High Flight Read online

  Anyone could monitor cellular telephone conversations, and it was assumed by Guerin and every other high-tech company that such eavesdropping was common. But if the call was from McGarvey, back from Moscow, it might mean trouble.

  It was 8:30 A.M. when he stepped off the elevator, crossed the broad, thickly carpeted corridor, and entered his suite of offices down the hall from the boardroom. His secretary, Nancy Nebel, was just putting down the phone.

  “Let’s get started,” he said, going directly into his office.

  “Am I glad to see you,” she said, jumping up. She snatched a stack of mail, a couple of thick file folders, and a steno pad from her desk and followed him inside.

  His office was large and well-appointed, with expansive windows that looked toward the airport terminal and the two main runways. From his desk Kennedy could see jetliners, many of them Guerin’s, departing for and arriving from all over the world. Sometimes he felt a great sense of pride and achievement. But at other times, like this morning, he felt a sense of impending disaster.

  “Mr. Vasilanti wants you in his office at nine sharp, which gives you a half-hour,” Nancy said, pouring Kennedy a cup of coffee as he hung up his overcoat in the closet. She was fifty-something and plain looking but pleasant.

  “Is Gary back from Rome?”

  “He got in last night.” Gary Topper was Guerin’s vice president in charge of sales. “Mr. Vasilanti’s already talked to him along with Mr. Socrates and Mr. Soderstrom.”

  George Socrates was vice president in charge of new airplane design, and Jeffery Soderstrom was Guerin’s chief financial officer. The old man had called all the heavy guns. This morning’s meeting was going to be a council of war.

  Kennedy hung his suit coat on the back of his chair, then took the cup of coffee from his secretary and sat down. She laid out a couple of legal pads and several sharpened pencils for him, along with a typed copy of his tentative schedule for the day, week, and month.

  She set the stack of mail to his left. “Nothing that won’t wait until this afternoon. Two queries from Washington. One from the FAA wanting a clarification on our suggested modification of the 422 rudder sensor AD that was issued in March.” An AD, Airworthiness Directive, was an order from the Federal Aviation Administration requiring that a fix or modification be made to an airplane.

  “And the second from Congressman Benton’s office requesting our current thinking on inertial guidance systems for airliners.” Benton was the new chairman of the House Subcommittee on Aviation and was interested, because of the tremendous savings for the government, in what Aviation Week & Space Technology was calling the “next generation” of aids to navigation.

  Airliners found their way around the world using a combination of high-frequency radio beacons, radio locating networks, and a series of satellites in geostationary orbits that provided precise location information. But such systems, especially the satellites, were expensive to maintain.

  Using an inertial guidance system similar to ones installed in U.S. submarines, an airliner’s exact location could be entered into the navigational device on the date the set was installed. At that point the aircraft “knew” exactly where in the world it was located. Thereafter, anytime the aircraft was moved, up-down, left-right, forward-backward, even by a few feet, the movements were sensed and the airplane’s true position was computed by the system.

  “Engineering can handle that,” Kennedy said.

  “Mr. Taich bounced it back here. Said our research was too sensitive to share with Washington at this time.”

  Kennedy had to smile. Fred Taich, vice president in charge of engineering, was one of the true “squirrels” in the business and had probably made a reply along the lines of “Fuck the bastards!” But Nancy had cleaned it up for him.

  “Send a letter to Benton’s office advising them we’re putting together a comprehensive study package that we’ll forward soon.”

  “A letter to that effect is in the pile for your signature,” Nancy said. “Nothing else in the mail is pressing. But I’ve put together two files you should look at before you see Mr. Vasilanti. The first involves the Japanese. I pulled what we had on their commercial aircraft and engine research, and Dominique’s office faxed us everything they had.”

  “Can we get anything from the State Department updating who we might be dealing with?”

  “Should be here within the hour.”

  Nancy had been his secretary from the day he’d started with Guerin. The third-floor junior executives called her “Attila the Hun.” But it was a term of respect, not derision.

