Hypersonic Thunder: A Novel of the Jet Age (Novels of the Jet Age)

by Walter J. Boyne

  V. R. nodded in agreement. “That was a lot riskier than bombing Qaddafi! Every time I watch their takeoff roll, I get goose bumps. They looked like they were going to buy the farm right there at Edwards.”

  Harry spoke up. “We’ll hear a lot more from them. Burt Rutan already has a series of designs in the works, all totally unlike anything we’ve seen before. He’s a genius, just like Dad said he was.”

  Surprisingly Warren Bowers spoke up. “What about ’87, Dennis? Anything worth while mentioning there?”

  Jenkins smiled. “Well, the funniest thing was that kid, what was his name, Mathias Rust, flew a Cessna into Moscow and landed in Red Square.”

  There was applause and O’Malley called out, “Don’t let that fool you. They had him under surveillance all along, and could have shot him down, but after all the bad publicity about shooting down the Korean Airliner, they didn’t have the guts to do it. But it does show that there are cracks in the Soviet system.”

  Dennis nodded and went on. “We’re getting some competition in fighters. The Brits and the French have the Typhoon in work, and the Swedes have another hot little fighter, the Saab Gripen; I don’t know how they do it, a tiny little country staying up with the rest of the world.”

  O’Malley, always a trifle chauvinistic, said, “They do it with American technology. That’s a G.E. engine they are using, and they are arming it with Sidewinders and Mavericks, all good G.I. issue, built under license.”

  Jenkins said, “Agreed, but be that as it may, they’ll be competition, and the market for fighters gets tighter every year as their price goes up. Remember what Norm Augustine predicted: someday every dollar in the Air Force budget will go to buy just one airplane.”

  “Anything else before we get down to business?”

  Jenkins spoke again. “Let’s hear it for the B-1B. Most of us saw it at the rollout, and this year it set a whole bunch of world records. Steve, V. R., you probably know Bob Chamberlain? He and his crew set more than a dozen world records in the B-1B on July Fourth. That airplane has come a long way, despite all the critics.”

  Harry waited a moment, looked around to see if anyone else was going to talk, then said, “Now brace yourself. Rod is going to give us the bad news.”

  Looking more than a little sheepish, Rod went to the easel and pulled the black cloth off, folded it as carefully as if it were a funeral flag, and waited while they digested the single sentence he had greasepenciled on the sheet. It read:

  Of 128 new low-cost airlines created after deregulation,

  only 37 are still operating.

  “You’ll remember that I told you that AdVanceAir Leasing was in the business of creating instant airlines. What I didn’t know, and couldn’t tell you, was that deregulation was in the business of creating instant bankrupt airlines.”

  Dennis said, “I’m just a minor stockholder in this group, but what does it mean to us?”

  “As you know AdVanceAir stock is not publicly traded; we were going to go public last year but I’m glad we waited, otherwise we would have cost a lot of people a lot of money. What it means is that the big cash-flow projections and the big profits we predicted for 1987 are just not going to happen. We’ve actually been pretty lucky—of the twenty-seven airlines we have leased airplanes to, only seven have failed, but another ten are shaky. I think the remaining ten are pretty solid. I’ll pass out some hard figures for you, but here’s the long and short of it. We’re just about going to break even this year, but next year we will lose money because we’ll have the expense of flying back to Mojave all the aircraft that are sitting abandoned because their airline has gone belly-up. There are about sixty of them, and unless I can peddle them, they will all have to be brought to ferry-flight status and flown back here for storage, waiting for business to pick up.”

  Bowers, not a wealthy man by any means, had most of his investment placed with AdVanceAir. There was a tremble in his voice as he asked, “Is that going to happen?”

  “I can’t tell you, Warren. The only thing I can tell you is that on my mom’s advice, I hedged on this happening. She had me use some of our surplus cash to buy positions on the Boeing 737 and Airbus A320 lines. If the demand for those airplanes picks up, the buying options will be like gold. I think it’s enough to keep us in the black all through 1988 and maybe longer. By then the effects of deregulation should have dampened out, and we should be back in business.”

