Roaring Thunder: A Novel of the Jet Age

by Boyne, Walter J.

  “No one should ask for more.” The words did not soothe him, but they did make a kind of cosmic sense to him. He had been lucky beyond belief for twelve years; now it was over.

  He knew she would be OK. He wondered if it was another man. Probably so, probably someone fairly wealthy, able to buy her anything she needed. No, that wasn’t right. She never cared about money. Someone interesting perhaps—it would not be difficult to find someone more interesting than him. An artist, perhaps, or a writer. Or maybe he was French, and she would return to France with him. That would be the best, for them both. A chance encounter would be difficult; it would be well if there was an ocean between them.

  He put the Old Grandad down untasted on the table beside him. There was only one antidote for his pain, not whiskey, not sedatives, just work, and he had plenty of that to do in his briefcase. Boeing’s big bomber was gaining steam, Bob Gross was asking him to come down to Lockheed to look at an unpiloted missile project, and North American was clamoring for his services. The one job that he really wanted, working with Jack Northrop on his jet flying-wing bomber, had never come about. Well, maybe he should give Jack a call and see if there was something he could do. Maybe he could get back more to test flying. There were a lot of new airplanes coming out, smaller jobs like the Johnson Rocket and the Globe Swift. It would be good to have a challenge, something to force him to concentrate.

  He slapped the side of the leather chair with his hand. “My God, I miss her so.” The phrase would become his mantra of pain, said over and over, usually under his breath, but not always. Occasionally he caught himself doing it at work and saw the fleeting expressions of sympathy on the faces of those who heard him.

  • THE PASSING SCENE •

  North Korea invades South Korea; MacArthur strikes back at Inchon; MiG-15 fighters appear; 1.5 million television sets sold in the United States; Einstein presents “General Field Theory”; Senator McCarthy hunts for Communists in government; Dr. Ralph Bunche wins Nobel Peace Prize.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  June 27, 1950, Palos Verdes, California

  Vance pressed his finger gently to Jill Abernathy’s lips, stopping her in mid-sentence. “Sorry, honey, listen to the radio.”

  They lay in each other’s arms, transfixed by the news of the rapid progress of North Korea’s invasion of South Korea. U.S. forces were already involved, and the United Nations had passed a resolution to provide assistance to South Korea.

  “Do you think this could start another world war?”

  “I hate to think so, but it might. After the Soviets quit blockading Berlin, I thought we had called their bluff. North Korea has to be backed by the Russians, and the Chinese, too. They never would have dared do this on their own.”

  With familiar conjugal accord, they kissed quickly and turned to dress. Jill had been in love with Vance almost from the day Madeline hired her. Six months after Madeline disappeared, Vance recognized Jill’s affection and responded to it. By now his pain at Madeline’s departure had eased to the point that he could accept the dreadful irony of Madeline selecting Jill as her replacement, for it was done as Madeline had done everything but leaving him—with good heart. For her part, Jill joked about it, calling herself a pinch-hitter.

  Neither of them had a bad word to say about Madeline. They credited her for her good points, her business sense, and especially the way she had taken care of Vance and the house. Vance did not arrogate to Jill the financial responsibility he had given Madeline, not because he didn’t trust her but because he knew it was outside of her interests.

  In long conversations, deep in the night, they agreed that Madeline was somehow possessed by another calling and that she had known all along that her time with Vance would be limited. Both blessed her for being farsighted enough to bring Jill into the picture. Jill was delighted with the way things had worked out and worried only that Madeline might someday return. Neither of them believed she would, but as a safeguard, Vance asked Jill to marry him, and they had set the date as November 1. Both Tom and Harry were grateful for the turn of events, for their father had been desperately unhappy after Madeline’s departure. They worried that his judgment might be affected so much that he would be dangerous flying.

