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

The front and rear canopies peeled away, Pavone ejected, and Shannon followed him out, separating from his seat as the rush of air tumbled him until his parachute deployed with a painful but satisfying jerk. The blast of wind tore off his helmet and mask and the sudden eerie quiet was unsettling. Shannon shifted in his harness, turning until he saw Pavone’s open parachute well below him and perhaps five miles distant. Too bad—their chances to evade would have been better if they had landed together.

He slipped into the top of the cloud layer, rehearsing in his mind all he had been taught about escape and evasion. Getting rid of the chute was paramount, and then he had to find a place to hide during the day. The clouds suddenly parted and he saw that he was going to land in the middle of a huge North Vietnamese Army encampment—if he survived the rifle shots that were now cracking around him as the enemy troops picked up their weapons and fired.

Shannon slipped his chute to speed his descent, wondering if he would survive to see Nancy and V.R. again.

CHAPTER FORTY-NINE

September 20, 1967

Van Nuys, California

W
illis Hawkins stopped his frantic pacing around the low-slung, lethal-looking new Lockheed AH-56A Cheyenne helicopter and walked rapidly over to Harry Shannon.

“How is Vance bearing up, Harry? We were so sorry to hear about Tom being shot down. Have you heard anything from him?”

Harry was touched by Hawkins’s concern at a time like this, when the Cheyenne, Lockheed’s $150 million foray into the attack helicopter business, was being prepared for its first flight. Things had not been going well for the company lately, and much was riding on the success of the radical new design.

“He’s not doing too well, Willis. We haven’t heard a word about Tom except that his parachute was seen to open before he entered a cloud deck. They made a reconnaissance over the area where he went down and found that it was a bivouac for an entire North Vietnamese division. No way for him to escape, I guess, but we’re hoping that they took him prisoner.”

“You give Vance our best, Harry, and we’ll all be praying for Tom. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’ve got to get back to work.”

Hawkins had been a stalwart at Lockheed for thirty years now, and he was as active and as aggressive an engineer as ever and fiercely protective of the veteran engineer most responsible for the Cheyenne, Irv Culver. Culver was an intuitive genius who arrived at his designs in totally unorthodox manners, often in ways that other engineers could not easily replicate. Without the usual formal training, he had actually invented his own system of mathematics—and it worked. Hawkins had the utmost faith in Culver and had backed him in a succession of designs that led to the Cheyenne.

It was a bright, sunny California morning, and Lockheed had provided stands for the VIP onlookers. Bob Wachter, an old-time Lockheed engineer, waved for Harry to come sit down. Wachter had invited him to the first flight because he had been designated to develop a simulator for the Cheyenne. Wachter knew that Aerospace Ventures was in the process of selling its simulator division to GE but he wanted to pick up some tips. He’d actually asked for Rodriquez, but Bob was still tied up with the
Apollo I
fire investigation. Harry felt woefully unprepared to talk to Wachter but felt he could at least take questions and get answers.

Wachter started off by repeating Hawkins’s conversation almost verbatim. Harry was grateful for the esteem in which they held his father. They didn’t really know Tom, but they seemed totally sincere with their concern, for they knew it had affected Vance terribly.

Wachter and Harry’s talk then turned to mutual friends, who was where, and, inevitably, the state of business, especially the purchase of Douglas by McDonnell earlier in the year.

“‘McDonnell Douglas’—sounds funny, doesn’t it?”

Harry nodded. “It’s the start of a trend. Stan Hooker warned my father about it years ago, when all the British companies were drying up. At least they kept both names—it would have been tough just to have it be ‘McDonnell.’”

Wachter nodded his agreement. “Couldn’t do that—too much history tied up in the Douglas name. It would be like Chrysler dropping the Plymouth brand.”

Harry filled Wachter in on all the details of the new Boeing 737, and Wachter gleefully recounted his Moscow-to-Tokyo trip in a new Tupolev Tu-114, a special flight laid on by Leonid Brezhnev for the foreign press and industry people.

“It’s the damnedest thing you ever saw, Harry, four huge turboprops, swept wings, and it goes like a bat out of hell. The amazing thing was the service on board. They must have had a special crew of stewardesses, because you couldn’t turn around without them offering you a vodka and some caviar. And they were always hinting that if you wanted more of something else, they’d be willing. I don’t know if anybody took them up on the something else, but everybody took them up on the vodka and caviar.”

