Conquerors of the Sky Read Online Free PDF

taste. “The culprit—in so many ways.”
    â€œI think you’ve got Adrian wrong. You’ve always had him wrong.”
    â€œYou’re saying you never know the whole truth about a man—even when you work with him for forty-seven years?”
    â€œI’m afraid not.”
    Maybe he was right. Maybe none of them, including himself, were as innocent as they wished they were—or as guilty as they feared they were. “Amanda—do you think it’s possible—?”

    â€œI don’t know. I hope so.”
    â€œIf I can hold her in my arms for a year—or even a month—I’ll forgive the universe.”
    The two men sipped their Scotch in silence, while from the empty desert welled the faces and the voices, the illusions and the heartbreak of the living and the dead. Above them flew the planes—from the wobbling fabric creatures of the first decade to the titanium projectiles of today. Seventy-six years of flight through Frank Buchanan’s life and Adrian Van Ness’s life and so many other lives.
    This was their journey, Frank thought. Only someone who flew the route across memory and time and history could decide who should be forgiven, who should be condemned. For himself, he relied on two lines from his favorite poet.

    Let the gods forgive what I
have made.
Let those I love try to forgive
what I have made.

EXILE
    As usual, Sarah Chapman Morris awoke an hour before dawn. She lay in bed, watching the windowpane grow gray. Around the house stretched the southern California desert, arid mile after mile to the Salton Sea and Death Valley. It was a landscape as different from the green flowering England of her youth as nature—or the imagination—could devise. The aridity, the emptiness corresponded exactly with her state of mind and soul.
    Thirty-six years. Thirty-six years since Sarah Chapman walked down the aisle of the country church outside Rackreath Air Base arm in arm with Captain Clifford Morris, the handsome American bomber pilot, whose indifference to religion dismayed her devout Catholic mother. Her brother Derek, flying fighters for the RAF, had asked in his brutal way how she could marry anyone from the “Bloody 103rd” bombardment group. Did she have some peculiar desire to become a widow?
    Sarah put on a dressing gown and padded through the silent house to the room that had been her husband’s study. She pressed a button on the desk. Along the wall to the right of the terrace doors, concealed lights illuminated an immense painting of a B-17 plowing through flak-infested skies, spewing bullets from its turret and tail and waist guns at German fighters. Beneath the cockpit window was a crescent rainbow with a plane soaring above it. At least once a day, Sarah stared at the painting as if she needed to convince herself that her life was not a dream.

    On the empty dest was a letter from Adrian Van Ness.

    Dear Cliff:
    We have weathered the worst of the scandal without losing a single contract. This is a tribute to your reputation within the aircraft industry and in Congress. Alas, the same thing cannot be said for the Buchanan Corporation. Over the years we have acquired enemies in the press and in Washington, D.C. who are still pursuing us. The other day I heard from one of our closest Pentagon friends that our chief tormentor in the Senate was threatening to start a new round of hearings to explore our “continuing culpability” because we have, he claims, displayed not a single sign of repentance for our sins. I am sure you realize more negative publicity would make it impossible for us to obtain the financing we so badly need.
    For thirty years you have demonstrated a readiness to work, to serve, to sacrifice for Buchanan. Can I ask you to consider an ultimate sacrifice, your resignation?
    I have told Dick Stone you might want to discuss the terms of your retirement. He has orders from me to be even more generous than