Hypersonic Thunder: A Novel of the Jet Age (11 page)

“Harry, they wouldn’t have listened. They have a lot of smart guys in their marketing department, and there’s been a lot of competition between Lockheed and Douglas ever since the Connie was bucking the DC-6.”

“Yeah, but the big problem is that the breakeven point for either company was about 750 aircraft. So if they divide the market equally—which is probably what will happen—both are doomed to lose a bundle on the project. If one captures most of the market, it might make a little, but the other firm will be ruined. And Boeing is doing a much better job than anyone thought selling 747s, some to the very market that the L-1011 and DC-10 are aiming for. I still think if I could have gotten to their top management, I could have convinced them.”

“Spilt milk, Harry, forget about it. We’ve got a long way to go to get our own company on its feet, so stop worrying about those guys. We’ve never done as well on the commercial side as we have on the military side, anyway. It’s time we were concentrating on some new military projects.”

Both men knew that there was a revolution in management taking place in the United States Air Force. The Strategic Air Command was for many years the fiefdom of the great Curtis LeMay, and he had given SAC its character. But now, seventeen years after LeMay’s departure, an erudite, soft-spoken, four-star general named Russell Dougherty was changing things, imparting a new look to SAC management. He had shocked his wing commanders in one of his early talks by saying, “There’s nothing in your job description or mine that requires either of us to be an unmitigated son of a bitch.” It was
Dougherty’s way of moving SAC from the authoritarian style that had been a necessity when LeMay had to whip SAC into shape at the start of the Cold War. Later SAC commanders had abused their authority and Dougherty saw that new methods were needed.

In the Tactical Air Command, the new mover and shaker was General Bill Creech, a perfectionist who demanded the best from everyone—especially himself. Since the Vietnam War, TAC had fallen on hard times, and it was going to take someone with Creech’s drive and determination to make it an effective force again.

Tom continued. “I think we’ll have an in with the Tactical Air Command. I know Bill Creech pretty well. He’s not everybody’s cup of tea—fighter pilots don’t like to be told to shine their shoes and wear neckties all the time—but he’s a hell of a leader and he knows combat. He flew 103 combat missions over Korea and another 177 over Vietnam.”

“You had a lot of combat, too, Tom.”

Harry never stopped trying to build Tom up. His ego, already badly deflated by his long prison stay, had been hurt even worse by his wife taking over the family business and almost destroying it. He was recovering from both shocks, but slowly.

“And that’s why he’ll talk to me. He’s got some great new ideas. He hates the fact that we lost 397 F-105s in Vietnam. Creech is determined never to have losses like that again.”

Harry looked at his brother fondly, wishing that their father could see how much strength he had regained. The more he became engaged in the business, the more he shook off the ravages of his time as a POW in North Vietnam.

Tom went on, visibly wound up, getting up and walking back and forth just as his father used to do when on to a new idea. But where Vance Shannon had walked with long, loping strides until his very last days, Tom’s injuries from his POW days imparted a nautical roll to his walk.

“Creech gave a talk at one of my Air Force Association meetings. He says he is determined to see that we never again try to fight an integrated air defense system like the North Vietnamese had or that the Soviets have now. He says he wants to take away the advantage that radar and surface-to-air missiles give them. He absolutely never wants us to have to go in low to avoid SAMs, then get the shit shot out of us
by antiaircraft. And he wants to take away the sanctuary that night gives the enemy. He says we used to fight all day in Vietnam, while the enemy stood down; then at night the enemy would move all their supplies, and we couldn’t do much about it.”

Tom was quiet for a moment, remembering his own time in Vietnamese skies, and the futile bomb runs he and his crews had made on jungle trails, risking a multi-million-dollar F-4 and two lives trying to pick off a three-thousand-dollar truck carrying two hundred dollars’ worth of rice.

Harry spoke, “We’ve been in the antiradar business for a while, Tom, with our jamming equipment.” He knew it was a mistake the minute he said it.

“Yeah, that’s another achievement of our friend, our enemy, Bob Rodriquez. But that’s old hat. We introduce some ECM equipment, the enemy introduces a counter, then we introduce a counter-counter. Creech wants the industry to come up with something entirely different, and the word is that the Air Force has Lockheed and Northrop working on it already in a couple of black programs.”

