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

by Walter J. Boyne

Shannon had stood up and strode around the room while he was thinking about Corona; now he came back and sat down again on the couch.

  “Vance, you know that Kelly’s been working hard on another project. It’s a spy plane, too, but one that will have incredible performance—long range, continuous Mach 3.0 speed, altitudes above ninety thousand feet. And it will be built like a battleship, too, nothing like the U-2, all lightweight and delicate.”

  “Mach 3? Is it manned? And what kind of power plants will you have? I don’t know of any jet engine that could produce enough thrust to fly Mach 3 for long periods—or, for that matter, fly Mach 3 at all.”

  “Yes, and it will be a handful, but we have pilots who can fly it. The first customer is the CIA, naturally, and they’ve picked Kelly’s last proposal to go with. We’re calling it the A-12. There are already a dozen variants, including a two-placer for the Air Force, but that’s all downstream. You mentioned the engines—that’s why I want to talk to you. You’ve been in jet engines since Whittle was a pup, and we’ve got a problem we’ve never even contemplated before. We want to fly at Mach 3, but we want the aircraft to be invisible to radar, and two big engines make that almost impossible. That will be your task, if you are willing to take it on. You’ll be working directly with Ben Rich, of course, and it was Ben who asked for you.”

  Ben Rich was Kelly Johnson’s heir apparent in the Skunk Works. The two men could not have been more different in their size or their managerial approaches. Where Kelly was always hurtled down a hallway, too preoccupied to greet people, Ben’s style was hail-fellow-wellmet. Where people dreaded Kelly popping into their office—it could only be bad news—they often looked forward to seeing Ben.

  “Of course, Bob, I’m flattered—Ben is a genius, and if he thinks I can help, I’ll do it.”

  “It looks like I’m gutting your business, pulling Rodriquez in for Corona and you in for the A-12, but we’ll make it up to you. You draw up the contracts, tell me exactly what you need to cover everything you might have made in the next year, and you come to work for us. And you can do it part-time, give us thirty hours a week; that’s all I’m asking.”

  “Bob, you are putting me on the spot. I’ve already signed a contract with Boeing, guaranteeing them twenty hours a week. It’s secret, too, just company secret, but it’s a commitment.”

  Gross laughed. “What’s the problem? You work twenty for them, thirty for us, that’s only fifty hours a week, and you haven’t worked less than sixty hours a week for the last thirty years. And as for Boeing’s secret, I won’t put you on the spot, but I’d bet five dollars that it has to do with a supersonic transport.”

  Shannon grinned sheepishly, and they shook hands. Gross walked him out, his arm around his shoulder, asking about Jill and his family. As they walked, Vance took a closer look at his old friend. The stress was telling on him.

  “Bob, we ought to chuck everything and take our families on a month’s vacation. It would do us both a world of good.”

  “It surely would, Vance, but you know and I know there are no more vacations in this business, not with the progress the damned Commies are making. We are at war again, or still, and you and I are still on the front lines.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  January 16, 1961

  Moscow, USSR

  Even at seventy-two, Andrei Tupolev could never rest easy. Memories of how quickly he had fallen from a height few Russian engineers ever reached hung around him in a shroud, as ominous and ugly as the “black dog” of depression that Winston Churchill complained of in his writings.

  As he was the founder of the TsAGI, the Central Aero-Hydrodynamics Institute, a member of the USSR Academy of Sciences, and a holder of the highest award of the motherland, the Order of Lenin, his position seemed unassailable. One successful aircraft after another flowed from his design bureau, including the largest in the world, the Maxim Gorky. His aircraft made long-distance flights, set records, were used by the Soviet Air Force. Yet on the morning of October 21, 1937, four members of the dreaded NKVD arrested him. In an absurd cover story, he was charged with selling the plans of the Messerschmitt Bf 110 twin-engine fighter to Germany. The real charges were far more serious, alleging that Tupolev was leading a mutinous organization within the Soviet aviation industry and personally committing sabotage as an agent of French intelligence.

