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

by Walter J. Boyne

  She laughed again. “Let me tell you what you are really thinking about. You’re thinking about setting up a trust fund for V.R.”

  He looked at her in disbelief.

  “How the hell could you know that? I’ve never said a word about it.”

  “We’ve been together a long time now. You don’t have to spell things out for me to know what’s going on in your mind. You were talking about him going to college the other day.”

  She kissed Vance and said, “Let me put another thought there, something you would think about eventually.”

  He waited, thinking how lucky he had been the third time around. Margaret, his first wife, had been a wonderful mother. Madeline, his lover, had seemed wonderful—until she left him holding the baggage of her espionage. But Jill was just a gem, able to do so many things, understanding him so well, handling the touchy situation with Tom and Bob. He was lucky to have her.

  “Mae is pregnant. I think it would be a nice gesture to include her children in any trust arrangement. Lord knows there’s enough money to go around for a half-dozen kids.”

  “She’s pregnant, eh? That rascal Bob, he’s a fast worker. How do you think that would go down with Tom?”

  “Not too well, but what will we care? We’ll both be pushing up daisies before it comes into effect. We’ll just keep it quiet, between us, and they can sort it out in a fight at the funeral.”

  “Let me think about it. I like the idea, but there are some ramifications. Harry doesn’t have any kids, and it sort of leaves him out.”

  “Honey, the money from the dealership is only a part of your assets. You’ll have plenty for Harry and Tom, and they are well-fixed on their own, thanks to you.”

  She walked with her arm around him down to the garage, where a cream-colored 1937 Cord Beverly was parked next to her Cadillac. Vance had acquired it in one of the rare moments when he decided he was going to work less. He’d gone through a long ritual of reading the automobile books, talking to traders, and finally located it in Illinois, stored not in the traditional barn, but on the third floor of an abandoned factory outside of Chicago. The cost of getting it out of the building and transported to Palos Verdes was almost as much as the price of the car. It was rolled off the truck, into Vance’s garage, and had sat there ever since. It was beat-up but somehow still beautiful, with its windshield cracked on the passenger side and one of the retractable headlights popped up in a perpetual leer.

  “Are you ever going to get this thing fixed up?”

  “First thing I’m going to do when I finally retire.”

  “I’m not holding my breath.”

  THE LUNCHEON WITH Lou Capestro was more than disappointing; it was frightening.

  “I hate to tell you this, Vance, but I’m thinking about selling, too. I know you’ve been having trouble with your ticker, but I think my problem is even worse. It’s colon cancer. I’m lined up for an exploratory operation in two weeks. It doesn’t look good.”

  “My God, Lou, I’m sorry to hear this. I know you’ll beat it, but I’m sorry you have to go through it.”

  “Well it’s part of life. I haven’t told anyone except you, not even my wife. There will be time enough for them to know when I get ready to go to the hospital. No sense in worrying them any longer than I have to.”

  They sat quietly together, two old friends who had been through the wars. Lou relentlessly played with the cutlery, drumming a knife against his glass so loudly that he was getting stares from a couple at the next table.

  Lou finally spoke. “Why don’t we call Obermyer and see if he’ll buy us out? He’s doing very well in Los Angeles, and he’s always been fair to us.”

  “Yes; I don’t want to go through the agony of selling it on the open market. If Fritz would take it over, I’d be willing to make some price concessions to him to do it.”

  “Me, too. Somehow money just doesn’t seem too important nowadays.”

  Alberto, their waiter for many years, brought them their usual coffee and the special grappa that he kept for old customers. Vance knew for sure that Lou was not well when he pushed both of them away, untasted.

  CHAPTER FORTY

  September 7, 1965

  Moscow, USSR

  Andrei Tupolev was seventy-seven and felt every one of his years. He stared with pride across the room at his son Alexei, now just forty years old and coming into his own despite the snide claims of nepotism made by jealous rivals. “Czarevitch,” indeed! Alexei had long since earned his position within the bureau by dint of hard work.