  “What about this other file?” Kennedy asked.

  “The project,” Nancy said. “Mr. Vasilanti asked me to see that you brought it along.”

  He flipped the file open to the artist’s rendering of the P/C2622. It looked sleek and fast.

  “He’s scheduled a news conference at noon sharp at Gales Creek.”

  Kennedy understood what the old man had in mind to counter the expected move against them by the Japanese and to prod Washington into standing up for them. NASA had used the same technique when the shuttle was in its developmental stages and Congress was dragging its heels over funding. A mockup of the space plane was shown to the public, and it made a big hit. Practically every television station, newspaper, wire service, and magazine in the world had covered the event. Congress quickly changed its mind.

  The P/C2622, minus its supersonic engine, was almost ready for its first test flight at subsonic speeds. He and Vasilanti had discussed the strategy of letting the media in on the event but had rejected it for being overly sporty at a time when they could ill afford such a gamble. If the test failed Guerin would suffer. Now, however, things were different.

  “What else?”

  “Mr. McGarvey called from Washington and said it was urgent that you call him the moment you got in.”

  “Get him on the phone,” Kennedy said, his chest tight. God only knew what had happened in Moscow.

  Nancy left the office, closing the door softly behind her, and Kennedy swiveled in his chair so he could look out toward the airport. Snowplows and sanders were busy clearing the active runway. For the moment Portland International was open.

  Another thought intruded. The Japanese weren’t his only problem. His marriage was in trouble too. Last night he and Chance had fought bitterly again. Something had gone terribly wrong with their relationship in the last year or so. In part, he thought, because of the long hours he worked and the frequent absences when he had to be in Washington or Paris or London. But, like a man who wants to get off a roller coaster, he was helpless until it stopped. Until the P/C2622 was flying.

  The telephone rang. He turned back and picked it up. “Mac?”

  “There’s no answer at his hotel room,” Nancy said.

  “Did you try Dominique’s?”

  “No answer there either, but I left a message at both places.”

  “All right, Nancy, call me if you get through to him, and buzz me when Mr. Vasilanti is ready.”

  “You have about twenty minutes.”

  Kennedy hung up, drew the first Japanese file to him and opened it to the first page: Japan—A Manufacturing Nation Without Natural Resources.

  McGarvey had picked up a tail the moment he’d passed through passport control and customs at Dulles Airport. They were probably FBI, one dressed as a customs agent and the other as a terminal cop. Both of them wore uniforms, but both carried handguns in shoulder holsters beneath their jackets, something uniformed officers never did.

  Outside, there’d been three pairs: one in a dark blue Ford van and a second in an electric-green Chevrolet Cavalier, alternating front and back of the Yellow cab McGarvey had taken into the city. He had the cabby slow down twice, and both times the two pairs slowed up. The third set materialized in an older brown Mercedes at the Hyatt Regency where McGarvey checked in under his own name. The driver stayed with the car, while the other agent pretended to carry on a conver
sation with someone on a house phone. And when McGarvey boarded the elevator to his floor, the man put down the phone and approached the registration desk.

  If they wanted to charge him with something, the FBI would have picked him up by now. Which meant that to this point they were merely curious about his movements. Waiting for him to make the next move, such as meeting with his Russian control officer. If they caught him at that, he would definitely be picked up.

  McGarvey did not bother going to his room. Instead, he took the service elevator down to the laundry and left the hotel by a back exit. He walked a couple of blocks to D Street and Third, got a cab to the Howard Johnson Downtown Motor Lodge across Virginia Avenue from the Watergate, and checked in.

  Standing at his fifth-floor window, he looked across the avenue as he waited for his Portland call to go through. He thought about Dominique Kilbourne. She was attracted to him because he was a dangerous man. Race-car drivers experienced the same thing. There was a type of woman who made a career out of having affairs with men in deadly occupations. But excess baggage was the bane of the field officer. The weak link that had brought down more than one good operative. A lover was an Achilles’ heel. He could write the book on that story.

