LITMIR.BIZ

      BORGO PRESS BOOKS BY GORDON LANDSBOROUGH

      Call in the Feds!: A Classic Suspense Novel

      Death Smells of Cordite: A Classic Crime Novel

      F.B.I. Showdown: A Classic Suspense Novel

      The Grab: A Classic Crime Novel: Heggy Investigates, Book One

      COPYRIGHT INFORMATION

      Copyright © 1951 by Gordon Landsborough

      Published by Wildside Press LLC

      www.wildsidebooks.com

      DEDICATION

      For Drew

      CHAPTER ONE

      Farran abruptly left his office and went across to the airframe shop. There was nobody there. There wouldn’t be, of course. Only the backroom boys of the drawing office, the foremen and senior executives, would be about the place—and they’d be sitting around reading or playing quiet crap, he guessed.

      He climbed the gantry moodily, and looked across that enormous shop—the second biggest in the world, he had been told. Ford had the biggest at Red Willow.

      There wasn’t a stir of life, where usually it was busier than the Boulevard at Los Angeles, noisier with riveters than a ball game at the Bowl.

      He looked down at the long line of aircraft—the nearest to him recognisable for what it was to be, almost completed; the farthest a mere skeleton of main spars and unclothed ribs. The biggest aircraft of their kind in the world—and a year behind schedule.

      He stood there, high up in the streaming Californian sunshine, his lean figure throwing a two-hundred-foot shadow like an exclamation mark over the silent, unfinished work. And that quick, snapping anger filled him.

      “Hell,” he thought, “they’ll be obsolete before they fly!”

      They’d been so far ahead of competitors with their design, but these labour disputes had pulled them back until now they were probably no more advanced than some of the things other manufacturers were putting up.…

      And then a tiny thought seemed to lift in his mind. It was there for a fraction of a second, to be lost when something distracted him.

      But it came—it was the first time there, and there must always be a first time. It dissolved in the contours of his memory cells, forgotten almost as soon as it came, but it would come again, and perhaps next time it would be remembered.…

      That dark patch under the gigantic wing of the first airframe was what distracted him. Blood. Left after the brawl of a few days ago, when some men hadn’t wanted to strike.

      He went down, went the way the boys went who couldn’t be bothered to use the steps—crooked his feet around the handrails and slid down like an old-time fireman on his brass pole.

      And it wasn’t blood. It was an oil stain. Someone must have cleaned up the traces of the brawl.

      He stood under that fuselage, which towered twenty feet above him, and would be still higher from the ground when the six-wheeled undercarriage was mounted.

      It was all wing, almost. Swept back, and with turbo-jet engines mounted as pushers on the trailing edge—eight of them. And British, of course. The British were still ahead with aero-engines.

      No room in the fuselage. Comparatively, that was. Space for the crew up forward, of course, and they could take a couple of jeeps or a few small field guns. That wasn’t considered a load at all for aircraft as big as this.

      And it was big—those wings were the biggest things that ever cast a shadow over earth, even though that earth had been concreted over in the airframe assembly shop. That was, excluding nature’s clouds, of course.

      They ought to be. Two hundred men would sit inside, one hundred in the port wing, one hundred to starboard. They’d sit and look ahead without any interruption to their vision; for the leading edge was almost continuous perspex.

      Farran mooched out of the deserted shop thinking, “I wouldn’t like to sit up there. Not in real operations.” Yet he had flown Mustangs over France and Germany in that big beat-up at the time of the Second Front, and that hadn’t worried him. But this was different, sitting with a hundred and ninety-nine other men, waiting to be dropped. Marines, they’d be, America’s elite fighters. For these were the first of fifty troop carriers ordered by the U.S. Navy.

      He went through the Administrative Block. There were a few people here, because work could go on for a time even without their ten thousand union-bound employees in the shops.

      They jumped into frenzied action when they saw the boss walking the corridors, though the girls took care to let him see their nylons and flashed him their best, dressing table rehearsed smiles. A man who owned a multi-million dollar concern—and a few other odd investments—was quite a guy and worth a bit of hopeful bait. And when he was young with it, tough with it, and reasonably good-looking, well, a girl could even forget that flaming bad temper of his.

      Just now he was moody. He didn’t see them. He didn’t know what to do, didn’t know where to go. His life stopped when the pulse died in this gigantic aircraft works that his father had started as an offshoot to his aluminium alloy concern—now, comparatively, only another odd investment.

      He paused outside the door marked Labour Relations. Uncle El would be there. El Farran, who had talked with union leaders so long he looked like one. Heavy-jowled, leather-faced, as yellow as a time sheet. Beglassed, with thick lenses so you couldn’t quite see what was going on in his mind through betraying eyes.

      Farran went into the department, putting everyone in a flurry, crossed to Uncle El’s room and opened the door. The boss doesn’t knock. Leastways, Russ Farran didn’t.

      Uncle El was on the phone. He was shouting for Washington. That was where the biggest crooks were, thought Farran cynically. Uncle El was swinging round in his swivel chair, jacket off, tie loosened. And bawling. Mad.

      “What the—? Washington, Washington.… Yeah, yeah, that’s the number I want.… The hell, not there? Then why didn’t you say so?”

      Smash went the receiver on the stand, and Uncle El came whirling round. He liked to give an impression of a big shot tycoon, thought Farran cynically. He liked to be a man of power. Well, he was big enough, maybe too big, he thought. His father always swore he was the best Labour Relations Officer in the United States, and one time he’d seemed to be. But not this last year. The Farran plant had the worst record for labour disputes anywhere.

      Farran didn’t understand it, couldn’t. And that was why that triggering little thought that had come to him was important. Because he was beginning to think their record was too bad.

      Uncle El saw him, stopped swinging. Farran couldn’t see those eyes behind the lenses, but the glass itself gave an appearance of pale, dead-fish orbs.

      El said, “That was Washington.”

      Farran said, “It sounded like Washington.” Whenever you had dealings with Washington you got good and mad.

      Then Uncle El just sat and said nothing more. Farran couldn’t think of anything to say, so after a few seconds he nodded and went back into the corridor. Then he decided to go down to the gate and see the pickets.

      As he came up to where the gate police were, just inside the high, steel-meshed gates, the public address system began its daily dose to the strikers.

      Uncle El had had those loudspeakers fixed up on the edge of the car park after the first strike nearly a year ago. He was a pretty smart man, Uncle El; he made sure that he could get a hearing with the strikers with those powerful broadcast units.

      Farran couldn’t tell what he was saying. You never could when you were on this side of the fence, because the loudspeakers were directed out towards the car park where the strikers were.

      The announcement

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