“ ‘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
STEVE O’MALLEY, 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.
V. R. Shannon sat down next to him and O’Malley said, “They’ll be stuffing flowers in rifle barrels soon. We’ll be seeing a whole second generation of peaceniks out there demanding that we get out of Iraq.”
Shannon surprised him. “And a damn good thing, too, Steve. You were right. We should have used shock and awe to subdue them, to make the entire Muslim world shiver with fear at what we might do next. Instead we have dozens of factions at war with each other, Syria and Iran helping out, al Qaeda gaining strength. We’ve made a colossal mistake, and we should get out and let them run themselves into the ground.”
“You serious, V. R.? I’ve never heard you talk like this before.”
“I can’t help it. The United States is willing to let one percent of the population fight its war, while we are going on the biggest prosperity binge in history. We are not going to get serious until the terrorists set off some nukes here, or London or Paris maybe, and even then, I don’t know if we have the will to fight the entire Muslim world. Because that is what it is going to take: fighting the entire Muslim world, way more than a billion people.”
O’Malley was distressed. “Jesus, V. R., you sound nuttier than I do! Don’t you think we can hound the terrorists out, deal with them in particular, cut them out of the body of Muslims just like you cut a cancer out of a human?”
“I wish I could think like that, Steve. But there’s no sign that the so-called nonviolent Muslim world has taken any steps to stop the fanatics. They are passive about them, just like the majority of the Germans were passive about the Nazis.”
O’Malley interrupted him. “I know, when we fought World War II, we didn’t just concentrate on the Nazis, we had to fight the whole German people. But, my God, that meant fighting maybe eighty million people in one country. Here you are talking about fighting a billion and a half people, all over the world, lots of them citizens in the United States.”
“I know. But that is what it will take.”
O’Malley found himself in the unusual position of trying to get someone else to stop talking about the Muslim threat; usually people were trying to stop him. He turned to their mutual favorite, airplanes.
“Did you see where your buddy, Skip Holm, set a new closed-course record in his Mustang ‘Dago Red’? He turned 507 mph at Reno!”
V. R. said, “Yeah, that is really pushing it. He won the Unlimited Gold class, too. I don’t know how much more they can get out of a P-51. Looks like some time they will have to turn to scratch-built racers to set any new records.”
O’Malley glanced at his watch.
“Let’s get the news on and see how they did with the Wright Flyer reproduction.”
Shannon said, “Tell me about it, I haven’t been following it at all. I’m ashamed of myself.”
“Well, you know Ken Hyde, out in Virginia. Ken’s masterminded an exact reproduction of the original 1903 Wright Flyer, using original documents and reverse engineering to make it as accurate as possible. He even brought in our old buddy Scott Crossfield to supervise training pilots to fly it.”
Crossfield was a hero to Shannon and all his colleagues, for he was both a true gentleman and a brilliant pilot. The first man to break Mach 2, he was also a pioneer in hypersonic flight, spearheading the engineering and making the first flights of the North American X-15.
“That will give them a big advantage. They’ve been running a simulator to teach them how to use the Wright Flyer’s controls, and what to expect on the launch. The Wrights are probably looking down with amazement—they could have used some training themselves before the first flight.”
“Have they modified the reproduction in any way?”
“No, it is as original as they can make it. They were supposed to fly it at the exact same moment that Orville made the first flight, but the weather was too bad. I think their only concession is to let the test pilot wear a crash helmet.”
The CNN station came on the big television set that Bob Rodriquez, Sr., had made personally for Vance Shannon many years before. It was obviously rotten weather, far different than the cold day in 1903, when the Wrights found exactly the wind they wanted and needed.
It was anticlimactic. The reproduction Wright Flyer, estimated to have cost $1.2 million, moved down the track and lifted off about six inches from the ground, then dipped its left wing in a puddle of water and came to a stop.
“Those poor guys! All that effort and then the wind doesn’t cooperate.”
