Hypersonic Thunder: A Novel of the Jet Age (Novels of the Jet Age)

by Walter J. Boyne

  Then there was China, doing now exactly what Japan had done after World War I. It was absorbing foreign designs, participating in their manufacture, and learning every day. Within months, the first Chinese-built McDonnell Douglas MD 90 would fly. There was no beating the Chinese combination of brains, energy, and low labor costs. They were going to be a player, perhaps the biggest player besides the United States, maybe even bigger than the U.S. In ten years, maybe twenty, at the outside, there would be Chinese designed and built airliners operating all over the world. They already had a good handle on fighter planes.

  Jenkins was tired. The work on the UAVs had been relatively relaxing, but every day that they progressed into the hypersonic field, the work became mentally and physically more demanding. It was so damn challenging, so interesting, that they were all, even Harry, working long days, sometimes pulling “all-nighters” like a bunch of freshmen in college. So far the results were elusive. Periodically, just often enough to keep their interest at a peak, they seemed on the verge of some breakthroughs, but so had everyone in the past who delved into hypersonic flight.

  He toyed with the idea of getting to work but quickly switched to having a black label Johnnie Walker on the rocks. Work could wait for a few hours.

  December 28, 1998

  Over Northern Iraq

  MAJOR GENERAL V. R. SHANNON felt at home for once. As always, his F-15E Strike Eagle was seemingly flying itself—it was a stable platform that turned refueling into a breeze and every landing into a grease job. He knew that young Bob Dorr, an up-and-coming major, was in the backseat, monitoring his every move, and while it irritated him, he was grateful. V. R. got to fly so little lately that it made sense to have a proficient pilot on board—and the regulations called for it.

  The Iraqis, increasingly recalcitrant under the bloody-minded Saddam Hussein, had attacked Kurdish villages earlier in the year, using helicopters and some fixed-wing aircraft. In response, the United States, the United Kingdom, and Turkey agreed to Operation Northern Watch, creating a no-fly zone that sealed off Iraq by air from the 36th parallel to the north. Shannon now commanded the 38th Air and Space Expeditionary Wing, operating out of Incirlik, Turkey, and tasked to suppress all Iraqi air operations in the no-fly zone.

  Shannon no longer flew as often as he wanted because budgetary cutbacks had reduced flying hours, and he always felt he was “stealing time” from younger pilots when he flew. Yet periodically he had to fly, just to stay current in the aircraft and to keep up his knowledge of what was really going on.

  Letting down could be fatal. Three years before there had been a totally sad friendly fire incident, when two F-15s had shot down two U.S. Army Blackhawk helicopters through a series of preventable errors. Shannon was determined not to have any repeat on his watch.

  Still, it was tedious work. The crews flew hundreds of hours every month putting time on the airplanes, but not getting the intensive training they needed. There were some valuable by-products, of course. The flights enabled dossiers to be built on Iraqi capabilities, and target folders were already prepared for virtually every SAM and radar site from Baghdad north. For Shannon, however, it was galling—there were targets below, lethal surface-to-air missile sites, radar installations, all set to attack, all manned by Muslims—and he could only overfly them.

  Dorr’s voice came over the intercom. “Skipper, we’ve got some SAM activity going on down there. Looks to me like they are getting set up to fire for real.” The Iraqis always went through a drill when the coalition aircraft appeared, but the electronic equipment on board the F-15Es and especially on the more distant AWACS aircraft could detect just how serious the efforts were. Sometimes it was just a proforma exercise—Shannon could mentally see the Iraqi soldiers listlessly going through the motions—but sometimes they went almost to the brink of firing, with all the right switches thrown and the only remaining task the order to fire. This was one of those times.

  Adrenaline rushed through Shannon, and he became instantly alive, one with his aircraft. From their position he knew the missiles were the two-stage SA-3s that NATO had given the strange code name “Goa.” The Soviet Union had shipped thousands of SA-3s to client nations throughout the world, and Iraq still had a massive supply. Shannon alerted the three other Eagles in his flight, knowing they had already probably picked up on the signals themselves. His call was followed instantly by an alert message from the AWACS aircraft orbiting to the north.

