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

by Walter J. Boyne

  Jill had not wanted Vance to go, but once Harry had the appointment, there was no holding him back. He insisted on flying to Washington three days early, to be sure that he would be rested and to be sure weather wouldn’t keep him away from his appointment.

  Now he and Harry were waiting in Meyer’s plush outer office, filled with plane and missile models. Vance had flown or worked on most of the planes.

  Meyer’s secretary, Grace Northrop, was a very proper-looking middle-aged woman with her pure white hair piled in a stylish bouffant. She had come to the Pentagon as a stenographer when it was opened and worked her way up to her current position of real power, able to give appointments with the Vice Chief or deny them. She said, “Please go in now, gentlemen.”

  Meyer rose to meet them, coming around his huge desk to shake their hands and direct them to a small settee next to a coffee table.

  “I’ve followed your career for years, Mr. Shannon, and I’m pleased to meet you. I remember when you and Ben Kelsey were flying the old Bell Airacuda! And you know that I knew Tom, too. I’m so sorry that he was shot down, but I’m glad that he’s alive.”

  “That’s why I’m here, General Meyer. I know there are many political considerations to running the war, and I know the White House has not made it easy for you, but I’m here to plead for an all-out air assault on North Vietnam.”

  Meyer started to speak, but Vance said what few people did. “Hear me out, please. We’ve made a big mistake in not using airpower in the North like it should be used. If we are ever going to end this war, we have to take out Haiphong and Hanoi, flatten them. I don’t mean nuclear bombs; I mean putting the B-52s over North Vietnam instead of having them bombing the jungle in South Vietnam.”

  Meyer nodded, a concerned look signaling Vance to go on. “I know it sounds crazy, with my son in a prison in Hanoi, but there’s no other way. I’ve studied this for more than a year, I’ve analyzed it from every angle, and if you knock out Haiphong and Hanoi, you will break their backs.”

  Meyer saw that Vance had stopped for a moment. “That’s exactly what General LeMay and General McConnell told the administration and the Congress should be done. And they refused, probably because they didn’t want to risk China or the Soviet Union being involved.”

  “They are involved, already! They are furnishing the arms, the airplanes, the food, the trucks. But you know that. They will not intervene on the behalf of North Vietnam! China hates Vietnam, and Russia won’t risk a nuclear war for the sake of a tiny country like North Vietnam. They are making fools of us.”

  Meyer nodded. “Mr. Shannon, it happens that I agree with you one hundred percent. But I won’t insult you by glossing over this. There is no chance that this administration will use overwhelming force against North Vietnam unless the United States finds itself in a position where it is going to lose massive numbers of troops on the ground.”

  “We’re already losing massive numbers of troops, General Meyer. You know that.”

  “Yes, but I’m talking about losing perhaps twenty or thirty thousand in a single action. If that were the case, I believe the White House would authorize the Air Force to do exactly what you say. But believe me, it’s is not going to happen, not in the foreseeable future. I wish I could tell you otherwise.”

  Vance slumped in his chair, defeat written over his face. In a much weaker voice, he said, “Thanks for seeing me, General Meyer. I knew all along that you would have known what to do, but I had to tell you myself. I hope you understand how a father feels.”

  Meyer walked them both to the door, shook Vance’s hand, then turned to Harry. “Thanks for coming, Mr. Shannon, and thanks for the privilege of meeting your father. We are doing everything we can to get our prisoners out, and I hope that the next time we meet I’ll be able to do more than I have done today. Believe me, if we ever get the go-ahead, we will drive the North Vietnamese out of the war in a matter of days.”

  Harry and Vance spent two more days in Washington, allowing Vance to gather strength for the flight home. Harry could ill afford the time away from the office, but he did not want Vance to travel until he had recovered somewhat from the disappointment he so obviously felt. While they were waiting in the crowded terminal at National, Vance tugged at Harry’s sleeve.

  “Harry, don’t think I was just being a crazy old man. I knew that the Air Force knows what to do. It was just that I had to be sure that they did, for Tom’s sake. I couldn’t rest on the off chance that somehow no one had considered it. It was foolish, I know, a waste of General Meyer’s time and yours, but it was something I had to do.”

