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

by Walter J. Boyne

  O’Malley was nothing if not insensitive. No one knew better than Rodriquez that the schedule had slipped on the Hypersonic Cruiser, and he didn’t want to be reminded of it, not now and not by someone who wasn’t contributing much more than money to the effort. In his heart he was glad for Rutan and his team, and especially glad that Melvill had made the hazardous trip into space safely.

  Safety was the heart of Rodriquez’s problem. He was building the Hypersonic Cruiser, and the chances were that his close friend, V. R. Shannon, would fly it. Unfortunately, the chances were also very good that something could go wrong, and V. R. would not survive. There would be no ejection at hypersonic speeds, and the craft was too small to have the luxury of an escape capsule.

  Rodriquez was not sure he could take the triple disappointment of the failure of his great project, the culmination of his engineering career, and, most important of all, the death of his friend. Thinking about it robbed him of his usual normal composure even though he was absorbed in his work as before. He was just too conscious that every bit of progress moved him toward a life-defining moment that might be laden with tragedy.

  “Steve, I’ve about decided to give up on the idea of manned hypersonic flight, at least for the first time. It will cost us some money, but I think I can make up the time we’d lose on the schedule.”

  “That’s a change of tune, Bob. You’ve been adamant about manned flight being the way to go. What’s changing your mind? Boeing’s success with the X-43A?”

  After an earlier failure, the Boeing X-43A had flown at 4,780 mph, about seven times the speed of sound.

  “No, listen, that doesn’t bother me at all. Look at the complexity of what they are doing—they have a B-52 chase plane to carry it to altitude, and then a Pegasus rocket to accelerate it to scramjet speeds. Worse than that, they have a half-dozen bureaucracies overseeing what they are doing. I feel sorry for them.”

  “Mach 7, that’s pretty good.”

  “It’s a small, single-use vehicle! It gets to Mach 7 and then crashes into the ocean. What the hell good is that? What would Kelly Johnson have said about a program like that?”

  “They are not shooting for a mission capable aircraft—”

  “Well, we are, dammit.” Rodriquez rarely interrupted O’Malley—few people besides his wife Sally did—but this was too much. “I’ve got to tell you, Steve, you’ve got to find something to do. You’re getting fat, you come around and bitch, and you are not contributing much but your money to this program. It’s about time you got out and drummed us up some business like you did in the old days, when we were chasing F-16 subcontracts in Europe.”

  O’Malley was stunned. His wife had said virtually the same thing to him that very morning. He stood up and walked into the tiny bathroom to gaze into the mirror over the sink.

  “Good Lord. You are both right.”

  He walked briskly past Rodriquez on his way out the door, saying only, “Thanks, Bob. I’ll be back, in shape and with some contracts. And something else. You tell V. R. Shannon that he’s got some competition now. I’m going to fly the Hypersonic Cruiser if he doesn’t want to. Or maybe even if he does.”

  Rodriquez went back to his work, still angry with O’Malley for his chafing remarks. He meant no harm, but he should know better. And if anyone should be worried about delays in development, it was O’Malley. He had helped father the F-16 program that took perhaps six years to go from a proposal to entering service. And he had been a big backer of the F-22, which was proposed in 1986 and still hadn’t entered service. He had a lot of nerve to complain about “slow progress” on the Hypersonic Cruiser. But O’Malley never had been short on nerve.

  September 14, 2004

  Maxwell Air Force Base, Alabama

  V. R. SHANNON strolled the familiar Maxwell campus in the near-mandatory civilian blue blazer and gray flannel pants, remembering the happy days he’d spent there so long ago as a lieutenant in the Squadron Officers School, and later as a major in the Command and Staff College. It had not been easy at first in either school because he was both younger than his peers and had been promoted more swiftly, neither fact designed to make him popular. Yet he had worked and played hard, and in both schools wound up at the top of his class.

  Nominally he was there on an unofficial mission, helping prepare for the next Gathering of Eagles event. The program had started in 1982 when fifteen distinguished aviators related their experiences to students. The Eagles were selected from all nations and all eras, and included such giants as Jimmy Doolittle, Curtis E. LeMay, Joe Foss, Adolf Galland, Gabby Gabreski, and Paul Tibbetts. The program was held every year, and many of the Eagles returned time and again, enjoying the company of the young officers with whom they talked.

  The group sponsoring this year’s event had invited V. R. down, ostensibly to discuss the possibility of including his grandfather, Vance Shannon, as an honorary Eagle. Shannon knew that this was just a cover, and that their real goal was to get his views—heretical from the Air Force’s standpoint—on the war in Iraq.

  Colonel Joe Carr was waiting for him on the steps of Austin Hall, the historic building where so many great Air Force officers had studied. Carr was project officer for the next year’s Gathering of Eagles, and led him into his small, crowded office.

  “General Shannon, it is good of you to come down. I would have been glad to pick you up this morning.”

  V. R. waved his hand. “No, I wanted to walk and soak up the old Maxwell aura. What a great place this is.”

  Carr went immediately to the point. “General Shannon—”

  “Just call me V. R., that’s what everyone does. I’m retired now, and there’s no point in standing on ceremony.”