  Their own marital affairs were still in disorder. It was now clear to Harry that when he was away, as he was so much, Anna drank too much and probably fooled around when she did. He had no hard evidence as yet. If he did find out for certain that she was unfaithful, he was determined to divorce her. In considering it, he recognized in a clinical way that he could not in good conscience desert her if she had a drinking problem, but infidelity would be a justifiable cause. He knew this was a cynical view, for the two problems were intertwined. Still, he had a life to lead, and if she did not agree to some kind of psychiatric counseling, he felt he could divorce her in good conscience.

  Tom was happy with Nancy, but the problems with Marie had spooked him and he was not eager to marry again. He was sorry that he was now flying on the opposite coast, but Nancy said she was willing to wait—at least for a while—until he felt comfortable with the idea.

  As Vance and Jill dressed, he wondered what effect the war in Korea would have on his sons, both on active duty in the Air Force. Harry, a full colonel, was still all wrapped up in pushing aerial refueling and was preparing a flight of single-engine, single-seat Republic F-84s across the Atlantic. He was somewhat frustrated that the experiment was not using Boeing’s new “flying boom” aerial refueling technique but instead a variation of Flight Refueling’s hose system. Precious few bombers and only a handful of specially equipped fighters were equipped for boom refueling, but it was clearly the path to the future. Tom was still a captain, to his chagrin, but was happy flying as a flight leader in the 4th Fighter-Interceptor Wing.

  Jill called Vance in to his usual bacon and egg breakfast, asking, “What will the boys do?” She had adopted the term “the boys” from Harry, although she was only ten years older than they were.

  “They’ll both volunteer for combat; that’s certain. Tom says he has developed some new tactics for the F-86 he wants to try. As for Harry, I don’t know. He’ll try to get into F-86s, too, probably, but he might well wind up back in B-29s, because that’s the airplane that will be doing the bulk of the bombing and he’s an experienced bomber pilot.”

  “What about you?”

  “You mean ‘what about us’! We’ll have a hell of a lot more business, of course. It’s hard to believe how short the Air Force and the Navy are on airplanes, equipment, everything. We had huge air forces at the end of World War II, and have thrown them all away in just five years. Everything will have to be built back up, and it will take a couple of years to get going. There will be a big buying spree, just like the early 1940s. Then when the war’s over, we’ll junk everything again. It’s a crazy world.”

  “How long will this war last?”

  “The way it’s going right now, it looks like they are going to throw us off the Korean peninsula, back to Japan. That will mean a long war, and we might have to use nuclear weapons. The Russians and the Chinese have so much manpower that we can never match them on the ground, division for division. The only hope is that they recognize the fact that we would be forced to use nuclear weapons, and back off.”

  He paused to look at her, wondering how Madeline could have got it so right. Jill was almost as tall as he but slender, with a voluptuous bosom that she covered decorously in the office but managed to reveal when she worked around the house. But beyond her sensual appeal, Jill exuded a sweetness that soothed Vance and everyone else. A furious contractor could call on the phone, demanding some impossible results, and within minutes Jill would have him calmed down, reasonable, and eating out of her hand. She was instinctively, intuitively kind, in every instance, no matter the provocation. Once, when a bank had charged her twenty-five dollars for a bounced check, Vance had commented wryly on the bloodthirsty mercenariness of banks. Jill immediately came back with a stou
t defense of the banks, saying they had expenses, that people were careless, automatically bringing her inherent kindness into play.

  She was not as efficient as Madeline. They both knew this, accepted it, and never mentioned it. Jill needed Nancy to complement her, and they worked so well together that they decided not to replace the secretary Madeline had hired. She had left for a better job, as did the two young engineering trainees, because Vance never had time to train them and he didn’t like having them hanging around the office when Jill and Nancy were there.

  September 22, 1950, over Labrador

  There were few things worse than being an extra crewman on an overcrowded bomber, high over the North Atlantic, hoping that an experiment about which you had mixed emotions would succeed.

  Cramped, cold, and hungry, his circulation cut off by the chest-pack parachute harness, Colonel Harry Shannon sat in the rear end of a Boeing YKB-29T tanker, waiting for two Republic F-84 Thunderjet fighters to appear from the mists that seemingly covered the entire ocean.