  The two men had been at their desks since early morning, scarcely exchanging a word. Alexei was in the midst of a mammoth reprogramming effort, so deeply absorbed that he did not even look up when his father made one of his now too-frequent trips to the bathroom.

  The elder Tupolev knew full well that his son did not have that rare spark of flaming genius that would lead him to a brilliant design, a spark that Andrei had possessed in such abundance for most of his life. But Alexei had something more important now, in this age when huge, sophisticated aircraft required teams of designers. He had the ability to integrate a mass of often-conflicting information and plan huge production efforts that involved the aerodynamicists, engine people, the materials group, everyone, in a sophisticated, closely scheduled program. This was a gift that few people possessed, chief among them Andrei himself.

  In the eleven months since Khrushchev had been deposed, Tupolev had hoped that there would be some relaxation in the insane schedule that had been ordered for the SST—to fly in 1968 but, above all, to fly before any Western SST flew. Instead, the flighty Nikita had been superseded by a pure technocrat, Leonid Brezhnev, who made a quasireligion out of the Marxist-Leninist reverence for science and technology.

  Brezhnev saw the SST as a personal fiefdom to gather prestige for the Soviet Union and for himself. Worse, he saw it as one of his own toys, no different from his growing fleet of exotic foreign automobiles. Far from relaxing the schedule, he let Tupolev know in no uncertain terms that the future of his bureau depended upon a successful flight in 1968.

  Andrei Tupolev had still not recovered from the embarrassment at the Paris Air Show, which had gotten off to a bad start when an Italian Fiat G.91 fighter crashed into a crowded parking lot. One of the many models of the SST was flown in for exhibit, and its sleek shape both stunned and amused the foreign press, which immediately dubbed it the “Concordski” for its resemblance to the Anglo-French transport.

  There was a good reason for the external similarity. Industrial espionage agents in France had given Andrei a three-year head start by stealing plans and data on the French research. He disliked the fact that the stolen design drove him to adopt the delta wing, something he had always avoided in the past.

  Despite the undeniable external similarities, internally it was a different matter. Western avionics and engineering were far in advance of anything he could command, and so he settled, as usual, for what worked best and was achievable. Soviet designers as a group always tried to keep designs simple, so they could be manufactured, strong, so that they could operate off Russia’s rough fields, and most of all workable, so that the designers didn’t go to jail.

  The most visible difference between the two SSTs was in the air intakes for the engines. The Concorde design had sophisticated sliding ramps that automatically moved forward and backward to smooth out the airflow to its engines. The Tu-144 used an old-fashioned idea, very long inlet ducts, which were heavier and far less efficient than the movable ramps.

  Internally, the differences were far greater. The Concorde used its fuel tanks as heat sinks, to absorb some of the heat generated by high speeds. At Mach 2.0, the temperature at the leading edge could rise to more than eight hundred degrees Fahrenheit. The Tu-144 was forced to resort to old-fashioned cooling systems, heavy, noisy, and space consuming.

  The most annoying thing about Paris was the press, which constantly pressured him for information and commentary. He kept u
p a brave front, maintaining the party line that the Tupolev Tu-144 would go into airline service soon, on international routes.

  It was hogwash, of course, for unless Alexei came up with some sort of a miracle there was no way that the Tu-144 could fly before 1970—and even then only with a good deal of luck. The British and the French were playing their cards close to their chest, but casual, well-hedged predictions were made that the first Concorde might fly sometime in 1969. Well, good luck to them!

  He glanced at the clock. It was almost two and he was hungry. “Alexei?”

  Too deeply absorbed to hear, his son seemed to thrash about with papers, moving them from the center of his desk to a table at the side and from there to the floor. He called again, “Alexei, I am hungry; would you like to get something to eat?”

  Alexei looked up, smiling. “In a moment. Just give me a moment more, and I’ll show you something that will give you an appetite!”

  Andrei Tupolev looked at the large clock on the wall, thinking, If he is not ready in twenty minutes, I’m going without him.

