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

by Walter J. Boyne

  “We can make an itty-bitty one like Boeing’s X-43A. It doesn’t carry anybody, and it malfunctioned on its first flight. We have no chance to make a conventional development program like the Air Force would demand. We can go for broke, or we ought to get out of the business. You know exactly what we are doing. We are depending upon computers for research that used to be done in wind tunnels and in test flights. We’ll never get where we want to go with conventional processes. Either we are right in what we glean from the computers, or we will fail in a spectacular manner.”

  Rodriquez’s tone was calm, but he was obviously sincere. They had charted a live-or-die course so far, abandoning all the traditional rules of experimentation that NASA and the military services lived by, and going on experience and gut instinct. It was the biggest gamble of their lives, for the future of all the companies—RoboPlanes, Vance Shannon, Incorporated, and all the rest rode on being correct. There would be no second prize for failure. And failure would inevitably also cost the life of the test pilot. At the moment, this was the most important factor in Rodriquez’s thinking.

  “Look, let’s stop mincing words. We all know that V. R. Shannon is going to be the test pilot for us, no matter which vehicle we create. He’s planning on retiring in 2005, and we will be rolling the Hypersonic Cruiser out the door by 2006 if possible, maybe mid-2007 if things don’t go as well as I’d like.”

  He paused for effect and went on. “I want you to think about what we are doing, and realize this: if we fail, we will have sacrificed our businesses, our wealth, and worst of all, one of the great pilots of our time, V. R. Shannon. If we succeed, we will hand the United States a military capability that is suited to fight the war on terror like nothing else.”

  O’Malley rose out of the chair to stand in a brooding, hunched-over position, looking as he did when he wrestled for the Air Force Academy. He leaned forward, arms spread, his legs positioned to leap, and said, “We’ve got a psychological problem here. You know that both V. R. and I are obsessed with the Muslim threat. We both vote to go ahead with this project. That puts the onus on the rest of you—Bob, Dennis, and Harry—to come to a measured decision. Right now there are two sure votes to proceed—mine and V. R.’s. We know the risks, all of them, and accept it, for the country needs a manned hypersonic vehicle, and it doesn’t look like any other manufacturer will be able to create one in the next ten or even twenty years. But like I say, we are obsessed, and might not be thinking clearly. It is up to you to call Harry, lay the cards on the table with him, and decide. As much as we like and love V. R., he is Harry’s nephew, his twin brother’s son. He may have strong feelings about this, and we have to listen to them. And I don’t want any split decisions. Either it is five to zero in favor, or let’s cancel the whole goddamn hypersonic program and concentrate on UAVs.”

  There was silence in the room.

  Rodriquez said, “These brochures I gave you are top secret in the company. The government would classify them immediately if it knew they existed, for we are no doubt treading on black projects that we don’t even know about. Make sure you don’t lose them. And if you have any questions, call me and I’ll come over. I only want to discuss this face-to-face, because I want to see your expressions as well as hear your ideas. We are not just risking V. R.’s life, we are fooling with a lot of lives here—no matter which way we decide.”

  O’Malley said, “Bob, when are you going to talk to Harry?”

  “Dennis and I will go over to Palos Verdes tonight. If he’s up to it, we’ll talk to him then. If not, we’ll wait there until he feels like discussing it. I don’t want to make him the first casualty of the program.”

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  THE PASSING PARADE: Jury convicts Libyan of Flight 103 bombing; huge spy scandal as FBI agent Robert Hanssen pleads guilty; ethnic Albanians rise in Macedonia; scientist, entrepreneur Dennis Tito pays $20 million to become “first space tourist” on International Space Station; U.S. economy boosted by huge Bush tax cut; peace agreement signed between Macedonian government and rebels; Muslim terrorists, most from Saudi Arabia ram jet liners into New York’s Twin Towers, the Pentagon, fourth attempt aborted by heroic passengers; al Qaeda Muslim terrorist network held responsible; United States and Great Britain initiate campaign against terrorist training camps in Afghanistan; Enron Corporation folds due to corporate corruption; U.S. campaign, combining special forces, airpower, and Northern Alliance ground forces, succeeds in toppling oppressive Taliban regime in Afghanistan; Hamid Karzai selected as new leader.

