Hypersonic Thunder: A Novel of the Jet Age (43 page)

“V. R. wants some kind of little museum set up in the main plant to honor Vance, Harry, and Tom. I’ve asked Warren Bowers to come over and sort of guide us through the models and the books to see which ones should go in the museum. Bob Rodriquez is coming, too, to look at the drawings and the technical manuals.”

“Steve, Warren is the right man for the job, but you’ve got to promise me that you are not going to unload on him and Bob about the Iraq War, and shock and awe and all that stuff you are always yelling about. I’m fed up with it and so is everyone else. They are not running the war the way you want it run and that’s it. Get over it.”

Steve’s four stars had never cut much ice with Sally when he was on active duty; now, retired, they cut even less. O’Malley wisely choked back a smart reply. He always came off second best in any exchange with her, and he also knew she was right. He’d become what he always swore he would not be, a retired bore, a backseat driver, a Monday-morning quarterback, angry with the way the war had gone. Worse, he made his feelings known on Bill O’Reilly’s television program, and gotten a rocket from the Chief’s office about keeping his mouth shut.

Still, he fumed as he moved around, picking up one dust-laden model after another, talking to himself as he had been since the opening night’s action on March 19, when Operation Iraqi Freedom officially began.

“Shock and awe, shock and awe! More like wimp and scrimp than shock and awe.” The doorbell rang, and he moved to it, admitting both Bowers and Rodriquez. Bowers was sporting his latest digital camera—he had a new one about every six months, and moved immediately to the library to take pictures, while Rodriquez made the fatal mistake of asking, “Well, Steve, what do you think of the war so far?”

“We are blowing it, Bob, and nobody should know it better than you. All this concern about collateral damage and minimizing enemy casualties is going to be interpreted as a sign of weakness by the Muslim world. We should have hit them with a massive attack, one that would put fear in their hearts. Anything else is nonsense. You watch, we’ll be in there for at least five years now, getting our guys killed, and they will grow a guerrilla movement we won’t be able to contain. We had one chance at this, and we blew it.”

Sally walked in and in a low voice that sounded as if it had been dipped in liquid oxygen hissed one word, “Steve.”

O’Malley caught himself, turned bright red, and asked Rodriquez, “Anything new at the plant?”

Rodriquez got Sally’s message as well.

“We’re still doing fantastically well on the small UAVs. We’ve had to open a second production line for the ones the sheriff’s departments are buying. And you know the school we set up to train them after they buy the aircraft? It’s making so much profit we are going to set up two more, one in Wichita and one in Martinsburg, West Virginia. The demand is skyrocketing.”

Rodriquez moved out the French doors to the patio and motioned for O’Malley to follow him.

“I take it Sally’s had a bellyful of shock and awe, eh? But I’ve got a little advance notice on a mission they flew last night. It’ll be in the papers tomorrow probably, but I thought this might give you a little peace of mind. It did me.”

Rodriquez pulled a sheaf of e-mail messages from a folder and selected one.

“Listen to this. It’s copy from John Tegler, a
Washington Times
reporter. It’ll be in print tomorrow if they pass it on. Listen.”

He began reading in a low hushed tone, with Steve leaning forward eagerly.

“ ‘One of the eleven Boeing B-1Bs deployed to take part in Operation Iraqi Freedom made a sensational attack yesterday evening. Bearing the name ‘Seek and Destroy,’ the aircraft is one of the much maligned B-1B bombers, and is part of the 405th Air Expeditionary Wing.’ ”

O’Malley nodded his head vigorously—he had been a leading proponent of the expeditionary wing concept, and here it was, proving its worth. Rodriquez continued reading:

“ ‘The aircraft and its crew of four are part of the 34th Bomb Squadron, 28th Bomb Wing. They are normally stationed at Ellsworth Air Force Base, South Dakota, where the 28th is commanded by Colonel James Kowalski. It is a small world: Kowalski is serving in Operation Iraqi Freedom as commander of the 405th AEW.

“ ‘Late yesterday evening, the crew of ‘Seek and Destroy’ was advised by the Airborne Warning and Control System (AWACS) controller
that Saddam Hussein had been detected at a particular restaurant. The report was credible, and probably from special forces personnel on the ground in Baghdad.’ ”

Rodriquez stopped and said, “Those special forces guys are terrific. Did you see the pictures of them in Afghanistan, operating on camels, but using a laptop for communications?”

