Supersonic Thunder: A Novel of the Jet Age

by Boyne, Walter J.

  Khrushchev began blasting Malinovsky with complaints that were, in traditional military fashion, duly passed on down the line, soon reaching the sharp end of the stick, the pilots vainly attempting to flog an aircraft capable of climbing to 60,000 feet all the way to 70,000. So far no missile batteries had been engaged, in part because of the U-2’s route, in part because they were still relatively primitive and the Soviet Air Defense Forces were not yet familiar with their operation.

  Lavochkin’s staff had worked hard in the field, coordinating with the radar units and trying to speed up the five hours of checklists needed to bring an S-75 battery to operational status. The tie-in with radar sites was crucial, for there had to be sufficient early warning. The typical radar could reach out to about one hundred miles to acquire the target. Then, as soon as notice was received, the missiles had to be brought to the correct firing attitude and its own radar system had to pick the target up. Essentially, the U-2 had to be acquired at least eighty miles away by the S-75 site, or there was insufficient time to fire.

  Some three hours into the flight, about 0800 Moscow time, the U-2 passed over Magnitogorsk, clearly heading for the heart of the Soviet nuclear weapon-building facilities in the Urals. When Khrushchev was told of the probable target he went white. This was the worst possible development—if the aircraft got through, it would have film of the most secret area in the Soviet Union. His mind began to drift from firing Malinovsky to being fired himself. He knew how strong his opposition was, how much they would love to dispose of him.

  Looking at the horizon, Powers saw for the first time that day a clear sky unencumbered by any clouds. Maybe my luck is changing, he thought, and immediately cursed himself for tempting fate.

  Fate responded with the nose pitching up violently. Powers disconnected the malfunctioning autopilot, retrimming the airplane so he could fly it manually. When stabilized at altitude, the U-2 was not unpleasant to fly. It was demanding, because there was very little margin between its low-speed stall and its high-speed buffet—the so-called coffin corner. He reengaged the autopilot, his hands still light on the controls. The U-2 flew normally for a few minutes and then pitched up again. Powers disconnected the autopilot and stopped the motion and knew it was trouble. He couldn’t risk trying the autopilot again—it wouldn’t take many g’s to shed his wings. Analyzing the situation, he saw that he was thirteen hundred miles into Russia and had almost twice that distance to go. Common sense told him to turn back, but the lure of the clear sky ahead of him ruled against it. The prospect of hand flying the airplane for another six hours was daunting, but he knew he could do it. He just might need more than one beer after he landed.

  In Moscow, Khrushchev had both Malinovsky and Lavochkin on the phone. “He’s nearing Chelyabinsk. Are the missiles there ready?”

  There was the slightest hesitation before both Malinovsky and Lavochkin replied simultaneously, “Yes, Comrade Khrushchev.”

  But they were not, and the U-2 sailed over the S-75 battery, with Powers unaware of how close a call it was. Frantic workers determined that the battery radar had malfunctioned. When he heard this, Malinovsky knew immediately that this was something he would have to withhold from Khrushchev, who constantly screamed that the air defense system got everything it asked for but could not defend the country. In his current mood there was no telling what the Premier might do. Instead, Malinovsky called him and said that a last-minute turn by the American had placed the U-2 outside of the missile radar capabilities.

  Powers had been a great reader in his youth, and he remembered a Richard Halliburton book that told of the murder of the Czar and his family in Yekaterinburg—now called Sverdlovsk. It was an hour away, and despite concentrating on the instruments, maintaining as smooth a flight path as possible to conserve fuel, he wondered about the last days of the Romanovs and the Anastasia story.

  On an air base to the south of Sverdlovsk, ground crew men swarmed around two MiG-19SVs and two Sukhoi Su-9s, topping them off with fuel and preparing them for launch, the mechanics taking special care with polishing the cockpit canopies. Both the MiG and the Sukhoi aircraft had pressurized cockpits, but the MiG pilots had pressure suits, while the Sukhoi pilots did not. All four were under orders to bring down the U-2, by ramming if necessary. Only the Sukhoi pilots thought they would get close enough for shooting, much less ramming.

