Supersonic Thunder: A Novel of the Jet Age (3 page)

Tom had rebounded, marrying Nancy Strother, and they were the proud parents of two-year-old Vance Robert Shannon. Nancy had given Tom an ultimatum: the Air Force or her, and after one last tour in Korea, he chose her. Harry left the Air Force to care for Anna. Fortunately, both men liked working with their father—until now.

Harry spoke jokingly at last. “The only thing positive about Bob’s being a partner is at least Madeline didn’t bring him in.”

There was sad truth to what he said. Madeline had completely captivated their father. She was French, working in the American embassy in London in 1941, and they became lovers almost immediately. Although apparently completely devoted, she had always refused to marry him. Vance had total confidence in her, and after the war, until 1949, she administered his business and his family life with competence and authority. Vance was totally absorbed in aviation and made an excellent income in the process. Madeline shrewdly invested his funds in real estate and, to a far lesser degree, the stock market. She kept a good account of all the transactions and turned a considerable fortune over to him in its entirety when on August 6, 1949—he’d never forget the date, his own personal Hiroshima—she left him abruptly and without explanation. Vance had been devastated, unable to understand what had happened. He had always considered himself too lucky and even anticipated that she might leave him someday for a younger or more interesting man. Yet she had given him no warning; the day before she left she was as loving as she had always been.

It was not until a few years later that the reasons for her refusal to marry and her abrupt departure were suddenly made clear to him. His old friend and confidant at Boeing, the masterful engineer George Schairer, had presented him with hard evidence that she had been a spy for the French government all along.

Vance was shattered by her departure and utterly demolished by the revelation that she was a spy. It became apparent that over the years she had removed papers from his safe, photographed them, and passed them to the French. Fortunately for Vance, all the material was Boeing-proprietary rather than U.S. government classified. There was no official action, but Boeing fired him and the word spread throughout the aviation community. He was virtually without work until circumstances forced Boeing to bring him back on. Since then his business had built beyond its former limits.

As well as Madeline had managed his financial affairs, she did even better in the emotional department, using great skill and discretion when hiring people to help her in the business. No one noticed, but her hiring practices had two goals. One was to substitute for her in administering the business. The other was to substitute for her with Vance when she left. Her choice was impeccable: Jill Abernathy as her main assistant, selected for her looks, her personality, her ability—and her suitability for Vance. Madeline had chosen well, and within six months of her leaving, Jill moved in with Vance. They subsequently married and were able to joke together about Madeline’s cleverness.

Madeline had equal, if unintended, success with her other hire, Nancy Strother, who became Tom’s lover first, than his wife and the mother of his son.

Tom nodded in agreement. “I still don’t know whether to love or hate Madeline. She was a spy, which is rotten enough by itself, and she deceived Dad totally about that, but she took wonderful care of him otherwise. Who else would ever have hired a substitute wife for him?”

“But as I say, at least she didn’t hire Rodriquez. What do you know about him? You’re really the one to blame; you introduced him to Dad, told him we ought to hire him.” Harry’s tone of reproach verged on anger.

“I’d met him a couple of times in Korea, of course, and I followed his progress, but I didn’t really know him until he came back to the States and got out of the Air Force. I couldn’t believed it—he had twelve MiGs to his credit, and you’d think he would have been planning to be a general. But he was furious with the Air Force, and wanted out.”

“The race business?”

Tom snorted. “Yeah, he was convinced that headquarters made him go home early to be sure that Jabara or McConnell wound up as the top ace. He claims that they were prejudiced against him because he was of Mexican descent.”

“You were there—were they?”

“No, of course not, not on base. Everybody looked up to the MiG killers; they even looked up to me. But there might have been somebody in Washington, somebody in public affairs, who decided that they didn’t want a man of Mexican descent to be the top ace of the Korean War. Stranger things have happened.”

“Seems far-fetched to me. The Air Force has gone further and faster with integration than anybody—Army, Navy, Marines, General Motors, UCLA—anybody. As long as he was an American, not a foreign citizen, why wouldn’t they want someone with Mexican blood to be the top ace?”

