Harold Robbins
The Raiders
For my wife Jann, with all my love.
You don't have to deserve your mother's love.
You have to deserve your father's. He's more particular.
No man is a hero to his valet.
Or to his father.
PROLOGUE
PEOPLE HAVE RECURRING DREAMS. Jonas cord had them. Memories are often distressing. Dreams, bringing memories to life, are worse; emotions that are dull in memory come back sharp and tormenting in dreams.
The one that came most often began with the words "Jonas — my son."
"Jonas — my son," his father had muttered as he toppled into his son's arms, dead of an abrupt, massive stroke. One moment Jonas Senior was a powerful, domineering man. The next moment he was dead.
He had died without ever having told his son he loved him, or that he was proud of him. He had died without ever hearing any such words from his son. The old man and the young man loved each other, but neither could ever bring himself to say so, and neither ever felt confident of it. Jonas resolved he would never let things be that way with a son of his own — if he ever had one.
It was Rina who first made it clear to him that his father had cared for him. Rina: the young, voluptuous Rina. Jonas had almost hated his father over Rina. He had decided to marry her and had announced his decision to Jonas Senior. His father had opposed the marriage on the ground that the boy was too young to marry; and he had blocked it in the most effective way he possibly could, by marrying her himself. Jonas had called the old man a fool who had fallen for a scheming, avaricious gold digger.
Within hours after his father's death, Rina had explained that the old man had not been a fool at all. He had demanded a prenuptial agreement from her, in which she accepted a settlement but would not inherit stock in the Cord family businesses. If she had borne the old man a child, that child would have inherited stock and Jonas would have had to share control. During a whole year of marriage to the luscious and licentious Rina, the old man had resolutely avoided getting her pregnant — to preserve Jonas's status as sole heir.
The next person who made Jonas understand his father was Nevada Smith, the best and wisest friend either of the Jonases ever had. The leathery, straight-spoken Nevada Smith had shown up at the Cord ranch one day sixteen years before the death of Jonas Senior and asked if there was a job for him. There wasn't, but Jonas Senior was a man who sized up other men quickly; and he had hired Nevada to teach his little boy to ride and shoot — in short, to make a man of him. After Jonas Senior died, Nevada moved on. He starred in his own Wild West show and then became a major star of Western pictures. But he remained a friend and saw Jonas often. He told Jonas things the old man should have told him.
Jonas never told anyone else, but he pledged himself that if ever he had a son, the boy would know he loved him, would know it all his life, would know it before it was too late.
In another dream that often came, the year was 1945, twenty years after the death of his father, and Jonas was proudly and exuberantly flying The Centurion, the huge fiberglass-hull flying boat in which he had invested seventeen million dollars of the assets of what the Wall Street Journal called "the Cord Empire." It had been at the time the biggest airplane ever built, designed to carry an entire company of soldiers with two light tanks and all the other equipment they would need to invade a Japanese-held island.
The conventional wisdom was that he could never get the thing to lift off the water, but he was in the air. The Centurion was one more example of how Jonas Cord — no longer ever called Jonas Cord Junior — repeatedly defied expert opinion, went his own way, and made things work the way he wanted them to work.
For example, at the time of his death, Jonas Senior had been about to launch the parent company. Cord Explosives, into the manufacture of an exotic new product said to have thousands of potential uses in industry and in consumer goods. For want of a better name, the product was called plastics. Jonas had picked up on this idea and carried it forward. Cord Plastics was one of the biggest names in the industry. A Cord company manufactured airplanes, and another ran an airline. Cord Productions had made movies for some years, but later Jonas had decided to get out of that business and use the soundstages as rental properties.
For the test flight of The Centurion, Amos Winthrop, Jonas's father-in-law, who had supervised the building of the plane, sat in the co-pilot's seat. They had taken off, and the huge plane was flying, but suddenly everything went wrong. In the dream it was as if the plane had been rigged backward. If he turned the yoke to lower the right wing, the left wing dipped. If he shoved in the left rudder pedal, the plane turned right. And then the engines began to fail, one by one ...
Then, invariably, the telephone rang. It rang once, just once, enough to wake him and interrupt the dream, mercifully sparing him from having to relive what had really happened in 1945 — the failure of the engines one by one, the plunge into the sea, his escape from the buckled fuselage with doors jammed shut, shoved through a port by Amos, who was himself too fat to squeeze through, and finally the sinking of The Centurion, carrying the older man down with it.
Two weeks later, while Jonas was still in the hospital recovering from injuries he had suffered in the crash, the atomic bomb brought the war with Japan to an end; and Jonas had to give up plans to build Centurion II. Fortunately, Cord Aircraft had also just delivered to the Air Force its first jet fighter. The luck of Jonas Cord, someone commented acidly.
A son. He'd never had a son. He had been married twice, twice to the same woman. Monica Winthrop. By a sad, stupid error he had decided that the daughter she bore, Jo-Ann, was not his. He left Monica, and she divorced him. Fourteen years passed before he learned he had been wrong. Then, thank God, it was not too late. He remarried Monica and happily accepted Jo-Ann as his daughter. Jo-Ann said she wanted a little brother, but five years of trying had not yet produced one. The fault wasn't his. He had established a trust fund for a daughter born to his secretary in 1948. It was Monica's fault. Doctors said there was something funny about her. Monica was forty-three, a pregnancy was not impossible, just unlikely, and if they really wanted another child they should keep trying.
Anyway, he had bought a home in Bel Air, and Jo-Ann was going to college at Pepperdine. Monica had not given up her career and spent a lot of time in New York — as he spent a lot of time flying here, there, and the other where — but they were together enough to have plenty of chances to make something happen.
Jonas was happy. He insisted to himself that he was happy. Why shouldn't he have been? He had inherited Cord Explosives and built it into a billion-dollar conglomerate that was still growing. He was notoriously successful. He had the luck of Jonas Cord. He was forty-seven years old and had done just about everything he had ever wanted to do in life —
Except that he had never told his father he loved him and never heard his father say it to him. And he had never had a chance to make it right in some sense by treating a son of his own a different way.
1
1951