Roaring Thunder: A Novel of the Jet Age

by Boyne, Walter J.

  They rendezvoused with the receiver aircraft, another Lancastrian, at 15,000 feet, over the Cotswolds. The two aircraft proceeded in trail westward, over the ocean. Harry watched as the receiver aircraft let out a long line, weighed down at the end.

  Russell nudged him. “Watch out now.”

  The tanker crewman fired a projectile that streaked out, carrying a light line that crossed the receiver’s trailing line, then slid down and caught on at the end in a device patented by Cobham.

  Russell smiled. “Lucky shot—we don’t always engage on the first try.”

  The receiver crew now began drawing the two lines back toward the side of their airplane as the tanker climbed. When the airplane was positioned above the receiver, it began letting out its refueling hose, which was drawn into the tanker and connected. The fuel transfer began immediately, with Russell saying proudly, “One hundred gallons per minute.”

  After five minutes Russell called to the pilot that they were finished. The fuel flow stopped and the refueling hose was drawn in, leaving the two guidelines still attached. After some brief communications, the receiver proceeded straight ahead while the tanker turned to the right. The lead lines that linked them together parted company and were jettisoned.

  Harry was thoroughly frozen by the time they got back to Littlehampton, but his mind was working furiously. Cobham’s primitive system worked, at least for bombers, and it would have to do for now. There had to be something better in the future, something that would work for fighters.

  Back in Cobham’s office, Harry, wanting to keep a clear head until the business dealings were over, refused the beakers of brandy that were broken out to “thaw them out,” as Cobham put it in his non–public school accent.

  Harry knew that he was in an extraordinarily favorable position. Each time Cobham had been close to commercial success in the past something had intervened. If Harry chose to be heavy-handed, he could probably force Cobham to the wall and get rock-bottom prices. Yet Harry wanted to get Cobham’s system in operation in the United States as soon as possible and also wanted the firm’s goodwill in developing a more advanced system. Harry decided to do as his dad probably would have done—be perfectly straightforward and count on Cobham’s good sense to see that there was more business in the future.

  “That was a brilliant display of in-flight refueling. We are all impressed. Would you be so kind as to tell me what the cost to the United States government would be if you were to provide us with two complete sets of hardware now, that we can take back in the bomb bay of the B-29, and would then manufacture an additional forty sets for later shipment? I’d want to know what the shipping schedule would be, as well.”

  Harry heard his contracts officer gasp—he was giving the farm away on this deal. But there would be other deals in the future, and he wanted to have Cobham on his side.

  Four days later, back in the United States, Harry briefed Colonel Boyd on his mission.

  “Looks pretty complicated to me, Shannon.”

  “It is complicated, the fuel flow rate is too slow, and it won’t work for fighters. But we can stick it on our B-29s and get some experience, and perhaps come up with a better system. Let me show you some rough drawings I made on the trip back. They are crude, but they’ll give you the idea.”

  He handed Boyd a sheaf of papers, ashamed at his poor artwork but aware that it told enough of the story to intrigue the colonel.

  “See, this is a rigid refueling installation, but it’s still flexible because it is flown by an operator, and the refueling tube retracts and extends to make it easier to maintain contact. It means that the refueler and the airplane being fueled will have to fly in close formation, maybe thirty or forty feet apart, but we do that every day.”

  “How does the operator move this tube—it looks like a crane boom; call it a boom—around?”

  “Well, there’s plenty of airflow of course, so he could use two little airfoils, about like a Bonanza’s tail, fastened on the end of the boom. Should be easy to learn to do.”

  Boyd nodded his head in agreement. “You talk to your dad about this yet?”

  “No, I did not think I should since he’s under contract to Boeing and they are looking into in-flight refueling themselves.”

  “Well, I’m directing you to talk to him. There has to be a better solution than Cobham’s—maybe your idea is it. I don’t know anybody better than your dad and George Schairer to decide if it is or it isn’t, but in any case, they can come up with something better if it’s not. I’m not worried about the economics or the competition or the restraint of trade or any other goddamn business problem. I want to have a system where one plane squirts a hell of a lot of gas into another in a hurry. Otherwise there’s no damn point in having jets at all.”