“I’ve tried to tell him that, but there’s no convincing him. He’s sure it happened, and that’s that. And I didn’t convince Dad to hire him. I introduced him, and when Dad looked over his record and talked to him, they hit it off like Mutt and Jeff. Rodriquez specialized in electronics, and had some interesting experience working with high-performance cameras over in Korea.”

They both grew silent when they heard the door upstairs open and their father’s footsteps pounded down the hallway to the door to the offices in the basement.

It was an affectionate family, no matter what the circumstances, and Vance came in and hugged both of his boys, just as he had been doing for the past thirty-seven years.

“Is the jury still out, or have you pronounced sentence on me?”

Unusually for him, Harry spoke first and with real vehemence.

“Not yet, Dad, but this is serious business. Tom and I are both angry, hurt, pissed off, and otherwise furious about this deal. I don’t know if we are madder about your doing it without talking to us or because you kept it from us.”

Tom shook his head in agreement. “It’s not like you, Dad; you’ve never done anything like this before.”

Vance felt he might as well get all the arguments on the table right away.

“Well, how about Madeline? I made the same sort of decision with her, didn’t I?”

Quick responses came to the lips of both his sons, but both kept quiet. Madeline had been gone for six years now, Vance had married Jill—but the twins knew he still had a soft spot in his heart for the young French refugee girl he had met during the war.

Tom finally said, “That was altogether different. This is a simple business deal; there’s no romance in it. We had a partnership, the three of us, and then suddenly we find there are four partners. What the hell are we supposed to think?”

“Well, what was the arrangement when there were three of us? How did we split the profits?”

“You had fifty-two percent, and we each had twenty-four percent. That was more than fair. What is the new arrangement?”

“You both still have twenty-four percent. I have forty-two percent and Bob Rodriquez has ten percent. This hasn’t cost you a dime.”

“It’s not the money—it’s the principal of the thing. What does Rodriquez bring to the table? Why should he start out with ten percent after we’ve put in our time building up the business?”

Harry stood up and put his arm around his father’s shoulder.

“Dad, you usually turn out to be right. But not this time. You really should have asked us about making Bob a partner, and worse, you should have told us right away when you did.”

Tom elected to be quiet. If someone was going to catch hell for this, he preferred it to be Harry.

“You are absolutely right, Harry; I should have talked to you and I should have told you sooner. I didn’t, for what I thought—and still think—were good reasons. You’ll probably disagree with me, but hear me out.”

Tom volunteered a safe, “Shoot.”

“Tom, it was you that introduced me to Bob, and I’m glad you did. I looked into his background, and saw that besides being a war hero—like you two are—he had a brilliant academic record in aeronautical engineering. Straight As. But what was more significant to me, he’s been attending classes in electronic engineering whenever he was in the States, and even when he was overseas, shooting down MiGs, he was taking all kinds of correspondence courses, building his own television sets, and so on. The thing that really impressed me was that every minute he wasn’t flying he was down on the flight line, working with the cameras and the communication gear.”

Tom shrugged. “We grant that he’s a good guy, and well qualified, Dad, but this business of being a partner and not telling us—”

“Give me a minute. I’d made my mind up to hire him, because the future is going to be as much electronics as airframes or engines, maybe more, and none of us are strong in that area. You know how long I’ve worked with Kelly on this high-altitude reconnaissance plane—by the way, they are calling it the U-2 now as a disguise, trying to make people think it’s a little utility aircraft; it’s still hush-hush. Where was I?”

Tom chipped in, “You were at ‘none of us are strong in that area.’”

“Right. I saw we needed someone with talent if we are going to continue to be viable as consultants. It’s not going to be so much like the old days, when you had a new model every year. I think airplanes are going to be used over much longer periods of time, and be updated with electronic equipment as time goes on. Look how many types of radar sets they’ve had already since about 1944.”

“Why? What’s different now?”

