Hypersonic Thunder: A Novel of the Jet Age (40 page)

Fourth, Paul MacCready’s
Helios
. Everybody in the industry loved Paul, who was always coming up with something new and startling. His
Helios
, a huge, unlikely-looking UAV, had recently set a 96,500-foot altitude record. He was going to have to come in with some tie-in on this, as there was no direct Boeing interest in the project. Maybe he could wrap it in with the need for more space activity here in St. Louis.

Fifth, Predator using Hellfire weapons in Afghanistan. He’d have to watch himself on this one. A lot of the material was still classified, but it would certainly generate the most questions. It was incredible, it was just what O’Malley had predicted—a Predator had used a Hellfire missile to take out an enemy in Afghanistan. It opened up whole new worlds for UAVs.

Sixth, Lockheed Martin winning the Joint Strike Fighter competition. This one would have to be soft-pedaled. He couldn’t avoid mentioning it, it was too recent and too important. Maybe some nice
words on the Boeing approach, but emphasize the lift-fan on the Lockheed Martin F-35.

Seventh, the war on terror. Here’s where he would have to be really careful. He knew that many people regarded him as a nutcase on the subject, and he knew that his obsession had ended his career on a slightly sour note. Still, here was the perfect venue to tell important engineers exactly what the dangers were. He’d just have to be measured, and make it sound reasonable.

Shannon read through the notes one more time and put them in his briefcase. He wouldn’t need them once he was introduced and started talking. The main thing was not to go on too long. About twenty minutes was all anyone wanted, unless you were a stand-up comedian. The cab pulled to the curb, where Jack Cummings, the Boeing rep, stood, visibly embarrassed at not having been there to pick Shannon up.

CHAPTER NINETEEN

THE PASSING PARADE
: Terrorist prisoners taken to Guantanamo Bay; Catholic church cover-up of pedophile problem sparks outrage; Enron scandal spreads, Enron chairman Kenneth L. Lay resigns; in first State of the Union address, President Bush links Iran, Iraq, and North Korea in an “axis of evil” to unprecedented high popularity rating; kidnapped reporter Daniel Pearl killed by terrorists in Pakistan; Muslim/Hindu riots in India claim hundreds of lives; Operation Anaconda launched with mixed success in Afghanistan; despite Saudi proposal for normal relations with Israel, warfare breaks out in Middle East as a result of Palestinian suicide attacks; Hugo Chavez reinstated after ouster in Venezuela, threatens to tighten control, confront United States; Russia and United States agree to major cuts in nuclear forces; United States announces that it will not recognize an independent Palestinian state with Yasir Arafat as its head; another major fraud disclosed when WorldCom files for largest bankruptcy in history; world watches rescue of Pennsylvania miners after three days in flooded shaft; President Bush calls for regime change in Iraq in address to UN; North Korea continues to develop nuclear arms; terrorist rebels take 763 hostages in Moscow theater, many killed in rescue attempt; Washington, D.C., area terrorized by two snipers; UN calls on Iraq to disarm.

September 1, 2002

Palos Verdes, California

T
alk about blue Mondays! V. R. Shannon had never seen Steve O’Malley so depressed. He was spread out on the ancient leather couch, an untouched bottle of beer on the floor beside him, staring at the ceiling and occasionally giving off the kind of groan you hear in a suicide ward. For the first time that morning, he spoke.

“Look at us. Two retired four-stars, both still young, and almost worn-out trying to keep this Hypersonic Cruiser madness going.”

V. R. Shannon knew he had to cheer O’Malley up, no easy task since the week before when the latest experimental scramjet engine blew up in their supersonic tunnel in Mojave.

“I don’t know how long we can go, V. R. We’ve got at least six years to go, and we are hemorrhaging money. Every time I go in the house, Sally is all over me, demanding to know what’s going to happen to us, and I cannot tell her a thing. I don’t know. I just know we can’t quit now.”

“That’s for damn sure. We’d be idiots to quit now after all we’ve spent. In for a penny, in for a pound as the Brits say. And we are doing well on the cruise missile and the anti-cruise-missile missile; they’re moving right along.”

It was true, the two less ambitious projects were going well, and they already had bona-fide proof of it from the government. The proof was not yet in the form of a contract, but in a Department of Defense prohibition of their sale to anyone but a U.S. military service. They had welcomed the “prohibition,” for they never intended to sell the missiles anywhere else, and it meant that the government was granting some grudging approval to their efforts.