  “Look at this.” Alexei put a series of papers before him, charting the flow of components to the factory for assembly. They came from all over the Soviet Union and were as tightly scheduled as a space shot.

  “You want to fly in 1968? I’ll show you how if you will take the risks involved.”

  “What risks? The whole program is a risk; life is a risk.”

  “Yes, but this is the worst kind of risk, engine risk! If you will agree to accept the Kutznetsov KN-144 turbofans right now, and agree that we will not change, no matter what, we just might be able to fly in late December 1968. But it means that we will be able to cruise at Mach 2.0 only in afterburner—and you know what that means for fuel consumption and for range.”

  Andrei sat, crestfallen. Damn this airplane, with its damnable delta wing and with its primitive engines. It should be a work of art, not something rushed through production like an army boot! There was no need for an SST in the Soviet Union, no need for one anywhere, if you got down to it. Ah, if he had five years to work on it, he could deliver an airplane with the range, the speed, and the safety. Especially the safety—they were exploring a whole new world, and they had no data to rely on.

  But he didn’t have five years to work on it—he had a little over three, and there was no one who could say that he would even live that long.

  “What else? Surely there are other risks.”

  “Well, you know the story on the tires. The French put one over on us, and that cost us four months of tire development. The fact is, we won’t have the right kind of tires, but we’ll be able to fly the airplane with what we have, even if we have to replace them all after every flight. The main thing is we can fly in December of 1968 if we commit to doing so now. And that means you’ll have to give up some of your prerogatives on changes. Once we are committed, you just have to accept what comes along. There will be surprises, but we’ll deal with those. Now tell me, shall we go ahead with this?”

  Andrei was hungry and tired. There was very little choice. If they did not fly in 1968, Brezhnev would close down the bureau and everything would be lost, the dacha, the cars, good universities for the grandchildren, everything Andrei had worked so hard for. Alexei would be sent to work in some rival’s design bureau if he was lucky, to some gulag if he was not. As for Andrei, it wouldn’t matter. He could not survive the failure; he might not even survive the success.

  He closed his eyes. How could this be finessed? Perhaps they could fly it in 1968—no one said it had to be a supersonic flight. No one had even said the gear must be retracted. Perhaps they could get it into the air for one trip around the pattern—that would be enough. Then they could stall and maybe get new engines for the next prototype. It was a fraud and a sham, of course, but so was the entire Soviet Union. The Tu-144 would simply be the fastest fraud, the biggest sham.

  He opened his eyes.

  “Agreed. We will proceed with the Kutznetsov engines, despite their unreliability and their thirst for fuel. No one is going to expect us to fly four thousand miles for the first few years. You really think we can make this schedule?”

  “I think perhaps—and I think it’s the only way.”

  Andrei’s stomach rumbled.

  “Let’s go get something to eat. When we come back, we’ll put a message together for Brezhnev, telling him what we are doing, asking for his approval. If he approves, and things go wrong, it will be a life preserver for us.”

  “It will if he’s still in power.”

  They walked out arm in arm, Alexei profoundly happy with the decision, Andrei profoundly worried by it.

  CHAPTER FORTY-ONE

  December 17, 1965

  New York, New York

  Jill had insisted on making reservations for them at the Waldorf Astoria.

  “If I leave it up to your penny-pinching ways, we’d be in some run-down hotel like the Windsor in Seattle! You are seventy-one years old, you have a lot of money, and you ought to spend it on yourself.”

  “You didn’t have to get a suite, did you? And Harry didn’t need a separate room; he could have bunked in here.”

  Harry laughed. Nothing would ever change Vance, who still watched every nickel spent on himself but was generous with everyone else in the family or the firm.

  Vance waved Harry into the sitting room, where he had two tablets put out on the table.

  “Harry, this is going to be one of the toughest meetings we’ll ever have. We have to go in and tell two of the most powerful men in the industry things they don’t want to hear. I’m not worried about Bill Allen, but I don’t know Juan Trippe very well, and I understand that he can be pretty willful.”