  The lead Thunderjet was flown by the legendary Colonel David Schilling, once again the commander of the Wolf Pack, the 56th Fighter Wing. Leading the same outfit in World War II, flying Republic P-47 Thunderbolts, Schilling had shot down twenty-two and one-half German aircraft and destroyed ten and one-half on the ground. Forceful, charismatic, and a leader who led by doing, he was now somewhere over the lonely Atlantic in a single-engine jet, accompanied by his wingman, Lieutenant Colonel William D. Ritchie.

  The two men were engineering rivals to Harry Shannon, for both had pushed for the probe-and-drogue refueling system, and Schilling had even worked with Flight Refueling Limited to create a special refueling hose. Schilling had devised a means by which a hydraulic valve in the refueling hose was closed at all times except when a fighter’s wing-or nose-mounted probe entered it and the receiver pilot triggered a switch on his control stick to open it.

  Harry had nothing against probe-and-drogue refueling except that it represented a dead end to him. Boeing was making tremendous progress with their flying boom. It now had a delivery rate of 700 gallons per minute, three times the amount that could be passed through a hose. But his boss, Al Boyd, had assigned him to the YKB-29 to watch the operation and see what conclusions could be drawn.

  Schilling and his wingman had departed RAF Manston, near the Dover Strait, some nine hours before. They had already refueled twice by civil Flight Refueling Limited aircraft. The first, a Lancaster, refueled them near Prestwick, Scotland, while the second, an Avro Lincoln, the Lancaster’s successor, had met them over Iceland. According to radio reports, both refuelings had gone off smoothly.

  With the Korean crisis building, the mass transfer of fighters was essential, and if it could be done with aerial refueling it might tip the balance. Things were different from World War II days. There was no time to build up forces and there were not enough fighters to go around, not enough cargo ships to put them on, and not enough bases to prepare them for combat. With in-flight refueling they could be flown to the combat area ready to enter combat when they arrived.

  Schilling was a go-getter, and while he saw advantages to the flying boom in the long run, he knew that a probe-and-drogue system could be fitted sooner to more fighters—if it worked at high altitudes and at the speeds the jets flew.

  Harry and Schilling had planned the mission for days. There were no arguments, Schilling understood Harry’s point of view on the flying boom, and he understood Schilling’s desire to get more equipment sooner. Both men realized that it was dangerous enough to fly a single-engine jet across the Atlantic, where chances for survival after an ejection were virtually nil. To do so with a fairly fragile probe-and-drogue refueling system upped the hazard. Fatigue would be a big factor, because flying a jet for eleven hours, much of it on instruments, and doing three in-flight refuelings in the process was exhausting. Yet the payoff would be enormous if it succeeded, and that is what Schilling sought—a quick payoff that would translate into use in the Korean War.

  The refueling equipment operator nudged him, then pointed to the stiletto-slim lines of two F-84s emerging from a bank of cirrus clouds, each one fitted with a probe on its left wing.

  Harry had his own checklist and he followed the process, mentally monitoring each step in the procedure. The two F-84s slowed to the tanker speed and pulled in position behind it, Schilling in the lead, Ritchie to his left and rear.

  The refueling hose streamed out, led by the feathery-looking drogue, an aerodynamic basket that stabilized the hose and held Schilling’s new hydraulic shutoff valve. The refueling operator declared the system ready and Schilling moved in, inserting the probe in the drogue on his first attempt. He pressed the switch on his stick and the valve opened, with fuel flow beginning immediately. Harry could see the skill Schilling was using, flying formation so perfectly that there was no loss of time or motion. When his tanks were topped off, Schilling broke away, and the hydraulic valve automatically shut off the flow of fuel.

  It was Ritchie’s turn. He moved in with the same precision Schilling had used, but when he depressed the control button on his stick, the valve did not open. Ritchie backed off and came in again, twice.

  In a very calm voice, Ritchie called, “That’s it, gang. I’m out of ideas. I’ll climb with the fuel I have left, and glide toward Goose Bay for as long as I can, then eject. Please see if you can get some rescue aircraft out to me. So long.”

