Joseph Finder - Power Play

I waited outside Bodine's office for a good twenty minutes, flipping through old copies of Fortune and Aviation Week & Space Technology, wondering why he wanted to see me. I kept adjusting my rumpled tie and thinking how stupid it looked with my denim shirt and wishing I'd taken a couple of minutes to change out of my jeans and into a suit. Everyone here at Hammond world headquarters was wearing a suit.

Finally, Bodine's admin, Gloria Morales, showed me in to Bodine's office, a vast expanse of chrome and glass, blindingly bright. It was bigger than my apartment. I'm not exaggerating. There was even a wood-burning fireplace, which he'd had installed at enormous expense, though there was no fire burning in it just then.

He didn't get up to shake my hand or anything. He sat in a high-backed leather desk chair behind the huge slab of glass that served as his desk. There was nothing on it except for a row of scale models of all the great Hammond airplanes-the wide-bodied 818, the best-selling 808, the flop that was the 828, and of course my plane, the 880.

Bodine was around sixty, with silver hair, deep-set eyes beneath heavy black brows, a high forehead, a big square jaw. If you'd met him only briefly, you might call him distinguished-looking. Spend more than two minutes with him, though, and you'd realize there was nothing distinguished about the guy. He was a bully, most people said-a big, swaggering man with a sharp tongue who was given to explosive tirades. Yet at the same time, he had a big, bluff charisma-a kind of Jack Welch thing going on.

Bodine leaned back, folding his arms, as I sat in one of the low chairs in front of his desk. I'm not short-just over six feet-but I found myself looking up at him as if he were Darth Vader. I had a feeling the setup was deliberate, one of Bodine's tricks to intimidate his visitors. Sunlight blazed in through the floor-to-ceiling glass behind him so I could barely make out his face.

"What's the holdup at Fab?"

"No big deal," I said. "A bonding problem in the vertical stabilizer, but it's taken care of."

Was that why he'd called me here? I braced myself for a barrage of questions, but he just nodded. "All right. Pack your bags," he said. "You're going to Canada."

"Canada?" I said.

"The offsite. The company jet's leaving from Van Nuys in five hours."

"I don't understand." The annual leadership retreat, at some famously luxurious fishing lodge in British Columbia, was only for the top guys at Hammond-the twelve or so members of the "leadership team." Certainly not for the likes of me.

"Yeah, well, sorry about the short notice, but there you have it. Should be plenty of time for you to pack a suitcase. Make sure you bring outdoor gear. Don't tell me you're not the outdoors type."

"I do okay. But why me?"

His eyes bored into me. Then the ends of his broad mouth turned up in an approximation of a smile. "You complaining?"

"I'm asking."

"Jesus Christ, guy, didn't you hear about the Eurospatiale disaster?"

The crash at the Paris Air Show, he meant. "What about it?"

"Right in the middle of the aerial demonstration, the pilot was forced to make an emergency crash landing. An aileron ripped off a wing at thirty thousand feet and smashed into the fuselage."

"An inboard flap, actually," I said.

He looked annoyed. "Whatever. The piece landed smack-dab on the runway at Le Bourget about six feet from Mr. Deepak Gupta, the chairman and managing director of Air India. Almost killed the guy."

"Okay." That I hadn't heard.

"Mr. Gupta didn't even wait for the plane to crash," he went on. "Pulled out his mobile phone and called Mike and said he was about to cancel his order for thirty-four Eurospatiale E-336 planes. Said those guys weren't ready for prime time. Wanted to talk business as soon as the show was over."

"That's about eight billion dollars' worth of business," I said, nodding. "Give or take."

"Right. I told Mike not to leave Mumbai until he gets Mr. Gupta's signature on the LOI." An LOI was a letter of intent. "I don't care how sick of curry he gets."

"Okay."

He pointed at me with a big, meaty index finger. "Lemme tell you something. It wasn't just one damned E-336 that crashed at Le Bourget. It was Eurospatiale's whole program. And Air India's just the first penny to drop. This is a no-brainer."

"Okay, but the offsite-"

"Cheryl wants someone who can talk knowledgeably about the 880."

Cheryl Tobin was our new CEO and his boss. She was the first female CEO in the sixty-year history of Hammond Aerospace and, in fact, our first female top executive. She'd been named to the job four months before, after the legendary James Rawlings had dropped dead on the golf course at Pebble Beach. Bodine must have been as stunned as everyone else when the board of directors voted to hire not just an outsider-from Boeing, yet, our biggest competitor-but a woman. Ouch. Because everyone thought the next CEO was going to be Hank Bodine. Hell, he even looked like a CEO.

"What about Fred?"

"Fred's doctors won't let him travel yet." Fred Madigan, the chief engineer on the SkyCruiser, had recently had a triple bypass.

"But there's plenty of others." Granted, I probably knew more about the plane, overall, than anyone else in the company, but that didn't make any difference: I wasn't a member of the executive team. I was a peon.

Bodine came forward in his chair, his eyes lasering into mine. "You're right. But Cheryl wanted you." He paused, lowered his voice. "Any idea why that might be?"

"I've never talked to Cheryl Tobin in my life," I said. "She doesn't even know who I am."

"Well, for some reason, you've been asked to go."

"Asked or ordered?"

I thought he'd smile, but he didn't. "It's not optional," he said.

"Then I'm flattered to be invited." A long weekend in a remote lodge in British Columbia with the twelve or thirteen top executives of Hammond Aerospace? I would have preferred a root canal. Anesthesia optional.

His phone buzzed, and he picked it up. "Yeah. I'm on my way," he said into the mouthpiece. He stood up. "Walk with me. I'm late for a meeting."

He bounded out of his office with the stride of an ex-athlete-he'd played football at Purdue years ago, I'd heard-and I lengthened my stride to keep up with him. He gave Gloria a quick wave as we hurtled through his outer office.

"One more thing," he said. "Before we reach the lodge, I want you to find out why that plane crashed in Paris. I want Mike to have every last bit of ammo we can get to trash Eurospatiale and sell some SkyCruisers."

The executive corridor was hushed and carpeted, the walls mahogany and lined with vintage airplane blueprints in black frames.

"I'll do what I can."

"Not good enough. I want the facts before we get to Canada."

Some other executive I didn't recognize passed by, and said, "How's it going, Hank?" Bodine flashed a smile and touched two fingers to his forehead in a kind of salute but didn't slow down.

"I doubt I can call Eurospatiale and ask them, Hank."

"Are you always this insubordinate?"

"Only with people I'm trying to impress."

He laughed once, a seal's bark. "You're ballsy. I like that."

"No, you don't."

He smiled, flashing big, too-white teeth. "You got me there." Then his smile vanished as quickly as it had appeared.

We stopped right outside the executive conference room. I sneaked a glance inside. One entire side of the room was a floor-to-ceiling window overlooking downtown L.A. On one wall was a giant screen on which was projected the Hammond Aerospace logo, which looked like some 1960s corporate designer's vision of the future.

Ten or twelve people were sitting in tall leather chairs at a huge O-shaped conference table made of burnished black wood. The only woman among them was Cheryl Tobin, an attractive blonde in her early fifties wearing a crisp lavender suit with crisp white lapels. Everything about her seemed crisp and composed and efficient.