  “I’ll give him a call tonight.”

  Boyd exploded, “You will not! You’ll get your ass in an airplane and go up and talk to him in person. This is top-secret material, even if it hasn’t been formally classified as such yet. I want you up in Seattle by Monday.”

  Anna had been delighted to see Harry when he returned, and he expected her to be upset by his leaving almost immediately for Seattle.

  “No, I understand. Business is business. But you can take me out to the O Club for dinner tonight, and maybe stay for a little dancing.”

  Even though he was dead tired from the round-trip to England, behind work at the office, and needing to prepare for the cross-country trip to Seattle, Harry agreed. He had been neglecting Anna and she needed to be spoiled a bit.

  “Have you heard from Marie?”

  “Yes, she’s having one of her spells. She says she was pregnant and lost the baby, but I doubt it. I suspect she’s just looking for sympathy.”

  Harry was stunned. He had never heard her talk about Marie—or anyone—with such calculated coldness. “Is there some problem? Is there something I ought to be telling Tom?”

  “You can tell him that I lived with her for a long time and now it’s his turn.”

  The evening at the Officers Club was much different from their first night. The food was the same, and at first Harry thought it was Anna’s comments. Then he realized that his wife was enjoying herself just a little too much with some of the people. It was clear from the quick, casual conversations with passing people, officers alone and couples, that she was not spending lonely nights at home while he was away.

  “Anna, you sure as hell seem to have a lot of friends here. Do you come to the club by yourself when I’m gone?”

  “Of course I do! What else am I going to do? Knit?”

  “Well, you might get a job. We could use the money, and you wouldn’t be bored.”

  “You’re right about that. I’m just wasting time during the day. I’ll see what I can do; there’s always something opening up. But even if I work during the day, I’m not going to spend the nights at home listening to the radio while you are off flying around the world. Don’t you trust me?”

  He patted her hand. “Of course I trust you. But I’m jealous, too.”

  She laughed and said, “I’m glad you are.” He toyed with the idea of saying something about her having had three Manhattans but decided against it. He had pressed pretty far tonight already.

  • THE PASSING SCENE •

  Allies use Airlift to offset Berlin Blockade; Pancho Gonzales becomes men’s singles champ. Harry S. Truman wins Presidency in his own right; T. S. Eliot wins Nobel Prize for Literature; Count Folke Bernadotte killed by Jewish terrorists.

  CHAPTER NINE

  June 30, 1948, Seattle, Washington

  Boeing always arranged for its minor-league visitors to stay downtown at the Windsor Hotel, an establishment that walked a fine line between being merely seedy and illegal. The rooms were clean, and in the basement the Tiki Bar featured entertainment every night, including a rotating lineup of amateur and professional ladies who were happy to meet visitors from out of town. The food—steaks and a pretty good take on Trader Vic’s fa
ux Chinese—was not bad, however, and the Windsor was centrally located and cheap. The scanty per-diem-paid military types covered the hotel bill and one or two meals a day, so even the more fastidious guests didn’t complain about the women who wore a shade too much makeup.

  Tom had picked Harry up at McChord Field, where he had flown in a T-33, and started back on the long, wet ride from Tacoma to the Windsor.

  “Is it always raining like this?”

  “Pretty much, but you get used to it, and when it’s not, it is so spectacularly beautiful that you won’t believe it.”

  Then they got started on their mutual tales of marital woe.

  “I tell you, Harry, I cannot understand it. You remember what a hot little number Marie was before we got married? We damn near had our wedding night on the day we met—and we would have, too, if it hadn’t been for the bodyguard of brothers.”

  “You say she’s turned cold?”

  “Frigid. But that’s not the worst of it. I think she’s losing her mind.”

  “Come on, Tom; not wanting to sleep with you doesn’t mean she’s crazy.”

  “Oh, she wants to sleep with me all right; she’s like a goddamn octopus at night, asleep, but crawling all over me. But if I lay a hand on her, getting serious, you know, she wakes up and freezes. But that’s not it. She’s gotten super-religious. Not just being a good Catholic, but praying all the time, and praying in the bathroom, as if it were an altar.”

  “Run that by me again?”