  Harry nodded, his arm around his father’s shoulders, watching him intently. As Vance talked, he seemed to shrink, seeming to crawl within himself, to give up.

  “Dad, it’s important that you look to the future. Tom will be coming home, we know that, and he will be coming home to see you. You’ve got to be sure you take care of yourself, not try to do too much, not worry too much. The main thing is for Tom to come back and tell you personally how it was.”

  “I’ll try, Son, but it’s not going to be easy.”

  “Then think about this. How would it be if Tom came back and you were gone? He’d be devastated. You need to take care of yourself so you can give him the kind of homecoming he deserves. It might be next week, it might be five years from now, but he’ll be coming home and he’ll want to tell you all about it.”

  CHAPTER SIXTY-ONE

  December 31, 1971

  Palos Verdes, California

  Vance Shannon looked vacantly at the line of pill bottles and for the fifth time in a week could not recall what he had taken or when. Mumbling to himself, he said, “Seventy-seven years old and acting like I’m ninety-seven. Better take these out to Jill.”

  Jill was preparing the lavish New Year’s table that was a Shannon tradition, even though only four other people were coming tonight, Harry, Anna, Nancy, and Warren Bowers, Vance’s unofficial biographer. In years past Jill had entertained as many as twenty or thirty people on New Year’s Eve, but since Tom was shot down the only entertaining they did was this little annual year-end gathering.

  When Vance walked in with his array of bottles she smiled, saying, “Honey, you took everything you were supposed to take this morning. I’ll put the rest out for you tonight, after Warren goes.”

  She knew that the others would eat and run back to their children, but Warren would be there for hours. He was finishing up a book on Vance for which he already had a publisher. Bowers had written a long series of articles for Wings and Airpower magazines on Vance and virtually every plane he had tested. Now Warren was combining these in book form with a story of Vance’s life as a businessman. Tonight he was going to finish up with a review of the past couple of years in aviation and Vance’s predictions for the future.

  Vance placed the medicine bottles on the sink and left. She ran her hands over them, knowing that the best medicine for him would be news that Tom was coming home. The second-best medicine, oddly enough, was Bowers’s methodical search into Vance’s past. He had never talked about what he had done, and in listening to the interviews and reading Bowers’s articles Jill had learned much that made her admire Vance even more. The process was a tonic for Vance. She firmly believed that it had made the crucial difference between life and death for him.

  The front door banged open and she heard Harry’s excited voice calling, “Dad, Jill, come on into the library; I’ve got something that will knock your socks off—it’s a movie with Tom in it.”

  Nancy and Anna quickly set up Vance’s old 16mm motion picture projector, a relic of his days of test flying, while Harry pulled down the movie screen and moved in to thread the roll of film into the projector. Warren Bowers hung near the door, looking uncomfortable, so Jill got him a Coke and told him to sit down, that this, too, was part of Vance’s story.

  Vance came in and after hurried greetings Harry said, “Dad, this is Lieutenant Colonel Steve O’Malley. He flew with Tom
in the Cougars, and he’s working with Bob now on the smart bombs.”

  “Welcome, Colonel O’Malley. Tom spoke and wrote of you often.”

  Unable to contain his excitement, Harry said, “Dad, General Meyer has sent Steve out here with an incredible reel of film. He wanted you to see it as soon as possible. Tom is on the film and he is doing something absolutely fabulous; wait till you see.”

  Vance exploded. “You mean you looked at it first without bringing it straight over here?”

  Harry put his arm around him. “Easy there, old fella; I had to! What if it was the wrong reel or something? You would have killed me. But it’s not, and wait until you see it.”

  Anna went around and switched off the lights as flickering black-and-white images appeared on the screen. Harry adjusted the lens, and the images resolved into the dimly lit interior of the Hao Lo prison—the Hanoi Hilton.

  “No sound?”