  Clearly uncomfortable with the idea, Carr went on. “Well, then, V. R., I want to level with you. You know your views on the conduct of the war in Iraq are not very popular in the Air Force. We get a good cross section of opinion through here, but we haven’t invited anyone like you or General O’Malley to come in. The brass would frown on it. We know you have what headquarters considers to be really radical ideas, and we’d like to learn what they are. There are about fifteen of us. Would you be comfortable in just talking off the cuff about the war?”

  Shannon nodded his head. “Yes, but you know you have to look at the war in context. I’ll ramble on, taking in lots of different things—the economy, the media. You can sort it out among yourselves.”

  “I see you didn’t bring any briefcase, so I guess you don’t need a PowerPoint setup or anything?”

  “No—all I’ll need is a bottle of water, an attentive audience, and when I’m done, lots of good questions.”

  Carr led him down the hall to a small conference room where fifteen officers, mostly lieutenant colonels, but with some majors and colonels as well, were gathered. As they went in, Carr flicked on a sign that said “Top Secret” and closed the door.

  After the introductions, Carr said, “General Shannon, this room is secure. No one is taking notes, there aren’t any recording devices, and you can be as frank as you wish to be. There will be no attribution in articles, no quotes that might embarrass you. We just want to know what you and, as far as you feel comfortable in telling, General O’Malley think about the war in Iraq.”

  Shannon hesitated for a moment, then decided to be utterly frank.

  “Let me tell you first that whatever I say has to be taken with a grain of salt, because, frankly, I think both General O’Malley—Steve—and I are probably nuts. I hope we are nuts and that we are dead wrong, because if we are not nuts, if we are right, the United States is not just in desperate trouble, it has already lost the fight. And not just the United States, the Western world, too.

  “And there is a basis for me thinking I am nuts. I have an irreconcilable hatred of Muslim fanatics because my wife was on Pan Am Flight 103—the 747 that was blown up over Lockerbie, Scotland.”

  There was a shocked silence. A few of the men had known of this, most had not. It
put things in perspective.

  “Since then, the more I’ve learned about Muslim fanaticism, the more my hatred has increased. Steve’s case is different. His hatred is based on his absolute certainty that Muslim fanatics are going to do exactly what they’ve said they are going to do: disrupt the Western economy and eventually establish Muslim control of the world.

  “Now, with this in mind, let me talk first about the Iraq war. We went in for all the right reasons, but we went in with the wrong intelligence and the wrong methods. We made exactly the same mistake that McNamara and his Whiz Kids made in the Vietnam War. We had no idea of the psychology of the enemy, and worse, far worse, we imputed to the enemy a psychology and values similar to our own.

  “It was wrong in Vietnam, but there was an escape clause there. When the Vietnamese defeated us, we could leave and not worry about them following us. Sure, they would expand into Laos and Cambodia, and they would overrun South Vietnam, and they would even duke it up with China. But there was no clear and present danger to the United States. There is no escape clause in the war in Iraq, or for that matter in the war on terror.

  “Our knowledge of the enemy psychology was so faulty that there were idiots who spoke of ‘winning the hearts and minds’ of the Iraqis, just as others had spoken in the same stupid fashion about the Vietnamese.

  “But it was worse, far worse, with the Iraqis, whom we made our substitute enemy in the war on terror. I believe that Saddam Hussein was helping terrorists, but that was not his main goal. His main goal was maintaining his image as the man who had defied the United States and lived to tell about it. With immense oil wealth at his disposal, he felt comfortable that he had bribed enough people in France, Germany, and Russia so that the UN would never allow the United States to take action. And he devalued the United States as well; he believed firmly that the American public, instructed by the media, could not take the casualties he thought he could inflict upon us.

  “The problem was that in attacking Iraq we had one chance at victory, and that chance was in making an initial attack so devastating that it would terrify the entire Muslim world, and force the passive Muslim population, through sheer fear, to take control of the terrorists and free us of the problem. Steve used to call it ‘shock and awe’ and you no doubt have heard the term.

  “Such a devastating attack would have killed tens of thousands of Iraqis, maybe more, and would have brought us censure from around the world. You can imagine what the French and the German governments would have said, not all of it just because many of their officials were on Saddam’s payroll.

  “Further, we would have had to give the impression that we were perhaps irrational, and ready to unleash a similar, perhaps even more ferocious attack on any Muslim nation that opposed us. And we would have had to sustain this impression for years.”

  Shannon paused to assess how his words were going over. Not well, apparently; some looked interested, but most looked appalled. He decided to press on.

  “I’ve said before that O’Malley and I are probably nuts. And others have said that it would be salutary for a superpower to occasionally appear irrational, so that lesser powers would not be inclined to tweak its nose on all occasions, for fear of an irrational reaction.