“Black programs” were so secret that only a few people in key positions in Congress were briefed on them, and their budgets were kept totally out of public view.

Tom went on. “We’ve got to get in on this, right on the ground floor. One thing I think we can do is work on night-vision equipment. You know we acquired that little outfit up in Redmond, Washington. What was the name of it?”

“I remember because it was named after its founder, Richard Pierce—he called it ‘Pierce the Night, Incorporated.’ You think they have potential?”

“They do if we finance them, and get them the military contracts. I think they are mostly concerned with police work, hunters, things like that. If we can get them to raise their sights, look at airborne applications, we’d be on to something. I’d like to take this on as a special project, make it my kind of contribution, à la Bob Rodriquez.”

“Go ahead. You can say what you want about Bob Rodriquez, but he’s a great role model for taking new businesses and turning them into profit makers. Go for it.”

Harry was delighted. This was exactly what Tom needed, a mission, something he could take on and claim for his own, something
that hadn’t been set up for him to do by Nancy or, worse, by Rodriquez.

“OK, I’m on it. And let’s get back to those black programs that we know Lockheed and Northrop are working. What can we find out about them?”

Harry was on the spot. Lockheed had called him in five years before, when the Air Force held its competition for a new aircraft that would be difficult for radar to see. The problem was that it was so secret that he could not even tell Tom without violating his oath. He had never even told his father—it was just too hush-hush. The situation was ludicrous, Tom was perfectly reliable, yet Harry was so conscious of the importance of what he was doing that he could not bring himself to give the secret away, not even to his brother.

“Well, you know Lockheed had a soft spot in its heart for Dad. Kelly Johnson and Ben Rich were always concerned about how you were doing in Vietnam. If Creech has Lockheed working on something, it has to be in the Skunk Works. Let me talk to Kelly and see if I can get something for us.”

Tom nodded, and Harry felt another jerk of conscience. Even his last statement had been a bit of a lie. For some reason, Kelly was not a true believer in the new project, but Ben Rich was, and it was Ben who had hired him. Telling Tom he’d talk to Kelly was just a ruse, one he felt badly about.

Harry was about to walk out the door when he suddenly changed his mind. Tom was trustworthy, and this might be the sort of thing that would help bring him round.

“Tom, I’ve been bullshitting you. We’ve already got a handle on the project at Lockheed, and up to now, I haven’t told you about it because, naturally, I’m sworn to secrecy; it’s a black program. But if something happened to me, you’d need to know, and since you brought it up, I’m going to tell you. But you have to swear to me you’ll never tell a soul that I mentioned this to you, not even after I get you cleared at Lockheed to discuss it. You’ve got to let on that everything you learn is absolutely new to you. Otherwise Kelly and Ben would come down on me like a ton of bricks and we’d be shoved out the door of the Skunk Works. Nobody, absolutely nobody, can know that I’m telling you this.”

Tom was torn between being pissed off at being treated like an outsider and being elated to learn they already had an in on something
he knew had to be important. He decided to roll gracefully with the news. “Of course. I’ll never say a word to anybody.”

Filled with guilty remorse, Harry came back to the desk and, in a low voice, said, “You know how the SR-71 is shaped. What you might not know is that its shape is not only for speed, it is also an attempt to reduce its radar signature. The shape, with the help of some of the radar-absorbing materials they used, succeeded in that. A B-52 has a radar cross section of more than a thousand square feet. Kelly cut that down to about eleven square feet in the SR-71. It was a tremendous achievement, especially at the speeds at which the SR-71 flies. By the time enemy radar picks the SR-71 up, it’s already gone past, out of range.”

“Yeah, but the enemy was always able to track the SR-71. They fired a lot of missiles at it. So it wasn’t perfect, even though they never hit it.”

“No, that’s right, and worse, the Soviets spent a lot of money improving their radar network, getting their SAMs faster firing, and so on, just because of the SR-71. So what the Air Force wants is an airplane that will be invisible to radar. But it also has to be invisible to infrared seekers, and to sound detection, too. That’s what we are working on. An airplane with a radar signature so low that it is virtually invisible electronically.”

