Hypersonic Thunder: A Novel of the Jet Age (21 page)

O’Malley finally broke the silence.

“I agree with you, Bob, but there’s another development just over the horizon. Nobody’s figured it out yet, but it has to be faced. And that is hypersonic flight. We’ve got the Concorde going, and lots of fighters are supersonic, but the next step has to be not just going three times the speed of sound, like the SR-71, but getting up there in six or eight times the speed of sound.”

There was silence again and Mae finally said, “Steve, you never say anything unless you are pretty well convinced of it. You’ve got some insight, from something, probably a classified project that we don’t have. But just hearing you say it makes me believe it.”

Harry said, “That’s enough for tonight! We’ve gone from a World War I toast to hypersonic flight. Now let’s just see if we can make it all the way to the buffet table, where I’ll at least know what I’m doing for once.”

October 18, 1984
Edwards Air Force Base, California

M
AJOR
G
ENERAL
S
TEVE
O’
MALLEY
and Dennis Jenkins walked slowly out of the debriefing room, shaking their heads. It had been one hell of a debriefing. The prototype North American B-1B had landed at 2:38
P.M.
after a three-hour and twenty-minute flight from the plant in Palmdale.

“Steve, this was pretty damn good for a first flight on an airplane as complex as the B-1B. There were only a couple of delays before takeoff, the flight systems worked fine, and so did most of the avionics.”

Jenkins’s morose expression did not change. “That’s easy for you to say; you’re not responsible for the radar—and it didn’t work at all.”

Both men wandered out toward the flight line where mechanics were still swarming around the huge bomber. Unlike the ill-fated B-1As, which had been painted white, the number one B-1B, serial number 82-0001, was painted in two shades of gray and a dusky dark green, giving its long nose and swept wings an even more sinister look.

Jenkins sighed. “Christ, this has been a long time in coming. I don’t think any bomber anywhere has had the development time or the mission changes this one has.”

It was true. The program had started in 1961, when the Air Force was looking for a replacement for the B-52, then already 19 years old. It continued on for the next sixteen years under a variety of names and stupid-sounding acronyms—subsonic low altitude bomber (SLAB), extended long range strike aircraft (ERSA), low altitude manned penetrator (LAMP), and finally advanced manned precision strike system (AMPSS).

The Secretary of Defense, Robert S. McNamara, had tried to kill it many times, once by demanding that the Air Force stretch the General Dynamics F-111 into a bomber, the FB-111. In April 1969, the aircraft finally received a decent designation, the B-1A, and a contract was let for North American Rockwell to build 244 of them. Four B-1As were built, the first one flying in December 1974. After three years of testing, President Jimmy Carter, in the midst of a frenzy of unilateral disarmament, canceled the program, saying that with the new air-launched cruise missile, it wasn’t needed. This was an outright lie; the ALCM, as it was called, was early in its development and was no substitute for a bomber that could penetrate enemy defenses.

Jenkins went on. “You were right about Ronald Reagan. When he ordered the B-1B into production, he saved the Air Force. This airplane has tremendous potential, and the B-52 design is thirty years old now.”

Both men knew that the B-1B was not as ambitious an airplane as its predecessor, the B-1A. It was not as fast, but it had far better stealth qualities.

O’Malley said, “Dennis, the nature of war is changing. The one hundred B-1Bs we’re going to buy will saturate the defenses of the Soviet Union better than the B-52s can do. But it’s more important that it’s adaptable. We’ll be able to use the latest in GPS navigation, and meld that into our precision guided bombs.”

“I agree. But what do you mean when you say the nature of war is changing? The Soviet Union is still our main enemy; we still have to claw through their radar, their SAMs, their fighters.”

“Yeah, but the Soviet Union is on its last legs. I just hope it doesn’t go out with a suicidal launch of intercontinental ballistic missiles. They’ve been stuck in Afghanistan since 1979. They are setting the Muslim world on fire. Look at all the incidents around the world, the hijackings, the killings, the explosions. And look how we are reacting to them. The Iranians made fools out of us by capturing our embassy in Tehran. And now last year, in Beirut, they bomb our embassy in April, and blow up the Marine barracks in October. What do we do? We protest and we walk. They killed almost 400 people and we flee the scene of the crime.”

