Hypersonic Thunder: A Novel of the Jet Age (42 page)

Rodriquez’s face flushed, realizing that this was a blatant lie and that there was no way to backpedal from it. He had assassinated several men in his undercover role. They were all enemies of the state. He had killed them all in the line of duty. But he had killed them, nonetheless.

O’Malley asked, “You’ve covered what the cost and schedule delay would be if we converted to an unmanned vehicle. What effect would it have on the utility, the salability of the Hypersonic Cruiser?”

Rodriquez shook his head. “I don’t know. I don’t know if we can sell the thing to the government at all, manned or unmanned. There’s going to be a world of resentment if we succeed, you know that. Talk about the ‘not invented here’ syndrome—this will epitomize it. But a piloted hypersonic vehicle has a tremendous appeal, and I think would have ten times the sales potential as an unmanned one. Who can say? There’s no focus group approach on a program like this. We’ve got to operate from gut feel, start to finish.”

V. R. asked, “When is the latest possible date when you can decide to convert to an unmanned vehicle?”

Rodriquez knew this was coming.

“Last month. A year ago. I’m not joking, that’s when we should have decided to go this route, if we go this way. But to answer your question, we could shift some priorities, do some testing in a different order, and maybe put it off until 2004.”

Dennis said, “Then let’s do that.”

Rodriquez spoke up. “If we do that, I reserve the right to bring another potential test pilot on board. I don’t want to wait until 2004, decide to go ahead with a manned vehicle, and then have V. R. decide to opt out. We should have a backup anyway. V. R. could always have a car accident or something and not be able to go, even if he decided to. Any objections?”

O’Malley said, “No objections. Let me make a suggestion. There’s going to be a war, and soon. There will be some pretty hot pilots who’ll distinguish themselves. Maybe we can pick out a backup for V. R. when the shooting’s over.”

They shook hands, V. R. and Rodriquez obviously uncomfortable, the others glad that things had gone off as well as they had.

CHAPTER TWENTY

THE PASSING PARADE
: The eastern end of the “axis of evil,” North Korea, withdraws from Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty; President Bush announces readiness of United States to attack Iraq with or without UN mandate; Israel elects grand old warrior Ariel Sharon as Prime Minister; almost seventeen years to the day after Space Shuttle
Challenger
disaster, Space Shuttle
Columbia
burns up on reentry, killing seven astronauts; France, Germany, and Russia, all “customers of Saddam Hussein,” insist that military option should be used against Iraq only as a last option; new Chinese President, Hu Jintao, elected; U.S.-led coalition unleashes Operation Iraqi Freedom on March 19; Baghdad captured in three weeks; official combat operations ended on May 1; President Bush signs largest tax cut in U.S. history; Iran’s nuclear programs discovered by International Atomic Energy Agency; soldier-turned-president Charles Taylor forced to leave Liberia; in Afghanistan, peacekeeping responsibility assumed by NATO; Lockerbie bombing of Pan Am 747 admitted by Libya; suicide bombings continue around world; UN headquarters attacked in Baghdad; action film star Arnold Schwarzenegger elected governor of California after recall of Governor Gray Davis; huge appropriations made for post-Iraq war reconstruction efforts; gay marriage approved by Massachusetts Supreme Court; former stalwart of Soviet Union, Eduard Shevardnadze, resigns as President of Georgia; D.C. sniper John A. Muhammad receives death sentence; American troops capture Saddam Hussein, hiding in a hole.

February 5, 2003

Mojave Airport, California

T
he meeting had been set for 9:00
A.M.
It was now half past ten, and Dennis was still on the telephone in a private office, talking to friends at Kennedy Space Center.

Rodriquez pulled O’Malley aside, saying, “Look, Harry’s just about faded already. Unless Dennis gets off the phone and comes in, let’s go ahead and start the meeting without him. I’ll fill him in later. He won’t care.”

“He doesn’t care much about anything. He’s been so distressed since the
Columbia
disaster that I’m worried more about his health than about Harry’s.”

The Space Shuttle
Columbia
, after flying an almost perfect mission, had burned up on February 1, during reentry to the atmosphere. Eerily, it was seventeen years almost to the day after the
Challenger
had exploded just over a minute after its launch on January 28, 1986.