  He asked Dorr, “Have you got them painted? Let’s not use the HARM missiles; let’s save a little money and drop the Paveways on them.”

  He was dissimulating and knew that Dorr knew it. The HARMs were deadly effective against the radar, but today he’d asked that his ordnance load include the GBU-15s that were more lethal to personnel.

  It pleased him that his Paveways had been brought into being by Bob Rodriquez over a long and difficult time. Essentially a two-thousand-pound Mark 84 bomb fitted with a laser guidance system, they cost about $245,000 each—about the same as the HARM missiles. But they produced far more collateral damage, and would take out the enemy soldiers at a far greater distance than the HARMs could.

  “They are firing, Skipper—there’s one, two, three of them away.” Dorr’s voice did not betray the lethality of the threat—the SA-3s were far more formidable than the SA-2s used by North Vietnam. The highly maneuverable Goas were capable of Mach 3.5 speeds and had a built-in television camera with a fifteen-mile range to close in on their targets.

  Shannon threw his fighter into a steep diving turn to the right, swinging his head to the left to see the rest of his flight following. It was a technique as old as the Vietnam War—keep the SAMs in sight, dive under them, and force them to try to maneuver beyond their capabilities.

  “I have the SAMs visually, all three. Let me know if they fire any more.”

  Dorr, straining under the G forces as Shannon tightened his turn, grunted, “Noo mooore soo faar.”

  The F-15E’s dive carried them below the smoke-streaming SA-3 missiles that would either turn so sharply that they broke up or would fly on aimlessly until they self-destructed.

  As they jointly went through the procedures, Shannon marveled at his own composure. He was about to do what he lusted to do most—kill Muslims like those who had joined together to kill his wife. Still, he contained his emotions, moving flawlessly through the long series of steps that would enable his laser-guided bombs to reach their targets.

  Shannon raced through the procedures to set up the bombing system, touching the computer screen quickly to enter his commands, Dorr following him through even as he scanned his own screens for more SAMs. They were vulnerable now, making a wide sweeping turn to come in toward the target and only ten thousand feet above it.

  The thought no different than Nintendo went through his mind as it had a hundred times before as he punched accept, accept, fly into the custom arming screen. Still effortlessly, strumming the controls as if it were a familiar guitar, he brought the video screen up on his number two multi-screen display. His gloved finger selected the Target Infrared button to pull up the LANTIRN pod targeting screen. Designed for use at night and in bad weather, it contained a combination laser designator and range finder. With it, a pilot could detect the target and attack it in a single pass.

  He could hear Dorr’s heavy breathing, and pressed the F3 key to check Dorr’s screen despite knowing that if he was off track, Dorr would tell him quickly enough. Shannon pressed the Air to Ground ARM screen, arming the two GBU-15s, then switched back to the targeting view.

  He picked up the target as his screen displayed the SA-3 site, making out the launch setup, the SQUAT-EYE search radar, and the LOW BLOW guidance radar. Shannon estimated there would be perhaps forty people within the lethal blast area; he wished there were more. Destroying the equipment wouldn’t do Saddam Hussein much harm; he had plenty more in stock. But killing the men manning the site would give Shannon the satisfaction of revenge. As the seconds flew by, Sh
annon selected his target with his mouse; the aircraft heading and the bomb-drop countdown immediately appeared on the HUD, the heads-up display. Now the target was being automatically tracked, integrated into the aircraft systems.

  Shannon fine-tuned the target designator, letting the autopilot keep the aircraft exactly on course. He alternated between the two displays, playing with the target’s infrared image, watching the countdown proceeding on the HUD, listening to Dorr’s countdown. Then five seconds before release, he pressed the button on the joystick, allowing the computer to drop the bomb at exactly the right instant.

  When the bomb released, the time to impact appeared on the screen; at twenty seconds before impact, Shannon pressed the ARM button, turning on the laser. He knew the bomb was locked on to the laser, the laser exactly illuminating the target.

  Dorr yelled, “Direct hit,” as they swept on in a sharp turn. Shannon glanced down at the huge plumes of smoke coming from the target.

  “The rest of the flight must have hit a SAM storage depot. This was a good run.”