Harry asked, “How was the noise level?” Turboprops were notorious for their noise and for their high frequencies, which often made ground crew men violently ill if they were not wearing adequate ear protection.

“On the ground the noise was just impossible, deafening. I don’t think the FAA would ever approve it for domestic operations, just way too noisy. But inside, not bad at all. You’re conscious of it on takeoff, of course, but in level flight it’s quieter than a piston-engine transport, noisier than a jet.”

They were silent for a while, companionably watching all the effort—cars driving up, people racing to the sideline for parts, panels on the aircraft being pulled, and an impatient group of executives glancing at their watches. It was all part of the preliminaries for a first flight.

“I’ll tell you, Harry, if we don’t get a contract for this chopper, there is no justice! It is so advanced compared to anything else in the competition.”

“A rigid rotor! That’s not just advanced; that’s futuristic. Can you make it work?”

“Well, you see that itty-bitty fixed wing?”

The Cheyenne had stub wings, about twenty-five feet in span, into which its wheels retracted.

Harry nodded.

“Well, they off-load the rotor during high-speed flight. It makes the fixed rotor practicable. And the pusher propeller makes it as controllable as an airplane.”

“Any problems that you see?”

“The wind tunnel and the slide rules tell us that it all works fine, but Willis is worried about stability at high speeds. You know it’s designed for about two hundred and fifty miles an hour—that is performance! Nothing like it in the competition.”

Harry nodded. As important as the jet engine had been to conventional aircraft, it had proved to be a lifesaver for helicopters. All the previous piston-engine helicopters had been woefully underpowered, particularly at altitude. The jet changed all that, and the success that Bell had with its Model 47 seemed to change the helicopter world. Now it looked as if the Cheyenne was the next great advance.

The Lockheed engineer went on, “This bird has everything! It carries a minigun in the nose turret, and can take six Hughes anti-tank missiles under the wing. They decked it out with night-vision equipment that you wouldn’t believe, and the helmet has a gun sight built in. It’s just phenomenal!”

In time Wachter’s enthusiasm for the Cheyenne trailed off, and he began inquiring about the simulator business. Harry leveled with him. “Bob, let’s just get right down to what you want to know, and let me get back to you. If I try to wing it, I’ll be certain to foul you up.”

Wachter pulled a folder out from the briefcase beside him and said, “I thought you’d never ask! Here’s about twenty key questions—any information you can give us I’d appreciate.”

Harry glanced at the questions and shrugged his shoulders. The first question: “Is three-axis motion feasible for a helicopter simulator?” took him out of his depth.

“Let me get this to Bob Rodriquez. He’s down at the Cape this week, but I’ll send it special delivery and he’ll get an answer back as soon as he can. He’s pretty busy there.”

Wachter nodded. “I understand they are attributing the accident to the one-hundred-percent-oxygen environment?”

“That’s what I hear, too, but not officially—just the usual rumors. Apparently a spark was all it took to turn the entire spacecraft into an inferno, and with the way the entrance hatch was designed, they had no way to get out. It means pretty much of a redesign of the entrance and the pressurization system.”

There was a flurry of activity by the Cheyenne where Hawkins was tossing his notebook on the ground in disappointment. He recovered himself and walked to the microphone that had been used to brief the crowd earlier.

“Ladies and gentlemen, I’m sorry, but we’ll have to postpone the first flight. There’s a small problem with the electrical system. First flight will be tomorrow, and I hope you all can return. We’ll shoot for a two o’clock takeoff.”

Wachter smiled ruefully at Harry, saying, “That’s the breaks. How many times has this happened to you?”

“More than I can count. It’s just part of the business. And I’ll be back to you on the simulator stuff ASAP.”

Hawkins walked over and sat down besides them. “What’s the electrical problem, Willis?”

“That’s just a cover. All of a sudden the Army project manager, Emil Kluever, decided he wanted to go along on the first flight! We don’t have a seat for him, so we have to rig one. I couldn’t tell that to the crowd. Kluever is a nice guy; I didn’t want to put him on the spot.”

