Hypersonic Thunder: A Novel of the Jet Age (18 page)

Harry was aware that the connection between V. R. and Vance Shannon, Incorporated, was suspect. Someone—naturally he suspected Bob Rodriquez—had written letters protesting what was termed an “egregious conflict of interest situation” to Ben Rich, to Colonel James Allen, the incredibly competent commander of his unit, the 4450th Tactical Group, and to the Secretary of Defense. All hell had broken loose for a couple of weeks until everyone was satisfied that V. R. was a staunch defender of the Air Force’s interest, and not that of Vance Shannon, Incorporated. The letters had phony signatures and addresses and, strangely, had not been sent to the press. That was the main reason Harry thought it was Rodriquez. He was clearly trying to hurt the Shannons, but was still patriotic enough not to want to hurt the still-secret stealth program.

“Tom, have you ever wondered how everyone has been able to keep the F-117A secret so long?”

His twin looked up from his checkbook and bank statement, hopelessly at odds with each other, as always.

“It’s amazing. Nothing else in this industry has been kept a secret for a minute, but they’ve been flying F-117As out of Tonopah for a year now, and no one has said a word. Somebody’s been doing something right for a change. And not all night flights, either, like it used to be.”

The front door burst open and V. R. thundered down the hall in his flying suit, boots clattering on the tile, then erupted into the library with a big grin, Harry’s ancient battered B-4 bag under one arm, and a six-pack of Budweiser in his hand.

“Dad! Uncle Harry! Good to see you.”

They embraced and Tom reached up and rubbed the silver oak leaves on V. R.’s shoulders.

“Man that looks good, V. R.! Congratulations. You’re going to be Chief of Staff someday if you keep going at this rate!”

Harry reached over and rapped on the big carved wooden table.

“Don’t say that, Tom—that’s what you used to say about Steve O’Malley, and look what happened to him.”

They caught up on family business for a few minutes, Tom warning V. R. that Nancy was going to pressure him about having some children.

V. R. grew serious. “OK, Dad, but tell her not to say anything to Ginny. We’ve been trying for the last year, and no luck. We’ve got a whole bunch of tests to do now, to see what the problem is. The last thing she needs is some advice from Nancy on having kids. She feels inadequate already. And as for me, if I find out that I’m firing blanks, I don’t know what the hell I’ll do.”

Then, unconsciously assuming a new, more formal posture that went with his new role in the family, he said, “Let’s get down to business. You remember the test I flew last May on the missile bay doors? The results were a disaster. When the bay doors open, the entire stealth capability is lost, just for seconds, but for that time the airplane appears as big as an F-15 on the radar screens.”

Tom and Harry nodded. They had been working the problem from two approaches. One of their subsidiary companies had spent thousands of hours and hundreds of thousands of dollars designing mechanisms to open and shut the missile bay doors more rapidly. The problem was that the missile or bomb required a small but irreducible amount of time to separate from the aircraft and clear the doors. No matter how fast the doors opened and shut, there was still the time requirement needed for the bomb to clear.

V. R. went on. “I’ve got an idea that I wanted to run by you before I propose it to my boss and to Ben Rich. It’s not gung-ho offensive, and that’s why I’m hesitant about it. And what I’m going to tell you is way more than top secret. You are both cleared, but you cannot let this go farther than this room, not even to the people you have working on this problem, until I tell you so. I’m sure you understand. Or you will when I’m finished.

“First off, we’ve got all kinds of radar equipment on the bombing ranges, at the base in Tonopah, at Nellis, and elsewhere. The information we’re getting back is that we are not as ‘stealthy’ as we thought—that under certain conditions we can be acquired by a SAM site. And this means we are going to need to operate with jamming support—and we are damn short of that.”

V. R. popped open three bottles of beer and handed them around.

“Well, here’s where I think we are. We’ve got the missile bay doors opening and closing as fast as possible, and we’ve got the launch trapeze operating as fast as possible as well. I don’t think we’ll get any more improvement in that area. So we’ve got an unsolvable problem,
unless we look at it differently. Here’s what I’m proposing. We hook the radar homing and warning system—the good old RHAW gear—to the bomb system. If we are being painted by enemy radar, we don’t open the missile bay doors, and come back around for another run, letting the escort jammers do their best to suppress the radar site that is painting us. It means wasting some run-ins, maybe, but it is better than getting hit by a missile.”

