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

by Walter J. Boyne

  Then they were back on the truck again, heading north, judging by the sun, when Pavone saw an arrow with the words “Hà Nôi” painted on it. A few moments later he was adjusting Shannon’s arm braces when he saw his good eye open and his lips moving.

  Shannon gave a slight nod of his head and then lay there, thinking coherently for the first time since he had hit the ground, his parachute billowing around him. He had instinctively understood what Pavone meant about pretending to be unconscious. As long as Shannon could convince them that he was near death, he would probably not be tortured. Sooner or later they would find out, but if he could get a few days he would be stronger, more able to resist. Right now, torture would be easy for them; they would only have to twist one of his arms or kick him in the legs. But if he could get stronger, he could resist longer.

  Wondering how Nancy and his dad had taken the news of his being shot down, he sank back into the black hole where pain could not come.

  CHAPTER FIFTY-TWO

  March 28, 1968

  Everett, Washington

  The invitation to watch the first 747 wing assembly to be removed from its assembly jig came at a bad time for Harry, but he reshuffled his schedule to be there. Moving the twenty-eight-thousand-pound assembly would signal that the Boeing 747 was on time, on schedule, and on its way to rollout.

  Harry wanted to check out the huge new factory that Boeing had carved out of seven hundred acres of Washington wilderness in less than a year. With forty-three acres under one roof, it was by far the biggest industrial building in the world. Boeing had had to build highways and railways so it could construct the $200 million plant. It started assembling 747s even before the enormous structure was roofed over.

  As big as Boeing was, it still depended upon individuals to move projects like the plant and the 747 itself forward. Joe Sutter and his team had done a fantastic job in designing the big transport, which posed a lurking danger to the Boeing company. Any major problems in building or selling it and, most particularly, any crash for any reason would almost certainly destroy the company. Everything was riding on the 747, and everyone at Boeing from Bill Allen down knew it.

  As a result, Sutter designed the aircraft with many redundant systems, making sure that any problems would be “fail-safe.” Harry Shannon had contributed in part to this, creating a new method of anticipating failures that he called fault-tree analysis. Charts recorded the safety relationship of every component to every other component in the airplane. If an element failed, its effect upon every other element could be spotted at once. With this in place, it was possible for the Boeing engineers to create solutions to problems before they occurred.

  Sutter’s operational counterpart was Mal Stamper, the driving force behind creating the factory and getting the first prototype assembled. Stamper literally lived at the factory, returning home only for an occasional meal and to collapse in bed. The stories about him were legend, but the most characteristic occurred when an unbelievable—even for northwest Washington—sixty-seven consecutive days of rain caused massive mud slides. A hill was washed into the still-building factory area, and it took more than $5 million to clean it up. In the midst of the cleanup, Bill Allen found Mal Stamper down in a ditch, directing how a pump should be installed. In the great tradition of Boeing, Stamper didn’t mind getting his hands dirty.

  The huge assembly bay was almost filled with spectators, awaiting the removal of the wing assembly. It was not a lengthy process, but not a word was said until the huge assembly, the first really major portion of a 747 to be completed, was moved toward its next station. As it slid effortlessly along, the room burst into cheers.

  Gordy Williams, a protégé of Wellwood Beall and fast becoming one of Boeing’s most successful salesmen, was standing next to Harry. When the cheers had died down, Williams said, “Got a second? I need to talk to you in my office.”

  It was a long walk to Williams’s office, and Harry was puffing by the time he flopped into the leather chair facing his friend’s desk, realizing at the same time how out of shape he was.

  Williams had his secretary bring them some coffee, and she said, “Did you hear the news? Yuri Gagarin was killed yesterday. Crashed on a training flight.”

  The two men discussed the irony of a man surviving being shot into orbit only to die in an ordinary plane crash before Williams said, “Harry, this has to be on the q.t. We’re getting some unexpected resistance to the 747 in domestic sales. American and TWA keep telling us what they’ve been telling us all along—the 747 is too big, and what they really need are smaller, three-engine airliners like the McDonnell Douglas DC-10 and the Lockheed L-1011.”