  The last charge had frightened him most, for although it was totally false, there were circumstances that could be misinterpreted. His visits to the United States in 1935 and to Spain in 1936 had included some contacts with both U.S. and French intelligence. It was inevitable that their agents should seek him out. It was easy for them to secure invitations to the receptions held for him by his hosts. They sent their most able and sometimes most attractive agents to find out what they could from his speeches or from casual conversation. There was one young woman he remembered vividly. She was fluent in Russian and had a piercing intelligence. Her seemingly artless questions had gone to the heart of some of his best designs. He often wondered what might have been if he had been courageous enough to try to escape his duty, his family, his honor, and pursue her, as his body had urged. Incredibly, she had contacted him again this year, in the guise of a letter from the Dassault company in France, inviting him to speak at a conference in Paris. He recognized her name at once. Madeline Behar. How strange that she should write, that she should use the same name. It must be that she wished him to remember her.

  The bright spot of her memory faded at once with the recollection of the agony of his arrest. They had detained him in his office until three in the morning then marched him out, a prisoner, in front of his loyal staff, who had remained at work at great personal risk. As he was led away, he had no idea of his fate. Stalin was slaughtering people of far greater prominence than he, ruthlessly purging thousands from the top ranks of military and civil life. Numb with fear, Tupolev hoped, at best, for the traditional exile to Siberia, to work under survival conditions in a mine or a forest. He had reason to be afraid. His colleagues and sometimes rivals Konstantin Kalinin and Vladimir Chizhevsky had already been executed, and he knew personally that neither man had committed a crime. They could not have. They were, as he was, loyal to the motherland, no matter which tyranny ruled her.

  In a swift show trial by the Military Collegium of the Soviet Supreme Court, he was charged, convicted, and sentenced without being able to make a token defense. Still, he was grateful not to be carted off and shot.

  There followed a year in the dark, fear-filled cells of first the Lubyanka and then the Butyrkii prisons, anguishing every day as the projects upon which he had lavished so much care were taken over by the rival Sukhoi bureau.

  In 1938, a decision was made—undoubtedly by Stalin; no one else would have dared—to place the many imprisoned aeronautical engineers to work in the Central Construction Bureau No. 29. In late August, after a bone-chilling interview with Lavrenty Beria, the perverted, murderously insane head of the KGB, Tupolev was taken to a rude prison at Bolshyevo, outside of Moscow. It was there that he began his greatest contribution to the Great Patriotic War, the beautiful, deadly, “Aeroplane No. 103”—the Tupolev Tu-2. He remembered with pride that it won the Stalin Prize—and helped restore his citizenship.

  Progress on the project was swift, but there were too few people and too little equipment at Bolshyevo, and in April 1939 the group was transferred to his old building on Radio Street in Moscow. It was now a combination prison and factory, with the top staff mostly prisoners and the workers as free as any Soviet citizen was in those terror-filled days. With some wonderment, he went back to work in his old office, where he had been arrested.

  Bureau No. 29 was unlike any prison an ordinary citizen would encounter. Soon the cream of the Soviet aviation industry were there—Petylyakov, Myasishchev, Korolev, so many more. They were definitely prisoners, with all the crushingly banal rules of KGB camps, and they worked to a strict schedule of ten to sometimes fourteen hours a day. Of itsel
f this was no hardship; they had always worked long hours. The amazing thing was that they were well fed, from tables draped with white cloths—not carrying a bowl and licking a spoon as ordinary prisoners did. They didn’t stay in cells but slept in large dormitory areas where each prisoner had a cot and a shelf for belongings he didn’t wish to store in the office area.

  Despite the benign treatment, neither Tupolev nor anyone forgot that they might be shot at any moment. Stalin’s paranoid whims were sudden, fickle, and usually fatal.

