The Fly Boys (10 page)

When at last his period of agony at the podium had ended and he was able to return to his seat, he’d reminded himself that
the only reason he’d decided to show up was because GAT’s absence from these proceedings would have been the greatest admission
of failure of all.

Gold slowed down the MG. Ahead, a sheepherder in a bright yellow slicker and thigh-high black rubber waders was taking his
time guiding his muddy flock across the roadway. Gold waited, goosing the idling engine to keep it from stalling, impatiently
tapping the steering wheel as he listened to the rhythmic groans of the impotent wipers. The sheep were sauntering along single
file, for chrissake. He glanced at his wristwatch. According to the directions he’d been given over the telephone, he should
have been there by now, he thought sourly, wondering if he was lost.

The road cleared and he continued driving, slowing down at every intersection to check the signs. He saw the sign for his
turnoff—
Crowell Lane
—as he was about to pass it. He quickly checked his rear-view mirror to make sure that there was no one behind him and then
double-clutched a downshift as he threw the little car into a hard right turn. The MG seemed to go over on its two right wheels
for an instant, and then its rear end fishtailed, spraying mud and gravel. Gold steered into the skid, straightened out, and
continued on, ignoring the sign that announced the road was closed.

He drove for another two miles along the curving lane. It was only one car wide, and the thick, high hedges on both sides
made the road even more claustrophobic. Gold felt like he was traveling through an undulating trench. It was enough to make
even an old ex–fighter pilot carsick. He hoped he didn’t run into anybody coming from the opposite direction, because he wasn’t
about to back up.

The road widened as he came to a high barbed-wire gate across the lane, guarded by a pair of sodden-looking British soldiers
armed with Sten submachine guns. Gold came to a stop and unsnapped the MG’s side curtain as one of the soldiers came around.

“Sorry, sir, but you’ll have to turn around,” the soldier began. “This is a restricted area.”

“My name’s Herman Gold. Would you check with Hugh Luddy, please? I’m expected.”

The soldier nodded. “Yes, Mr. Gold. We were told to expect you. Might I see some identification, sir?” the soldier asked politely.

“Uh, sure.” Gold unbuttoned his trench coat and reached for his passport in the left inside breast pocket of his suit coast.
As he made the movement, he noticed that the second guard was casually lowering the barrel of his Sten gun in the direction
of the MG’s windshield.

“Very good, sir,” the first soldier said, glancing at Gold’s passport and then handing it back. The second guard began opening
the gate. “Welcome to the Stoat-Black Experimental Works,” the first guard continued. “If you’ll just drive through the gate
and continue on for about a quarter mile, you’ll come to a low clapboard-sided building painted light green. That will be
HQ, sir.” The soldier paused and smiled sardonically. “You’ll find
Sir
Hugh there.”

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.”