leave a fuel reserve in order to get home, and
if they bailed out during combat the chances were that they’d end up as P.O.W.s.

Most important, the British enjoyed the added edge given them by a state-of-the-art early warning system, the heart of which
was an electronics miracle called radar.

Gold couldn’t help feeling some pleasure in the fact that the air battle for Britain was proving right his own air combat
theories, which had been discounted by so many so-called authorities. Fighters were proving to be indispensable for air defense
and massive formations of marauding bombers were proving to be vulnerable. An efficient early warning system was proving to
be as essential to the British against the Germans in this war as it had been for the Germans against the Allies in the war
previous.

“You know as well as I do that Britain is at risk,” Teddy was saying. He paused to light a Pall Mall. “Their aircraft industry
is straining to rebuild the RAF’s fleet of Spitfires and Hurricanes and Supersharks, and hundreds of their pilots have been
killed or wounded. I read the other day that the British have recruited a couple hundred Polish and Czech fighter pilots.
How do you think that’s going to make a guy like Blaize feel, knowing his country is that desperate for pilots, and that he
could be an ace, but here he is stuck behind a desk in California?”

“I don’t know and I don’t care,” Gold said flatly. “So he’s a little upset. He’s going to have to deal with it, and then get
on with his job.”

“There’s another alternative,” Teddy said. “You know as well as I do that if you gave the word, the RAF would pull him home
and then he could get reassigned to Fighter Command.”

“But I don’t want him in combat,” Gold said. “I want him safe and sound and at his drafting table, being very bright for GAT.”

“Even if he’s miserable? If he’s not getting any worthwhile work done?”

“He’ll snap out of it,” Gold said confidently.

“On a couple of occasions I’ve caught him drinking in his office.”

Gold shook his head. “There must be some flaw in that boy… Here I’ve tried to do what was best for him—”

“How do you know what’s best for him?” Teddy challenged.

“What do you mean?”

“You heard me, so answer my question.” Teddy took a last drag of his cigarette and then ground it out in the ashtray on the
coffee table. “Wait a minute,” he added, his voice rising. “Instead of answering that one, answer
this:
What gives you the fucking right to play God?”

“I don’t get it?”

“You know what I’m talking about. There’s this bullshit concerning Blaize, and what you were trying to do to your son, forcing
him to be an engineer.”

“And Steven’s going to be one—”

“Bullshit,” Teddy said. “You had him working for me for two months, remember? I can tell you that the kid hasn’t the slightest
aptitude for it. He’s a competent mechanic, sure. He’s inherited that much from you, but that’s not enough. Trying to turn
him into an engineer is like trying to force a square peg into a round hole.”

“You hammer it hard enough, and it’ll happen,” Gold said.

“And cause a lot of damage in the process,” Teddy replied.

“Look! Don’t tell me what my kid can or can’t do!” Gold jumped to his feet. “He’ll do what I tell him! And who the fuck do
you think you’re talking to, anyway?”

“
S’cuze me, massa.”
Teddy looked up at him and smiled.

“Fuck you, Teddy,” Gold said, and stormed out.

Gold strode angrily down the corridor to the elevators, wondering where Teddy Quinn got off talking to him that way. He slammed
the elevator call button with his fist, waited a second, then slammed it again.

Nobody talked to Herman Gold that way. Nobody! Not even old friends
—

“Hi, Pop.”

Gold turned. His son, wearing a mailroom smock, was coming toward him, wheeling a cart filled with interoffice correspondence.

Steven had taken up Gold’s offer to work at GAT after school and on weekends. When his stint in Teddy’s R&D department hadn’t
worked out, Steven had transferred to the mailroom.

“Pop, can I talk to you for a minute?”

“Yeah, sure,” Gold muttered.

“I took some mail over to Brian Thomsen, the chief test pilot,” Steven began.

“I know who Thomsen is,” Gold grumbled. He was only half-listening to his son. He was still brooding over his exchange with
Teddy. The more he thought about it, the madder he got…

“Well, I was talking to him about flying, and he offered to let me try out one of the new BearClaws, if it was okay with you—”

“Godammit!” Gold exploded.

Steven flinched. “Hey, Pop, calm down—”

“I’m so fucking sick of talking about the same things over and over!”

“Why can’t I do a little test flying? I’ve been working here almost nine months, just like I said I would.”

“But you showed absolutely no interest in engineering!” Gold accused. “Probably because you wanted to spite me!” He savagely
jabbed the button: Where was the fucking elevator?

“Come on, Pop!”

“Don’t raise your voice to me!”

“It’s just that I haven’t worked for Teddy for two months now,” Steven complained. “It’s old news!”