Tom snorted. “That’s nuts. You’ll never be able to do it.”

“That’s what Kelly Johnson thinks, too. But Ben Rich is taking over from Kelly, and he’s staking his reputation on the idea. And back in 1973, the Air Force held a competition to see if a real stealth airplane was possible. They named the project ‘Have Blue.’ Northrop and some other companies competed for it, and Lockheed was not even invited to enter. But you know the Skunk Works, they never give up and they elbowed their way in. Lockheed and Northrop won. Then in the runoff for what they were calling the XST, the Lockheed entry was so much better than the Northrop entry that it was no contest. Northrop figured that it had to be stealthy from the front and below—Lockheed tried to make it stealthy from all angles—and they won the contest and built the prototypes. And just to give you an idea of how they regarded the airplane, the XST stood for ‘Experimental Survivable Test Bed’ meaning they thought it would be enough if the pilot survived flying it.”

Tom laughed and Harry went on.

“It was the first plane designed by electrical engineers instead of aircraft designers; it had every stability sin in the book—longitudinal, directional, pitch-up, pitch-down, you name it. They joked that the only thing it didn’t do was tip back on its tail when it was parked.”

“How long have you been involved?”

“For about five years now. I’m running a very small subsection of the project, trying to speed up the construction of the test vehicles, mostly by selecting already manufactured parts for the prototypes, you know, picking the gear from a Northrop F-5, and the fly-by-wire system from the F-16, and so on. But I’ve put three carefully selected scientists on our staff at Palmdale, people who have tremendous math backgrounds, way beyond our capability. It takes people like that to understand what is going on.”

Harry watched Tom closely. This was the sort of thing that, properly handled, might put Tom back in the saddle, directing things and making projects happen.

It was working. There was a new light in Tom’s eyes as he asked, “Well, what’s the theory behind it? Am I smart enough to learn if you tell me, or you too dumb to make me understand it?”

“Both, Tom. But I’ll get someone in who can teach us both more about it. It won’t be fun, but it’s got to be done.”

“Who are you thinking of?”

Harry smiled. “This will floor you, Tom, but it’s V. R. He’s been working the test program, even doing a little flying.”

The old Tom surfaced, his face red with anger.

“Goddammit, my son and my brother in on a project, and nobody tells me! Sure, I’m just a shot-up old crock, but it looks like you could have given me a clue. How you two must have yakked it up behind my back.”

“Tom, you know V. R. loves you more than anything and respects you as much as he loves you. So do I. When you get the full story, you’ll see why we kept it quiet. And you’ll see that I’ve really stuck my neck out here, tonight. This whole thing is potentially bigger than the Manhattan Project in terms of its effect on warfare. It’s not something you can talk about lightly. Especially for V. R., just at the start of his career. Wait till he briefs you. You’ll see what I mean.”

Tom snorted, subsiding as he usually did when he realized he was making a jerk of himself.

“We’ll see if I see.”

December 31, 1978

Palos Verdes, California

J
ILL
S
HANNON TRIED
to preserve the traditions that Vance had established, and every New Year’s Eve held the same sort of party where Vance enjoyed recounting the year’s events and the progress of his firm.

This year she decided to skip the business part. Nancy was still wounded from being forced out of the company’s management. And worse, it was already obvious that there had been a dramatic improvement since Harry had taken over the reins.

Jill was looking forward to meeting the newest member of the family, V. R.’s new wife, Ginny. Although she had firmly resisted marriage for three years, Ginny finally gave in and eloped with V. R. the previous February. Jill understood her reluctance to marry V. R. Anybody marrying a Shannon man was going to play second fiddle to flying, and Ginny was too strong-willed for that—or so she thought. Even though V. R. was stationed somewhere in Nevada, in all the long months since the marriage he had not come home once with his bride.

So it was just as well that the Rodriquez family no longer attended, even though Mae worked for Nancy. Love of work, rather than flying, had broken up their marriage, and the last thing Ginny needed was another bad example of a ruined relationship. She had invited them all, but Bob, Sr., had not responded, and Mae had declined. Curiously, his son, Rod, accepted with obvious pleasure. He seemed determined to somehow build a bridge back between his father and the Shannons.