Shannon went on. “Besides, Bob Rodriquez has never failed yet. Look what he did for GPS, for precision guided munitions, for composite structures. He’s a genius, right up there with Rutan and MacCready.”

“I know that. Nobody has more regard for Bob than I. But Rutan and MacCready sort of keep their sights on more realistic targets. You don’t see Rutan trying to fly into space, or MacCready trying to launch satellites. We’re going way beyond anything anybody’s even
dreamed about. Just the cruise missiles programs are fantastic, but a Hypersonic Cruiser? Look at Boeing, the biggest, maybe the finest, aircraft company in the world, loaded with government contracts, and they don’t dare to try what we’re trying.”

Shannon breathed a little easier. The conversation was taking a direction he could manage: talking about airplanes.

“Yeah, you’re right, but of course look at all the other things they are doing that we’re not even looking at. They flew their first Airborne Laser aircraft back in July.”

He knew O’Malley had been invited to Wichita to see the first flight, because he had been a big backer of the project in the Pentagon. Then he bit his tongue; this might get O’Malley off on one of his anti-Muslim rants. As ferocious as Shannon was about the fanatical Muslim world, he was dead tired of listening to O’Malley’s harangues. Sheepishly, he realized that he must bore people as badly as O’Malley bored him on the subject.

“Yeah, it’s something else. It’s got that big turret—looks like Durante’s schnozzle—on the nose. But you got to remember, Boeing’s working with Lockheed Martin and Northrop Grumman on this thing—they are not going it alone like we are. Everybody in the industry but us teams up on risky projects.”

O’Malley was quiet for a minute and then said, “I was more impressed—and more worried—about Boeing’s X-45. They are building a whole family of them, calling them UCAVs—unmanned combat aerial vehicles—and planning to use them for defense suppression.”

This time both men were quiet, each lost in his own memory of flying the old Wild Weasel missions, attacking the enemy air defenses, taking out surface-to-air missile sites. It was the toughest job in the world, and if any mission could benefit from being unmanned, that was it. V. R.’s dad, Tom, had told him about the terrible losses the Wild Weasels had incurred in the Vietnam War. Their motto was “First In, Last Out” but all too often they didn’t come out at all, victims of the very SAMs they were trying to suppress.

V. R. said, “The X-45 is pretty impressive, and they’ve got some bigger ones coming along, too. I heard that they even have one that is super-secret, a deep black program that is much farther along than people would believe.”

O’Malley immediately switched subjects, convincing V. R. that he
had been on target with the deep black X-45 program. If it had been just speculation, O’Malley would have run with the subject, but he clammed up, saying, “All that stuff is great, but I saw something this year, got to fly it, in fact, that is nonmilitary in character, and is just about the most important advance in safety I’ve ever seen. They let me fly a Gulfstream V with the Enhanced Vision System. It is absolutely incredible.”

V. R. had been briefed thoroughly on the EVS at Gulfstream’s Savannah headquarters two months before, but didn’t say a word. The only way to get O’Malley out of his deep funk would be to get his juices going, talking about airplanes.

“You know, it sounds like the simplest thing in the world. They have an infrared camera, sensing heat and light, a whole bunch of computers and processors and a heads-up display in the cockpit, and it literally turns night into day. I was making an approach into Aspen, late at night, in the soup, and there, on the heads-up display, the HUD, was the whole scene, the valley, the ridge line of the mountains, the runway, the surrounding industrial area, the residences, it was just like it was VFR. But if you looked out the windscreen—nada, nothing. You glance back at the HUD, and it’s all clear. Amazing. And scary to realize that most people are flying without it.”

“I wish Grandpa Vance could have seen something like that. He used to tell me about flying the radio ranges, doing aural null approaches, and things like that—it must have been terrifying!”

“I know one thing—we’re going to have the EVS retrofitted on our Gulfstream—if we still own one after we get through with this Hypersonic Cruiser craziness.”

“I agree; it’s almost irresponsible to fly an airplane without it. But I tell you something else we are going to get—when we get through with the Cruiser—or it gets through with us. You know Vern Raburn, don’t you?”

“Sure, a great guy. Good thinker, straight shooter.”