“He’s deeply affected. He knew most of the crew on the
Challenger
, and everyone on the
Columbia
. It is like losing your entire family in a single stroke.”

The door opened and Jenkins, white-faced and obviously shaken, came out. “It was the foam.”

The others quickly glanced around, recalling how excited Jenkins was reviewing the television clips of the
Columbia
’s liftoff. Just eighty-one seconds after launch on January 16, a suitcase-sized piece of insulating foam had broken away from the orbiter’s huge fuel tank, striking the leading edge of the orbiter’s left wing. Jenkins had immediately said, “That’s it, that’s what caused the accident.”

The first official comments on the accident had discounted the possibility of the foam damaging the tile, and no steps had been taken to ask the crew to try to verify the extent of the damage.

Jenkins said, “The irony of this is just so great. You can spend millions of dollars, billions, really, and some cheap nothing will destroy all your plans and dreams. The
Challenger
was destroyed by a two-dollar frozen rubber O ring, about seventy-one seconds into its mission. The
Columbia
was effectively destroyed by maybe two dollars’ worth of foam, eighty-one seconds into its mission. This time, though, the damage
just didn’t come in to play until fifteen days, twenty-two hours, twenty minutes, twenty-two seconds later. The heat of reentry broke through the damage caused by the insulation hitting the wing. Then the heat bored on through, heating up the wing so that the tiles came off, and going on to sear through the metal, aluminum, stainless steel, whatever, until the Orbiter broke up.”

They were silent, full of questions, but unwilling to ask, given Jenkins’s emotional state. Then he went on. “There probably was not much that could have been done, but they could have made some efforts, done something if someone on the ground had taken the foam hitting the wing more seriously.”

He was silent again, and Rodriquez asked quietly, “What does this do to the Space Shuttle program, Dennis?”

Jenkins shook his head. “I don’t know. They’ll have the usual standdown, the usual committees, but they’ll fly them again. They have to, we’ve got the International Space Station to support, and there are military missions that have to be done. But it will be a while, six months, maybe a year.”

He stopped, visibly pulled himself together, and said, “I’m sorry about the delay. You know how important the Shuttle program is to me. But let’s get on with today’s business. I need to get thinking about something else.”

Rodriquez stepped to the podium and said, “As you know, V. R. could not be here today; the Air Force asked him to come down to Central Command—looks like things are getting serious.”

O’Malley chortled. “You’re damn right it’s going to be serious! Shock and awe, shock and awe; I’m just sorry I’m so far out of the loop, persona non grata, that’s me. I’m surprised they called V. R., he’s as outspoken as I am.”

No one spoke. O’Malley was out of the loop because he had become so outspoken about his perception of the Muslim threat since the attack on the Twin Towers and the Pentagon. He had offered his services repeatedly, but the Air Force, trying to keep the State Department happy, had declined. V. R., while outspoken, had not gained the audience O’Malley had, and consequently the Air Force made more calls on his expertise.

Rodriquez picked up his laser pointer and started his PowerPoint presentation, which promptly went blank. He grumbled, “If Orville
and Wilbur had to use PowerPoint, we’d never have gotten off the ground.”

After a few minutes fumbling, the right symbols came up and the first image came on, two profiles of the Hypersonic Cruiser, one over the other. Although they had all seen drawings of the aircraft many times, it still drew an involuntary whistle of admiration from O’Malley.

“The top drawing is the last version, Model 188 C. Below it is Model 188 D, and you can see that the provision for the cockpit and canopy is gone. This would be an unmanned vehicle, from start to finish, and of course it means we gain a little bit in performance—less weight, less drag.”

He right-clicked the mouse, cursed, and bent over the keyboard and pressed the down-arrow button and the slide changed.

“Here is what it costs us: you make a choice. And I already have V. R.’s proxy. I’ll tell you what it is after you decide for yourself.”

The slide read:

A: Stay with manned program. No change in cost or schedule.

B: Switch to unmanned vehicle only. Add $700,000 and eight months to the existing program.

C: Dual track: build components to convert manned program to unmanned program if required in 2006. Add $1.2 million and one year to the existing program.

O’Malley asked, “Why is it so much more expensive and take so much longer to go the dual track route? I can see why you’ve got the numbers you have in B, but C seems high.”