  April 29, 2001

  Mojave, California

  Just as it had been almost every week for the past six months, it was crisis time at RoboPlanes. Most of the problems stemmed from the quickly reached agreement to proceed with the Hypersonic Cruiser. Harry had demurred at first, but yielded to V. R.’s quiet, persuasive pitch that the company’s founder, Vance Shannon, would have gone ahead. They both knew this was the case, and V. R. added that Tom Shannon would have cast his vote to proceed as well. It cost Harry a great deal of his fast diminishing reserves of strength, for V. R. was the youngest surviving Shannon and the only one who might have children and carry on the family name. Still, the final company vote had been five to zero to proceed, just as O’Malley had demanded.

  For once, today’s crisis didn’t stem from the Hypersonic Cruiser. Instead, Rodriquez had insisted on a meeting of the firm’s officers to discuss some expected but still unwelcome developments in the UAV end of the business. Harry had again begged off, giving his proxy to Bob as was his wont lately. Only the “usual suspects,” Jenkins and O’Malley, would be there.

  V. R. couldn’t attend and wouldn’t have if he had been available. He studiously stayed away from ordinary company business to avoid any possible charge of conflict of interest. Now a four-star general, he was deputy commander of Central Command, and spent almost every waking hour touring American facilities in the Middle East. For V. R. it was a waiting game. He knew that the radical Muslims were going to attack, and he believed that the attack would come on the United States in some spectacular fashion. He combed intelligence reports and closely cross-questioned every one he dealt with. The State Department regarded him as an utter liability in the Middle East, a catastrophe waiting to happen, and had filed numerous complaints with the Department of Defense. None of them held water, for Shannon’s job performance was spectacular, and he never quite crossed the line so far that the foreign-service types could nail him.

  Rodriquez wanted to get right down to business, but knew he’d have to wait when Jenkins, virtually frothing at the mouth, said, “Did you read about this Dennis Tito? He paid twenty million dollars to the Russians for a ride up to the International Space Station! It’s deplorable.”

  O’Malley always liked to egg him on. “Come on, Dennis, you’re just jealous that you’ve stuffed all your money into this turkey of a Hypersonic Cruiser, and Tito is up there floating around weightless like you’d like to do.”

  Jenkins took the bait. “I’d never waste twenty million on a stupid, self-indulgent joyride. If he wanted to make a splash, he could have spent twenty million feeding starving kids in Africa, or right here in the States. That’s where he earned his money; he should spend it here.”

  Rodriquez said, “Well, he’s no friend of ours, that’s for sure. His investment company dropped us a long time before we went private—somehow he got word of what we were doing with UAVs and the hypersonic stuff. Actually, it was pretty shrewd of him.”

  Jenkins began to settle down, and Rodriquez went on. “Here’s the deal, gents. We’ve been outhustled on two important contracts. You know that we were bidding a whole mixture of subcontracts on General Atomic’s RQ-1B Predator, and another bunch of them on the Global Hawk.”

  The RQ-1B Predator was a new, turboprop-powered version that had flown on February 2. The Global Hawk had just made news with an incredible seventy-five-hundred-mile nonstop flight across the Pacific to Australia.

 
; “Well, we went wrong somewhere, because we got skunked on both programs. It really hurts, because we’ve been with both from the start.”

  O’Malley asked, “What was the reason they gave for cutting us out?”

  “Cost, pure and simple, was the reason. But I got a signal from Al Bonadies, one of the top engineers at Northrop Grumman. He had me over to his house for a beer last week, and they told me that part of it was the cost, and part of it was losing confidence in RoboPlanes because of what we were spending on the hypersonic projects. In simplest terms, they think we are nuts trying to do something that is a decade beyond anyone else.”

  There was a stunned silence. Jenkins said, “Well, we shouldn’t be surprised. You know how this industry is, there are virtually no secrets, and word has to get out on how ambitious our project is.”

  O’Malley said, “And how risky. They probably expect us to lose our shirts. Worse, they probably figure that we are using a pencil on their costs to cover some of the costs on the hypersonic program.”

