Hypersonic Thunder: A Novel of the Jet Age (13 page)

The sharp, quick communications from the Israeli Grumman E-2C Hawkeye reminded him: he was there to kill Syrian MiGs and bring back data to the USAF on the F-15’s performance in combat. No one, not even his darling Ginny, knew where he was—the mission was too secret. The United States could never acknowledge that it had an active duty Air Force pilot flying combat missions with the Israeli Air Force. He carried no identification material at all—no papers, no dog tag, nothing—and he had made a not-too-cheery commitment not to be taken alive if he was shot down.

Security was strict even for security-minded Israel. He had been introduced to his suspicious fellow pilots simply as Captain S. It was pointless, because he had been the instructor pilot for two of them when the Israeli Air Force got its first F-15s. Then he had become quite friendly with Dan Shapira and Beba Hurevitz; both gave him a wink and a nod at the introduction, but said no more. The other two pilots remained polite but wary of him until the first two indoctrination flights, when he demonstrated his proficiency and his gunnery prowess. They all spoke English on the ground, but in the air language remained the big barrier despite his two-week crash course at the language school in Monterrey. There they had concentrated on flying terminology, much of it derived from English practice.

Now he was number four in a flight of F-15s, Shapira in the lead, cruising at twenty thousand feet where there were no contrails to give them away. Israel was conducting raids on terrorist bases in the areas under Syrian control, and the intercepted radio communications showed that the Syrian Air Force was active. An Israeli Grumman Hawkeye command and control airplane—a sort of “mini-AWACS”—was watching the area, alert for any reaction from Syria.

As they turned over Sidon, the Hawkeye radar operator called: “Turn to 360 degrees; two formations of MiG-21s.”

Shannon knew that the MiGs were being sent to attack the Israeli F-4s striking PLO encampments. Strange war, with the F-4s being bombers and the F-15s their escort. He knew the Phantom pilots would prefer to handle the MiGs on their own, once they had dropped their ordnance. Minutes later V. R. picked up the two MiG formations on his own radar. On Shapira’s command, the F-15s lit their afterburners and dropped down on the still unsuspecting Syrians.

The late-model MiG-21s, suddenly aware of the F-15s’ presence, broke off their diving attack on the F-4s and turned to run. It was too late.

Heart pounding in his first combat, V. R. mumbled, “Dad, I hope I do as well as you did,” and saw three MiGs already spiraling down, trailing smoke. As his accelerating F-15 moved into firing range, he locked on his target, fired his Shafir missile, and watched with satisfaction as it flew right up the Syrian MiG’s tailpipe to explode. Seconds before there was a tiny camouflaged triangle of an airplane, flown by a
living, breathing Syrian pilot; now there was just a big red ball surrounded by black smoke drifting above the barren landscape below.

As V. R. climbed back up to altitude, he was surprised to see his flight of F-15s form around him. The radio crackled and Shapira’s voice came on: “Congratulations on your kill, Captain! You lead us back to base.”

The flight back was less than thirty minutes. V. R. smiled all the way.

December 21, 1979

Edwards Air Force Base, California

H
ARRY
S
HANNON RECOGNIZED
the slim, slightly stooped figure immediately. Once the maverick of swept-wing aviation, R. T. Jones was thin as ever, slightly stooped, and, Harry guessed, perhaps using a little Grecian Formula on his slicked-back hair.

“Dr. Jones, you won’t remember me . . .”

“Harry Shannon! Of course I remember you! How could I forget Vance Shannon’s son, after you flew me all over Europe?”

In the late spring of 1945, Harry had flown a C-47 carrying his father and the elite of American aeronautics deep into Europe to ferret out the secrets of the Luftwaffe. R. T. Jones, along with Theodore von Karman and others, had ruthlessly gone through the German engineering records, seeking whatever they could find that was in advance of American practice.

It had been a particularly satisfying trip for Jones, who had previously postulated that at very high speeds swept wings would have far less drag than straight wings, and been politely told by the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics that he was dead wrong. Jones always felt that the NACA’s negative reaction was in part because he was a self-taught engineer and did not fit the academic mold. But the German data—and German airplanes like the Messerschmitt Me 262—proved that Jones was absolutely right, and he gained his deserved stature in the engineering community as swept wings became standard for jets.