V. R. Shannon abruptly got up and left the room. The Wrights had ushered in the age of manned flight one hundred years before. In just a couple of years, he would have the opportunity to usher in the age of extended manned hypersonic flight, testing the Hypersonic Cruiser, and he still did not know if he would elect to try to do it.
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
THE PASSING PARADE: Ambitious space program proposed by President Bush to return to moon, go on to explore Mars, no funds attached to proposal; evidence begins to accumulate that Saddam Hussein did not have weapons of mass destruction; mass sale of nuclear weapons information to North Korea, Iran, and Libya admitted by A. Q. Khan, who was founder of Pakistan’s nuclear program; President Aristide forced to resign and flee Haiti; Spain capitulates to al Qaeda terrorist attacks that killed about 200; NATO expands by admitting seven new countries, many former Soviet satellites, Bulgaria, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Romania, Slovakia, and Slovenia; Sharon becomes peacemaker, announces plan for unilateral withdrawal from Gaza Strip; Abu Ghraib prison scandal erupts; twenty-one-year civil war in Sudan purportedly ends, but war and genocide continue in Darfur; Iyad Allawai first interim Iraqi government leader; dispute erupts over rights of “enemy combatants” held at Guantanamo Bay; John Kerry “reports for duty” as Democratic candidate for presidency; hurricanes ravage Florida; Bush renominated at Republican convention; over 300 killed when Chechan terrorists take 1,200 hostage in Beslan, Russia; no weapons of mass destruction found according to final U.S. report on Iraq; Bush reelect
ed President; Arab leader Yasir Arafat dies; Hamid Karzai inaugurated as first democratically elected President in Afghanistan; massive tsunami kills more than 200,000 in Asia; the United States leads way in immediate compassionate relief efforts.
June 21, 2004
Mojave Airport, California
I still can’t believe it. Those guys in Rutan’s shop are fantastic. They pulled it off. Imagine, a civilian spacecraft actually going into space and coming back safely. I sort of wish we’d tried for that instead of screwing around with the always-evanescent Hypersonic Cruiser.”
Bob Rodriquez looked up with sad eyes.
“That’s a hell of a thing to say, Steve. Mike Melvill’s flight in SpaceShipOne is a tremendous achievement, but it has none of the complexity and none of the problems of manned hypersonic flight. You know that.”
At 6:45 A.M. that morning, SpaceShipOne had lifted off the Mojave runway, nestled under the White Knight carrier aircraft. The White Knight had a totally different configuration than the Proteus aircraft, but was unmistakably a Burt Rutan product. About an hour later, SpaceShipOne was dropped. After a short glide to about forty-seven thousand feet, Melvill ignited the hybrid rocket motor and the gleaming white plane, almost toylike in appearance, streaked straight up. It reached the desired hundred-kilometer, sixty-two-mile altitude that qualified it as a flight into outer space, and then began its descent, with Rutan’s brilliant device, a movable tail section, positioned to slow it down. Once back in the atmosphere, the tail was moved back into place and Melvill made a smooth descent and landing at about 8:15 A.M. to the delight of an awestruck crowd.
“I know but, just think, if we’d set our sights on the X Prize and beaten Rutan to the punch, we’d be ahead of the game right now, instead of slipping farther behind.”
The X Prize was a ten-million-dollar prize modeled on the twenty-five-thousand-dollar Orteig Prize of 1919, which Charles Lindbergh won with his nonstop solo flight to Paris from New York. Backed by the well-endowed Ansari family, the X Prize was intended to award teams who reach specific goals with the potential to benefit humanity. For this contest, the winning contestant must fly to space in a civilian-built spacecraft, return safely, and repeat the process within two weeks. The hope was that the X Prize would change the space industry just as the Orteig Prize had galvanized the aviation industry. There were other competitors, but none with the genius and the financial backing of Rutan’s group.
Hypersonic Thunder: A Novel of the Jet Age (Novels of the Jet Age) Page 34