  Warren looked blank. “I have no idea what you are talking about. What is buying a position? What is a buying option?”

  Rod said, “It’s common practice. You put money down early in a production cycle on an airplane that’s supposed to be delivered a year or two or more later. Then if an airline comes along that’s desperate for new equipment, you can sell them your place in the line at a profit. If not, and we stay in business, we can lease the new airplanes to customers.”

  Obviously distressed, Warren murmured, “I sure hope so.”

  Rod went on. “And I’ll tell you something else. Unless Boeing gets organized, the A320 is going to clean the 757’s and 767’s clocks! The fuel efficiency numbers for the airplane are fantastic, and it looks like the public is really going to like the interiors.”

  O’Malley said, “Isn’t Boeing going to compete with a new design? They have to, otherwise they are helping create a monster competitor.”

  Rod said, “No, it looks like they are going to stand pat and just upgrade the 737. It is a terrible strategy and the old-line guys at Boeing, the guys who saw the company bet on the 707, the 727, the 737, and the 747, are going nuts! They can’t stand the idea of another company making a better airplane.”

  Dennis Jenkins was always up on the inside news and said, “Apparently the new top brass in Boeing is saying that it is time to stop trying to run the company like a model railroad, and always spend the money on new equipment. Instead they are going to concentrate on shareholder return. Personally, I think it’s a fatal strategy.”

  There was a general murmuring—all were Boeing fans—and Harry said, “Well, Rod’s given us the bad news and I hope that that is as bad as it ever gets. The good news is that the rest of Vance Shannon, Incorporated, performed better than the market; every share you held in the company last year has gone up in value by about 30 percent. That’s better than almost any aerospace company stock in the business, and it speaks to the values Dad instilled in the company and in us. I just wish he and Tom were still here with us.”

  Harry passed around the draft copies of the annual report for analysis. He felt fairly comfortable. No one, except perhaps Warren, had been unduly shaken by the bad news from AdVanceAir and the profit and loss statement in the annual report would ease most of their discomfort.

  As they read, he surveyed the group, admiring their boundless source of energy and talent, and realizing how well they represented the aviation industry. From the start, aviation had demanded the utmost from its people, often even their lives. It was no different now. With a sense of nostalgia, he remembered those long gone years when he and his twin brother Tom were young, trying to expand their father’s business. They would have given a lot to have had people like these to work with then. He was just glad he had them to work with now.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  THE PASSING PARADE: U.S. Navy mistakes Iranian airliner for hostile aircraft, shoots it down, 290 dead; George H. W. Bush elected President; compact discs outsell vinyl records for first time; defeated Soviet Union leaves Afghanistan; antidepressant Prozac introduced; tunnel (“Chunnel”) under English Channel under way; eight-year Iran-Iraq war ends; Lucille Ball dies; Exxon Valdez releases huge oil spill in Alaskan waters; Chinese students rebel in Tiananmen Square; Oliver North guilty in Iran-Contra affair; Mikhail S. Gorbachev becomes President of Soviet Union; Cincinnati Reds star Pete Rose banned from baseball for gambling; Colin Powell appointed first African American Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff; huge earthquake in San Francisco; Burma becomes Myanmar; Deng Xiaoping resigns lea
dership; Communist bloc begins to disintegrate; Berlin Wall torn down; Romanians revolt, kill President Ceausescu.

  November 22, 1988

  Palmdale, California

  Steve O’Malley grabbed V. R.’s hand and said, “Congratulations on those eagles, Colonel; you’re getting to be a pretty hot rock in the promotion department.”

  V. R. returned the grip, grinning with pleasure, saying, “I’ve been lucky. I’ve had some friends—you being the best of them. And being the son of an ace and the grandson of Vance Shannon has helped a lot. I don’t know how long it will go on, but I’m going to ride it out.”