Jones said, “It was a great time. But I don’t believe mankind has learned anything from the wars. Look what’s going on in the Middle East. Poor people oppressed on all sides, and their sorry governments using hatred against Israel and the United States to take their minds off their poverty. What do you think of this business in Iran?”

On November 4, Iranian students under orders from the new Iranian government seized the United States embassy in Tehran and were now holding sixty-six U.S. citizens hostage. Jones’s comment touched on a sensitive issue with Harry. Still outraged by the event, he forgot his usual policy of never talking politics, saying, “It doesn’t make any sense. They think we are weak, because President Carter has kept chopping down the size of the military. Canceling the B-1 was bad, but it was just a symptom. You lose all international respect if the world knows you are willing to disarm unilaterally.”

Jones nodded. “You’d have thought we’d have learned our lesson with Hitler. You’ve got to stop these rabble-rousers when they are still small, before they have too much influence.”

“It will be interesting to see what the Soviet Union will do. They love to see us sucked into small wars. And they have a huge interest in the area, they have for centuries.”

“We have to worry about Iraq, too. They are getting close to having a nuclear weapon, and if they have it, they’ll use it—maybe against Iran, but more probably against Israel.”

Both men shook their heads, silent now in their frustration, then Jones spoke, “I was sorry to learn of your father’s passing, Harry.”

“Yes, it was sad. But we are losing so many of the great ones now. Just in the last year or two, we’ve lost Willy Messerschmitt, Barnes Wallis, Bill Lear, Wernher von Braun—it is really sort of melancholy to be an engineer nowadays.”

“Well, you’re looking good, but you’re just a kid of fifty or so, aren’t you?”

“I wish—I’m sixty-one and cannot believe it. And you were born in 1910, I know, so you’re ahead of the curve. And still pitching swept wings!”

Jones laughed. “No, this time, it’s a swing wing. Look, here it comes now. Tom McMurtry is flying it—I hope all goes well.”

Harry was there to witness the flight of the Ames-Dryden AD-1 oblique wing aircraft in the hope it would have some application to
problems he was working on in a “deep black” black stealth aircraft program. Their research showed that range was a problem with stealth aircraft, and Jones’s oblique wing innovation was a promising new approach.

They stood quietly as McMurtry taxied past, the two tiny jet engines putting out an ear-piercing whistle.

Harry noticed Jones shivering.

“It’s cold for Palmdale, Dr. Jones; can’t be much more than fifty degrees! Would you like my jacket? I’m feeling perfectly warm.”

Jones shook his head, laughing. “No, I’m delighted it’s cold. Those engines only put out about two hundred pounds of thrust each; the colder the temperature, the better they will perform. I wish it were freezing!”

Except for its size, the AD-1 was a perfectly ordinary-looking airplane. It had a slender clean fuselage, with a disproportionately large bubble canopy that seemed out of scale with the rest of the aircraft. The wings, designed to pivot at the center and lie almost parallel to the fuselage in flight, were narrow, very high aspect ratio, and from a quick glance had an unusual airfoil. Oddly enough, for a jet, it had a fixed tricycle landing gear.

Jones spoke up. “Look at that—thirty-two-foot wingspan, about fifteen hundred pounds gross weight—and McMurtry has flown everything from the 747 shuttle carrier aircraft to fighters. He must feel constricted in there.”

Shannon nodded and Jones went on. “I opposed this test at first. We’d already proved the theory in model form, but somebody up the line insisted on a manned vehicle.”

“Did you design it yourself?”

Jones shook his head. “No, the idea of an oblique wing, pivoting at the center, is mine, but Boeing came up with this configuration and it was built by the Ames Industrial Company up in Bohemia, New York. But I tell you, you can keep your eye out for a smart, up-and-coming company right here in California, run by a guy named Burt Rutan. Do you know him?”

Harry shook his head.

“Well, if you get nothing else out of this trip, go over to Mojave and tell him I sent you. I consider Burt to be the top aerodynamicist in the country now, and he combines it with a building savvy that is going
to be impossible to beat. His outfit did all the detail design and load analysis on this plane.”

Jones took out a tiny pair of binoculars to watch McMurtry take off.

“He cannot fool around. That thing doesn’t carry much fuel.”

Shannon watched as the AD-1 sped down the runway, lifted off far later than he thought it would, and climbed up to about a thousand feet.