  Utter confusion now reigned in the ranks of the missile batteries. It was a national holiday, and many of the senior staff were on leave. At the district headquarters where the command post controlling the Sverdlovsk missile batteries was located, the battery commander was away, and his deputy, Major Mikhail Voronov, was new to his job and terribly hungover from last night’s drinking bout.

  Hunched over their sets, three radar operators watched for the first appearance of the U-2, now traveling at more than 9 kilometers a minute along the periphery of their radar signal.

  Voronov sat behind the technicians at his own complex, staring at the screen, perplexed, wishing he were anywhere but there. If he fired the missiles and they missed, he would be in enormous trouble. If he didn’t fire the missiles, he’d be court-martialed and probably shot.

  One of the operators called, “Automatic tracking,” then, moments later, “Missile-tracking mode.” Another technician leaned over Voronov’s shoulder, pointing a grubby finger at the screen where the amber dot was now enclosed in a phosphorescent circle that followed it relentlessly. The U-2 was 24 kilometers away at an estimated altitude of 21,000 meters. His mind made up, Voronov yelled, “Launch three missiles.”

  The launch control officer looked at him stupidly. They had practiced this many times but never actually fired.

  “Fire!”

  A sheet of flame burst from the booster rocket of one S-75 missile. The other two missiles remained on their launch pad.

  Powers continued on, checking his map for the next set of cameras to be used at Kirov, unaware that the deadly missile with his name on it was now at Mach 2.0, its second-stage rocket exhausted, homing directly in on his U-2, ready to explode its 130-kilogram fragmentation warhead either on a command from its guidance system or from a proximity fuse when it closed on the target. When the warhead blew, it would send thirty-six hundred pellets ahead of it in an expanding ball of steel.

  Four Soviet fighters struggling for altitude watched the long trail of smoke from the first S-75 they had ever seen fired. None of the planes were in striking distance, but each pilot hoped to be in on the kill if the missile damaged the U-2 and forced it down from its ungodly height.

  Powers was dutifully recording his instrument readings when a huge explosion thrust the U-2 forward like a ball hit by a bat. A garish red sheet of flame surrounded him, lighting up his cockpit like a torch.

  His reactions were automatic—shove the throttle to cram power on, level the wings with the control wheel, pull back on the column to bring the nose up. The wings leveled, but the nose wouldn’t come up, and the frail U-2 pitched down, accelerating swiftly past its structural limitations and shedding its wings exactly as Kelly Johnson had predicted a hard landing would cause it to do. Now Powers was inverted, spinning in a wingless, tailless fuselage, his once-despised pressure suit inflated and keeping him alive. He fought to eject, realized he could not, jettisoned the canopy, and was flung, still spinning, into the cold Siberian sky, suddenly blind as his faceplate, his blessed, life-saving faceplate, frosted over.

  On the ground, Voronov guessed uncertainly at his triumph—the radar indicated no forward movement of the target now, and the technicians cheered, sure that the U-2 was destroyed. Neither they nor Powers, free-falling above them, had any idea that their swiftly concluded battle was the future of jet aviation in microcosm: surface-to-air missiles versus ever more sophisticated aircraft.