O’Malley nodded impatiently, eager to get to some shock and awe.

Rodriquez resumed. “ ‘The AWACS provided the crew with full information and confirmed the order to attack. The four men, all seasoned professionals, were ready and began a series of closely coordinated tasks. The crew consisted of the aircraft commander Captain Chris Wachter; pilot Captain Sloan Hollis; Lieutenant Colonel Fred Swan, Weapon Systems Officer (Offensive); and Lieutenant Joe Runci, Weapon Systems Officer (Defensive). They were ready. Each man knew that they had twelve minutes to complete all of their tasks and drop the four bombs they were directed to use.

“ ‘Among their tasks was locating the exact target, the al-Saa restaurant, probing enemy air defenses, confirming all decisions with the AWACS controllers, arming the specified weapons (two different types of JDAMs), and finally placing the exact coordinates of the target in the bombs’ guidance mechanisms.’ ”

O’Malley, virtually overcome with anticipation, nodded again. He knew that while still in the bomb bay, the JDAM received constant updating from the aircraft’s avionics system. And that once released, the inertial guidance system takes over, and, with periodic GPS updates, guides the bomb to its target.

Rodriquez went on. “ ‘The B-1B was backed up by the AWACS and by Lockheed Martin F-16CJs. The F-16s were there to suppress any enemy missile sites. A Northrop Grumman EA-6B Prowler provided electronic countermeasures. Fortunately, the crew had the benefit of the enormous computer capacity of the B-1B, which stored the electronically captured images of virtually the whole of Iraq. They compared the coordinates given by the AWACS with the high-definition images to make sure they had the exact target.’ ”

The coordinates themselves were received over the radio, and written down, then transmitted back to the AWACS’s controller for verification. There was always the possibility of what the crews called “fat finger error”—the equivalent of a typo. Once double-checked, the
numbers are entered into the weapons system, and rechecked again to be sure they correspond exactly to those originally given.

The AWACS gave the crew of “Seek and Destroy” two specific targets, with specific coordinates for each one. The distance between the two targets was only about seventy-five yards.

The crew knew the stakes were high, but so was the risk of collateral damage, and precision was the byword. The twelve minutes passed swiftly, filled with one procedure after another, and “Seek and Destroy” was flying at thirty thousand feet and five hundred knots when the first two GBU-31 version three hard target penetrator JDAMs were released by the automatic mode of the bombing system.

“ ‘These were special two-thousand-pound BLU-109 bombs equipped with the JDAM kits, designed to blast through the restaurant and reach the bunkers beneath where the meeting was to take place. Three seconds later, two of the standard GBU-31 version one JDAMs were released. Because of the difference in their case design, the standard JDAMs have more explosive power than the penetrators. All four bombs followed direct paths to the targets, destroying them.’ ”

O’Malley snorted, clearly dismayed.

“Four bombs? That’s it? What the hell are they worried about?”

Rodriquez read the final paragraph, “ ‘Unofficial reports indicate that more than a dozen bodies were removed from the wreckage by Iraqi personnel. At this writing, the debris is being carefully analyzed to determine if Saddam Hussein was killed in the attack.’ ”

O’Malley was fuming. “It doesn’t make sense! Are we fighting a war or conducting a picnic? They should have put a flight of B-52s in to carpet bomb the entire district. I’ll bet Saddam got away. You cannot hit an elusive target like that, not even with smart bombs. We are giving the war away by trying to win the hearts and minds. Goddammit, doesn’t anybody understand, we lost their hearts and their minds in the Crusades. We’re fighting the war just like Vietnam, with no understanding of the enemy’s mentality. They are laughing at us!”

Rodriquez was nonplussed. He’d hoped to cheer O’Malley up, to show him that some of his favorite weapons—the B-1B, the GPS system, the JDAMs—were all working well. Instead he saw only a failure to apply power massively. O’Malley was more concerned about creating an enduring impression on the collective Muslim
mind than he was on killing an individual, even one as important as Saddam Hussein.

