Supersonic Thunder: A Novel of the Jet Age (9 page)

He picked up a heading of 270 degrees, carefully maintaining his altitude of 67,000 feet. To his left he could see far into Mexico, a place he intended to visit before returning home. To his right he saw the endless Texas plains stretching to the horizon. He had come to love the state in spite of the strange mixtures of its cuisine. Suddenly he wondered,
How many square miles can I see from here, horizon to horizon?

He had the aircraft perfectly trimmed and reached down to figure out the area on the small notepad on his knee. The radius he estimated at about 150 miles and jotted down “π
²
.” Pi was easy enough, 3.145, and squaring 150 should be …

For some reason, the numbers did not come. He stared at the notepad and sensed that he was breathing a little too rapidly. Glancing up at the instruments, he saw that they registered a thirty-degree bank to the left.

Thinking,
That’s definitely off,
he glanced outside for a visual check, realized that he was now in a steep, diving turn, and instinctively pulled back hard on the stick. The airplane was descending through 60,000 feet at 130 knots indicated and the g-forces from his stick pressure caused the U-2 to shed its wings just as the hypoxic Osborn shed his consciousness.

At 13,000 feet, hurtling downward in the wingless, tailless fuselage, Osborn regained consciousness enough to try to use the Lockheed designed ejection seat. It failed and he was fumbling with the canopy release when the U-2’s fuselage dug deep into the hard Texas earth.

CHAPTER TWELVE

July 15, 1958

Central Intelligence Agency Headquarters,
Langley, Virginia

R
ichard Bissell, the U-2 project chief within the CIA, had backed Kelly Johnson from the start of the program but never hesitated to butt heads with him on matters of principle. Osborn’s death, followed the next day by the fatal crash of Daniel Chaplin in an almost identical accident, had created a crisis.

“Goddamm it, Kelly, we’ve had ten accidents with the U-2, two in the last week. Everything points to the oxygen system. The first autopsy reports show that both Osborn and Chaplin were hypoxic.”

Johnson’s face flushed. He was used to doing the yelling in any argument like this, but he wasn’t going to do any today.

Bissell went on, “We only ordered twenty aircraft—twelve of them have had accidents. If this doesn’t stop, by God, I’ll pull the plug on the program unless we get a fix.”

Kelly knew this was a bluff. The U-2 overflights of the Soviet Union had already brought back priceless information that revealed that the Soviet bomber force was not nearly as formidable as feared, but that their ICBM program was further along than thought. Nor was that all; flights over Indonesia and China had provided information that allowed the United States to assert its diplomatic efforts with authority. Besides, the Air Force had ordered thirty aircraft, with a provisional order for five more.

“Rich, we’ve known from the start that flying at extreme altitudes required extreme measures in controlling weight. I’ve been lobbying for weeks to get a dual oxygen system installed, and every proposal I put in has been kicked back as too costly.”

“They have been. I’ve reviewed them myself, and it looks to me like you are trying to make excessive profits on the engineering-change proposal. That’s not like you, Kelly.”

Johnson glowered, veins pulsing in his neck and forehead, hands gripping the table to keep from pounding on it.

“You’re damn right that’s not like me! I brought that goddamn airplane in on time and under budget, and I’m going to be giving you a big fat refund, near ten percent, if things keep going like they are. But the kind of reliability you want in a lightweight oxygen system is damn difficult—and damn expensive—to obtain.”

“Well, let me tell you this. We found moisture in Osborn’s oxygen system, and ran a fleet-wide check. Moisture in all the systems! Worse, it looks like Chaplin’s system had a fire. Talk about contradictions! Moisture in the system and it burns up. And poor Osborn attempted to use his ejection seat, but couldn’t get through the sequence in time. Probably too groggy from hypoxia.”

Bissell, wanting to cool off and particularly wanting to cool Kelly off, turned to Vance Shannon. “Vance, what do you think?”

As always, Shannon waited a second before replying. It was a ploy he had used over the years, making sure that he understood the question, considering what the implications of the answer were politically, and, most of all, making sure that people were listening to what he said instead of talking among themselves. “Well, it won’t affect training too much. We can restrict flights to no more than twenty thousand feet. If the President lays on an absolute must-do mission, we’ll just have to accept the risks. No problem with that; this is the greatest bunch of pilots I’ve ever seen.”