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  September 6, 1960

  Burbank, California

  The gloom at Lockheed headquarters was as thick as the day was beautiful. The year had been a series
of shocks one after another. The first and most visceral was the apparent failure of Lockheed’s reentry into the commercial transport field, the sixty-six-passenger Electra II. Too busy to compete with Boeing and Douglas in the jet transport race, Lockheed had decided to take a leaf from the success of the Vickers Viscount turboprop airliner. Drawing on its experience with the C-130, it had created a low-wing four-turboprop airliner. Much faster than the Martin 404s or Convair 240s it would replace, the Electra was perfect for American and Eastern Airlines to use on the short-haul sections of their lines where a 707 or DC-8 was not economical to operate. But three Electras had crashed by March 17, 1960, the first one just a week after it entered airline service. The first crash was probably caused by pilot error, but in the next two the Electra had broken up in the air, killing all aboard, with no obvious reason for the catastrophe. Lockheed fought the Federal Aviation Administration’s attempt to ground the aircraft. Elwood Quesada, a famous pilot and military commander, was the FAA Administrator, and he compromised—the Electra could continue to fly, but he limited it to a 295-mile-per-hour cruising speed. Sales of the aircraft immediately dried up, but the worst part of the story was still to come. Today Bob Gross was going to have to make a decision about how Lockheed would bear the expense of modifying the aircraft, including all those already in airline service.

  Next in the seeming unending series of disasters was the shock of Gary Powers’s being shot down, imprisoned, tried, and sentenced. It was now general knowledge that a surface-to-air missile had destroyed the U-2, with consequences far greater than were being admitted to the public. Nikita Khrushchev had played his cards carefully, not announcing the shoot-down until May 5 and not revealing that Powers was alive until two days later. Khrushchev went on to meet with Presidents Eisenhower and de Gaulle at summit talks in Paris and, in a masterpiece of showmanship, declared that the Soviet Union would not take part in the talks unless the U.S. government immediately stopped all flights over Soviet territory, apologized for those already made, and punished everyone responsible. Eisenhower was embarrassed by the fact that the United States had lied about Powers’s flight and promised to suspend all future flights while he was President. This was exactly what Khrushchev wanted—a chance to shore up his failing regime. He declared that Eisenhower’s response was inadequate and stormed out of the Paris summit conference, returning to the Soviet Union as a hero who had humiliated the United States.

  Everyone at Lockheed and in the CIA knew from the start that ultimately the Soviets would shoot a U-2 down, and work was already under way on a replacement with far greater capability. But Eisenhower’s promise to suspend overflights put the replacement program in the same jeopardy as the U-2 program.

  George Mulliner, Bob Gross’s executive assistant, came into the outer office and said, “You can come in now, gentlemen.”

  Vance always made it a point to defer to the Lockheed staff. When he stood up, he waved Willis Hawkins and John Margwarth, Lockheed’s director of safety, on ahead of him. They were followed by the other Lockheed executives, the senior men in every discipline in the company. Everyone in the room was an old friend and Gross nodded to Hawkins, saying, “Let’s have the bad news, Willis.”

  Hawkins, small, direct, economical in his speech, began his analysis with a brief sentence: “It’s the whirl mode phenomenon.”

  At that moment, only he and Margwarth knew what he meant. But using charts and drawing freehand on the huge blackboard that had been brought in, he gave them a quick engineering analysis of the catastrophic results of a sudden force being applied to the gyroscopic characteristics of a swiftly rotating propeller.

  Shannon was an experienced engineer, but it was difficult for him to follow Hawkins’s discussion, even when Margwarth jumped in with explanations. When Hawkins finished, Margwarth summed it up in layman’s terms for the non-engineers in the group, concluding with the key statement: “Essentially, the flaw was in the three-member structure connecting the gearbox and the engine. It failed and put a precession force on the propeller, which in turn placed an impossible stress on the wing.”

  Gross’s face lit up. “But that means it was not a Lockheed design error.”

  Hawkins nodded, obviously comforted, but showing no other emotion. He might have been expected to be a little triumphant, a little pleased that his design was vindicated, but he was thinking now of the passengers, victims of a wildly improbable circumstance.

  Gross asked, “What is the fix?”

  “We can modify the wing to accommodate the stresses,” Hawkins replied. “Allison will modify the structure that connects the gearbox to the engine. Without any reservations, I can guarantee to you that there will never be another accident like this on the Electra II.”