  Harry nodded. The name “McDonnell Douglas” still sounded unfamiliar, but he knew that American Airlines had already ordered twenty-five DC-10s. Further, and he could not tell Williams this, he knew that Lockheed had secured orders for almost 150 of the L-1011s from Delta and some other airlines.

  “I tell you frankly, Harry, we’re not so much worried about the DC-10. It depends too much on DC-8 technology. But the L-1011 scares us; it is a very modern airplane.”

  Harry wanted to be noncommittal. “I see that they’ve gone with Rolls-Royce for the engines. It really surprised me.”

  “Me, too, but it’s supposed to be one hell of an engine. Anyway, what I want you to do is do a study, sort of like the one your father did on the supersonic transport, and lay out the merits of the 747 versus the L-1011 and even the DC-10. Tailor it for domestic customers, using domestic routes. We don’t have any problems with foreign carriers ordering the 747, they’re lining up in droves, but we need to nail down more of the domestic market.”

  The request both touched and bothered Harry. He was glad that Williams considered him in a league with the legendary Vance Shannon when it came to plans and forecasts, but he had some doubts about his ability to live up to the reputation. Vance had more experience, and he had an intuitive sense that Harry felt he lacked. Yet he knew that Boeing had many strong, experienced people who could do a study like this. Williams obviously wanted an unbiased, unvarnished look and felt that Harry could give it to him.

  “I’ll be glad to do it. What’s your time line?”

  “The usual, yesterday morning, but if you can give it to me in six weeks, I’ll have it before a tour I’m going to do of all the major U.S. airlines.”

  Harry thought for a moment. Six weeks was cutting it close. He had to leave Everett and go directly to Fort Worth to the General Dynamics plant. The F-111 had been deployed to Vietnam and been an instant disaster, with three aircraft disappearing on combat missions. The airplanes were withdrawn from combat, and there was an all-out push on to discover the cause. Still, there were always nights and weekends, so Harry said, “Six weeks it is.”

  Harry started to go and Williams said, “Maybe I shouldn’t be asking you, Harry, since I’ve got my own sources in the company, but how’s it going in the great SST race?”

  “Ah, Gordy, you know the Boeing team is still working hard, but I can’t get the sense that anyone believes there will be an American SST, not even after all that’s been spent on it. What do you say?”

  “I say you are right. We won’t even be ready to start on the prototype until next January. But what are our friends the Brits and French doing, and our old Commie buddy, Tupolev?”

  “They’ve got a real horse race going. I keep getting feedback on it, and the Anglo/French cooperation is better than anyone has ever seen, in spite of themselves. The bigwigs get in major dustups, one crowd walks out of one meeting, the other the next, but the troops on the factory floors are getting along, trading information, making it work.”

  The Concorde was being created by the French firm Aérospatiale and British Aerospace. The French built the wings and control surfaces and much of the internals. The British built almost all of the fuselage, the vertical tail surfaces, and the engine installation. Four of Stanley Hooker’s Olympus engines had been fitted, improved, and enlarged to provid
e 38,000 pounds of thrust each.

  Harry went on, “In fact, even if they never built a single SST, they’ve forged a pattern for European cooperation that’s a real threat to Boeing. And I’ve heard talk about an international consortium being formed to take build airliners.”

  Williams snorted. “They’ve tried that in the past, especially the Brits. Except for the Viscount and the Caravelle, the Europeans have never been a threat. I think they’ll lose their shirt on the Concorde and there will be no follow-up airliners. Mark my words.”

  Harry never argued with a customer but went on, “Well, the first SST to fly will get a lot of press. It will probably be the Concorde, because we hear there’s trouble with the Tupolev job. But who knows?”