  O’Malley nodded at the closed hangar doors of Northrop’s Palmdale facility, saying, “They are sure doing this differently than the F-117! Imagine having an open rollout like this before the airplane even flies.”

  “I think there are a couple of reasons for it. We could keep the F-117 pretty well hidden—”

  O’Malley interrupted, “Pretty well hidden! There wasn’t any public announcement of the Nighthawk until about ten days ago. I never knew anything that was kept so secret so long.”

  “We were lucky, but I’m glad they let the public in on it. It will make things easier, you know, routine flights in daytime, and all the rest. But the B-2A is so big, they couldn’t hide it, and they couldn’t just test it at night. And as you know better than me, its cost is soaring, so they need some hype to strengthen its position in Congress.”

  O’Malley said, “Well, no surprises. Congress never stops shooting us in the foot, grandstanding for votes. It played its usual game of cutting back procurement as costs rose, and surprise! Unit costs go up. They knew going in that the research and development costs were astronomical—they had to be to get an airplane this advanced. It would have averaged out for the original 135 aircraft program, but if they do what the insiders say they are going to do—cut back to just twenty airplanes—it means each B-2A is going to cost more than two billion dollars apiece. The press and the antimilitary types will have a field day with that.”

  He wanted to say more, that the B-2A program was billed for hundreds of millions of dollars of even more highly classified “black” programs, but he could not, not even to his old friends. Dennis Jenkins slid in beside them in time to comment on O’Malley’s last remark.

  “There’s not much in the way of press here today—can’t be more than fifty people. For a big event, they’ve really limited the media. We’re lucky to be here ourselves.”

  It was true. Normally a rollout like this called for all the bells and whistles a public relations department could devise and everyone with any remote connection to the program was invited. If you supplied the plastic envelopes that held the nuts that went on a starter assembly, you got an invite, because invitations translated into promotion and into votes. Today there were only about five hundred spectators, all arranged in the bleachers facing the hangar. Everyone was a heavy hitter in government, business, or the military, but there were not many of them.

  “It looks like they are walking a tightrope between wanting to court Congress and not antagonize the press.”

  O’Malley shook his head, saying, “No, it’s more than that. Northrop and the Air Force are extremely sensitive about the shape of the aircraft’s trailing edge. That’s why they’ve positioned the bleachers the way they are. You watch, they will open the hangar doors, roll the aircraft out, and keep the rear of the aircraft away from public view. It’s just good sense.”

  The crowd was a little restless. Security had been tight and some people had been in their seats for almost an hour, and these were people who didn’t have an hour to spend. The airfield seemed strange, for instead of the typical roar of aircraft taking off, it was dead quiet. All takeoffs and landings at Palmdale had been suspended for the rollout. Fortunately the temperature hovered around 70 degrees instead of the summertime 105.

  “What’s going on in your world, Dennis? You keeping your eye on the Russkies for us?”

  “You have to hand it to them, gents. Their Space Shuttle looks pretty much like our Space Shuttle. They named theirs ‘Buran’—means ‘snowflake’ they tell me, a hell of a name for a shuttle. I’ve seen some videos that were smuggled out to us, and it looks pretty good. They had the guts to launch it and land it unmanned!”

  Jenkins and V. R. exchanged looks. O’Malley never wanted to hear anything about the Soviet Union’s progress nowadays—he was becoming more than ever focused on what he called the “Muslim threat.”

  Just to prod him, V. R. said, “Yeah, and I saw some film of their new bomber, the Tupolev Blackjack. It looks like our B-1, but it’s much bigger. They’ll probably make a lot more of them than one hundred, to boot. And I heard they flew the Tu-154 on hydrogen. Imagine that!”

  O’Malley snorted and said, “Well, you watch that hangar door. They are going to roll out something shortly that will make the Russians weep! There’s no way they have anything like it, not now, not for twenty years. This thing is a miracle.”

  All three men knew it was, for all had some hand in it, and they sat together companionably, lost in their thoughts.