“He had me down to Albuquerque the last week in August for the first flight of his new Eclipse 500. It’s one of the new VLJs—Very Light Jets. It is the neatest-looking little business jet you ever saw, six passengers, 370 knots, and he’s going to bring it in for way under a million dollars—he hopes!”

“Did you get to fly it?”

“No, I flew in the chase plane with Verne. The number one Eclipse took off, flew forty minutes, and landed, a totally routine flight. The thing I like about it is that it’s all metal—no questions about composite construction and pressurization—and they use a special welding process that eliminates most of the rivets. Really a clever design.”

“Well, I share your concern about composites and pressurization. We don’t have the data on fatigue life of composites yet. It’s OK on UAVs, even desirable, because they are expendable. But not in full-size, people-carrying aircraft. I know everybody is going that way, Boeing, Airbus, Cirrus, Rutan, of course. But it’s still not like an aluminum structure, not in my mind.”

“Well, you’ve got some company. Everybody’s pointing to composites in the crash of Flight 587, you know, the Airbus A300 that went in after departing JFK last year.”

The previous November, an A300 crashed after takeoff when its vertical stabilizer and rudder separated from the fuselage. The first investigation reports attributed the accident to the copilot’s overuse of the rudder controls after encountering jet wash from a 747 that had departed earlier.

“Yeah—that really chilled me. They are blaming the copilot, but when they look at the attachment, they found that the aluminum and titanium fasteners holding the fin to the fuselage were intact—but the composite lugs were broken. There will never be a straight story on this one.”

O’Malley stood up, in a better mood, but obviously still troubled.

“V. R., you know what’s worrying Bob, Dennis, and me the most? The fact that you are lined up to test-fly the Hypersonic Cruiser. It’s one thing to piss away maybe a billion dollars on a dream. It is another to kill your best friend in it. The pressure on you to fly is going to be tremendous, but I want you to know that we would all understand if you declined the honor.”

V. R. was deadly serious as he considered his reply.

“Steve, you remember Jimmy Doolittle, and how we talked about him at the funeral. He was known as the ‘master of the calculated risk.’ Well, I’m no Doolittle, but I’m going to be doing a lot of calculating. You know that nobody hates the fanatical Muslims more than me, and that nobody thinks they are a bigger threat than me—always excepting you, maybe. I want more than anything to prove the Hypersonic
Cruiser by test-flying it; I want to save the money we’ve all poured into the project, and I want to put a weapon in the hands of the government that will help it win the war on terror. And I will do it—but only as long as I calculate the risks and believe I have a good chance of success. You can always crash in any airplane, from a Cub to a Concorde, but we know that. What I don’t know is what the margin of error is for me in the Hypersonic Cruiser. I’ve been analyzing it as we’ve gone along, and right now I think it is slightly in my favor. I think that for the most part, I’ll be like the first astronauts, but instead of being locked, controlled by a ballistic trajectory, I’ll be locked in, controlled by preprogrammed computer inputs until I get over the target area. But—and I never have said this before, and I should have—if I think it’s a suicide mission, I will not go. Call me chicken, call me quitter, whatever, I’m not going unless I think I have a better than even chance of coming back.”

“Jesus, V. R., I’ve chided you for saying some dumb things over the years, but I have to say this is the smartest thing I’ve ever heard you say. Can I pass this on to Bob and Dennis?”

“No, I should have said this a long time ago. Let me do it. To be honest, I never thought we’d get this far along. I thought that the challenge was worth taking up, but that even Bob couldn’t do it. Now that it looks like we might have a shot at it, I’ve taken a closer look, and I want to tell the other guys myself. We all have our fortunes invested in this, but I know you all well enough to know you don’t want a kamikaze test pilot. It’s only money, and we all know it’s a gamble.”

Obviously vastly relieved, O’Malley grabbed his arm.

“You up for some tennis? It’s still early, we could play a couple of sets and still get out to the plant before Bob finishes his rounds.”

December 15, 2002

Mojave, California

B
OB
R
ODRIQUEZ CURSED
under his breath. He had just been examining a very positive report on the hypersonic cruise missile, and now he couldn’t find it. This happened more and more often to him. He would get up, march smartly over to a file cabinet, and then forget
what he was looking for. Like everyone else he was frightened of growing old, particularly now when so much depended upon his ability to bring the missile projects to fruition. As he searched for the report, he pushed a massive pile of paper off his desk. It cascaded to the floor next to an overflowing wastebasket and he realized that it was time for the monthly office cleanup.