Hypersonic Thunder: A Novel of the Jet Age (35 page)

With the rest of the crowd, they lapsed into silence as the
Proteus
taxied out to the runway, seemed to hesitate for just a few seconds, and then almost hopped into the air after an incredibly short takeoff run. Then like a gleaming white and very streamlined pterodactyl, it turned out of the pattern for its test hop. The “Shannon gang”—minus Warren, who had gone off to talk to some of his friends at Scaled Composite—squatted under the well-worn wing of a DC-3 parked on the apron.

Rodriquez spoke. “It’s funny, the
Proteus
doesn’t look anything like Paul MacCready’s designs, but both companies are working from the same premise: using composites and lightweight construction to get high altitude, long duration missions.”

Jenkins said, “We won’t go wrong if we draw on both teams for ideas for UAVs, but I don’t see much in either one yet on hypersonics.”

O’Malley added, “Talking about UAVs—the
Proteus
could be used as a UAV with no problems. There’s a world of room for equipment on board, and you could store another ton, maybe more, underneath.”

Harry Shannon was quiet, obviously troubled as the temperature rose rapidly toward the hundred-degree mark.

“This has been good, but I’ve got to get back to the car and turn the air conditioner on. The one thing that troubles me is not what we’ve seen, but what we didn’t see. If we are interested in hypersonic flight, it’s a damn sure thing that Burt is, too. If he’s not, somebody, NASA or industry, will be tasking him to get interested. I’d like to find some way to work with him, but we don’t have enough to offer him yet. Plenty of money, yes, but we’ve got to get some definition to our projects, and then maybe go to him.”

He nodded to Steve who immediately left with him toward the Mercedes, already idling, air conditioner on, in anticipation.

Rodriquez said, “I worry about Harry. You know how Tom went; I’d hate to see Harry do the same thing.”

Jenkins said, “Me, too. I think he’s worried about having led us all into some kind of dead end, between the UAVs and the hypersonic research. Coming out to see the
Proteus
sounded like a good idea, but I’m not so sure now. I think Harry sees Rutan as too advanced for us to compete with.”

“Maybe so, Dennis, but I get the opposite feeling. As a kid I used to come out to Mojave here and just bum around. Over the years I watched as it turned into this center of research. Dan Sabovich, a really good guy, took over a closed-down Marine base and nurtured it into this premier civilian flight test facility. It’s had more crazy airplanes and more old warbirds than you can imagine. Then Sean Roberts established the National Test Pilot School! Talk about balls. Sean had a lot of flying time in a lot of airplanes, maybe fifteen to sixteen thousand hours, but he didn’t graduate from a test pilot school himself. Now it’s the only civilian test pilot school in the world, and has the respect of even the great centers like Edwards. Then there was Bob Laidlaw and Flight Systems, and the Rutans—they’ve all helped to make this place great.”

Jenkins took this in, absorbed by the lore and by Rodriquez’s intensity. He said, “And your point is?”

“All these guys succeeded and they started out with far less than we have. They had nowhere near the money—we’ve got practically inexhaustible funds if we are prudent. And look at the baseline of information we have to draw on. It’s endless, monumental. The problem will be sifting through it and getting the relevant data. And as much as I admire Burt, and Paul MacCready, and some of the other giants, I think we have as much talent available to us.”

“You’re right, of course, Bob. I think the first thing for us to do is get back in the car with Harry and pump him up a bit, then go have another skull session on laying out a schedule for our first scramjet engines. We’ve got the UAV line pretty well in hand, as far as we can go with it. We just needed to cut some metal and burn some kerosene in a scramjet. We don’t care if a few of them blow up on the way—Frank
Whittle used to laugh about standing in the lab, with his jet engine about ready to come apart. He’s probably looking down now, thinking what a bunch of wusses we are.”

“Frank would never have said ‘wusses.’ ‘Namby-pambys’ maybe, but never wusses.”

October 5, 1998
Cape Canaveral, Florida

D
ENNIS
J
ENKINS LET
himself into the small condo he maintained in Cape Canaveral, put the small stack of groceries away in the cabinets and the refrigerator, and heaved himself into his one major luxury, a massaging recliner that he’d bought on impulse from a Sharper Image catalog, and never regretted.