  “Just that. She’s got a crucifix rigged up in the bathroom, like in every room of the house, but she goes in there and kneels by the bathtub and prays, for hours. If I say something, call her to dinner, try to get her to go out, she just gets up and locks the door. Then when she comes out, she acts almost normal. You’d never know it, if you happened by after one of her prayer sessions. But they are getting more and more frequent. It’s a damn good thing we happened to move into a place with two bathrooms, or I’d be out of luck.”

  “Wow. I thought I had problems. Have you had her to a doctor?”

  “Not yet. She gets furious if I even mention it. I’ve got to do it, but I don’t want her to be hysterical about it.”

  “Have you talked to her family? Her dad, Lou, needs to know about this.”

  “Same thing. She says if I complain to her family she’ll kill herself. I don’t believe she would, but it’s clear she has some mental problems. And to tell you the truth, Lou would probably blame me right off the bat. He’s a nice guy, but when it comes to his family, you know how rigid he is. But the funny thing is, she keeps saying that she is going to leave me and go back to her family. I ask her why, and she just says, ‘That’s what Jesus wants me to do.’ ”

  “Well, Lou has to know about this, right away, because if she just shows up on his doorstep, he’ll think you drove her out. Worse, she might hurt herself, or you. I’m really sorry to learn about this, Tom, but I did have a hint from Anna. She said that Marie said she was pregnant and lost the baby, but Anna laughed it off, saying Marie was always being dramatic. Is there any chance that she wasn’t fibbing?”

  “There’s no chance that she was pregnant, at least by me.”

  “I don’t know much about having babies or losing them, either.”

  “And, sad to say, after being married a year, I don’t even know anything about making them.”

  Harry laughed. Tom always exaggerated. “Have you told Dad?”

  Tom paused to curse at a trailer-truck spraying water from its eighteen wheels like a fire hose and taking up more than half of the well potholed Route 99, before saying, “Not yet. He’s got his own problems with Madeline. She refused to come with him on this trip, even though she loves Seattle. I don’t know what their problems are and he sure as hell is not going to tell us, but it looks like you are the only guy in the family with a woman who’s not giving him problems.”

  Harry laughed. “I wish! But I’m not sure I really have a problem. I know Anna is drinking more than I think she should, but I’m a blasted prude as you know. I don’t think she’d be unfaithful, but she seems to be awfully popular at the Officers Club.”

  Tom shook his head. “No, she’s been brought up like Marie; she’d never fool around. She’s just telling you she doesn’t like you being away so much.”

  “I hope you’re right.”

  They began talking about the prospects of war. A second ring of the Iron Curtain had dropped on June 24, encircling Berlin, already deep within Soviet-occupied Germany. The battered city of 3 million war-torn souls was blockaded by the Soviet Union in an attempt to force the Western Allies—Great Britain, France, and the United States—to leave. The United States, unable to respond on the ground against the thirty Soviet divisions in the area, made a decision to airlift supplies into the beleaguered city. Moscow relished the idea—it had seen the catastrophic failure of the German airlift at Stalingrad, where only a few hundred thousand troops had to be fed. With the railroads, roads, and canals all shut down, they knew it would be impossible to supply the city by air, and welcomed the chance to have the Allies fail.

  “Harry, I know this sounds rotten, but I’m thinking about volunteering to go back in the Marines, or maybe even the Air Force, if I can work a transfer. It’s cowardly, but maybe Marie would be better off with her family. I’m obviously the problem, or sex with me is obviously the problem, I don’t know which. Going back into the service might help us both. This Berlin Airlift is a worthwhile thing, if it works, but if it doesn’t the country is going to be calling for experienced pilots again.”

  Their father could not get to the Windsor to see them that night—there was an emergency meeting on the B-47 program that he had to attend—but he made arrangements for them both to meet with him at George Schairer’s office in the morning.

  The next morning they walked through the Boeing plant, escorted by a Boeing security man. Vance said, “It’s like a tomb. Four years ago this place was throbbing with B-17s, rolling them out the door, ten, fifteen, or more a day. It’s sad to see all this vacant space.”