Neither Tom nor Harry spoke. This was a new approach, and an unusual one for it was, as V. R. had warned, defensive in nature. It could mean that some bomb runs would be aborted and have to be repeated—always risky.

Tom spoke up. “If your RHAW gear could speak direct to the jammers, it could give them a fix on the radar causing the problem. And maybe to the local AWACS as well; they could vector some Wild Weasels in to take out the radar site.”

Wild Weasels had the toughest assignment in the Air Force. Always “first in and last out,” the Wild Weasels’ job was to attack the SAM sites and clear the way in for bombers. In essence, they had a shoot-out with the SAMs, trying to kill the SAMs before the missiles killed them. Their losses had been staggering in Vietnam, with the pioneering crews paying the heaviest price. Even today, only the toughest, most competent crews could handle the duty.

Harry spoke up at last. “I think that’s brilliant, V. R., and Tom’s idea is great, too. No reason we cannot get it to talk to the jammers and the AWACS simultaneously with its stopping the missile bay doors from opening. And I don’t think it suffers from being a defensive idea; the whole idea of stealth is basically defensive, anyway. This is the sort of thing Bill Creech will go for in a minute. And Ben Rich, too.”

“OK, if you think so. I’m going to go back to Tonopah today and propose this, and Dad, I’ll fold your suggestion in as well, as my idea. When it gets back to you, it’s news, you understand? I don’t want any more letters saying I’m doing what I’m doing—talking to my dad for advice. And talking to you, too, Uncle Harry.”

With that, V. R. turned and headed out the library door, leaving his untasted beer on his dad’s desk. Tom picked up V. R.’s beer and glanced at Harry.

“You not drinking yours, either?”

“No, I don’t want to go home and have Anna smell it on my breath. She really doesn’t care if I have a drink, but I’m just more comfortable doing without. I couldn’t take another round of her falling off the wagon.”

They sat comfortably, not talking for a while, marshaling their thoughts. They didn’t get to meet face-to-face as often as they should, and they always tried to bring each other up to speed. Both men knew that the company had grown so much that they needed to delegate some of their responsibilities, but the turnaround from Nancy’s disaster had been so recent and so remarkable that they hated to do so.

“It’s been quite a year, Harry. The company’s doing well, we’ve got most of Nancy’s obligations taken care of, Bob Rodriquez has fallen off the face of the earth, and V. R. is a roaring success. I just hope that he gets his marital issues solved.”

“Does anybody ever do that? They’ll survive, just as Dad did, and we are doing. I just hope there’s no war, and that V. R. can move on to less dangerous flying.”

“That’ll be the day. A young guy wants danger; you know how that is.”

“You more than me, Tom. I always thought I wanted to be a fighter pilot, but I kept flying other types. You wanted to be a fighter pilot, an ace, and that’s what you were. It takes all kinds.”

“You were in combat; it takes more guts to sit there in a B-17 and let the Messerschmitts and the flak have at you than it does to try to sneak up on a Betty! But things don’t change. Just look at that young kid, H. Ross Perot’s son. He’s wealthy, got a tremendous family business, and what does he go and do? He and his copilot, Jay Coburn, become the first to fly around the world in a helicopter. I read the story on it, and there was plenty of danger involved, particularly when they had to land on a container ship at sea to refuel.”

Harry nodded. “They picked the exact right time; until the jet engine came along for helicopters, it would have been out of the question. There’s a market we ought to take a look at. Not building helicopters, but getting more into the maintenance side of the business.”

“You’re right. Perot and Coburn were smart enough to see that the Bell Jet Ranger could just do the job, even though there wasn’t much margin for error. It took some guts to do it. But there’s something in young guys that makes them want to test themselves. Look at
the Falklands War. I was talking to the British air attaché in Washington a few weeks ago, and he said that there were fistfights among crew members scrambling for an assignment to go to war.”

“Probably the same thing on the Argentine side. Just a bunch of young guys panting to go shoot and get shot at.”

Tom laughed. “Shooting is better. Getting shot at is no good.”