  He got Kennedy’s secretary on the line. “McGarvey. Let me talk to David Kennedy.”

  “He’s right here, Mr. McGarvey,” Nancy said, and a moment later Kennedy came on.

  “You weren’t supposed to call this number.”

  “All the principals know who I’m working for.”

  Kennedy was silent for a beat. “When did you get back?”

  “This morning,” McGarvey said. “They agreed.”

  “The whole package? Both sides?”

  “Everything. They’re expecting our first team in the next few days.”

  “This is happening pretty fast,” Kennedy said, cautiously. “What about their part?”

  “They’ll provide the site, the materials, and the construction crews, supervised by your people. They’ll provide all the technical help they can.”

  “When can we start exchanging information?”

  “Soon,” McGarvey said. It was possible that Guerin’s phones were tapped. There was no use taking unnecessary risks.

  “No … trouble?” Kennedy asked. “No snags, or last-minute demands on their part?”

  “None,” McGarvey said.

  “You should come out here. Al Vasilanti wants to meet you, and there are a number of things you should know about us.”

  “I’ll be free tomorrow.”

  “Good. In the meantime Al has called a press conference at Gales Creek. I think he’s going to unveil the new airplane.”

  “That’s not such a good idea, David,” McGarvey said. “It could push the opposition into making a move now.”

  “I think that’s what he wants,” Kennedy replied. It sounded as if he wasn’t very happy about the decision. “He’s up for the fight, and I think he wants to get it over with.”

  “I can understand that, but try to stall him if you can. Tell him that we’ll be better equipped to put up a fight after we get some hard intelligence.”

  “He’s called a council of war in his office for about two minutes from now. I’ll do what I can.”

  “See you tomorrow,” McGarvey said.

  They met in the old man’s office. The walls were adorned with paintings of some of the most famous commercial aircraft in the history of aviation, among them Ford’s corrugated-skin Tin Goose, Douglas’s DC-3, Boeing’s 707 and 747, and Guerin’s 422 and 522—two of the biggest-selling airplanes ever.

  At seventy-seven, Alfred Vasilanti had been witness to a lot of aviation history, jumping into the industry with both feet after graduation from Harvard in 1941. Two years later he bullied his draft board into granting him an exemption because he was working in a critical industry. Not because he wanted to avoid the war, but because, as he put it, “I knew damned well I could do more to beat the Nazis and the Japs by designing and building good airplanes than by shooting at the bastards.” He’d always played it close to the hip, and as a result his staff meetings were lively affairs.

  The aircraft business bred contentious men, and a few women, who held strong opinions and were willing to go to the mat for them. Odd ducks. Eccentric geniuses—“squirrels.” These were the people Vasilanti surrounded himself with. As a result, the company was successful. There wasn’t a national airline in any country, except Russia, that didn’t fly Guerin equipment. Airplanes, he liked to point out, that except for their Rolls-Royce engines were one-hundred percent American designed and manufactured.

  Kennedy was the last to arrive. The old man motioned him to his place next to George Socrates, vice president of design. The second generation Greek-American had designed and built his own two-seater rag-wing monoplane in his father’s Kansas garage in 1946. He was only thirteen years old, and legally still too young to get his solo license, but he learned to fly at the town’s grass-strip airport. He never became a great pilot, but he maintained that in order to design them you sure as hell better know how to fly them. He quit high school at the age of fifteen and enrolled at Kansas State University, breezing through the aeronautical engineering program in two years, after which he went to work for Cessna Aircraft Company as the youngest engineer on staff, or on the staff of any other airplane company so far as anyone knew. Since then he’d worked for every major airplane company in the U.S. designing or helping to design everything from sea planes to helicopters, and from sport aerobatic biplanes to Guerin’s 322, 422, 522, and finally the P/C2622—the culmination of his life’s work. He was the most respected man in the industry and could walk into any airplane design facility in the world and get a job, no questions asked, for practically any amount of money he wanted.

