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

by Walter J. Boyne

  “Now we’re going to intensify our flying. We’ll fly all the missions they assign us, and we’ll fly an additional training mission every day. We’ll practice dive-bombing, air-to-air gunnery, and, most of all, how to avoid surface-to-air missiles. Don’t tell me we don’t have the airplanes to do this, or the fuel, or anything else. If we don’t have it, I’ll get it.”

  He stepped down from the podium, hesitated, then climbed back up on the little stage and said, “One more thing. We are going to shoot down one hell of a lot of MiGs in the process.”

  Like a fast serve being returned, he heard from the back of the room: “What’s this we shit, kemo sabe?”

  Tom stopped in his tracks.

  “OK, who is the wise guy?”

  A short, heavyset man sent his hand up in the air, his dark face flushed with embarrassment.

  “What’s your name?”

  “I’m Lieutenant Michael Pavone.”

  “What’s your job, Lieutenant Pavone?”

  “I’m a backseater for Captain Murray.”

  “Not anymore. From now on you fly with me.”

  It was as good a way to pick a crew member as any—at least he knew Pavone had guts. No brains, maybe, but guts.

  CHAPTER FORTY-SEVEN

  January 27, 1967

  Palos Verdes, California

  Vance’s health had been up and down for the past few weeks and it was unusual for him to hold a meeting at night, but there was a pressing issue and it turned out that both Harry and Bob were available after nine o’clock. Vance hated to impose on them, but with Tom gone, there was more work than he could handle.

  Vance knew that Harry and Bob recognized that he was gradually turning more and more control over to them. He did it reluctantly, not because he didn’t trust their judgment but because he hated the thought of not being on top of every detail. He’d spent a lifetime building up his firm, and now, when it was at its peak, with offices in three cities, he had to give up the reins.

  He felt fortunate that he had Harry and Bob to take over. Tom’s return to the Air Force had disappointed him, as much as he understood it, and judging from Tom’s letters, he was doing well, shaping his unit up, and even scoring two kills. Imagine that, a forty-eight-year-old man in combat and shooting down airplanes. It was incredible, even if Tom was his son, his favorite son. Vance could admit it only to himself; he’d die before letting Harry even think that was the case. But Tom was so much like his mother, while Harry was just another Vance Shannon. All of Tom’s strengths and weaknesses were the very ones Vance had loved in Margaret, God rest her soul.

  The only real problem was Tom’s antipathy toward Bob. Oddly enough, Vance knew Margaret would have felt the same way. It was something inherent, some sense of turf that they both had aplenty. Tom had made an attempt, not at reconciliation but at least cooperation, a few months ago with some very pertinent suggestions on simulators, based on his experience at Eglin. But since then, it was the same old story, a coldly formal friendship. Tom’s wife, Nancy, went out of her way to be nice to both Bob and Mae, but the lines of separation were there, hard and unmistakable and, now, getting more troublesome all the time. Vance knew that Tom was clearly in the wrong, that his views were counterproductive for the family and for the business. Vance also knew that there was nothing he could do or say to make a difference.

  Things were not improved by the way business had boomed for the last six months, not always in the manner Vance liked to see. Last December, the German Luftwaffe grounded the Lockheed F-104G, after the sixty-fifth crash of the hot little fighter. The grounding was the result of a recommendation of a committee in which Harry and Bob had both participated. Naturally enough, the Germans were unwilling to admit that there was anything wrong with their training system and wanted to find an inherent flaw in the airplane. The truth was different. The attrition rate for F-104G was no worse than that of other high-performance fighters in other air forces around the world and, in fact, better than in some that also flew the Starfighter.

  It was a crisis for the Luftwaffe, as it grudgingly accepted that it had not been as stringent as it might have been in either pilot selection or training. But as was so often the case when Rodriquez was on the job, there was a windfall for Aerospace Ventures. Well-known among the Luftwaffe leadership for his twelve victories in Korea and able to speak German well enough to sell, if not actually negotiate the contracts, the affable Rodriquez had walked away with an $80 million contract for simulators to improve instrument training. The contract had to be shared with half a dozen European countries, but it was a fantastic boost to the Aerospace Ventures bottom line.