  “Here is what O’Malley and I believe was our only hope. We could have avoided the war in Iraq entirely if we had reacted properly and angrily after the terrible attacks on the United States on September 11, 2001. Within a week of that date we should have detonated nonnuclear weapons over the capital of every Muslim nation, and over every Muslim holy site—Mecca, Medina, all of them. And we should have issued an edict to the Muslim world: ‘Stop terrorism in the next thirty days, or the next series of explosions will not be over your cities, but on them. The explosions will not be nonnuclear: they will be nuclear. It is for you to decide your fate.’ ”

  Most of the expressions around the room registered horror; a few showed agreement.

  Shannon went on. “Then we should have added this proviso to the Arab governments: ‘If you stop the terrorists, the United States will begin the biggest economic development program in history for Muslim nations, and will bring them from their abject poverty into the family of nations.’

  “If we had the brains and the balls to have done this, the Muslim world would have collapsed into a jelly of acquiescence. Muslim leaders would have cut off funds to the terrorists, and would have rounded them up and killed them for us. The whole global war on terror would have been over. And you wouldn’t have to be listening to an old bore like me.

  “And instead of reacting with anger and an obvious desire for revenge, what did we do? We went through a maudlin period of self-congratulations over our ability to endure tragedy, and through a tedious effort to prove our humanity by insisting we would punish only the guilty, by insisting that there be no racial profiling, and in general by demonstrating all the good traits of a democracy which the enemy—and the fanatical Muslims are our enemy—intends to destroy.”

  Obviously concerned that the discussion was getting more radical than he intended, Carr spoke up. “But we are in Iraq now, General Shannon. How are we going to get out?”

  “Sadly, we are going to get out as we got out of Vietnam—dishonorably, shabbily, and at great cost to the people we were honestly trying to help. We’ll have political reasons to find some palpably unbelievable way to leave the country with a counterfeit semblance of what the perpetrators will call ‘honor,’ and I use quotation marks. Iraq will be submerged in violence, subverted by Iran and Syria, and a clerical state will emerge, one that will foster terrorism again to an unimaginable degree. And we will do this in the name of politics. In effect we will have congressmen selling the soul of the United States in order to win their next election.”

  Carr asked, “Do you see any way out for us that is not a humiliating defeat?”

  Shannon shook his head. “Sadly, no. Despite the bravery and the brilliance of our fighting personnel, Congress will cut the legs out from under them and either cut off funding or demand a prescribed withdrawal date, or both. The question now is not what do we do after Iraq. The question is what do we do after the Muslims carry out their announced intentions and detonate nuclear weapons in our cities.”

  “Do you believe it will come to that?”

  “Absolutely, the minute they are capable of setting off nuclear weapons they will do it. This seems self-evident, even discounting the fact that I may be a nut. They have been far more forthcoming in their pronouncements than Hitler ever was in Mein Kampf. We didn’t believe him because almost no one read his book, and he was regarded as a passing irritant on the international scene. Even those who saw Hitler as a threat thought he could be bought off—given little countries, some colonies, let him terrorize the Jews, and everything would be OK. But the Muslims have been much more straightforward, much more consistent. Their goal is to convert or kill all of us, and establish a worldwide Muslim caliphate with all the misery and poverty that entails.

  “So far they have tried to do everything they have promised us, from the World Trade Center on. And we can expect smaller actions, bombs in schools, in malls, all the things going on every day in Israel.

  “The question is: what will we do when this happens. Will we have the guts then to take what the world would call irrational actions, and use nuclear weapons against Muslim states? Or will we slowly trade our civilization for theirs, just as they promise and predict?”

  There was a general silence. One major said, “General Shannon, I hope you are nuts. If you are not, life is not going to be worth living for my kids.”

  Realizing he had to change the thrust of the discussion, Carr said, “General Shannon, you don’t have to tell us anything you think is secret or proprietary, but it is generally known that your company is concentrating on building a manned hypersonic aircraft that you believe might be an effective tool to quell terrorism at its source. What can you tell us about it?”

  Shannon flushed. He kne
w this was coming. There was no way to avoid it, Aviation Week had been monitoring RoboPlanes for years, and it was rare when the government could keep a secret, much less a private company that had to purchase materials and supplies from vendors who were under no obligation to keep what they were selling secret. It was easy enough to infer what RoboPlanes’s goals were, just from the amount of titanium purchased and the kind of software suppliers it was using.

  “I’ll tell you what I can. But let me put it in context. As you know as well as anyone, hypersonic flight has been around for years, and manned hypersonic aircraft were planned as long ago as the 1930s, with the Sänger experiments. The Air Force’s own late, lamented Dyna-Soar project was designed to maneuver in orbit, and would still be in use today if we had not been so stupid as to cancel it. But hypersonic projects are like all air and space projects today, caught up in a welter of budgetary, programming, and media hurdles that attenuate the programs endlessly.

  “And let’s not forget the hobby-shop factor. Programs become careers for officers and civilian engineers alike, and they want constantly to improve them, so that the original idea gets enhanced and more capabilities get added—but the program gets more expensive and more stretched out. I won’t mention any programs by name, but you could pick any program from any service, throw in the Coast Guard if you want to, and you’ll find the same factors.