  George Schairer met them at the door to his Spartan office. He was a prototypical Boeing executive, always immaculately dressed in a good but not too expensive suit, wearing a white shirt and conservative tie, with shoes highly polished. He was balding, with close-cropped hair, and his eyes gleamed with ferocious intelligence behind his rimless glasses. Like Ed Wells, Bill Allen, and the rest of the top Boeing personnel, Schairer was always the soul of quiet courtesy. So although he was expecting to meet only with Vance Shannon, he showed nothing but pleasure on finding that both Tom and Harry were to attend. His voice had a measured metallic sound, and he talked as if his brain were a slide rule measuring every syllable for exactitude.

  “Mr. Schairer, you’ve met my boy Tom, but I’d like to introduce Harry. He’s just been to England to work with Alan Cobham on some aerial refueling ideas, and I wondered if you could spare him half an hour to tell you about it.”

  Schairer’s grin narrowed a bit, and he glanced at his watch and said, “Sure, no problem, let’s go in the conference room down the hall here. Anyone else you think ought to be called in?”

  Vance Shannon knew he had an opportunity here that might not come again. “How about Wellwood Beale, Ed Wells, Cliff Leisy, and Elliot Merrill?” Beale was the rotund, heavy-drinking chief of engineering, who also happened to be one of the best airplane salesmen in the world. Wells was sedate and retiring but a top engineer who had first brought Boeing to prominence with the 247 transport. Leisy was an all-around engineer who Vance knew had been researching in-flight refueling. Merrill was Boeing’s top test pilot since the death of Eddie Allen in 1943.

  Schairer snorted. “How about the president, Bill Allen, too? Let’s get serious; I call Ed in, and Cliff, but that’s it. And I’ll give you thirty minutes, because we’ve got to get back on the B-47 stuff we hashed out last night.”

  All the Boeing types sat on one side of the table, dressed almost ide
ntically and behaving in the normal Boeing way, friendly, correct, but just formal and distant enough to maintain decorum.

  One of Sergeant Shackleford’s gifts was being a pretty fair artist, and Harry had asked him to sketch out both the British system used by Cobham and the new system he was proposing. Shackleford had used a grease pencil on two-foot-square sheets of paper, drawing in clean, straight lines and even managing a little perspective.

  Harry walked them through the Flight Refueling Limited system first, pointing out the strong points—availability and track record. He noted the weak points as well—slow fuel flow, lots of equipment required, and some rather delicate hardware used to engage the lines when they crossed.

  “And there is the hazard of equipment and hoses freezing in subzero temperatures at high altitudes. But the system works; they’ve tested it scores of times, and never had a failure. We are going ahead and ordering forty sets of Cobham’s equipment to install on B-29s. We’ve got to gain some actual in-flight refueling experience, and this is the fastest way to do it. But let me show you a very simplistic idea that I’ve had drawn up. I don’t know how feasible it is, but it seems to me to be a better way to go, because you could use it on both fighters and bombers. The Cobham system will work for bombers only, obviously.”

  Harry pulled out the second set of drawings, far more sophisticated than the ones he had shown Colonel Boyd. They depicted the rear end of one B-29, fitted with a refueling compartment and an extended boom, equipped with two little wings. Shackleford had outdone himself, and the drawings showed how the receiver aircraft, equipped with a refueling receptacle just behind the cockpit, would move into position, fly formation at a distance, then close the distance, open the refueling receptacle, and have the refueling boom operator steer the boom into the hatch.

  Leisy slammed his fist down on the table. “That’s it, man; that’s it! That will work; we’ll get rid of all these damn hoses and reels and throwing lines. This is the way to go, no question about it.” He jumped up and looked at the others, waving his arms, saying, “This will save the 377 program; we’ll finally make some money on that clunker by turning it into a tanker. This is a godsend.” Then, almost confrontational, he turned to Schairer and said, “Well, what about it?,” his expression changing as he realized that not only was everyone from Boeing in the room far senior to him, but there were also strangers, before whom such things were never discussed. The 377 was Boeing’s Stratoliner, an adaptation of the B-29 into the transport role, using a new fuselage. It was liked by travelers but not by airlines, who found it too expensive to operate, and Boeing was hemorrhaging money on the program.