As the programmed massage began to ease the muscles knotted from driving too far and too long in his Corvette, Jenkins contemplated the two manuscripts that loomed in great stacks. One, on his desk, was a scholarly history of the Space Shuttle program, grand achievements, warts and all. The other, on modern aircraft and the advent of genuine foreign competition, rested in part on a card table and part spread over the floor.

Looking at it, he estimated he was about a year behind on the Space Shuttle, and two, perhaps three years behind on the modern aircraft book.

“And worse, I’m putting myself farther behind. Every time we advance at RoboPlanes, with either UAVs or hypersonic vehicles, my book gets more out-of-date.”

He considered the Space Shuttle book first. Three of the four remaining space shuttles—
Endeavour, Columbia
, and
Discovery
—had flown in 1998, making a total of five flights. It was far short of the optimistic planning of the early years, but it was still adequate for the current missions. In June, the
Discovery
had docked with the Russian Mir Space Station, offloaded almost five thousand pounds of supplies, and for the first time in history updated its navigation data with data from the Global Positioning Satellite system. It took Andrew Thomas
from the Mir, after he had spent a record-setting 130 days in its cramped confines. This was the sort of thing he had to record, in detail, so that it wouldn’t be lost to history.

The
Discovery
flew again in October, deploying and retrieving the Spartan-201-05 free-flyer, and doing test work in preparation for servicing the Hubble Space Telescope. These difficult and important experiments were largely overshadowed by the return to space—after more than thirty-six years—of Senator John Glenn.

Who knows
, he thought,
maybe they’ll be selling tickets to rich tourists next
.

Much more had been done, not least the long overdue selection of Eileen Collins to command a Space Shuttle flight in 1999. An Air Force lieutenant colonel, Collins had earned her right to command the hard way, through work, skill, and lots of flying time. But of course the press ran away with the idea of her being a woman, instead of her being the best for the job. A woman as space shuttle commander, a senator returning to his astronaut days—that’s what sold papers.

It was understandable. But that was why his book had to be different, a meticulous, day by day, minute by minute, problem by problem, success by success, failure by failure account of an incredible program of which the world had no real idea. The Space Shuttle itself with its launch system, controls, stringent training, and unbelievable human factor requirements were all so amazingly complex that they were simply outside the ken of a layman. They were difficult to comprehend, and there was no need for the average person to know about them.

Sadly, the days when the first seven astronauts had won the hearts of the American public were long over. Now astronauts were doing far more difficult tasks under equally dangerous circumstances, and the public registered little or no interest. They watched the liftoff and the landings, and pretended to be grateful if there was no accident, when, Jenkins suspected, for many, disappointment was the real emotion.

The other book was perhaps an even greater challenge. Airbus had emerged as a formidable competitor to Boeing, a story in itself. But there were other factors now. Based in Brazil, Embraer was turning itself into one of the world’s leading aircraft manufacturers simply by creating one efficient, salable product after another. Canada’s Bombardier was doing the same thing, building aircraft that American
businesses and airlines bought with pleasure because they were tailored to the new operating modes. In Europe, Dassault was continuing its dazzling series of designs, and four nations were combining their talents to produce the Eurofighter. Even tiny Israel was competing, and it looked like Russia was coming back with new designs.

Then there was China, doing now exactly what Japan had done after World War I. It was absorbing foreign designs, participating in their manufacture, and learning every day. Within months, the first Chinese-built McDonnell Douglas MD 90 would fly. There was no beating the Chinese combination of brains, energy, and low labor costs. They were going to be a player, perhaps the biggest player besides the United States, maybe even bigger than the U.S. In ten years, maybe twenty, at the outside, there would be Chinese designed and built airliners operating all over the world. They already had a good handle on fighter planes.

Jenkins was tired. The work on the UAVs had been relatively relaxing, but every day that they progressed into the hypersonic field, the work became mentally and physically more demanding. It was so damn challenging, so interesting, that they were all, even Harry, working long days, sometimes pulling “all-nighters” like a bunch of freshmen in college. So far the results were elusive. Periodically, just often enough to keep their interest at a peak, they seemed on the verge of some breakthroughs, but so had everyone in the past who delved into hypersonic flight.

