HYPERSONIC THUNDER
FORGE BOOKS BY WALTER J. BOYNE
Dawn Over Kitty Hawk
Operation Iraqi Freedom
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Supersonic Thunder
Today’s Best Military Writing (editor)
Hypersonic Thunder
HYPERSONIC THUNDER
A Novel of the Jet Age
WALTER J. BOYNE
A Tom Doherty Associates Book
New York
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This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.
HYPERSONIC THUNDER
Copyright © 2009 by Walter J. Boyne
All rights reserved.
A Forge Book
Published by Tom Doherty Associates, LLC
175 Fifth Avenue
New York, NY 10010
www.tor-forge.com
Forge® is a registered trademark of Tom Doherty Associates, LLC.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Boyne, Walter J., 1929–
Hypersonic thunder : a novel of the jet age / Walter J. Boyne.—1st ed.
p. cm.
“A Tom Doherty Associates book.”
ISBN-13: 978-0-7653-0845-0
ISBN-10: 0-7653-0845-2
1. Aeronautical engineers—Fiction. 2. Jet planes—Fiction. 3. Aeronautics—Fiction. 4. Astronautics—Fiction. 5. Aircraft industry—Fiction. I. Title.
PS3552.O937S87 2009
813'.54—dc22
2008038105
First Edition: April 2009
Printed in the United States of America
0 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
THIS BOOK IS DEDICATED TO MY BELOVED WIFE, TERRI,
The most helpful, generous, spontaneous, good-natured, goodhearted, sweetest person I’ve ever known. Instinctively and intuitively kind, intelligent, and intensely pragmatic, she has been and still is a treasure to hundreds of her friends and family. They value her as I do, for she is a unique, blessed person, a superb artist not only in the art world, but even more important, in the world of human relations.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
THIS, THE THIRD novel in a trilogy on the history of jet aviation, reflects the interest, concern, and assistance of literally hundreds of people over many decades, many of whom have passed on. The greatest help often came indirectly, with neither person knowing that help to write a novel was being given. A case in point: The late great test pilot Russ Schleeh used to talk to me at length about his experience in selling the Douglas KC-10 tanker to the Air Force. Neither of us ever contemplated that his wisdom would appear in a book written thirty years later, but you’ll find it in this novel. In a similar way, conversations over the years with aviation luminaries such as Dr. Hans von Ohain, Sir Frank Whittle, Sam Shannon, Bill McAvoy, James Webb, William Pogue, and literally hundreds of others of aviation’s great achievers contributed directly to the information to be found herein.
And, as always, I received great support from the rather small but very tight community of aviation authors. Among them are Clif Berry, Philip Handleman, Dennis Jenkins, Fred Johnsen, Wally Meeks, Mike Machat, Lon Nordeen, Warren Thompson, and many more. Dr. Richard Hallion, a renowned author and historian, gave me insight into the mysterious world of hypersonic flight, and linked me up with Dr. Mark Lewis for further information.
There were many others without whom the book could not have been written, including C. O. Smith, John Helfers, Marty Greenberg, Melissa Frain, Eric Raab, and of course my editor, Robert Gleason.
Sadly, I will have omitted many names in this short list, not from lack of care, but from that familiar problem, lack of memory. I mean no disrespect to those I’ve overlooked, and am comforted by the fact that most of them will recognize the difficulty that living long confers on memory.
Many thanks go to all whom I’ve mentioned and many more to any whom I may have forgotten.
AUTHOR’S NOTE
THIS IS THE story of the fantastically swift rise of jet aviation from a military curiosity to a system of civil and military aircraft that has revolutionized the world.
All of the events pertaining to the advance of jet aviation in this trilogy of novels are real with one exception. All of the production decisions, rollouts, cancellations, first flights, records set, crashes—everything are as they happened. The one exception is in this third volume of the trilogy, in which a fictional hypersonic aircraft is created to bring the story into the next era of the jet age.
All of the real accomplishments are properly credited to the people who made them possible, e.g., Sir Frank Whittle and Hans von Ohain for the invention of the jet engine, Kelly Johnson for the creation of the U-2, Bill Allen and Juan Trippe for initiating the Boeing 747, Andrei and Alexei Tupolev for creating the Tu-144 supersonic transport, and so on through the years.
But these giants would be the first to recognize that the projects attributed to them are the work of a vast system of people—engineers, pilots, mechanics, sales personnel, accountants, and so on. It is, of course, impossible to recognize all of the participants in real time in a novel. Instead, a fictional family, the Shannons, and their associates have been created to provide continuity and insight, and to substitute for all of the thousands of important people who cannot be recognized individually.
Thus Vance Shannon, the patriarch of the Shannon family, finds his way around the world of jet aviation, acting as a facilitator, a lubricant, a pressure pump, for telling the story of the momentous rise of jet aviation from the first successful jet airplanes in 1939 to the hypersonic scramjets of the future. The Shannons are on-scene for most of the major events, or create relationships with those who are.