Jones smiled at him.

“They won’t do any dramatic testing today—McMurtry will just make sure it’s a good airplane first. And it’s not a good airplane, at least not when he gets around to swinging that wing fully back. It’s going to be tough to handle. To tell you the truth, Harry, the oblique wing won’t prove itself until you get to big airplanes, supersonic transports and”—he paused, smiled wickedly, and said—“stealth bombers.”

Harry’s mouth dropped just as a group of NASA engineers surrounded Jones and began congratulating him.

This was not good. Jones might just be guessing, but if he wasn’t, there was a leak in the program somewhere. And how the hell did he know, or even suspect, that Harry had a part in the stealth bomber? This was not good.

July 12, 1980

Long Beach, California

“W
HAT ARE WE
doing working on a Saturday?”

“Like we don’t work every Saturday and every Sunday, too, for that matter. Glad you could make it, Bob. We haven’t had a chance to talk face-to-face for weeks.”

They were sitting in Rodriquez’s rental Chevy outside the chain-wire fence at the airport, windows rolled up, radio playing, air conditioner on in the eighty-degree sunshine, waiting for one of Steve O’Malley’s longtime projects to take off. Steve had worked for years with the famous test pilot, Russ Schleeh, to sell the McDonnell Douglas KC-10 to the USAF as a tanker. After years of delay, the Air Force finally agreed to buy some.

O’Malley glanced cautiously around the interior of the Chevy; the backseat was filled with business magazines—
Forbes
,
Fortune
—and probably twenty different issues of
The Wall Street Journal
.

“What are you doing in this rental heap, Bob? And how come you let it get so dirty—it smells like you have a week of hamburger lunches back there.”

“I don’t own a car anymore. I’m in so many different cities during the course of the year, it’s easier and cheaper just to rent all the time. And that stuff”—he pointed to the newspapers and magazines—“is how I make my real money. You can make money easier on Wall Street than you can in aviation, that’s for sure.”

“How do you know what to buy? I’ve got a few mutual funds, but I’ve no idea what they are worth. All my money is in the company.”

“Big mistake, Steve. Playing the stock market is just a matter of watching the technology and picking the comers. It’s really no different than what we try to do with our company, pick a technology and try to sell it. Except if you are smart, you can make a hundred times more in the stock market because you have a whole lot of people working for you, not just yourself and a few people in the company. You just ride on their backs.”

“This is all new to me, Bob. When did you get interested in this stuff?”

“I’ve been doing it about ten years now. The divorce was a big setback, of course, I gave Mae half of everything. That’s why it made me so angry when she said she had to go to work.”

Rodriquez went silent, with the sullen look on his face that O’Malley had seen so often in the last year.

“Well, if you are beating the market, you’re doing better than most people. The Dow Jones has been virtually flat.”

“I don’t buy the Dow. That’s what the mutual funds do, mainly, and that’s why they don’t make any money. I buy shares in companies I think will do well. And, mostly they do. Anyway, I’ve got a lot more invested outside of our good old ActOn than I have in it, and I’m going to keep going in that direction. When I get enough, I’ll jump ship and disappear.”

O’Malley stared at him. It was an odd thing to say, totally untypical. And Rodriquez rarely joked. There was something behind this. He tried to change the subject.

“How is Rod doing?”

Rodriquez jumped as if O’Malley had stabbed with a needle.

“Don’t mention him to me. He’s sucking up to the Shannons, after I warned him about them. I think he’d go to work for them, too, if he wasn’t scared that I’d cut him out of my will.”

“Come on, Bob, that’s nonsense! Your son is doing well with Lockheed, why on earth would he deliberately offend you? He’s just being civil, that’s all.”

Rodriquez sat silently for a while, obviously offended, then asked, “How come you couldn’t get admitted to the flight line? I thought you had an in here at Long Beach?”

“Not anymore, and it’s a damn shame. I’ll bet Russ and I walked a hundred miles together in corridors at the Pentagon, trying to sell the concept of a tanker that could do so much more than the KC-135, and getting a deaf ear everywhere. Now they are going to buy sixty, when they ought to be buying six hundred. But the wheels in St. Louis are pissed off at me now. You know how the rivalry goes between McDonnell brass and the poor remaining guys with the old Douglas company.”