“What the hell can we do; it’s just a bunch of fanatics, not the whole Muslim world. You can’t declare war on the fanatics and kill people wholesale.”

“The hell you can’t. Germany was run by a bunch of fanatics, the Nazis. And Japan was run by a bunch of fanatic militarists who ordered Pearl Harbor bombed and then declared war on us. And we sure bombed the hell out of
their
people. We had to—they were passive about the fanatics, and the fanatics were trying to kill us. It’s the same thing here.”

Jenkins shook his head and stayed silent. O’Malley was a brilliant guy, but this seemed to be off base.

“I know it sounds nuts, Dennis, but I’m running the trend lines out ten, maybe twenty years, and it looks to me like we’re going to be fighting entirely different kinds of wars. We’ll be looking to kill individuals, or maybe small groups, not armies. No army blew up the barracks in Beirut, just a bunch of terrorists. No army is going to blow up the New York subway system, or set off a little nuke in D.C.—it’ll be a small gang of terrorists.”

It was hot on the tarmac at Edwards, and they stood sweating in the shade of the swept wing of the number one B-1B. They were alone—all the mechanics and technicians had gone in for supper.

“Steve, you don’t talk like this as a rule. This is the first time you’ve ever mentioned anything like this to me.”

“Or to anyone else. I’m just getting used to the idea.”

“Well, be that as it may, something caused it. And I’ve got a
damned good idea it was something you found out about Bob Rodriquez. You probably cannot tell me what it is, but there’s something going on here that is totally strange.”

“You’re right, as usual, Dennis, and not only am I going to tell you, I have to tell you. Something fatal could happen to Bob, and we’ll never know about it, and nobody would ever reveal anything. Something could happen to me, for that matter, and I want somebody able to tell the family what he’s doing when the time comes. You can’t tell them now, it’s too secret; talk about deep black, this is deepest indigo, you can’t get any more classified than this. And I’d be court-martialed if anyone knew I told you about it. But I’m going to because I know you’ll keep it to yourself. If something happens to me, later on, you’ll be able to pass the word on to Mae and Rod, and to the Shannons.”

O’Malley stood up and walked around the airplane, scanning the tops of the wings on the off chance that there might be someone he hadn’t seen still there. He came back and said, “OK. Here it is. Bob Rodriquez had been running drugs, working for the FBI. His looks and his Spanish language talent made him a natural. Apparently he was so fed up with the Shannons and Mae and the business that he volunteered for undercover work, just to get away from it all.”

“I figured it had to be something like that. Bob was a patriot.”

“That he was and is. Then something bigger came up. They needed someone who could infiltrate some of the terrorist networks they were uncovering. They faked the accident in the Bahamas where he was supposed to be killed, and put him into an intensive course in Arabic language and culture. His size and his coloring made him a natural. Bob wasn’t really a linguist, but apparently he did well in school, and now he’s working inside some terrorist organization. I don’t know where, and I don’t want to. I just hope he can survive, and somehow get back to a normal life back here.”

“So this was how your theories got started. Did you meet with him?”

“Yes, one short two-hour meeting, in the back of a van parked out in West Virginia. He was so hungry for news, real news about Mae and Rod that we talked about them most of the time. But he told me that the terrorist threat was real, and that their ultimate goal was to defeat the United States, not in face-to-face combat, but by destroying our economy with terrorism.”

“Not bloody likely.”

“Don’t discount it, Dennis. I think we’ve got a real fight on our hands, because the terrorists are radical Muslims who are making the whole Muslim world—a billion and a half people—dance to their tune.”

“Frankly, Steve, I think you are wrong. In the first place they are terribly poor. In the second place, they are militarily inept; look how Israel has cleaned their clocks every time.”

“They almost succeeded in 1973; it was a close-run thing. If we hadn’t bailed Israel out with an airlift of supplies, the Arabs would probably have won. And the Israelis would probably have used their nukes. No telling what might have happened then. Believe me; this is the threat of the future.”

Jenkins mulled it over for a while and said, “Steve, you haven’t really convinced me, but I’ve known you long enough to know that you are usually right. This tells me that we’ve got to look into changing our weapons and our tactics for a totally different kind of fight. At the same time, we can’t let down our guard. We both think the Soviets are going down the tube, but some lunatic might decide to take us down with them, and we have to be able to prevent that.”