The next day, at two o’clock sharp, veteran test pilot Don Segner took off and put the Cheyenne through its paces for twenty-six minutes. Kluever perched on a makeshift seat in the front cockpit.

Harry talked to Segner later. “She looked pretty good, Don; what do you think?”

“I had some control problems, nothing I couldn’t handle, but I tell you this. The Cheyenne is too good.”

“Too good? How’s that?”

“As soon as the Air Force sees the Cheyenne’s performance, it’s going to start a rolls and missions war with the Army. They don’t want any two-hundred-and-fifty-mile-per-hour helicopters out there providing ground support. I got a bad feeling about this, Harry. It doesn’t make sense, I know, but the Cheyenne is just too hot to succeed. But don’t tell anybody I said this—that’s just between you and me.”

Harry nodded—rolls and missions were the basis for apportioning the budget, and the services were intensely jealous about them. And as much as he hated to admit it, he knew that politics might prevent the Army from getting the best weapon it could.

CHAPTER FIFTY

January 8, 1968

Palos Verdes, California

C
lad only in his old terry cloth bathrobe, Vance Shannon was reaching for the refrigerator door when the stroke felled him. He stumbled straight ahead, gashing his scalp on the door handle, then crashing to the Mexican tile floor with a thump that brought Jill running from the next room.

She knew what it was at a glance, checking his breathing, then calling an ambulance. Forty-five minutes later he was in the hospital undergoing treatment, Doc Parry at his side.

Harry had rushed to the hospital and now he sat with his arm around Jill, comforting her. Jill had come late in life as a stepmother, but he loved her dearly.

“Anna will be here soon, and so will Nancy, as soon as she gets a babysitter.”

Jill was a trooper, no tears, her emotions betrayed only by her death-white face and the constant squeezing of the handkerchiefs she held in each hand. She and Harry sat in the long green hallway, the walls throbbing with reflected fluorescent light, nurses and medics racing up and down, patients wheeled by, the curious combination smell of medicine, illness, and death, all with everyone looking anxious.

“I thought something was coming, Harry. He ate scarcely anything last night, just went into the library, and sat there, worrying about Tom and the business. Every once in a while, he’d talk to himself, and I could see him being agitated. I went to try to comfort him a few times, but he did what he always did, smile, and say he was OK in a way that let me know he wanted to be alone.”

An hour later Parry emerged, his hair tousled as usual but his manner unusually grave. Normally almost preternaturally cheerful, Parry sat down with them and said, “Vance is going to live, but I think he will be impaired. I hate to tell you this, and I hope I am wrong, but it’s apparent that this was a serious event, and we are going to have to watch him carefully for a few days. Then, when he comes home, he’ll need almost constant care for a while.”

“Is he conscious now?”

“No, he’s sleeping, and that’s the best thing for him at the moment. We’ll do our best for him. I know what his regular medications are, but has he been taking anything over-the-counter?”

Jill thought for a moment and said, “Aspirin, he’s always been a hound for aspirin, but I noticed he was taking them two at a time, several times a day, recently, complaining about headaches.”

“That’s a break—it may have saved him, that and your getting him to the hospital right away.”

Harry and Jill went in to see Vance, frail and drawn, the usual array of drip bottles surrounding him.

Harry made a wry joke. “Too bad Bob isn’t here to make sure the oxygen flow is right.”

Jill whispered back, “Too bad Vance can’t hear you—he’d be the first to laugh.”

After a sad, silent twenty minutes, they left to meet Anna and Nancy in the hallway. They arranged to meet back at the house.

On the drive home, Jill cried quietly. She put her hand out on Harry’s arm. “You know what this means, Harry. Vance wanted you to take his work over completely, and now you’ll have to. I know you are too busy already; do you think you can handle it?”

Harry pulled over to the side of the street, closed his eyes, and thought hard. “I’ll never be able to do what he did. He had an immense amount of knowledge and just incredible intuition. But I’ll try to cover as much as I can. I think the best thing to do will be to get together with Bob and see what he’s willing to take over. We can sort of divvy things up. And if it gets to be too much, we’ll hire people. There’s a recession going on in the industry now; lots of companies are squeezing their higher-salaried people out, the old story. We should be able to pick up some talent without much of a problem.”