  O’Malley, uncharacteristically quiet, spoke up at last. “No, sir, they’ve got a sound version, but it’s classified until they get the Vietnamese translations done. No one is supposed to have even this silent version, but General Meyer knew what it would mean to you. And you’ll see that, silent or not, it says a lot.”

  The film was obviously done by an amateur. The camera panned jerkily around the bleak room, coming to a halt on a desk, covered with some sort of cloth and bearing a book, writing paper, and what appeared to be a judge’s gavel.

  The Shannon family held their breath as a figure brushed past the camera, to stand behind the desk. A haughty Vietnamese, dressed in a military-style uniform without any distinguishing insignia, threw his shoulders back, coming to a loose attention.

  There was clumsy shift in point of view as the camera was apparently carried around to focus on a prisoner, standing on a white circle painted on the floor, his head hanging down as if he were warding off a blow.

  Nancy screamed, “It’s Tom!” just as the others perceived that the emaciated, dirty creature in his threadbare pajamas was indeed Tom Shannon. A crude misspelled subtitle, “Colonel Shanon, USAF,” then appeared, inserted at about knee level.

  Tears sprang to Vance’s eyes. “My poor son; may God have mercy on him.”

  The Vietnamese judge, if that was what he was, read at length from a set of folded papers, the camera going from him to Tom and back again.

  Crying, Jill, who never used bad language, said, “He’s so thin, and look how he’s holding his arm. It looks like he can just about stand up. Those dirty bastards, they’ve been torturing him!”

  Harry and Vance had long known that Tom was undoubtedly being tortured, but they had maintained a fiction with Jill and Nancy that he was being treated according to the Geneva Convention.

  Harry said, “Now watch; you are going to see some great acting.”

  The camera panned toward Tom, then went to a close-up of his face. Nancy moaned, “Look at the bruises. The poor baby, he’s been beaten.”

  Even as she spoke, Tom seemed to weave as he began to talk. They couldn’t hear him, but he was obviously talking very slowly and deliberately.

  O’Malley said, “Watch his eyes.”

  Tom’s eyes blinked tightly together, held for a second, opened, then repeated. It was as if he were reacting to the bright light, but there was a pattern, a rhythm, to it.

  “See that! Look, he’s blinking in Morse code! And they don’t see it; they think he’s too sick to be able to resist; they think he is saying what they want him to say.”

  Tom was on-screen for a full two minutes. Apparently another camera was in use, and this one shot over the shoulder of the North Vietnamese interrogator. Tom continued speaking the whole time even as he blinked his eyes.

  “Dad, my Morse code ability is long gone, but I’m sure you recognize some of it. Colonel O’Malley brought me a translation. I’ll read it.”

  Vance said, “No, dammit, this is my son talking to me. Let me see how much I can figure out; then you can tell me.”

  The film ended and Vance said, “Run it again.”

  They played it five more times, and Vance finally said, “Tom is blinking three messages. The first one is just ‘SOS’—I guess that was to tip us off to the fact that he was blinking Morse code. The second was ‘Bad hurt, will live.’ And the third was ‘Bomb Hanoi; they fold.’”

  “Damn, that’s pretty good, Dad, just what the Pentagon decoders read.”

  Vance, feeling his oats, said, “I may not know what medicine to take, but I can still take Morse code.”

  They ran the film another three times, with the women crying and the men getting angrier with each showing.

  O’Malley, visibly excited, said, “Do you realize how sharp he has to be to be able to speak the drivel they were making him say and at the same time blink out a Morse code message to us? It’s like rubbing your head and patting your stomach at the same time, only harder.”

  Vance pounded the table. “Are they so stupid as to think this is good propaganda for them? It shows them torturing a helpless prisoner.”

  “Dad, most of their audience is already anti-American; they’ll eat this up, sad to say.”

  Nancy had sobbed almost uncontrollably throughout all the showings, once going up to the screen to touch her finger to Tom’s image. She spoke bitterly. “There are Americans who will eat this up. I don’t know what’s happening to this country.”