  Williams laughed and said, “Harry, you’re just like your dad. Informative, but always politic! One thing for sure, whatever happens, you’ll be among the first to know.”

  CHAPTER FIFTY-THREE

  May 16, 1968

  Hanoi, North Vietnam

  The huge block-square Hoa Lo prison was located virtually in the middle of Hanoi, the shabby, run-down North Vietnamese capital. The prison was built by the French, and the name meant “portable earthen stove,” because the hibachi was the principal industrial product of the area. Most of the North Vietnamese government had been imprisoned in Hoa Lo by the French. Now it served primarily as a catch basin for the increasing numbers of U.S. airmen shot down over Vietnam.

  With its dirty, cream-colored stucco walls and muddy-red tile roof, the prison was run-down like all the Vietnamese public buildings. Inside, the bottom halves of the walls were painted black, while the tops were the same dirty cream as the outside. Every wall was worn, with the paint stained from the salts weeping through the concrete. When the wind blew, the air was filled with the open-sewer odor that pervaded Hanoi. When the air was still, Hoa Lo generated its own foul smells, a mélange of unwashed prisoners, open latrines, and the decades of filth and mold, a living, breathing petri dish of bacteria that coated the prison’s walls, ceilings, and floors.

  It had not been difficult to feign unconsciousness at first. Tom’s internal injuries hurt so much that he just lay still, minimizing all movement. They knew the prison housed other airmen—Pavone reported hearing one whistling “Yankee Doodle” and at night there was an almost jungle rhythm to the prisoners’ communicating by tapping. But Tom and Pavone were kept completely isolated from the others, living in a damp concrete world of their own.

  Their cell—Pavone had noted that it was Number 44, according to the door—was about ten feet square. Their beds were concrete blocks, fitted out with metal and wooden stocks for their feet—in case they needed to be restrained. A battered bucket placed against the wall was their toilet, patiently brought into position and held by Pavone when Tom needed it. A wooden door, so worn that it was reinforced with strap iron, had a peephole. Opposite it was a window with bars. Pavone said he could see the prison wall from it, but Tom had not yet tried to get up to do so.

  They listened constantly to the tapping, trying to get in on the communication flow, to let someone know who they were and to find out who else was suffering with them. Both men strained to catch any sound of a guard coming. The slim rations, watery rice with an occasional fish head floating in it, were inedible at first, but by their second week of imprisonment it took all of Pavone’s sense of duty to divide the rations equally and not sneak an extra bite for himself.

  Two days before, a guard had sneaked up on them and caught Tom whispering to Pavone, and the game was over. The first thing the Vietnamese did was play catch-up with Pavone, who had been almost immune from torture as long as he was taking care of Tom. Two guards, inexplicably led by a vociferously profane brute of a Cuban, pulled Pavone out of the dank cell and carried him away.

  For almost forty minutes Tom heard the steady stream of blows raining down on the screaming Pavone until, suddenly, he went quiet. Tom wondered if they had killed him.

  Two guards came back to his cell and dragged Shannon down the hall, showing him an unconscious Pavone, trussed up, his hands manacled, ropes tied around his upper arms until they forced his elbows to touch. Another rope was looped around his neck and his ankles and tightened so that even unconscious, on his side, Pavone’s back was painfully arched.

  They took Tom back to his cell, shoving him to the floor. Not until the next day did they dump Pavone’s horribly bruised body in Tom’s cell, the Cuban guard saying, “Now you have to take care of him.”

  There wasn’t much Tom could do. After checking Pavone for broken bones, he laid him out on the hard concrete bed. To Tom’s surprise, a Vietnamese guard handed him a bucket of water without his asking, and he tried to wash his friend’s battered face. Pavone’s eyes were swollen shut and his tongue bulged from his mouth. Tom drizzled water on Pavone’s tongue, saw where he had bitten almost through it in pain, and stopped, afraid to start the bleeding again.