“It is higher and riskier because we’ll have to farm it out to another contractor. We are stretched to the limits now, and I don’t see how we could do it in-house.”

“Who would bid on this? It seems like we are asking someone to come to the party way late in the game.”

“That’s the problem, Dennis. If we’d brought people on board early on, this wouldn’t cost us so much. But to bring someone in now, we’ve got to do a lot of back-filling and educating, and they will have a flat learning curve during the time that our learning curve is at last beginning to pay off a little. There are a few companies that could do the
work, but none that could come on and operate at our speed and with our level of confidence.”

“Then it looks to me like C is really not an option at all. We don’t have the money, and without the money, we don’t have the time. Am I wrong about this?”

“No, Steve, you are right on, but it is an option. We could do some borrowing, there are ways to get some money, maybe even go public with it—all things we’ve never wanted to do. But we’ve got to decide now, because every day we wait is going to send the cost up even more. The same with the schedule; every day we waste now will cost us double at the end of the schedule.”

“Bob, I know you have backup on these numbers. Can you run through the rest of the program, just so we see what’s involved?”

Rodriquez nodded, and began going through the slides, the PowerPoint working perfectly now. He began with the start of the program and walked them through each year, showing the progress, the costs, and at the end of each year, the projections for the future. The slides were remarkably consistent. Rodriquez and his relatively small team had, to date, hit every milestone and had kept slightly under budget.

With the last slide, Rodriquez said, “Before we vote, let’s go out and take a look at what has been built so far. You’ve all seen it before, but we’ve come a long way in the last six months.”

Harry spoke up. “Folks, you go on. I don’t feel like suiting up, putting on the rubber gloves and so on. I’ll just sit here and do some thinking and you can brief me when you get back.”

Rodriquez took O’Malley and Jenkins into the dressing area next to the manufacturing clean room where the Hypersonic Cruiser was slowly taking shape. They donned the usual hospital-like green robes, hat, booties, and clear vinyl gloves, went into the adjacent chamber where a vacuum sucked all the dust from their clothes, and then into the manufacturing area.

The one-hundred-foot-long fuselage of the Hypersonic Cruiser was mounted on a huge jig that could be rotated through 360 degrees. At the moment it was resting with its underside facing the group.

Rodriquez said, “Just as I briefed you, you can see how the shape of the nozzle has been changed. We’ve probably changed it ten times, now, but I think this is it. Now let me show you the most important
thing we’ve done the last few weeks. This is really the key as to whether we’ll get a Hypersonic Cruiser, or just the world’s biggest scramjet test vehicle. We all have to remember that a hypersonic air-breathing aircraft requires much better matching between the engine and airframe, because the forebody is really part of the engine inlet.”

He signaled to the assembly operator behind the mammoth computer console, who moved a short lever forward.

Rodriquez pointed to the lever and said, “We took that off an F-111 in the boneyard at Davis Monthan.”

As the lever moved, the mock-up of the turbofan engine centered in the aft of the long slender fuselage moved down. Simultaneously, the cowling that had been tightly tailored to the shape of the engine rose up, changing its shape from almost perfectly circular to ovoid, and then locking in position where it could channel the scramjet’s torrent of power.

“Guys, we live or die with this. If it works as my computer tells me it works, we get a huge boost in power and in range. If I’m wrong, we’ll have the world’s biggest scramjet test vehicle—and not a lot more.”

No one said anything. They went back into the dressing area, pulled off the protective gear, and walked back into the briefing room.

Harry Shannon lay slumped forward in his chair. Rodriquez rushed to him, yelling, “Call 911!”

He put his fingers on Harry’s neck. There was no pulse.

April 8, 2003

Palos Verdes, California

S
TEVE AND
S
ALLY
O’Malley moved around the house, at a loss as to where to begin. Harry’s death at age eighty-four had been too much for Anna. Traumatized, frightened by life without Harry, she went into an abrupt decline, dying of a stroke less than a month later. With V. R. called back to active duty in Iraq, it fell to the O’Malleys to go through the process of preparing the house for its new role in life. V. R. had not wanted the house sold, but felt that it needed renovation if it was to continue to serve as a sort of guest house for company executives visiting either RoboPlanes or Vance Shannon, Incorporated.