  He looked into Rodriquez’s eyes and asked, “Are we, Bob? Is there some crossover on the program that’s hurting us? We’ll be a cooked goose for sure if we lose our edge on the UAVs.”

  Rodriquez shrugged. “There is no fraudulent bookkeeping going on, and I know you know that. But there’s bound to be some costs that are melded into the overhead that affect both programs. There’s no way to avoid it in practical terms. We can take some artificial measures, run some estimates on what it might be, and then factor it into the proposals. I guess we should have been doing that all along. But I don’t think costs are the problem. Credibility is. The problem is there is no way we can accelerate what we are doing. If we move like a sleepwalker for the next six years, never making a mistake, there is still no way we can fly the Hypersonic Cruiser much before 2008. We all know that.”

  Jenkins spoke up. “I’ve seen your financial forecasts, Bob. I guess it’s just a coincidence that December 2008 is when we run out of funds as well?”

  “Oddly enough, Dennis, it is just a coincidence. There’s no fudge factor on either side. If everything goes as we want it to go, if all of the decisions we make are correct, we’ll have a flight-worthy Hypersonic Cruiser ready for test in the fall of 2008. And if everything goes like we want financially, if the RoboPlanes UAV cash cow keeps on giving milk, we’ll have enough money to last until then. After that, all bets are off.”

  O’Malley broke in. “I’m usually the Cassandra of this bunch, always seeing pitfalls, but I’m more optimistic about the UAVs than ever. Maybe we should just back off from trying to swim with the big guys and doing their subcontracting. You know how their accountants are, going over every penny spent, and their value engineer guys, always poking their noses in. I think we are better off sticking to our own clientele, the small user, foreign governments, and the like. It makes it a lot easier for security purposes, too—we only have to deal with our own internal security and don’t have a raft of other people checking us out.”

  Jenkins said, “Looks like our roles are reversed, Steve; I’m usually the too-optimistic guy around here. But I wonder if we haven’t pretty well pushed the UAV market to the limit? The problem is we are making too good a product. Some of the UAVs being used by local police have several hundred missions on them. And the latest wrinkle, the mini-ballistic parachute, has saved half a dozen more. I guess what we need are some self-destruct units that go off after twenty missions or so. Just kidding, of course.”

  “Well, look what the software people have done, bring out new things that the user ‘has to have.’ That’s what we have to do with the UAVs. The vehicle is the least of it. We need to concentrate more on products, really far-out stuff, that we can put inside the UAVs. Look at the airline security problem—if we could have UAVs flying the perimeter of airports, low altitude, not messing with traffic, with some sort of an explosive sniffer on them, we’d have a gold mine. Or look at the border patrol. We need to get an infrared device that will reach out maybe forty miles in the desert to pick up illegal immigrants making their way north. Our problem is we are all airplane guys, we want to push buttons and go vrroooom. We’ve got to do like Paul MacCready does, get specialists in arcane fields and let them riff on the problems.”

  Rodriquez spoke. “Steve’s right. We’ve been doing that all along with the airframe, looking for ways to save weight, just letting the mission come find the airplane. Now we’ve got to start creating the missions. The environment’s the key. We cannot lose if can figure some inroads into saving the environment some way. But we’ve got to break out of the airplane builder’s mode and get some fresh talent in, people who don’t give a damn about airplanes, but want to see how glaciers move, or what’s happening in the rain forest. We’ve got UAVs of all sorts now on the books—let’s give some to some colleges and let them figure out how to use them.”

  He shook his head. “Here I am worrying about every dime we spend on the Hypersonic Cruiser, and now I want to give money away to colleges. But still, I think we should. We’ve got money for six more years for sure; if we use our heads. We could view the gifts to colleges as seed money, maybe we’ll be getting a return by 2007, and it will keep us going.”

  Jenkins put up his hand. “This is the sort of thing I like to do. Let me have a crack at this, and I’ll get back to you. I’ve got some ideas about where a few UAV systems could go to really be helpful. What would you say for a budget, half a million?”

  “Let’s start with a quarter million and see how it goes.”