  The Cuban came back later in the day and motioned to Tom.

  “Tomorrow it will be your turn. Then you’ll learn how we get information in Cuba.”

  There was nothing to do but wait. Tom sat with Pavone, talking to him constantly. About noon, he seemed to be able to swallow and Tom carefully daubed the water back behind the cut in his tongue. That afternoon Pavone regained consciousness. After a few hours of moaning, he stirred himself to say, “Tom, I broke. Second goddamn day, I couldn’t take it and I broke.”

  Tom stroked his forehead. “Don’t worry about it. They can break all of us. It doesn’t matter. We don’t know anything they don’t know.”

  “It was strange; I tried to give them phony stuff about where we were based and what kind of airplanes we were flying. I said we were flying T-33s. But they didn’t seem interested in the military stuff; they kept talking about war crimes.”

  American prisoners of war were operating under a strict Code of Conduct, established by President Eisenhower after the Korean War when it was learned that some prisoners of war had been broken by fiendish torture. Under the Code, you could tell the enemy only your name, rank, serial number, and date of birth. You were obliged to try to escape. You could not help the enemy, of course, or accept any favors from them. Most importantly, you were forbidden from making any disloyal statements about your country. Korean torture experts had extracted confessions of war crimes from some U.S prisoners, and it had rocked the services. But the Code had no provision for the hard fact that sustained brutality could ultimately break anyone.

  The Cuban came back the following morning, with two of the khaki-uniformed guards. They picked Tom up and forced him to walk down the hall, certain that the long-deferred torture was coming. To his surprise, the Cuban abruptly left and Tom was placed on a chair in the center of a room about twice the size of his cell. Opposite him, behind a worn wooden table, were seated two North Vietnamese officers. What followed might have been scripted for a B movie about Nazi interrogators. The Vietnamese on the left was about five foot eight, thin and severe looking. He was obviously the bad cop. To his right sat a shorter man, quite rotund for a Vietnamese, who seemed cordial and concerned—the good cop.

  Tom expected them to question him about Operation Toro. He intended to follow the Code of Conduct as long as he possibly could when they tortured him, but he also prepared an elaborate story, totally false, about the mission.

  The mission never came up. Instead, the two asked him the same questions over and over again. First it was what kind of a plane he was flying and where he had taken off. Then it abruptly diverged from the military, and they asked where his home was, what political party he belonged to, a whole series of non-military questions.

  Tom replied only with his name, rank, serial number, and date of birth, refusing to answer anything else. After a long and boring two hours, he was taken back to his cell. Pavone was sitting up.

  “What did they do to you?”

  “Nothing. Just some softball questions.”

  “They didn’t hit you?
” Pavone seemed almost resentful.

  “No, but I figure that’s coming soon enough.”

  The next morning, the two Vietnamese who had interrogated Tom came to his cell with the same two guards. Without a word, he was half-walked, half-carried down to the same room. This time the two interrogators left and only one man was in the room. The Cuban.

  CHAPTER FIFTY-FOUR

  July 8, 1968

  Palos Verdes, California

  Jill was in the kitchen preparing lunch, tears of happiness running down her face. It was a miracle. Vance had been almost helpless for months, unable to do more than grunt or to make a stroke on a pad of paper when she put a crayon in his hand.

  Then that crazy Fritz Obermyer had showed up with a young amateur historian, Warren Bowers. Bowers was writing a series of articles for Wings and Airpower, two specialist aircraft magazines for history buffs. He wanted to interview Vance on his early test pilot days. Jill had said no at first, but Fritz had really persisted, and Bowers had been coming faithfully two or three times since early April.

  At first it was painful. He would ask questions of Vance, framed so that they could be answered by a grunt for “yes” or a shake of the head for “no.” But within about two weeks. Vance began to be able to say individual words, almost always of a technical nature—things like “flaps” or “canopy” or anything related to airplanes. Bowers then began to expand his questioning technique a bit.