  There was a long silence as Bob Gross hung his head, deep in thought. Finally he looked up to Carl Kotchian, his vice president for production.

  “Carl, how much will it cost us to modify all of the aircraft we’ve sold, or have waiting for sale?”

  Kotchian was surprised at the question. Hawkins had previously alerted him that it was not Lockheed’s design error, and he was already preparing to wage a legal battle to lay the modification costs at the door of the engine manufacturer, Allison. But he had the figures at his fingertips.

  “At least twenty-five million.”

  Gross’s face went white. Lockheed had been doing well, but no one had expected an outlay like this. Then he said, “We’ll do it. Lockheed stands behind its products. We’ll pay every cent, and make it right.”

  Gross’s words spread shock around the room; every man there knew what the huge charge would do to the balance sheet and ultimately to the stock price. But they expected nothing less from Bob Gross.

  As they were filing out, Gross called out, “Vance, have you got a few minutes? There are a few things I’d like to fill you in on.”

  When the door closed behind the last person, Vance said, “That’s a pretty noble gesture, Bob. Not many company chairmen would think that way.”

  Gross shook his head wearily, reached up, and ran his finger along the fuselage of a model of the U-2 that now occupied a place of pride on his desk.

  “It’s tough, Vance, but we have to do it. It will pay off later, I know; the airlines will remember this, even if the traveling public never hears about it. They wouldn’t understand if they did.”

  He called for some coffee, then motioned for them to move over to the green leather sofa. Vance remembered when Gross had purchased it, many years before. He had agonized over the cost, worried that people would think he was being extravagant with company money. It was as well-worn as the two old friends were now and seemed to enfold them as they sank down in it.

  “Vance, you’ve been a friend for a long time, and I know how you’ve been suffering with us through the U-2 problem. I thought I’d give you a couple of pieces of good news for a change.”

  “I’m all ears, Bob. Glad to hear you have some.” And he was. Gross deserved whatever good was going his way.

  “How much do you know about the Discoverer program?”

  “Bob, security here at Lockheed is good. I know you are involved in it, but all I know is what’s been in the papers. Eisenhower’s called it a scientific program, it had a whole bunch of failures, and the public is pretty disenchanted. They’d like to see a success.”

  “Well, we’ve had one, but we cannot tell anyone. The only reason I’m telling you is that I want to borrow Bob Rodriquez for about six months to work here full-time on the project.”

  Gross saw the shock in Shannon’s face. Gross knew how important Rodriquez was to his firm.

  “Before you say anything, let me brief you on Discoverer. That is just a cover name. The real project name is Corona, and it is not for scientific research; it’s a photoreconnaissance satellite. We’ve just had our first successful mission—number fourteen, can you imagine?—and we got more useful intelligence on the Soviet Union in that one mission than we did in all the previous U
-2 missions combined.” He paused to let this sink in.

  Shannon was stunned. The ramifications were incredible. First of all, there was the sheer magnitude of the success after fourteen failures. It was amazing the program had not been canceled long ago. And what an advance! A spy satellite avoided all the problems of overflying the Soviet Union’s borders, there was no pilot to capture or kill, and once in orbit it was invulnerable to any attack or interference.

  He was about to congratulate Gross but didn’t speak for another minute. Shannon also saw that Corona diminished the U-2 at a time when it had already run its course, at least as a spy plane. Even worse, Corona reduced the probability that there would be a follow-on project. He knew that Kelly Johnson had been burning up his slide rule on a new aircraft, but beyond that he knew nothing. Nor should he have. Lockheed was deadly serious about its security.

  Finally he said, “Bob, this is wonderful news. For an outfit that has been building airplanes all its life, this is a real triumph for Lockheed.”

  “Thanks, Vance. It’s just the beginning, too. I can see our missiles and space side outgrowing our aircraft side, and in ten years or less. But we’re not done with airplanes, not yet, and that’s really the main reason I had to talk to you.”

  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.”