He toyed with the idea of getting to work but quickly switched to having a black label Johnnie Walker on the rocks. Work could wait for a few hours.

December 28, 1998
Over Northern Iraq

M
AJOR
G
ENERAL
V. R. S
HANNON
felt at home for once. As always, his F-15E Strike Eagle was seemingly flying itself—it was a stable platform that turned refueling into a breeze and every landing into a grease job. He knew that young Bob Dorr, an up-and-coming major, was in the backseat, monitoring his every move, and while it irritated him, he was
grateful. V. R. got to fly so little lately that it made sense to have a proficient pilot on board—and the regulations called for it.

The Iraqis, increasingly recalcitrant under the bloody-minded Saddam Hussein, had attacked Kurdish villages earlier in the year, using helicopters and some fixed-wing aircraft. In response, the United States, the United Kingdom, and Turkey agreed to Operation Northern Watch, creating a no-fly zone that sealed off Iraq by air from the 36th parallel to the north. Shannon now commanded the 38th Air and Space Expeditionary Wing, operating out of Incirlik, Turkey, and tasked to suppress all Iraqi air operations in the no-fly zone.

Shannon no longer flew as often as he wanted because budgetary cutbacks had reduced flying hours, and he always felt he was “stealing time” from younger pilots when he flew. Yet periodically he had to fly, just to stay current in the aircraft and to keep up his knowledge of what was really going on.

Letting down could be fatal. Three years before there had been a totally sad friendly fire incident, when two F-15s had shot down two U.S. Army Blackhawk helicopters through a series of preventable errors. Shannon was determined not to have any repeat on his watch.

Still, it was tedious work. The crews flew hundreds of hours every month putting time on the airplanes, but not getting the intensive training they needed. There were some valuable by-products, of course. The flights enabled dossiers to be built on Iraqi capabilities, and target folders were already prepared for virtually every SAM and radar site from Baghdad north. For Shannon, however, it was galling—there were targets below, lethal surface-to-air missile sites, radar installations, all set to attack, all manned by Muslims—and he could only overfly them.

Dorr’s voice came over the intercom. “Skipper, we’ve got some SAM activity going on down there. Looks to me like they are getting set up to fire for real.” The Iraqis always went through a drill when the coalition aircraft appeared, but the electronic equipment on board the F-15Es and especially on the more distant AWACS aircraft could detect just how serious the efforts were. Sometimes it was just a proforma exercise—Shannon could mentally see the Iraqi soldiers listlessly going through the motions—but sometimes they went almost to the brink of firing, with all the right switches thrown and the only remaining task the order to fire. This was one of those times.

Adrenaline rushed through Shannon, and he became instantly alive, one with his aircraft. From their position he knew the missiles were the two-stage SA-3s that NATO had given the strange code name “Goa.” The Soviet Union had shipped thousands of SA-3s to client nations throughout the world, and Iraq still had a massive supply. Shannon alerted the three other Eagles in his flight, knowing they had already probably picked up on the signals themselves. His call was followed instantly by an alert message from the AWACS aircraft orbiting to the north.

He asked Dorr, “Have you got them painted? Let’s not use the HARM missiles; let’s save a little money and drop the Paveways on them.”

He was dissimulating and knew that Dorr knew it. The HARMs were deadly effective against the radar, but today he’d asked that his ordnance load include the GBU-15s that were more lethal to personnel.

It pleased him that his Paveways had been brought into being by Bob Rodriquez over a long and difficult time. Essentially a two-thousand-pound Mark 84 bomb fitted with a laser guidance system, they cost about $245,000 each—about the same as the HARM missiles. But they produced far more collateral damage, and would take out the enemy soldiers at a far greater distance than the HARMs could.

“They are firing, Skipper—there’s one, two, three of them away.” Dorr’s voice did not betray the lethality of the threat—the SA-3s were far more formidable than the SA-2s used by North Vietnam. The highly maneuverable Goas were capable of Mach 3.5 speeds and had a built-in television camera with a fifteen-mile range to close in on their targets.