  On Socrates’s right was Newton Kilbourne, Dominique’s older brother and vice president in charge of new product development and prototype manufacturing. He’d come to the aircraft industry from Detroit, where he’d started on the Ford plant’s assembly line out of high school. Within the first month, realizing that being nothing more than a “wrench” wasn’t good enough for him, he went to night school, finishing in six years with degrees in mechanical engineering, electrical engineering, and business administration. When Vasilanti hired him eight years ago Kilbourne was vice president in charge of manufacturing the Taurus automobile. His transition to airplanes was simple. One day he was building cars, and the next he was building jetliners.

  Next to Kilbourne was Gary Topper. Topper, vice president in charge of sales, was an industry “squirrel,” but his high jinks were tolerated because he sold airplanes A former Air Force jet jockey, he’d worked for American, Pan Am, and Northwest before coming to Guerin four years ago at the age of thirty-seven. He’d been hired as a test pilot, but at a commercial air show in Buenos Aires he’d come in over the grandstands doing 400 knots in a Guerin 522 … upside-down, something even Socrates said was impossible for a commercial jetliner that size. Everyone was so impressed (some of them angry, but all of them impressed) that they placed their orders for the airliner with the pilot who could pull off such a stunt.

  Beside him was his exact opposite, Jeff Soderstrom, Guerin’s chief financial officer. A former Citibank vice president in charge of international commercial loans, he was accustomed to dealing with figures in the billions. But he was an arch conservative from a solid family, and Guerin’s oftentimes precarious financial position drove him up the wall. It was the reason Vasilanti had hired the man. “We need someone to keep our feet on the ground.”

  “We have a lot of work to do this morning, so let’s get to it,” Vasilanti said when Kennedy was seated. “I’ve scheduled a media briefing for noon at Gales Creek. We’re going to show them the 2622. And we’ll let them climb aboard and take as many pictures as they want.”

  “So that’s what this is all about,” Kilbourne groaned. For the past two weeks the rush had been on to hang the aircraft’s subsonic engines and t
he temporary cowling approximating the aerodynamic shape of the single hydrogen-burning hypersonic engine not yet ready from Rolls-Royce. “You ought to have your head examined.”

  “Save it until you hear everything,” Vasilanti growled. “David, give us the background on the Japanese problem … the entire background, including Kirk McGarvey’s recommendations and actions. Is he back?”

  “He’s in Washington. He said it’s a go.”

  “Back from where?” Soderstrom asked.

  Kennedy looked at him, still not sure that this was the right thing to do. But he understood the old man’s thinking and it was hard to fault it. “Moscow.”

  “You’re still thinking about putting a wing assembly plant in Russia after everything I’ve shown you?” the CFO asked. “When they collapse—not if, but when—we’ll be out a billion dollars we can’t afford to toss away.”

  “We can’t afford not to do it,” Vasilanti said sharply. “Go ahead, David.”

  “I’ll go over the details later, but simply put we think there may be a grain of truth to the rumors we’ve heard about a Japanese move to buy us out for our HSCT research.” The acronym stood for High Speed Civil Transport, the next generation of commercial aircraft.

  “We know that,” Soderstrom said. “We’re keeping a close watch on the market.”

  “We also think that they mean to do whatever it takes to drive our price per share to a favorable level by destroying the public’s confidence in our equipment.”

  “Come off it, David. Don’t you think this Japanese paranoia has gone far enough?”

  “I don’t know, Jeff. But the question remains that the American Airlines O’Hare crash in ’90 might have something to do with the Japanese.”

  “Doesn’t it seem coincidental to you that our troubles began after McGarvey was hired?” Soderstrom asked. “He may be, as you say, a bright and conscientious man, but considering his background, mightn’t he be seeing boogeymen?”

  Kennedy glanced at Vasilanti who sat impassively for the moment. It’s your show, you deal with it.