  Vance thought to himself how strange it was that Bob and Harry got along so well but that Tom couldn’t stand Bob. Yet Bob used Tom’s ideas for simulators in the proposal he had made to the Germans. All that remained was to build them—easier said than done. It was typical of Bob that he had insisted that one section of the contract specifically spell out that the basic idea for the 3-D simulators he was proposing was derived from Tom’s suggestion.

  The other bit of bad news was deceptive, for it looked good on the surface. Boeing had beaten Lockheed for the contract for the supersonic transport, somewhat to the Seattle firm’s chagrin. Opposition to the SST was building on a number of fronts, but the major opposition was from a wide-ranging coalition of environmentalists. The principal leader was William Shurcliff, who headed the Citizens League Against the Sonic Boom. At the same time, government support was waning. Jeeb Halaby had been a strong and vocal advocate of the SST when he headed the FAA, but he had gone on to run Pan American. Now Bill MacGruder, a former Lockheed test pilot, was running the SST program for the government, and he simply did not have Halaby’s clout.

  Yet there was another problem, far more subtle, that Vance saw early on. It was not perceived by Boeing, and Vance couldn’t point it out without offending a long laundry list of friends. The SST was being designed primarily by engineers from Boeing’s commercial aviation side. But because the government was funding 90 percent of the program, these engineers were dealing with the same government representatives who worked with the Boeing military aircraft people. Boeing’s commercially trained people were treating the sole government customer as if it were one of several airline customers, a basic error that had to be redressed. As a result, communication was poor and the government was forming a very bad opinion of Boeing’s responsiveness.

  Just as they had promised, Harry and Bob rolled in at nine o’clock, both men apologizing for being late and both eagerly wolfing down the sandwiches and cocoa that Jill had prepared for them. Jill cornered Bob, made him show her every new picture of the baby, and gave him yet another outfit to take home for Bob Junior.

  Vance watched approvingly, then said, “It’s a hell of a note that we cannot get together during the day like normal human beings, but there’s just too much going on. Thank goodness that Luftwaffe business is over with—I thought you guys would have to give up your citizenship if you didn’t get back here.”

  Bob Rodriquez shifted a bite of sandwich to the side of his mouth, took a sip of cocoa, and said, “If I hadn’t come back, Mae was going to divorce me. She’s really upset about me being gone so much with a brand-new baby. And it’s not really over, Vance, in truth it’s just getting started, and that’s why I was happy you got us together tonight. When you’ve gone through your agenda, I want to make a proposal to you both.”

  “OK. We’ll do that. Mine is short and sweet. With Tom gone, we are just stretched too thin, so either we’ve got to bring some talent on board that we can really rely on or we’re going to have to consider selling some of the business off. I hate to do that; everything we own seems like part of the family. But we cannot keep growing like this without expanding our management base. The problem of course is to get people we’re comfortable with. Right now, any one of us …”

  He stopped, then said, “I was going to say any one of us can cover all the bases. That’s not
true anymore. Bob has projects going that are beyond my ken—especially the simulators.”

  “Mine, too.” Harry didn’t like saying it, but it was true.

  When he was excited about a project, Rodriquez was like an eager beagle puppy, almost unable to contain himself with the prospect of pleasing someone and very anxious for approval. Vance saw him squirming and waved him to go ahead.

  “Look, I’ve got an old friend at General Electric, Bill Roos. He’s in their electronics division and has been experimenting along the same lines I have, introducing the digital computer into simulators. We had a long talk, off-the-record, of course, and it turns out we have an exact fit between what we are developing at Aerospace Ventures and what GE is working on. We both plan to get away from the big special purpose computers that everybody, Link included, has been using, and use smaller general-purpose digital computers.”

  He saw that he had lost both Harry and Vance technically.

  “I’m sorry. To be brief, I’m proposing that we split off our simulator line completely from Aerospace Ventures and sell it to General Electric. Both our systems are able to generate three-dimensional images, but ours is a better system, easier to manufacture. But they are way ahead of us in using color. It is a perfect fit, and Bill Roos is more than willing to buy. It fits their plans even better than it might fit ours.”