In some instances, real events have been compressed in time and space so that they can be related as fiction in the form of the actions of the Shannon family. In all cases, however, there has been no alteration to the effect of the events on the development of jet aviation.
WALTER J. BOYNE
Ashburn, Virginia
July 17, 2007
HYPERSONIC THUNDER
CHAPTER ONE
THE PASSING PARADE: Supreme Court rules on Roe v. Wade; peace treaty signed January 27, ending war in Vietnam; Salvador Allende overthrown in Chile; Arab/Israeli Yom Kippur War begins; Vice President Spiro Agnew resigns; OPEC raises price of oil; Juan Perón returns to Argentina; Sears Tower in Chicago finished, 1,450 feet tall; Bobby Riggs defeated by Billy Jean King in tennis; Congress passes War Powers Act.
February 12, 1973
The “Hanoi Hilton”
Tom Shannon watched unbelieving as the first group of 120 American prisoners of war formed up in columns of two. They looked strange in their ill-fitting new clothes—dark blue pants, light blue shirts, windbreakers, and some kind of little black bag. The clothes were the only new thing in the entire prison, with its worn walls, tired paint, and rusting iron fixtures.
A
ccording to the ceaseless tap code messages, those vibrating signals of defiance, they were being returned home. The POWs had tried to argue that the most injured and the sickest should go first, but the North Vietnamese had insisted on them going back in the order in which they came.
The tap code.
It was the only thing that kept him alive. Even though he was forbidden from mixing with the rest of the POWs, they knew he was there, and their messages had sustained him. It came in many ways—the traditional tapping, by hand signal, even by bits of string, knotted in a Braille-like code. The tap code told him things had changed in the last year for the others—beatings had stopped, discipline had relaxed, relief packages were not plundered so badly, and food had improved.
But not for him.
His rations had never improved, but his last beating had been four months earlier, when the Rabbit had administered a scientific series of kicks and blows that brought him near death once again. He still ached, especially his ribs, which always seemed to take the longest to heal. One of the most vicious guards, nicknamed the Rabbit for his manner, had an obsessive, inexplicable hatred for Shannon.
The gaunt fighter pilot, former commander of the 6th Fighter Interceptor Wing, watched with envy from his latest cell, perched on the second floor of the main building. They had moved him around at random intervals, apparently determined to prevent him from making any contact with other prisoners. Now, by standing on his toes and clutching the open windowsill, he could peer through a gap in the wooden shutters for a view of the yard where the six buses were parked. Ironically, the Rabbit seemed to be supervising the departure just as he supervised the torture.
Shannon sat down for a moment to gather his strength. It was emotionally draining to see the months-old rumors about the coming freedom suddenly become real—but only for the others.
Painfully he clawed his way up to squint again through the shutters, his vision, once so acute that he could pick out an enemy plane miles distant, now blurred. He knew that Everett Alvarez was probably leading the group. Everett was the longest surviving prisoner, kept here or in other filthy North Vietnamese prisons for eight years. Now Alvarez and the others were being set free, at last. It was incredible.
A wave of trembling fear swept over him. Now he knew why the North Vietnamese had always kept him separate from the rest of the POWs—they never intended to release him.
In his six years of tortured confinement, he had spoken to only one other American, Michael Pavone, his backseater in their F-4 that had been shot down. Pavone had saved his life, nursing him back to precarious health for months. When Shannon had recovered sufficiently to be interrogated, the North Vietnamese promptly beat Pavone to death, as if punishing him for aiding Shannon.
Six years, that surely entitled him to be in the first group—if they were going to let him go at all. He could never understand why they kept him separated, nor could the other prisoners, who came to know him only by the covert tap code that linked them together, day and night. The other prisoners were naturally suspicious of him at first, fearing that he was a North Vietnamese spy using the tap code to gain information. It took weeks before he convinced them that he was truly an American pilot.
The only rational explanation for his isolation was their resentment for his leading the famous Operation Toro, which trapped and shot down a lot of North Vietnamese MiGs. And later when the North Vietnamese had placed him in one of their crude propaganda films, he had outfoxed them. Even as he parroted their stilted phrases, he had blinked a message in Morse Code with his eyes, one that told the world that he was being coerced. Both events had earned him many beatings. The other prisoners had been beaten for similar things, but were not kept isolated for so long.
Now Shannon was blinking away the tears coursing down his face. He hated himself for crying, but the thought of everyone going free, of them seeing their families again, while he stayed here, rotting alive, was impossible to bear. He was wearing the same filthy, black pajamas that he had worn for months. That was the sure sign that he was not going home, not now, not ever.