  O’Malley had to leave immediately, and dinner was a quick affair, with Harry, Anna, and Nancy departing within the hour. Bowers asked, “Mr. Shannon, are you sure you want to be interviewed tonight? I know you must be completely engaged by the film.”

  “No, Warren, you’ve spent the whole day coming here. I’ll have plenty of time tonight to think about the film. Let’s go into the library and maybe we can finish this up tonight.”

  In the library Bowers went through his usual elaborate setup of two voice recorders, put his list of questions in place, and arranged the yellow legal pad in which he wrote so swiftly that he kept pace with the recorders. He always prepared for a meeting by furnishing Vance an advance copy of his questions, along with some follow-up questions from previous sessions.

  In all their months together, Bowers’s natural diffidence never allowed him to call him Vance, despite being urged to do so.

  “Mr. Shannon, as I told you, I’m pretty far along with the book. Tonight, if you feel like it, I’d like you to give me a quick review of aviation for the past couple of years, and then tell me what you think the future holds. Maybe we can break it down to commercial, military, and general aviation, or some other way that is convenient for you.”

  Vance, his mind still on the tape, on Tom’s plight, on his inability to help, didn’t respond.

  “Sir, would it be better if I came back?”

  Vance shook himself and sat up in the chair. “No, Warren, let’s get on with it. I don’t want to waste your time. Let’s take a quick review of the past two years. It has been pretty surprising, some big advances, and some big setbacks. Would you like a cognac?”

  Bowers never drank and declined. Vance poured himself a double shot of Courvoisier, saying, “Normally I never touch this stuff anymore, but tonight I need it. It was pretty demoralizing seeing my son …”

  He stopped and visibly gathered his resources.

  “But let’s get down to business. I made some notes, and I’ll just read them out and you can ask questions if you want.”

  Bowers fussed with the recorders—he usually fouled up the process one way or another, listening to Vance talk after letting the tape stop recording or forgetting to start it again after a pause. Bowers sat poised to take down the comments in his own brand of shorthand, as a necessary backup.

  “Let’s do as you suggest and break it down. Let’s talk commercial aviation first. It’s a mess, as you know, despite the fine airplanes that we are flying.

  “One thing you have to remember, Warren, is that industries age, and companies age, just like men do. Douglas w
as a terrific success as long as Donald Douglas was younger and running it with a few key managers. But when he aged, so did his management and so did his company. They got behind the eight ball with the DC-8—no pun intended—and almost went under with the DC-9 until they got things figured out. But even the DC-9 couldn’t save them, and McDonnell took them over. Their new airplane, the DC-10, made its first flight in August of 1970, and it would be a success if the market was there. But the market’s not there, and worse, the Lockheed L-1011 is there. Both good airplanes, but airplanes cost too much nowadays.”

  Warren had heard this before and asked, “How does Boeing compare in this regard?”

  “Well, Boeing, much against its general inclinations, diversified better than other companies, better and smarter. Instead of diversifying by building canoes like Grumman tried to do, or a light plane, like General Dynamics tried, Boeing built a whole array of airliners, and that has kept them going. But they are having a hard time, too. The 747 sales have dried up, and the SST program has been canceled, just like they knew it would be, but after they poured millions into it.”

  Vance was quiet for a moment. Somehow the SST program was really the aircraft industry at its most idiotic. The government forced companies to bid on a plane it didn’t really want built. The companies bid on it, knowing they were going to waste a lot of money, and in the end, everything went down the drain. Not like during wartime, when you could decide on a plane you knew was needed, like the B-17 or the B-29, and be sure you built it by the thousands.

  “Boeing was damn near bankrupt early in 1970. They had thirty 747s sitting out in front of the plant, white tails, with no engines in them.”

  “White tails?”

  “They call them white tails because they don’t have any airline logo on them. But they cost money, sitting there. They owed money to everybody, couldn’t get it from the banks, finally got it from the industry—big subcontractors put up enough to keep them going. And they laid people off, right and left—more than sixty thousand of them. They had a running gag that an optimist at Boeing was somebody who brought his lunch to work. It was horrible.”