  Vance looked alarmed. “What about your interest in this? You wouldn’t be going with them?”

  “No, I’ve taken it about as far as I can go. We couldn’t justify the expense at Aerospace Ventures to do what GE is going to do. But I’ll bet we can sell to them at a great price, considering we’re bringing the German contract along. Besides, I’ve got some other ideas I need to work on.”

  Harry cut in, “Like what? Are they apt to be as profitable as we projected the simulators to be? I’m not sure I like the idea of GE cleaning up on your invention.”

  “Well, I think the next big field in the military will be what they call smart bombs, you know, precision guided munitions, and I’ve got some ideas that I want to develop. I think it will be at least as profitable as simulators, maybe more. There’s no question in my mind that the volume will be greater—we’ll be getting to a point where there will be a surplus simulator capacity in five or ten years, but we’ll be dropping smart bombs forever.”

  Vance and Harry both looked at him with admiration. Rodriquez always managed to be thinking ten years ahead, a vital characteristic that they lacked—and knew they lacked.

  “And remember, the deal with GE will have a percentage rider in it; we’ll continue to make money from the simulators they sell.”

  Bob, ever the salesman, turned to Vance for the close. “What this does, Vance, is free up about eighty percent of my and my people’s time. We’ll devote about half of that to the new projects, and the rest is at your disposal, to help out where you are short.”

  Vance mulled it over in his mind. No sense in going to Tom to inquire whether he was interested or not; he’d say he didn’t care and be pissed off at Bob anyway. The key thing for Vance was that it provided at least a partial solution to the current management crisis, and although he hated to admit it, he was always more partial to munitions than to simulators. Gad, he was tired. Twenty years ago he’d have made up his mind in a second. Now he wanted to think about it.

  “Tell you what, Bob, let’s talk in the morning by phone. I can tell by Harry’s face that he thinks it is a good idea, and so do I, but I want to see the deal you propose to GE first.”

  He’d always liked General Electric since the days back in the mid forties when he’d brought Whittle’s engine over for them to copy. They’d never looked back and were now one of the biggest jet-engine makers in the business. Maybe this would be the same. He started to tell Bob and Harry a story about the first Whittle engine blowing up, then stopped. He was getting old, but he was not going to be one of those old blowhards, always dredging up stories from the past.

  The phone rang and Vance picked it up. “Vance Shannon here.”

  “Vance, this is Bud Bodie down at the Cape. We’ve had a catastrophe here, a fire in Apollo I. All three crewmen are dead. We’re convening a board of inquiry and wonder if you can send Bob Rodriquez down as soon as possible, tomorrow if you can.”

  Shannon was stunned. He knew all three of the primary crew for Apollo I—Gus Grissom, Ed White, and Roger Chaffee—and two of the three men on the backup crew, Wally Schirra and Donn Eisele.

  “Which crew was on board?”

  “The primary. Can Rodriquez be here? I have a bunch more calls to make.”

  “He’s on his way.”

  Shaken, Vance hung up the phone. “Bob, we’ll talk about your proposal another time. You have to go to Cape Canaveral, first thing in the morning. They had a fire in Apollo I, killed all three of the crew members. I guess they want you because of your background in oxygen systems.”

  They talked quietly for a bit, shaken by the tragedy and speculating on its effect on the Apollo program.

  Rodriquez said, “This open policy on the space program is a good thing, I guess, but there are going to be some real turf wars over this. The Russians do it differently—they never let any word out about any tragedy; they only tell about their successes.”

  “Well, we lost three fine officers in this. And I’ll bet we lose six months or a year of time. It might cost us the race to the moon. I hope not.”

  After a long silence, Vance went on, “It looks like the space age is going to be built on sacrifice, just like aviation has been.”

  They left him with his thoughts of so many of his friends lost over the years and of the question he had asked himself a hundred times, whether it was worth it or not. He had asked himself that most often when he knew Tom or Harry was flying a dangerous mission.