  Tupolev worked there throughout the war, mingling with the free and largely sympathetic workers who came in every day as if the prison were an ordinary factory. It was there that he had another challenge from Stalin, one that implicitly guaranteed a death sentence if he failed. Three American Boeing B-29s had landed in the Soviet Union after raids on Japan. In 1944, Stalin ordered Tupolev to copy them exactly, to create duplicates. At first he gently argued against the idea on the basis that Soviet engineers, working from their own material, could create a comparable aircraft in less time. Copying the B-29, with all its complex pressurization and fire control systems, its powerful but troublesome engines, would be a far more difficult task—in fact, he was not sure that it could be done at all.

  Stalin sent back an order to copy it in two years, and copy it they did, wheedling some concessions such as using Soviet rather than American engines. But on May 19, 1947, the copy, known now through Stalin’s graciousness as the Tupolev Tu-4, made its first flight. It was the start not only of a long-range bomber fleet but also of the beginning of the jet age, for the advanced technology of the B-29 would transfer readily to the new power plant.

  There were many more successes, and three years after Stalin’s death in 1953 Tupolev was completely rehabilitated, brought back almost to the status he had enjoyed before 1937. Since then he had created the utilitarian but very successful Tu-104 passenger jet, a modification of his Tu-16 jet bomber. Then there was his greatest triumph of all, the remarkable Tu-95, the four-turboprop swept-wing bomber that matched the remarkable Boeing B-52 in performance. From it was derived the Tu-114 transport, not so fast as the American jets but so much longer ranged that it could beat them over long distances because it did not have to land and refuel. And there was more to come. In just six months, at the first Tushino Air Show in five years, his Tu-22 supersonic medium bomber would be unveiled. It should be enough for any old man.

  But it was not. Now, when he should be retired, when his son, Alexei, should take over, he had another task, laden with the same threats for failure as the Tu-4 had been. Nikita Khrushchev had mandated a supersonic passenger airliner, and Tupolev and his old prison-mate and longtime rival, Vladimir Myasishchev, had each been tasked to create one.

  Khrushchev was not yet a Stalin but seemed to be veering more and more in that direction. Earlier in the month he had thrown down the gauntlet to the United States, proclaiming that he would support wars of “national liberation” all over the globe, specifically mentioning Vietnam, where there was a strong American interest.

  Just as with the Tu-4, the supersonic transport seemed impossible. Just as with the Tu-4, Tupolev would do it. Somehow. At least now there was his son to back him, to take over if and when the time came. No matter that his workers called Alexei the Czarevitch. Andrei Tupolev knew that he was accused of nepotism, but he didn’t care. Alexei was his son. He would take over.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  April 17, 1961

  Seattle, Washington

  George Schairer, noted in recent weeks more for irascibility than humor, looked around the room and said, “As Yogi Berra puts it, it looks like déjà vu, all over again.”

  Virtually the same group had gathered in the same office, over a similar problem, only forty-two months before when Sputnik had blasted into orbit and the hearts and minds and fears of Americans. This time it was an even more significant event. On April 12, a twenty-seven-year-old Russian pilot, Yuri Gagarin, rode a Soviet rocket into space, then made a single 108-minute orbit of the Earth, landing safely. He was the first man to do so, and the Soviet Union justifiably crowed about its achievement. Khrushchev now promised the Soviet people that he would solve their housing problems in ten years and that within the same time their standard of living would exceed that of the United States. Gagarin helped make them believe it.

  Vance Shannon responded, “It is exactly like Lindbergh in 1927. Overnight, Gagarin is the most famous man in the world.”

  Vance immediately regretted the remark. Some of the engineers in the room had not even been born when Lindbergh flew from New York to Paris. Vance hated when his conversation dated him, just as he hated his graying hair, growing paunch, and, too often now, slight lapses of memory. To himself he said, Next thing I’ll be doing is buying one of my own company’s Porsches and wearing a gold chain around my neck.

  Harry Shannon watched his father, amused, knowing exactly what he was thinking and knowing that it couldn’t have mattered to the Boeing engineers there, all of whom deeply respected him and his work. The fact that the Shannons were invited there proved that. Boeing, despite its size and accomplishments, was still in many ways a small company, and it played its cards close to its chest. Having the two Shannons at a critical meeting spoke volumes for their respect for Harry’s dad.