And maybe he was right. Everything seemed to be going well on the ground, but who knew what the future held. Rodriquez thought about his years of experience in the Arab world. The poverty, the hopelessness, of the young Muslim was the real problem. The complete bankruptcy of their system had created a generation of young people to whom death was a good career move. Precision bombing could not possibly change that. Maybe O’Malley was right. Maybe to win the war on terror, the United States had to conduct warfare on a massive scale, without regard to civilian populations.

Rodriquez shook his head. If that was the case, his nation had already lost. The United States would never conduct a war of massive casualties. The reaction to 9/11 had been relatively mild; the national anger had quickly been supplemented by a sense of national pride in being able to suffer and endure. That was not a winning combination, not when fighting an opponent whose goal is exactly to make you suffer until you acquiesce.

Well, he thought, sometimes it is not bad to be old. The future does not look good. Unless maybe, somehow, we can pull off this crazy Hypersonic Cruiser, and use it to snuff out terrorism at its roots, one crazy terrorist at a time.

December 17, 2003

Palos Verdes, California

S
TEVE
O’M
ALLEY, THIRTY
pounds heavier than when he retired, flopped down on the ancient leather sofa and slipped his arm around young Bob Rodriquez’s shoulders, saying, “Let me tell you how a husband should work. I just made the greatest finesse of any married man in history, and since you are thinking about getting married again, and since you don’t seem to have a clue about women, I feel I should let you in on how I did it.”

Young Bob looked apprehensive. He regarded O’Malley, the retired four-star general, as completely whipped, totally henpecked, and he didn’t look to him for advice on women. The problem was that
young Bob’s marital track record was terrible, far worse than his father’s. The senior Rodriquez had married Mae, the love of his life, only to lose her to a blind workaholic addiction to aviation. After years of angst and separation, however, they had come back together and were now truly, happily, and permanently married. Young Bob had been married three times already, each time to a gorgeous young woman who quickly tired of his work obsession and moved on to greener pastures, each one carrying a sizable portion of Rodriquez’s fortune. Now he was in the process of marrying a fourth time, once again to a young starlet type, and was being ribbed mercilessly by both the men and the women of the “Shannon gang.”

Resigned, Rodriquez said, “Go ahead, it’s a cinch I need to learn something.”

“Well, Sally had always wanted to fly on the Concorde, and somehow we never got around to it. I tried my best to get on before they stopped service in November, but somehow I just couldn’t make it work. When I could get tickets, she couldn’t get away, and when she could get away, they were sold out. She kept saying it was because I was too cheap, and there might be something in that, God knows this Hypersonic Cruiser is making paupers of all of us. But I did try.”

Rodriquez looked at him blankly, hoping the story was going somewhere.

“Well, needless to say when she saw in the paper that service had ended, she was ticked off. She began the usual treatment, you know, how could you do this to me, all that, and it looked like I was in for a bad night. Then she starts up ‘and I guess I’ll have to have the annual New Year’s Eve party again, just like last year.’ ”

O’Malley paused, relishing his coming coup.

“As if she’d done anything last year! I did all the work myself, you know I did. But I let her go on, and came in with the winning idea. I told her, ‘Let’s forget the New Year’s Eve party. This whole bunch owes everything to Wilbur and Orville Wright. Let’s throw the party on December 17, the hundredth anniversary of the first flight, and let me handle all the details.’ ”

He sat back, smiling, and Rodriquez said, “So?”

“She went for it. It’s the old shell game. I turned the Concorde argument around by taking away the New Year’s Eve argument, and here we are. She’s happy, forgotten all about the Concorde, and we can sit
around and rehash all the stuff going on to celebrate the hundredth anniversary.”

Rodriquez said, “Well, it’s pretty amazing how no one has been able to do what the Wrights did. I can hardly wait to see the replay on television.” With that Rodriquez moved away to get a much needed drink, a feeling that O’Malley often instilled in him.

O’Malley sat back, waiting for someone else to come along to tell his story to. As he did, his thoughts turned to the events of the past year. The war in Iraq, which had been executed so brilliantly by the American armed forces, seemed to have spun into the worst of all worlds, a series of tribal wars where one faction was bent on killing another, and all bent on killing Americans. He could already sniff the tide changing from pride in the swift accomplishment of the military objectives into a Vietnam War-tainted era of criticism.