“Well, expense for one thing; airplanes are already ten times as expensive as they were in World War II, and the ratio is going up. Development time is another; before the war, you could go from an idea to production in four years for sure and, if you pushed it, in three. Nowadays, it looks like it’s going to take ten to twelve years to get a model into production and, once you get it operational, you have to keep it going for years to amortize its costs.”

“So?”

“Well, we are going to have to be working on updating aircraft, rather than just consulting and testing new ones. And the updating is going to come in the electronics. I saw that Bob had the skills I wanted, he has a good personality—a little standoffish at times, I’ll admit—so I offered him a job, and he didn’t take it.”

“Didn’t take it? Why not?”

“He already had a job offer, from Lockheed, paying about twice what I was going to offer him. He has talents they want for the U-2 and for some other aircraft they have coming down the line in the Skunk Works. I don’t blame them; Bob’s a shrewd, hardworking guy.”

“Well, what happened? Give it to us; we already know we’re beat.”

“I knew we couldn’t match Lockheed’s salary offer—he’d be making more than the three of us combined. So I upped my salary offer a little—it’s still a little less than you or I take home—and offered to make him a partner. He thought it over, realized he’d have a lot more opportunity to do things with a small company like ours and could make a lot of money if we succeed. He agreed. I’m glad he did, and I want you to make him feel absolutely welcome. Also I wanted to give him a chance to prove himself before I told you what I had done.”

Tom said, “I don’t know if I can make him feel welcome as a partner. As an employee, sure, but not as a partner. I still think you made the wrong decision.”

Harry caught a vein throbbing in Vance’s temple and knew that he was angry. Harry waved at Tom to shut up, but Tom pressed on, “He is a damn good pilot, we all know that, but we’re not shooting down MiGs; we’re trying for contracts in a tight market. Where are his connections?”

Vance walked over to the carved mahogany table where his latest pride and joy sat. It was a Telefunken Operette six-tube shortwave radio, and he played with it almost every evening, enjoying getting news and music from around the world.

Without a word, he raised it full-length over his head and smashed it down on the tile floor, parts flying and tubes popping. Both of his sons dropped their jaws—they had never seen a similar display of temper from their father.

“Which one of you geniuses can fix this radio?”

Neither son spoke.

“I’ll tell you. Neither one of you. You are great stick and rudder men, and you are great salesmen with the airframe and engine manufacturers. But the future is going to be in electronics. If I swept up this mess and handed it to Bob Rodriquez, he’d have it fixed in an hour. He’s an electronic genius. I hired him away from Lockheed. They are starting up a new missile division, under Willis Hawkins, and Willis says he’ll never forgive me!”

Hawkins was second only to Kelly Johnson at Lockheed; at any other company he would have been chief engineer.

“Like I said, I couldn’t match Hawkins’s offer to him, I wanted him on staff, so I offered him half as much salary and a ten percent equity. You’ll see—it was one of the smartest things I’ve ever done, even if it pissed Hawkins off; he knows how good Rodriquez is. You know what he told me?”

Tom, still shaken by the smashing of the radio, a gesture so uncharacteristic of his father, muttered in a low voice, “Who told you?”

“Dammit, aren’t you listening to me? Willis Hawkins, that’s who. He told me that if Rodriquez had gone anywhere else, he would have outbid anybody to get him, but he figured that if Rodriquez worked for us, he’d always have him on call. Now do you think I did the right thing?”

Tom shook his head. “I don’t know, Dad. I’m still not sure you did.”

“Tom, would it sweeten the pot to tell you that Bob has already secured a four-million-dollar contract for us with the company making the cameras for the U-2?”

Tom looked at Harry and said, “We give in, Dad. Bring Bob around, and we’ll welcome him aboard.”

“I will. He’s out waiting in my car. I’ll go get him.”

Harry stood up and ran for the door. “Fat chance. I’m going to get him, and I’m taking him out to dinner.”

Tom chimed in, “Correction.
We
are taking him out to dinner.”

“You’re both wrong. All three of us are taking him out to dinner. And after dinner, you two are going out and buy me another radio. It’s getting to be expensive educating you in the business facts of life.”