“Easy, Howard,” Graham cautioned.
“Jesus Christ!” Clete exclaimed.
“Colonel McCormick was going to put this story on the front page of all his newspapers,” Hughes said. “Lindbergh asked him not to. He said it was personal between him and Roosevelt, and it wouldn’t help us win the war. He said he could make himself useful out of uniform.”
“How?”
“He went to work for Lockheed,” Hughes said.
“What’s your connection with Lockheed?” Clete said. “You own it?”
“I own TWA—which, by the way, I renamed from Trans-Continental and Western to Trans-World Airlines, to annoy Juan Trippe—and there’s a law that if you own an airline you can’t own an aircraft factory, so I don’t own Lockheed.”
“What’s the point of that?” Clete asked. “I never heard that before.”
“There are some critics of our commander in chief,” Hughes said, “who feel Roosevelt had that law passed to punish Juan Trippe, who had the bad judgment to hire Lindbergh after Lindbergh gave his professional opinion that the Luftwaffe was the best air force in the world. I mean, what the hell, compared to Roosevelt, what did somebody like Lindbergh know about the Luftwaffe?”
“I didn’t know Lindbergh worked for Trippe,” Clete said.
“In addition to being a hell of a nice guy, Charley is a hell of a pilot and a hell of an aeronautical engineer,” Hughes said. “He not only laid out most of Pan American’s routes in South America for Trippe, but worked with Sikorsky to increase the range of the flying boats. You didn’t know that?”
“I heard he’d been in South America,” Clete said. “I didn’t know what he was doing.”
“Anyway, Trippe’s smart enough—particularly after Charley pointed it out to him—to understand that flying boats are not the wave of the future. So he wanted to take over Don Douglas’s Douglas Aircraft. Roosevelt heard about that and had the law passed. Trippe had the choice between owning Pan American and getting a monopoly on transoceanic flight or buying Douglas. He chose Pan American, and having got the message, fired Charley. Politely, of course, but fired him.”
“Jesus Christ!”
“I gave him a job at Lockheed—”
“I thought you don’t own Lockheed,” Clete interrupted.
Hughes ignored the interruption. “—where he went to work on increasing the range of the P-38. There are some people who suggest that I had something to do with the design of the P-38.”
“I heard you had a lot to do with the design of the Jap Zero,” Clete said. “I remembered that when I got shot down by one of them.”
Hughes ignored that, too, and went on: “Charley went to the Pacific, to Guadalcanal, as a Lockheed technical representative—”
“Lindbergh was on Guadalcanal?”
“Meanwhile, the Navy in Pearl Harbor, having broken the Jap Imperial Navy Code, was reading their mail. They knew—”
“Be careful here, Howard,” Graham said.
Hughes nodded his understanding. “They knew that Yamamoto made regular visits to Bougainville in a Betty—you know about Bettys, don’t you, ace? Two of your seven kills were of that not-at-all-bad Jap bomber—in what he thought was complete safety because Bougainville was out of range of our fighters.”
Graham made a Slow it down gesture, and Hughes nodded.
“Well, I just happened to overhear a rumor that the range of the P-38 was greater than anyone thought it was because of the efforts of a certain Lockheed tech rep on Guadalcanal. And I just happened to mention this to a mutual friend of ours, also a Texan, when he was out here chasing starlets.
“And, lo and behold, the next thing we hear is that on the eighteenth of April, Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto, commander of the Combined Fleet of the Imperial Japanese Navy,
was shot down—and killed—by Army Air Force P-38s operating out of Henderson Field on Guadalcanal.”
Hughes paused and looked at Graham.
“Did I say anything I wasn’t supposed to, Alex?”
“Not yet.”