He paused, letting it sink in, then said, “The moisture in all the oxygen system, that tells me that it’s a quality control problem with whoever is supplying the oxygen or with the storage techniques on the bases. It’s a pain, but it should be an easy fix; we’ve had this in the past on other airplanes, the B-52, for one.”

Again he paused, letting Bissel make notes.

“But the fire in the oxygen system is a real worry. Can I have a complete pressure suit, oxygen lines, and all, to study?”

Kelly spoke up, “We’ll have one delivered to your office,” and Bissell nodded agreement.

Vance went on, now getting a little out of place but determined to make the point. “I think we have to start upgrading the autopilot. It’s still too demanding, especially long into a mission, when the fuel management gets even more important.”

Bissell jumped on his remark. “You’re damn right we do. And a better ejection seat. We’ve got to get it down to a simple one-step process that is still foolproof.”

Johnson stood up, saying, “Send me some proposals on the autopilot and the ejection seat, Vance.” Then turning to Bissell, he said, “Do we need Vance for the next part of the discussion?”

Bissell replied, “No, but I suspect we will before too long. Would you excuse us, Vance? We’ve got something that’s still so sensitive and so uncertain that I just want to talk to Kelly about it. You’ll be briefed on it sooner or later, I know, but right now, I have to ask you to excuse us.”

Shannon stood up, glad to be released, glad that the fireworks had not been any worse. “No problem, I have plenty on my plate right now as it is. Good luck to both of you.”

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

August 1, 1958

Palos Verdes, California

A
ll four men had gone over the MC-3 pressure suit several times. Rodriquez had brought home an oxygen cylinder and the necessary hardware, and Tom had suited up. There was nothing obviously wrong that could cause a fire.

Harry spoke. “We should probably be looking at it in place, in the cockpit. There may be something there that interacts with the suit that we are not seeing.”

They mulled this over for a while, using the photos and manuals Kelly had supplied to see if there was anything obvious that might be the problem.

Rodriquez asked, “How old were the suits worn by the pilots who crashed?”

Vance moved to the phone. “I don’t know, but Kelly can find out for us. If I called the base at Laughlin myself, they would probably be reluctant to pass on any information.”

Vance’s call to Kelly took, as usual, some time to get through, and Tom asked, as he was removing the pressure suit, laying the components on a table, “Bob, how is your work back at Cambridge coming?”

Rodriquez was embarrassed. “Don’t be angry, but I just cannot tell you. It is top secret, need to know, and I signed a statement that I would not discuss what we were doing with anyone, not even my partners.”

Tom cringed at the word “partners.” He didn’t need to be, didn’t want to be, reminded that Rodriquez, a new man to the firm, no relation, was already a partner.

Harry saw the wince and jumped in. “I understand you were down at the RAND Corporation a couple of months ago. How are they to work with?”

“Terrific; they are more Air Force than the Air Force. They should be, of course, the Air Force is paying the bill, but they were really helpful. And they got me tickets to the rollout of the Douglas DC-8.”

Vance, done with his call, said, “Kelly’s going to call for me. How did the DC-8 look?”

“Well, it’s the same formula as the 707, you know, just a tiny bit bigger all around, and they say a little faster. If you saw them parked side by side you might be able to tell the difference, but there’s no way you could spot them in the air and decide. To tell you the truth, I think the DC-8 is a prettier airplane, but they’ve got a long way to go. They’re eighteen months behind Boeing now, and it’s hard to make up that much time in the airline industry.”

Vance shook his head. “Never forget how loyal airlines are to their manufacturers. I’ll bet Pan Am will order more DC-8s than they will 707s, just because they’ve always done business with Douglas. Same with United and KLM; they practically cut their teeth on Douglas products.”

Rodriquez replied, “I hope you’re right, Vance, but I got a bad feeling down there, talking to the engineers. They seemed concerned about the management, about production costs. They are already talking about stretching the airplane, and they haven’t even delivered one to an airline yet.”