  They broke up in general agreement but with Bob Rodriquez saying, “For Christ’s sake, what is the matter with me? I’m seventy-three years old. I’ll be damn near eighty by the time the Hypersonic Cruiser flies, if I’m lucky and I live that long. I should start thinking about slowing down.”

  O’Malley, normally gruff and no-nonsense, slipped his arm around Rodriquez’s shoulders and said, “Bob, even if you died, you’d have a laptop in your coffin and be working on something. You’ll never slow down. That’s why we call you ‘Hypersonic Bob’ behind your back.”

  September 11, 2001

  Washington, D.C.

  BY NINE O’CLOCK V. R. was ready for his second cup of coffee, and Julie, his incomparable assistant, had just left the room to get it. Steve O’Malley was sitting bolt upright in his chair opposite the desk, about to shove some figures across the table on the Joint Strike Fighter program when Shannon’s red phone rang. It was Snake Clark, who said simply, “Turn your television to CNN.”

  The indispensable Clark was normally unflappable, but the tone in his voice compelled Shannon to comply immediately, and CNN opened with a view of the North Tower of the World Trade Center wreathed in smoke.

  O’Malley said, “It’s got to be terrorists, they said they’d be back.”

  Shannon picked up the other line and asked Julie to get Bob Rodriquez and Dennis Jenkins on the line in a conference call.

  “I know it’s three hours earlier out there—just get them on the line.”

  CNN’s Carol Lin’s familiar voice came through, her professionalism smoothing over the confusion, saying, “This just in. You are looking at a very disturbing live shot. That is the World Trade Center, and we have unconfirmed reports that a plane has crashed into one of the towers . . .”

  Julie came to the door, saying, “I’ve got Mr. Rodriquez and Mr. Jenkins on the line, but you’ve got a call from the deputy administrator at the FAA, Mr. Greener.”

  “I’ll talk to Greener first, keep the other two on the line, tell them to turn on CNN.”

  Shannon said, “Hello Bill, what in God’s name is happening?”

  “V. R., we’ve got four, maybe five airliners hijacked. One of them just hit the World Trade Center. Can you scramble fighters and maybe locate the others and stop them?”

  Shannon whirled to face O’Malley. “Steve, tell my guys to get any fighters they can on the East Coast into the air, armed, authorized to fire on airliner targets only whe
n we give the word.”

  O’Malley bounded to the next room to ask a pale-faced Lieutenant Colonel Jim Mueller to call NORAD first, then Air Combat Command, then the Air National Guard unit at Andrews. He knew Shannon was exceeding his authority. No one but the President could actually authorize firing on an American passenger aircraft, but there was no time to go to the White House. He had no business giving orders, but they knew he was acting on Shannon’s behalf. He went back to V. R.’s office to hear him say, “Bill, we need locations and positive identification of these hijacked aircraft. What can you tell me?”

  “We think it was American Flight 11 which—Oh, my God!”

  Shannon whirled in time to see another airliner slicing into the South Tower, leaving a clear imprint of its shape before the flames erupted.

  “That’s probably United 175, out of Boston. It may be too late for the fighters.”

  “What else have you got? Where should my guys be looking? For Christ’s sake, Bill, what’s going on?”

  “It’s terrorism, well coordinated; you and Steve were right all along. Right now we’re tracking American Airlines Flight 77 heading your way; United Flight 93 is headed off somewhere, probably toward Washington, too. We are closing all the airports around New York, we’re probably going to ground all aircraft. Leave this line open, I’ll feed you anything I find out.”

  O’Malley picked up the other line, saying to Rodriquez and Jenkins, “This is it. The terrorists have struck, and there are two, maybe three more out there. Get the factory on alert; I doubt if they’ll try anything in an unpopulated area, but go ahead and warn them anyway.”

  Shannon’s office erupted into a whirlwind of staffers, bringing in or carrying out information and instructions, each one pausing momentarily to watch the unfolding horror.

  Colonel Miller came in, saying, “We’ve got F-15s off at Otis. They are going to orbit till they get a vector to the target. No F-16s off from Andrews yet.”