“I wouldn’t have said a word to you, Dennis, if I didn’t know you’d keep it as secret as I have to.”

They walked in silence back to the edge of the flight line, where O’Malley had parked his staff car.

“It’s a damn shame, Dennis, that we cannot all get along. Look what’s happened just this year—the Space Shuttle’s working beautifully, we fired off an antisatellite missile, and Reagan is calling for a space station to be built. It’s good in the civil market as well. We’ve got twin-engine airliners, 757s and 767s flying the Atlantic, and that crazy Burt Rutan has a round-the-world nonstop, non-refueled airplane being built. It could be a lot of fun if we could get away from the wars.”

“We’ve gotten away from the wars; it’s just that the wars haven’t gotten away from us.”

CHAPTER TEN

THE PASSING PARADE
: Uranus examined by
Voyager 2
spacecraft; space shuttle
Challenger
explodes after launch; President Marcos forced out after twenty-year reign; Nazi service of Austrian President Kurt Waldheim revealed; nuclear accident at Chernobyl power plant causes immense damage; Reagan’s “Star Wars” policy rejected by House of Representatives; Jonathan Pollard convicted of spying for Israel; legislation bars hiring illegal immigrants; Margaret Thatcher elected to third term as Prime Minister; huge earthquake hits Los Angeles; Rudolf Hess found dead, strangled, in prison; huge 22.6 percent drop in value of stock market on “Black Monday,” October 19;
Les Misérables
wins eight Tony awards.

April 14, 1986
Off Land’s End, England

V.
R. Shannon was still not comfortable in the airplane, and he didn’t like flying with another man in the cockpit, his weapons systems officer. The F-117A Nighthawk in which he had accumulated six hundred hours wasn’t as fast or as long-ranged as the General Dynamics F-111F he was flying tonight, but he was used to its quirks, and he flew it solo. This was different. His hands didn’t yet go automatically to the needed switches, and he had to sort out the emergency procedures that applied to the F-117A when he needed to correct something in the F-111F. Yet like all the F-111 pilots, he relished the ease with
which he could sweep the wings, extending them for low speed operations, sweeping them back to go supersonic. It took all the guts he had, though, to fly hands off while the automatic terrain-following radar guided them at low levels—three hundred feet or less, through valleys and over mountains, day or night, without regard to weather. And while he had absolute confidence in his weapons systems officer, Captain Charles Waple, he knew that the confidence was not reciprocated. Yet.

Major General Steve O’Malley had dragooned V. R. from his job as operations officer with the 415th Tactical Fighter Squadron a year before, pumping him up with his radical theories on the nature of the terrorist threat and the need to strike a blow. Steve’s wife, Sally, had called V. R. two months earlier. They were both worried that Steve was going to scuttle his career with his continual focus on the threat of Muslim terrorists. This ran counter to the pervasive, time-honored thinking within the Air Force that the main threat was the Soviet Union. And once again Steve was making powerful enemies in the Pentagon, people who resented his having left the Air Force, made a fortune in industry, and then returned to be put on an apparent fast track to four-star rank. V. R. had talked to him in early January, when O’Malley was visiting Lakenheath, checking on their readiness.

“General, you know that Sally and I had a long conversation about you. She’s worried that you are about to shoot yourself in the foot with this terrorist business, just like you did with the F-16.”

O’Malley grinned. “And who was right about the F-16? I was. And I’m right about this, no matter what they say in the Pentagon. I’m getting some traction with the idea, too. Look what the bastards have been doing to us.”

Intuitively, V. R. couldn’t believe that O’Malley was right. The Soviet Union seemed like a much more impressive threat—it could wipe out the world in an hour, even if it chose to sacrifice itself in the process. Yet O’Malley was smart and it was hard to deny his logic. The worst was the truck bombing of the Marine barracks in 1983, but since then the terrorists had launched attacks on airports in Rome and Vienna, and exploded a bomb on a TWA airliner—it was a miracle that the plane had not crashed. In April, they had attacked a Berlin discotheque, killing American servicemen.