  The tanker’s aircraft commander came back, “Roger, good luck, we’ll get them out ASAP.”

  Inside the Thunderjet, Ritchie began a careful climb, trying to trade his fuel for as much altitude as possible. As he rose toward 36,000 feet, he adjusted his parachute harness and made sure his helmet straps were tight. When his engine flamed out from lack of fuel he called, “Flameout. I’m starting my glide west.” There was a faint “Roger” in his headset, from either the YKB-29 or, he hoped, the Goose Bay rescue people.

  The overcast began at 34,000 feet, and as the F-84 slipped earthward Ritchie began the procedures that would take him as far as possible. In the incredible silence, he quickly checked that the throttle was closed, the fuel tank selector was off, and the landing flaps and speed brakes were up.

  Ritchie wiped his eyes. The rush of moisture over the canopy seemed to blur his vision, but when he focused on the instrument panel, dimly but adequately lit, he knew it was an illusion.

  He hit the switch jettisoning his tip tanks and was glad to see them both depart—the last thing he needed now was a hung tank. The aircraft was eerily quiet as he trimmed it to its best glide speed of 220 mph. He knew he could glide for about thirteen miles for every 5,000 feet of altitude. He was passing 30,000 feet now, so he was good for about eighty miles before he would have to eject. That would put him eighty miles closer to Goose Bay and eighty miles farther away from the cold, dark waters of the North Atlantic.

  Ritchie hoped that he had a good battery to keep his electric-powered instruments and radio operational. He focused on the instruments, continuing to ignore the continuous rush of gray moisture that sloshed over his canopy like water from a hose. After that last faint “Roger” there had been no responses to his radio calls, or if there had been he had not heard it. It didn’t matter; he could only glide smoothly down to 3,000 feet, then pray that his ejection seat worked. En route he worked out a sequential prayer process. If the ejection seat worked, he could pray that his parachute opened; if the parachute opened, he could pray he was over land; if he was over water, he could pray his poopy suit, the massive rubber survival suit required for over-water flights, would work and not upend him, head down in the cold, dark sea. And most of all, he would pray that the rescue teams could find him.

  At 3,000 feet, still in the soup, he ejected, the red bang of the ejection seat pyrotechnic lighting up the sky beneath him, hurling him up and out of the cockpit with a spine-compressing jolt that disoriented him momentarily. His helmet and oxygen mask were torn off in the rush of wind, but he se
parated easily from the seat, pulled his ripcord, and started his third set of prayers. So far all had worked and when he looked down between his legs he saw a welcome snowy landmass below.

  The touchdown was hard, and the wind caught his chute, pulling him along like a sled until he managed to hit the quick-release button and separate from the canopy. Then, cold, alone in the middle of nowhere in Labrador, he said a final thank-you prayer.

  Ritchie went through all the survival routines, gathered in his chute, dug a little cave in the snow, dried off his equipment, and began what he knew could be a long and perhaps terminal wait.

  Two hours later he heard his rescuers calling using his name. He had made it to within nineteen miles of the huge base at Goose Bay, and radar had tracked his airplane down to 3,000 feet. He was grateful that they had wasted no time.

  Harry’s KB-29 was still en route back to its base when the news came that Schilling had landed successfully at Limestone and that Ritchie had been picked up, alive and well. The first single-engine jet had flown non-stop across the Atlantic, thanks to aerial refueling. Harry snuggled down in a stack of parachutes and began to think about the logistics of moving an entire wing of aircraft, not just across the Atlantic but across the Pacific. It would be a monumental effort, but the time and money it would save would be incredible. A capability like that would have the effect of multiplying the Air Force by three or four times, with only a relatively minor increase in the number of tanker aircraft. The plans were forming in his head when he drifted off to sleep.

  December 1, 1950, Suwon Air Base, Korea

  On the preceding November 11, Mahoney stopped Tom Shannon as he walked toward the operations section, saying, “Tom, mandatory pilot meeting at ten o’clock. See you there.”