“You don’t have to go to war to get shot at today! I understand that some of Braniff’s stockholders were threatening to shoot somebody at Braniff or at the Federal Aviation Administration, somebody.”

The government, in its wisdom, had deregulated the airlines in 1978, trying to get more competition into the business. Braniff International Airways, for years one of the most progressive and innovative airlines, had expanded too far too fast and went too deep in debt. In May, they shut down, leaving employees, stockholders, and customers desolate.

“They won’t be the last, Tom, you wait and see. This deregulation thing will change the whole picture of airlines. Old companies will be failing and new companies will be starting up.”

“Is that something you would like to get into? We’ve got some capital building up, we could hire some of the top hands and start an airline of our own.”

Harry hesitated. He had to work up to this in the right way, get Tom interested, and then lay the kicker on him.

“Way too risky, especially in today’s climate. But I’ll tell you what. I think we could consider starting a business where we buy airliners—some used, maybe some new—and lease them back to the airlines. Form a separate corporation, use mostly the bank’s money for finance, and base it somewhere in southern California, say at Mojave or somewhere, where the land’s relatively cheap and the climate is good for outdoor storage.”

Tom balked in his familiar way, brow wrinkling, shoulders hunching up, fists clenching.

“I don’t know. Sounds like we’re getting into banking more than airplanes—we don’t want to repeat the real estate fiasco.”

“No, I’ve been looking into this. There are some people doing it already on a small scale, here and in Europe, too. But if deregulation goes like we think it will, it would be perfect. The old companies will have to get rid of their airplanes, probably for a dime on the dollar; the
new companies won’t have any money to buy airplanes, and we could be there to lease them. Save them the capital expense.”

“It’s intriguing, Harry, we’ve got to do something. Can we run it by the board of directors and get some insight?”

“I’ll get it on the agenda. I know they’ll say what you just said, ‘It’s like real estate.’ But it’s not. Its airplanes—buying them, selling them, maintaining them. And it’s civilian business, so if the Reagan spending boom stops, we’ll have some balance in our business.”

“Let me think this over, Harry. I’m inclined to go along on it, but I get goosey every time I think about how close we came to shutting up shop over the real estate deals. We’re just nicely back on our feet, and I hate to tip the balance. Not only that, we are spread thin; we’ll need somebody to manage it for us, someone we can trust.”

“We’ll be careful. And the board has to approve. We’ve got some smart people helping us. And I’ve got an idea about who could manage it. You won’t like it, of course.”

“Well, why pick someone I don’t like? Half the industry’s being laid off nowadays; there are a ton of people to choose from.”

“Yes, but the guy I’ve got in mind is good—and it would be good for us to have him. Bob Rodriquez, Jr., is available. Rod’s looking at the consolidation within the industry and wants to get out from Lockheed and into a smaller firm, someplace he can have more say.”

Harry watched the familiar series of expressions march across Tom’s face as he struggled for control. Finally, he stood up and hunched over his desk, saying in a low, measured voice, “Are you serious? Do you have any idea of the repercussions this could have on us with his dad, wherever he is? And as nice as the kid is, do we know he’d be loyal to us? Look what Bob tried to do to us.”

“Tom, the kid has been working to smooth things over for the last few years. He has a good head, not as sharp as his dad, but a good heart. I think we’d be smart to bring him into the company. More than that—if his dad surfaces, we’d be smart to bring him back into the company. I wish I knew where he was.”

“You are a glutton for punishment. Rodriquez tried to take over this company; he would have fired us if he had.”

“There was something wrong with him, Tom. I talked to Steve O’Malley about it. He was convinced Bob was having some sort of nervous breakdown. But after all he did for Dad, after all he did for us,
I’d be happy to have him back on the team. And getting his son on board might be a way to do it.”

“Have you talked it over with V. R.? You’re always in cahoots with my son, you’ve probably talked to him about it before you talked to me.”

“Absolutely! He has the best read on you of anybody. And he told me that you’d turn red, get mad, and then finally see the sense of it.”

Tom slumped back in his chair. “He was right, as usual. It’s a pain in the ass having a kid who’s smarter than you are. And I also know what you’re thinking.”