  Harry nodded. “Are you sure you want to do this, Dad? You are going to be offending virtually everybody—Boeing, Pan Am, even Pratt & Whitney. From all I hear, both Allen and Trippe have made up their minds to build a big transport, and I don’t think there’s anything we can tell them that will stop them.”

  “You’re right, there’s not, but Aerospace Consultants—I mean Aerospace Ventures—has made a reputation, and a pretty good living, on calling things as we see them, and that’s what we’re going to do.”

  He put his hands together in a characteristic gesture and said, “We’re dealing with a lot of emotions here. Boeing is ticked off because Lockheed won the C-5 contract, and Bill Allen wants to recoup some of that engineering investment in an airliner. Trippe is angry because the SST program is getting killed off, and he wants a new airplane to take its place. But he’s insisting that the SSTs will come in, and then the big airliner will have to be converted to be a cargo carrier. So he’s compromising the design right from the start.”

  Vance and Harry talked earnestly for the next forty minutes, each making occasional notes before leaving his tablet on the table and departing for their meeting in the glittering Pan Am building. They were pleasantly surprised to find Harold Gray, Pan Am’s president, waiting for them on the steps.

  “Good to see you, Vance! I remember the day you checked me out in a Sikorsky S-42.”

  Genuinely touched that Gray had come all the way down to meet them, Vance turned to Harry and said, “This is Harold Gray, the finest pilot Pan Am ever produced! And he’s one hell of a businessman, too.”

  Harry stood by as the two men went through the usual litany of inquiries about mutual friends. Once seated in his office, however, Gray turned serious.

  “Listen, Vance, I have to know. What are you going to tell Mr. Trippe about the new airplane?”

  “Well, it’s not all good—I have concerns about the engine, about its freight-hauling capability, about its weight estimate. I’m going to piss both of them off, I guess, but I have to do it.”

  “Well, I hope to God you can talk them out of it. If we go through with this deal the way they are talking about structuring it, it will be a miracle if either company survives. It’s just too damn risky, especially with the war in Vietnam escalating
all the time. We don’t need an airplane this big yet.”

  “I don’t have anything against its size, although it will be a problem for the airlines to handle at the terminals, but I am concerned about a number of things. But Harry here tells me there’s little or no chance of changing their minds. Half the staff back at Boeing are terrified of what might happen if there’s a problem in production. They don’t even have a factory to build it, you know.”

  Gray glanced at the clock and said, “We can go in now.”

  The office was quietly elegant without being extravagant, with recessed lighting and lots of leather chairs. Paintings, photos, and models of Pan American airliners were everywhere, starting with the early Fairchild and Fokkers and continuing on through the glorious days of the flying boats, down to the latest jets. Vance noted a model of a generic SST had pride of place next to Trippe’s desk.

  Vance had first met the man who had made Pan American a household name in 1929. Charles Lindbergh was serving as Pan Am’s technical adviser and had asked Shannon to come out to evaluate competing aircraft for the mail route that was planned for the Caribbean. Vance had ultimately recommended the Sikorsky S-40 for the route. Trippe had seemed somewhat remote, reserved even, in Lindbergh’s company. Vance had come away with the impression that Trippe was a visionary autocrat, who listened only to what he wanted to hear. In later years Vance heard that Trippe was obsessively secretive, that he ruled the company with an iron hand and frugal paychecks. Vance wondered if anything had changed.

  Both Trippe and Allen stood when the two Shannons came in, a gracious touch that pleased Harry for his father’s sake. Gray made the introductions and, to Vance’s surprise, excused himself, pleading a crisis in the accounting department.

  Trippe seized the initiative with a briefing that would have been worthy of Boeing’s legendary salesman, Wellwood Beall. “This new aircraft—Boeing’s going to call it the 747—will revolutionize air travel. Every projection that you see tells you that air travel is going to double or triple in the next ten years. Pan Am is going to lead this revolution, and to lead it, we need a big aircraft.”