This- well, that really, that at the end of the runway, still unmoving was another beginning. The first of his order of six of Vance's aircraft waited to begin its pre delivery flight waited to begin his revenge.
The flight crew were to rehearse the press flight while they tested the systems.
When they returned, reporters and cameramen would be loaded aboard and flown on a sightseeing, publicity-serving junket, awash with champagne and knee-deep with caviar and canapes, over the Grand Canyon and back to Phoenix. Maximum exposure, locally, nationally, internationally, for Artemis Airlines and Vance Aircraft. Sounds good to me, he thought, suppressing a satisfied, anticipatory smile.
Cameras fussed around them. Vance, inexpressive behind sunglasses, had summoned the media as if by magic they had come to see the man being investigated by the Senate and the man who had always been the maverick of the US plane makers the dazzling, flawed boy whose firm jaw was now padded with the jowls of success and power. Beside Vance, his daughter Barbara, Executive VP in charge of Corporate Affairs at Vance Aircraft, was darkly power-suited against the mood and heat of the morning.
Burton tensed as he saw the plane straighten, and the cameras turned towards it as to a new bird seen in an unexpected place. The tension was palpable. The low hangars and factory buildings were crouched around them beneath the desert sky, which diminished the aircraft, and made it more fragile as it began to accelerate. The Vance 494 airliner was no more than a distorted, shimmering image as it rushed towards them through the heat. Burton felt Vance's hand on his arm, but with a questioning touch. Momentary loss of nerve? Success was as important to Vance as to himself… His daughter's features seemed varnished with a glossy anxiety. Other company people were in suits and overalls, or dresses that attempted competition with the hard sunlight. In his own concentrated anxiety, he had forgotten how many people there were, arranged as for an American funeral or graduation ceremony on white chairs in neat rows in front of the hangar from which the airliner had been rolled out an hour earlier. Local politicians and dignitaries, businessmen, faces that habitually adorned the Arizona social and charitable functions and glossy magazines. The delivery of the first of Burton's six ordered planes was important to Arizona, to the whole south-west sunbelt.
The employees and executives had moved into what might have been a protective fence around himself and Vance.
A plume of dust billowed out behind the accelerating plane and its noise was beginning to cannon back at them from the mountains. It was a projectile being fired down the runway. Burton felt his mouth dry and his hands grip at themselves, holding certainty in a fierce grip or suffocating doubt. Then the gleaming metal bullet sailed… moving effortlessly into its natural element above the desert and the roiling dust. A great silver insect against the mountains, then against the sky like a star. There was clapping, but the reflected, magnified engine noise drowned it.
As the noise diminished, he heard Vance's chuckle of celebration and relief.
Barbara held the big man's arm. His jaw was firmer, younger again, and his blue eyes glinted challengingly as he removed his sunglasses. The cameras whirled around them once more like seductive dancers, and Vance was answering the reporters' questions about bribes and misappropriated funds. His manner was confidently dismissive. Burton moved to his other side and shook his hand for the photographers. Above them, high above, the plane circled slowly, a distant, winking speck. Burton's mood was elated, but fierce as a weapon. After all the dirty tricks, the attempts of the big national carriers to keep him out of Heathrow, JFK, O'Hare, Europe's international airports after the vast bank loans, the rescheduling of debts as regularly as bowel movements this was a real beginning.
It had been exhilarating, climbing the mountain against their hostile weather. Then his own country's national carrier, privatised but anticipating monopoly, had attempted to steal passengers, spread black propaganda, question his liquidity, the safety of the huge loans.
They'd settled out of court, eventually, but their actions had declared that now it was a dirty war. One he had taken on with a ruthless alacrity that had surprised him.
Now, with the 494 in service within six months, regularly flying the Atlantic, he would undercut all competition.
He pumped Vance's hand, perhaps his sudden exhilaration surprising the American. Then Vance slapped his shoulder — they slapped each other's shoulders in their released, gratified nervousness; brothers under the suits. Vance had begun in overalls, as he had in bright, even lurid sweaters and with much longer hair.
Now, neither of them could be stopped.
"Let's get a drink!" Vance bawled, his arms embracing the cameras, the guests, his small desert kingdom.
"Or drunk! Come on, Tim-boy it's our day!"
His enthusiasm was tumultuous, enveloping. He dragged Burton to his side like a lover, his arm on his shoulder, and steered him towards the hospitality marquee, its gaudy, flounced sides flapping in the desert breeze.
Vance had begun designing and building executive jets, rich toys for richer boys.
Then he'd copied the Boeing philosophy, stretching and fattening the fuselage until he had the skeleton of the 494. A long-haul workhorse on to which he had bolted the two big Pratt & Whitney engines he had helped design, some fancy avionics he'd bought in and his own design for the fuel management system and the airliner possessed a better load-to-range ratio than any of its rivals. It was the most effective and cheapest transatlantic carrier in existence. Burton knew that as certainly as did Vance… but the people wouldn't buy it. Not yet.
They were waiting patiently in their lightweight suits and silk ties in their boardrooms for him to be their guinea pig.
The big carriers would flock to Vance and stand in admiration with the desert dust blowing over their polished shoes and squinting against the sun once his airline, Artemis, had shown how good and cheap the 494 was. Until then, they would stick with their Airbuses and their Boeings. So, Vance needed him like an addict just as he needed Vance.
He smiled reassuringly as they approached the marquee. He could hear the canvas cracking in the breeze like old wood. Fuck the rules, don't tell me about them… It could have been a pledge between them. Bankers patted Vance on the back as his smile preceded them into the marquee's illusory cool.
Local politicians seemed lit by his confident flame.
The 494's two big engines had faded into the distance beyond Phoenix.
Thanks, Alan, he thought. Oh, thank you, Alan… He had been given the means to shaft the European and British carriers who had tried, for a decade, to ensure his failure.
Barbara Gant or did she call herself Barbara Vance Gant now? No, he remembered, she had remarried and there was a child… She, too, was smiling, glad-handing. He was given a glass of chilled champagne and raised it to her. She returned the salute with a quiet triumph.
"Of course a wonderful aircraft," he offered in reply to someone in a light-grey suit with the distinguished grey coiffure of an American banker or mafioso.
"Local employment?" He remembered. The state senator.
"Employment will be no problem—" he grinned.
"Give me six months on the New York route and they'll be flocking here, Senator. I guarantee!" His confidence embarrassed him, his habitual reserve reminding him of its right to his smiles, his manner.
"I won't let the plane down," he could not avoid adding with a laugh.
"Next spring, at the latest, they'll be falling over themselves to buy Alan's baby!"
He moved further into the undergrowth of the crowded marquee, among species he had forced himself to be able to confront and confound.