The phone rang and Vance ran to it, shouting, “It’ll be Kelly,” over his shoulder. It was, and Vance walked back to his group, shaking his head. “They told Kelly that Osborn’s suit was virtually brand-new, but that Chaplin had accidentally ripped his own suit and was wearing one that another pilot had used for about a year. They said it was perfectly sound, and that the two men were virtually identical in size.”

They all reconvened at the table where Tom had laid the pressure suit. Suddenly it was obvious. The radio leads to the pilot’s helmet ran alongside the oxygen tubes, pressing against them at several spots, but now bound tightly to them.

“All it would take would be a short circuit, particularly near one of the spots where the oxygen tubes bend, and that would be all she wrote.”

“It wouldn’t even take a short circuit—they are pumping one hundred percent oxygen; just a spot of grease would do the same thing.”

“You’re right, Bob, but they’d probably be very scrupulous about checking for any oil or grease stains. They might not even see the frayed wiring, but at altitude, in an unpressurized cockpit, the spark could leap right across the fabric. Any tiny leak of oxygen would burn like a welder’s torch.”

Harry spoke. “Well, at least it is an easy fix—they can reroute the radio wires easily, so that they aren’t in proximity to the oxygen tubes. Also they can probably get a change to the suit that puts the wiring into some kind of a rubber conduit, to insulate it. The actual work won’t cost much, but the engineering and the testing will be expensive.”

“Let’s hope Kelly agrees. He’s awful sensitive about the oxygen system. Have you done any more work on an inexpensive dual system, Tom?”

Vance’s second son had made a trip through Europe earlier in the year, talking to foreign manufacturers of lightweight fighters, with a view to getting information on a building a small executive jet aircraft with Bill Lear. Tom had also taken time to talk to the foreign suppliers and picked up a half-dozen products and ideas for systems for the aircraft.

Tom rustled in his briefcase and brought out a small stack of drawings. “Take a look at this. I picked the idea up from Messier, in France, but this is my own design.”

The drawings showed a completely redundant oxygen system, main and backup, in a package no larger than the standard pressure demand system.

“This will cost about ten percent more than a standard system if they only build it for the U-2. If they run the production numbers up, and use it in some other airplanes—like I think they should—it would not cost any more, maybe even cost less. It will weigh less, too.”

Rodriquez asked, “Have you applied for a patent, Tom?”

“Not yet, but I will; you can be sure of that.”

The two men looked at each other, each wondering what was behind the other’s remarks. Vance saw the interchange and thought,
Uhoh. There’s going to be trouble here someday. I wonder if I did the right thing after all.

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

November 8, 1959

The Kremlin, Moscow, USSR

A
wan winter sun glinted through the tall golden curtains lining the narrow windows, the freezing weather outside a perfect complement to the chill in their souls. Four men sat at the huge, magnificently carved table, gleaming in the light of elaborate chandeliers and precisely set with tablets, pencils, and silver water carafes. They were waiting, they believed, for the arrival of the new Premier of the Soviet Union, Nikita Khrushchev. Though he was long the power behind the throne—he had been First Secretary of the Communist Party since Stalin’s death in March 1953—it had taken Khrushchev five years to consolidate his position sufficiently to also assume the mantle of Premier.

All hoped it would be not be Khrushchev himself, but one of his aides. If Khrushchev came in person, the meeting would not be pleasant. It was not like the old days, of course, when Stalin’s whim could send you to a gulag or have you shot. But Khrushchev, full of himself now as an international figure, could make things extremely difficult. If he sent someone else, it was possible that the news was not all bad.

They had been waiting for almost forty-five minutes, and apart from their silent nods of acknowledgment when they were ushered in, not a word had passed among them.

Part of this was the normal caution of any participant in a Kremlin meeting, for they knew that all of their conversations would be recorded and were probably being actively listened to. But the greater reason was mutual antipathy, for on one side of the table sat the two designers largely responsible for the future of Soviet fighters, while on the other sat their implacable rivals. One of these was an aircraft designer from the past who was now fully invested in creating surface-to-air missiles. The other was his chief designer, the architect of the missile defense system that surrounded Moscow.