  They leveled out and began to climb, heading toward the distant KC-135 tanker that was orbiting, waiting to refuel them.

  Shannon let the image of the explosions run through his mind, thinking that it was some small payback for the loss of Ginny. He wanted more. The old saw that revenge is a dish best served cold flashed through his mind—What bullshit, he thought. Revenge is best served in a hot blast of bombs.

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  THE PASSING PARADE: Newt Gingrich replaced by Dennis Hastert as Speaker of the House; ten members of International Olympic Committee expelled for bribery in site selection; King Hussein of Jordan dies; President Clinton acquitted of impeachment charges by Senate; Bertrand Piccard and Brian Jones make nonstop balloon flight around the world; the Yankee Clipper, Joe DiMaggio, dies at 84; Czech Republic, Hungary, and Poland join NATO; Serb attacks on ethnic Albanians prompts NATO air strikes; Dr. Jack Kevorkian guilty in seconddegree murder trail; two suspected bombers of Flight 103 handed over by Libya; fifteen killed in Columbine High School shooting, including two shooters; eleven weeks of NATO airstrikes force Serbs out of Kosovo; Taiwan openly challenges China’s “One China” policy; John F. Kennedy, Jr., wife Carolyn, and sister-in-law Lauren Bessette killed in airplane crash; Colonel Eileen Collins becomes first woman to head a space shuttle mission; Vladimir Putin becomes Prime Minister in Russia; world population reaches six billion; General Pervez Musharraf seizes power in Pakistan; copilot deliberately causes crash of EgyptAir airliner, killing 217; first spacecraft launched by China; Islamic terrorists hijack Indian jet; Hillary Clinton enters race to become senator from New York; NEAR spacecraft orbits an asteroid; Internet stock boom busts; stocks plunge; widespread computer disruption from “I Love You” virus; former Indonesian President Suharto arrested for abuse of power, corruption; Sinn Fein agrees to disarm, Great Britain restores parliamentary powers to Northern Ireland; Saddam Hussein revives missile program; Bashar al-Assad becomes Syrian President, succeeding his father; Concorde crash kills 113 near Paris; Republicans choose Bush and Cheney; Democrats pick Gore and Lieberman; Milosevic overthrown in Yugoslavia; terrorists kill seventeen U.S. sailors in atack on U.S.S. Cole.

  June 1, 1999

  Over Kosovo

  V. R. Shannon felt like a fraud, a stowaway watching Operation Allied Force unfold, even though the fantastic crew on the AWACS airplane treated him like a king. Somehow, in the twenty-four hours between the notice of his coming and his arrival, they had set up a special chair and console arrangement so that he could be switched from screen to screen and from audio channel to audio channel so that he would constantly be in on the unfolding airpower assault as it happened.

  Major Hank Myers kept apologizing for the lack of action.

  “We’ve pretty well beaten them down, sir. Over the last nine weeks, NATO’s put up more than thirty thousand sorties—that’s almost five times what we did in Operation Deliberate Force in Bosnia in 1995. We’ve even got the Luftwaffe down here—the first time German planes have been in combat since 1945.”

  It was about time. The war in Kosovo had been going on for weeks, and almost a million refugees had been forced from their native lands. For some unfathomable reason, airpower had not been used effectively or in mass. As a result, the goal of throwing the forces of Slobodan Milosevic out of Kosovo had fared badly. The Serbs were tough fighters, brilliant in their use of terrain, adept with fobbing off dummy tanks and fake bunkers to draw fire. But finally, at some command level, a decision had been made to get on with the war, and on March 24 a force of more than one thousand NATO aircraft began an unrelenting air campaign that was now paying off.

  Shannon was there as an observer, gathering information to report back to the headquarters, USAF, upon his return. He would much rather have been in the cockpit of a Nighthawk or a Strike Eagle. But those days were gone. Rank and age had turned him into what he had always derided, a “chairborne warrior.”

  His participation in this war was ironic. NATO, and of course, principally, the United States, was fighting to free Muslims from oppression. He would do everything he could to carry out his duties, and he knew that the ethnic minorities that Milosevic was trying to wipe out were largely innocent people. But they were Muslims, and Muslims were in his mind inalterably identified with terror. He knew that only a few fanatics carried out the acts of terror, but he blamed the Muslim majority for being passive, for being intimidated by the minority.