  Harry himself had done well working with Boeing. He had been one of the principal architects behind the widespread adoption of in-flight refueling and had conceived the original idea for Boeing’s now indispensable flying-boom in-flight refueling system. In the process he had become close to Schairer, not just because he was Vance Shannon’s son—although that would have been enough—but also because they worked well together.

  Schairer was the indispensable spark to Boeing engineering. There were literally dozens of stellar engineers at the Seattle firm, but Schairer was always the most inventive, the most unorthodox. He drove his engineers crazy with challenges, and they worked hard to meet those challenges. Today’s meeting would have been pointless if Schairer had not fought for the creation of a supersonic wind tunnel many years before. At the time it seemed like an expensive luxury—something that Boeing traditionally did without—but now Schairer’s prescience was obvious.

  Mild, soft-spoken Ed Wells, a genius and veritable father figure to Boeing engineers, glanced at his watch, a signal that he wanted things to get going. Schairer took the hint.

  “As much as we’d like to talk about our cosmonaut friend Gagarin, the business today is the supersonic transport. The question is what do we know and what do our competitors know?”

  Wells cleared his throat and said, “We know that our boss, Bill Allen, says that the cost of developing an airframe and engines for a supersonic transport will run from one to two billion. It is too much for any private firm, or any combination of private firms. That means the government has to be involved in financing the project, with all the complications of annual budgets, changes in administration, and all the rest. I think we need to go slow on this.”

  No one disagreed.

  After his last remark, Vance Shannon was hesitant to volunteer another comment. In the past it had been his almost invariable custom to say nothing until asked or, if he had something vital to say, to wait until the very last moment. But shrugging his shoulders, he leaped in now, saying, “I spent two days with Jeeb Halaby last week.”

  Najeeb Halaby was the personable Administrator of the Federal Aviation Administration, a former test pilot, and a successful businessman.

  “Jeeb is absolutely for a supersonic transport, as you know. He says he is willing to go to bat for us with Congress. There will have to be a competition, of course.”

  He hesitated, shrugged mentally this time, and went on, “And he believes we should go for Mach 3, even if it means using titanium for the airframe. He believes that there’s just no way that a smaller Mach 2 transport can pay for itself.”

  And, in a rush, he added, “He even talked about getting things started by
converting Convair’s B-58 to use a passenger pod. But I don’t think he was serious.” The B-58 was the world’s first supersonic bomber. Instead of a bomb bay, it carried a weapons pod that was intended to be jettisoned for the trip back from the target.

  Maynard Pennell, who had cut his teeth on the Douglas DC-3, was a man of George Schairer’s mold, full of ideas. Wells often joked that he got paid just for distinguishing between Schairer’s and Pennell’s good ideas and their bad ones. Pennell said, “Halaby couldn’t have been serious about converting the B-58. But he is right otherwise. For an SST, we ought to establish, as a minimum, a Mach 3.0 speed, a four-thousand-mile range, and at least one hundred and fifty passengers, maybe two hundred if we can find a way to do it.”

  Harry Shannon whistled to himself. This was an incredible goal, and even more incredibly, the circle of Boeing engineers simply nodded in agreement.

  Wells asked, “What kind of a time frame are we talking about?”

  Schairer replied, “It depends upon the competition. The Commies have been talking about an SST for a couple of years. They have a bomber prototype, a Myasishchev, or however you say it, looks like a B-58. Maybe they are thinking about doing something like Halaby suggested.”

  Jack Steiner, who had pushed the successful 727 through against almost incredible engineering and financial odds, was attending the meeting almost by accident, for he was now deeply involved in the 737 project. But he commented, “The Russians are very interested. I’ve been following this pretty closely. A couple of years ago, June 1959, I think, their fighter guy, Mikoyan, the chief guy at the MiG bureau, told some Brits that they were seriously interested in a supersonic transport. Then about six months later our friend Andrei Tupolev made a speech to the Supreme Soviet, supporting Khrushchev’s decision to scale back the armed forces a bit in favor of consumer goods. He said flat-out that they should build supersonic transports.”