  Funny enough, he thought to himself, sad as it is, there is something in the human soul that makes it worthwhile. If it wasn’t worth it somehow, there wouldn’t always be someone willing to take up the challenge after an accident.

  CHAPTER FORTY-EIGHT

  February 27, 1967

  Over North Vietnam

  So far the weather was absolutely perfect for Operation Toro, Colonel Tom Shannon’s trap for the MiGs of the North Vietnamese 921st Fighter Regiment. A solid cloud deck covered the ground at about five or six thousand feet. There were some intermittent layers of clouds all the way up to his 15,000-foot altitude, where fourteen flights of four McDonnell F-4 Phantoms each flew at 480 knots, pretending to be bomb-laden Republic F-105s.

  He rocked his wings, craning his neck to view as much as he could of the magnificent spectacle, fifty-six superb fighters in the classic Air Force fluid-four formation. From each of the Phantom’s two engines there extended the usual telltale columns of smoke that would have been a dead giveaway had there been no cloud cover.

  Pavone, his voice husky with excitement, called, “Crossing the Red River.”

  Shannon accelerated to 540 knots, and the Phantoms assumed the QRC-160 pod formation that the F-105s always used, hoping to lure the North Vietnamese up to fight. If they did, they would be cold meat, for more F-4s from Da Nang were positioned to cut off their route home, catching them with their fuel low and nowhere to go. Shannon felt like an airborne Hannibal, planning his own lofty Cannae.

  A glance at the clock told him that the trap would not be sprung for ten more minutes, and he luxuriated in the enforced idleness. All they had to do was stooge along, pretending to be bomb-laden F-105s, until the MiGs appeared. Constantly alert, he scanned the sky, checked his fuel state, set the armament switches, and noted a change in the vegetation near a village that he had flown over the previous day. But even as he watched and set and checked, he allowed his mind to go back and recap the past few action-packed weeks.

  Shannon stretched in his seat, thinking how good it was to be back in combat and how impossible it was to explain the feeling to Nancy. She’d never understand what it meant to be accepted as the leader of
what he knew was now the most formidable Phantom unit in the world, the Cougars of the Sixth Tactical Fighter Wing. And intuitively, he knew that he loved her better for not understanding.

  It hadn’t been easy to mold the Cougars into their current from, for the war was being fought on a ludicrous basis. The Secretary of Defense, Robert Strange McNamara, had issued stringent rules of engagement that pitifully handicapped the United States Air Force. Left to follow its own doctrine of air superiority, the Air Force could have cleared the Vietnamese skies of all enemy airpower in one or two days of fierce action. But McNamara was convinced that he could educate the North Vietnamese with a graduated response to their aggression, sending subtle messages to Hanoi to desist or things would get worse.

  It was absurd. The people running the Hanoi government had resisted the Japanese and defeated the French. They were not susceptible to hints or persuasion. Nonetheless, McNamara persisted, conferring political air superiority upon the enemy, a historical first of enormous importance. Under his rules, the airfields from which the MiGs flew were off-limits, as were the surface-to-air missile sites that fired the deadly telephone pole-long SA-2s, supersonic surface-to-air missiles that could blow you out of the sky with a near miss. If World War II had been fought the same way, the Germans would have won.

  Other rules specified that it was necessary to have a visual identification of enemy planes, to avoid fratricide. This made sense except that it put the F-4s in a hopeless position with their all-missile armament. Their AIM-7 radar-guided Sparrows were designed to reach out and destroy enemy bombers at a distance. The requirement to visually identify the target negated the Sparrows’ value, discounting their combat capability.

  The heat-seeking AIM-9 Sidewinders were also handicapped by the requirement, but not to the same degree, being intended to work closer in than the Sparrow. But both missiles were designed for use against bombers flying straight and level, not for dogfighting with a diving, twisting, turning MiG fighter. As Tom had said so many months before, what was needed was a gun—but there were no guns on Phantoms yet. McNamara had refused to consider their installation, saying that in the age of missiles they might as well put bows and arrows on the Phantom. Sometimes, when all his missiles misfired, Tom would have settled for a longbow.