  The glowing radar screens were quiet, and while there was a steady traffic on the radio, it was muted, obviously only routine transmissions going on. Shannon was lost in thought. It was the same in Germany. The Nazis were a minority, and they were the fanatics who started the war, who killed the Jews. But that didn’t stop us from attacking the German people who allowed the whole sordid mess to happen. We bombed German cities day in and day out trying to eradicate the fanatics. We should be doing the same thing now with the Muslims. Sad as it is, unjust as it is, we’ll have to kill non-fanatic Muslims to get them to control the fanatics. There is no other way. We—

  Myers tapped him on the arm and pointed to a blip on the radar screen at his left.

  “That’s a U-2, sir. We call it ‘the Dragon Lady.’ ”

  Shannon nodded, his mind going back to stories his grandfather told of Kelly Johnson and Tony LeVier and their arguments about how to fly the prototype U-2. Good Lord, that was in 1955, forty-four years ago. And the U-2s were still flying. They were doing different missions now, not flying the long secret overflights as Gary Powers had done. Instead they were loaded with all kinds of sensors and linked to a whole galaxy of satellites, command and control aircraft, fighters, and bombers. Instead of being a lone star in the distance over the horizon, gathering information on film to be viewed later, they were now like the central gear in an enormous clock of capability, sending real-time information to centers for analysis that resulted in real-time bombing action.

  Shannon had flown in the two-seat version of the U-2 not long before, and could remember how uncomfortable his pressure suit was, and how noisy it seemed, with the sound of his own breathing, the hum of avionics, and, just once in a while, a muted gasp from the engine, as if it too were starved for oxygen. And it was of course. The single General Electric F118-GE-101 turbofan engine was at full throttle, ingesting a minimum amount of fuel with the thin air.

  He pictured the pilots in their U-2s, busy with their computers and sensors, their tiny cockpits pressurized to 29,500 feet, and breathing the throat-drying 100 percent oxygen to maintain the equivalent of an 8,000-foot pressure altitude.

  Myers touched the radar screen again, unaware that Shannon was reading and understanding the information as swiftly as he was.

  “Watch this, sir, it’s going to happen fast. He’s acquired a target, some enemy aircraft parked on a dirt road under some heavy overhanging trees. He is sending the position to the CAOC”—then remembering that Shannon was a four-star but not
necessarily up on the acronyms, Myers went on—“the Combined Air Operations Center in Vicenza, Italy, via satellite.”

  Shannon nodded, not wishing to seem impatient, grateful for Myers’s concern, realizing that he might misunderstand the steady stream of audio and visual information.

  Myers said, “We get the information as well, of course, and we just alerted a flight of orbiting F-16s just south of the area. If—and I’m sure it will—CAOC authorizes a strike we’ll give the F-16s the goahead.”

  Less than thirty seconds later, Myers said, “There it is—they have approved the strike.”

  Two minutes later Myers turned to him, saying, “They hit the targets; looked like old MiGs to them but full of fuel. A good run.”

  While Myers talked Shannon put himself in the F-16’s cockpit, vicariously sharing the thrill of the target acquisition, the run in, the concern for antiaircraft fire, and the pleasure when the bombs hit their targets. Nowadays precision guided bombs rarely missed.

  The AWACS went on in its long lazy orbit, and Shannon once again had time to think. Bob Rodriquez and the Shannon family firm had done a lot to make this mission possible. Bob had contributed mightily to the precision guided munitions program, to the GPS, and to the AWACS as well. Going back a bit farther, Harry Shannon had been behind the Boeing boom refueling concept that was still being used every hour of every day. And of course, Steve O’Malley had virtually fathered the F-16 program years ago. All in all it was a family night.

  Myers came back to his chair, saying, “Would you like me to go over the mission with you again, sir? We have it on video, we can run it through if there’s anything you’re not sure about.”

  Shannon just smiled. “No thanks, Major Myers. I have a pretty good idea of what happened tonight. Better than that, I’ve got a good idea of what it took to get to where we are tonight. Thanks for all your help. You can just let me vegetate here for a while.”