Shannon looked out at the grubby yard. There was some sort of disturbance—the POWs were refusing to get on the drab blue buses. He could see the Rabbit, his own particular nemesis, railing at someone—it had to be Alvarez or Robby Risner, the men who had been here longest.
The Rabbit turned and left the yard, and Tom slumped down, unwilling to watch anymore.
I’ve got to get hold of myself. I cannot give in now. They cannot beat me now. Not after all this misery. He had started his mental rosary, the prayers that had kept him sane for so many months.
Fifteen minutes passed before his cell door burst open and the Rabbit came in, furious and bearing an armload of clothing. As always, the Rabbit’s hair was closely cut, his uniform pristine, his lean body erect.
“Put these on. Your friends won’t leave without you.”
Tom reached out for the clothes carefully, certain that the Rabbit was toying with him. He tossed his filthy black pajama top to the side and pulled on a shirt, his bruised and battered fingers having trouble with the buttons. What a magnificent group of men his fellow prisoners were, renouncing their own freedom to save a man they had never seen, never talked to.
Only when he slid into the dark blue trousers did he allow himself to hope that his long agony was coming to an end. He was going home. He only wished Pavone was going with him.
March 17, 1973,
Palos Verdes, California
VANCE SHANNON STARED at the television set. For so many months it had been a source of pain to him, watching the debacle unfold in Vietnam, watching the miserable, long-haired peaceniks demonstrating against the United States, against their own country, by God, the worthless bunch of traitors.
But now television was an unbelievable source of hope. It had picked up the dot of an airplane in the distance, panning over the crowd of people waiting at Travis Air Force Base to greet the returning prisoners of war. Almost everyone in Shannon’s family was there to greet Tom when he stepped off the plane. Nancy and V. R. were there, and so were Harry, Tom’s twin brother, and his wife, Anna. Vance Shannon’s wife Jill had stayed home to nurse him, as she had done for so long.
“By God, Jill, I should have gone, I shouldn’t have missed this.”
Jill patted him on the shoulder as she had the previous ten times he raised his plaintive cry.
“No, honey, it’s best you are here. Let Tom and Nancy have their get-together, and he’ll be home to see you in a day or two. After six long years, you can wait another few days.”
It was not like Shannon to wait for anything. An ace in World War I, he had become one of the top test pilots in the United States, ranking with Eddie Allen, Jim McAvoy, and Vance Breese. Afterward, building on his test pilot reputation, he had started a one-man consulting firm that quickly grew into an industry legend. His twin sons, Tom and Harry, had helped, but his real forte had been in picking innovative young leaders, giving them a piece of the business, and letting them run with it. Now Aerospace Consultants had offices in eight cities and was a major force in industries no one had dreamed of when he had been flying his SPAD on the Western Front, or even when he was testing Mustangs for North American. Aerospace Consultants and its subsidiaries were a force in avionics, simulators, precision guided munitions, and the executive jet business.
At seventy-eight, Shannon was in better shape than he had any right to be. He’d survived a severe stroke, and by sheer willpower had brought himself back to the point that he was still of real value to the company he founded—at least on the airplane and engine side. Most of the rest he left to Bob Rodriquez, a twelve-victory ace in Korea, and an electronics genius who had carried the firm to new levels that he and his boys, smart as they were, could never have reached.
“I wish I could pick out Nancy in the crowd. She was wearing that fancy hat with the feather on the side, but I still can’t see her. I’d love to see her reaction when Tom comes off
the plane.”
“And I’d really love to see Tom’s reaction when he sees her and V. R.”
March 17, 1973
Travis Air Force Base, California
NANCY SHANNON HELD tight to V. R.’s arm. At twenty, young Vance Robert was as tall as his father had been, six-one, and built just like him. On leave from the Air Force Academy to meet his father, V. R. searched his mother’s face to see how she was bearing up.
He had been fourteen when his father, the old warhorse, had returned to the Air Force and volunteered for combat duty in Vietnam. Tom Shannon had blazed brightly across the Vietnamese skies, shooting down four—and perhaps five—North Vietnamese MiGs before being shot down and imprisoned for six interminable years. In the meantime Nancy Shannon had soldiered on, taking on more and more responsibility with the business, pushed by both Harry and Vance Shannon, who wanted to see her occupied, her mind off the tortures they all knew that Tom was enduring.
V. R. tried to drink in everything, the surging crowd, emotions bubbling like champagne, the endless waiting as the airplane bringing his father changed from a tiny dot against the gray overcast of the sky to this huge Lockheed C-141 now slowly taxiing up to the carefully plotted area where the prisoners would be received.
It was a beautiful aircraft. V. R. noted the tail number, 60177, and the name on the nose, “City of San Bernardino.” It was impossible to believe that the father he loved so much was just two hundred yards away, inside the strong white fuselage of the C-141.
Hypersonic Thunder: A Novel of the Jet Age (Novels of the Jet Age) Page 1