  O’Malley had been an ardent supporter within the Air Force and on the Hill with Congress, and for reasons of his own. The airplane was sold as a solution to the magnificent Soviet air defenses, and it was that indeed. But O’Malley saw it as something else, a silent sentinel that could fly unseen and undetectable anywhere in the world. With its uncannily accurate precision munitions, a single B-2 could take out multiple small targets.

  The targets O’Malley had in mind were special and unprecedented. To him the entire Muslim world, all the one and one-half billion of them, was dancing to the tune of a handful of fanatic leaders, men such as Osama bin Laden, Abul Nidal, and others. He knew that these leaders had large organizations, but that their infrastructure was fragile, and that much—perhaps everything—depended upon their messianic leaders. He saw the B-2 as an instrument of divine justice, able to take out these leaders with a single strike that did little collateral damage. If the terrorist cells were the hydra-headed enemy they were said to be, the B-2 was the perfect sword to remove their multiple heads.

  And it would be even better if another of his programs could be kept from view long enough to bring it into existence. There was hard evidence that the rogue states—Iraq, Iran, North Korea, others—were hardening their weapons facilities where they were developing nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons of mass destruction. These sites were scattered and either located in mountain tunnels or buried under tons of desert rock. In either case, no conventional weapon could reach them. The standard nuclear weapons in the arsenal would cause too much collateral damage. So O’Malley had seen to it that there was adequate “black” money secreted in the B-2A program to develop “mini-nukes.” These were small bunker-busting bombs that the B-2 could carry. These mini-nukes would have a small yield, perhaps only onetenth of one percent of a kiloton—but would be effective against the embedded factories. A test of a dummy of one version, the B61-11, showed that a nuclear warhead could survive plunging through hundreds of feet of rocky soil before detonating.

  Virtually no one within the departments of State or Defense saw the Muslim threat as he saw it. In part this was based on bad intelligence. Jimmy Carter had gutted the “humint,” the human intelligence gathering capability of the agencies. As a result, O’Malley had to dissimulate, backing the B-2A on the basis of its deterrent value, while knowing that another, more important mission would be covered as well.

  It wasn’t hard for him to do, for the huge bomber, with its 172-foot wingspan and 350,000-pound gross weight, was a magnificent weapon, one with which the Soviet Union could not cope. It was designed to be invisible to radar and heat-seeking devices, and at a little distance, virtually invisible to the eye.

  V. R. was nostalgic. The airplane about to rolled out was replete with techniques, systems, and devices that the various Shannon firms had participated in over the years. The first w
as the standard in-flight refueling system that Harry Shannon had helped develop with Boeing after World War II. Then there was a quadruple redundant fly-by-wire control system that Bob Rodriquez had pioneered and that O’Malley had backed in the F-117A. One small division of the firm had helped develop the incredible “cotton gin” method of applying the radar absorbent structural material that permitted the B-2A to have its flowing, radar-deflecting contours. Perhaps most important, there was the family of precision guided weapons that Bob Rodriquez had developed over the years.

  The thoughts led him to wonder where Bob was; it was something that they knew he was alive. It would have been great to have him here at this rollout, to see the fruit of his work. He should be up on the speaker’s platform, ready to take some bows; instead he was somewhere in the Middle East, apparently. Privately, V. R. thought that Bob must somehow be in contact with O’Malley—he was probably the source for much of O’Malley’s information on the Muslim terrorists, or at least the source for O’Malley’s consuming concerns.

  Dennis Jenkins’s thoughts were quite different. He knew that the basic argument for the B-2A was that instead of sending a thousand bombers to take out one target, you sent one bomber to take out sixteen or more targets. The secret was stealth, and where the F-117A was all angles and facets, the B-2A had a sinuous flowing beauty. Its basic titanium structure was wreathed in a smooth-flowing jacket of radar absorbent material, its lines unmarred by any fins or rudders. Like the F-117A stealth fighter, it provided the radar screens with a target smaller than a hummingbird.