Hypersonic Thunder: A Novel of the Jet Age (46 page)

“In terms of our chances for success, Bob is rating it at ninety-ten that we’ll have a flight that the pilot will survive. I’m rating it a hundred to zero or I wouldn’t go. And Bob is rating it seventy-thirty that we’ll achieve our Mach 8.0 design goal.”

Shannon let a little rumble of conversation roll through the room, and went on. “We are pinning everything on a radical engine innovation that I am not going to reveal to you, but which will make or break
the project. If it works as Rodriquez thinks it will, and as his computers and wind tunnels tell him it will, we’ll have a genuine Hypersonic Cruiser. If it doesn’t, we’ll just have a long needle-nose aircraft with the longest takeoff run and highest landing speed in history. I hope to walk away from either situation.”

The talk concluded with a series of questions, fewer than Shannon had hoped. Some of the men were obviously traumatized; some were looking at him with either pity or contempt, he couldn’t tell which. A few asked questions that Shannon had difficulty fielding and had to promise to get back with answers. He signed some autographs, and then declining Carr’s offer to walk back with him, resumed his stroll back through the Maxwell campus, pondering the mixed impression he had made and wondering what the young officers were thinking.

Talking in a whisper to himself, as he found himself doing more and more, he said, “They almost certainly think I’m crazy, about the Muslims and how we should have stopped them. They must think our approach to the Hypersonic Cruiser is as crazy as our political views. And they are probably right. I may very well be crazy, and maybe it is a good thing. It is a cinch that the fanatical Muslims are crazy, by our standards. Maybe we need craziness to stop them. Maybe it’s guys like O’Malley and me who will finally be the answer.”

He paused to watch an aircraft pass near the campus, its engine noise noticeably breaking the quiet. When he was attending school, the air was so filled with the noise of aircraft and landing and taking off that no one looked up. Now it was quiet and seeing an airplane was a treat. He went on, saying to himself, “Well, that does it. I’d really not made my mind up about flying until I saw the face of that major worrying about his kids. It’s time to step up to the plate.”

He felt strangely comfortable with his decision. At first he could not understand why, but came to a rapid conclusion. Taking the risk of the flight was the one sure weapon he could use to revenge Ginny’s death. It was as simple as that. He wasn’t going to be in any hand-to-hand fights, not unless some Muslim fanatic listened to his talks. He wasn’t going to drop any more bombs. But he could deliver the single most important weapon ever created in the fight against terrorism. And now, firmly committed to flying the cruiser, he felt whole for the first time in years.

November 17, 2004

Mojave Airport, California

T
HE AIRPORT AT
Mojave was never noted for neatness. It couldn’t be with acres of stored airliners lining its borders baking in the sun and dozens of start-up businesses that blossomed and withered over the years. But today it was an absolute mess, the detritus of the fantastic celebration for winning the X Prize. Rutan’s group, financed by Microsoft cofounder Paul Allen, had done exactly what it set out to do: create a civilian presence in space.

The day before, Brian Binnie took the almost Disney-like
SpaceShipOne
to a very real altitude of 367,442 feet—sixty-nine point six miles—and a speed of Mach 3. On September 29, Mike Melvill had flown
SpaceShipOne
to 337,569 feet, despite having to shut down the new and more powerful engine eleven seconds early because the aircraft was making a series of unintended corkscrew rolls.

The two flights firmly established Rutan’s Scaled Composite group as the premier civilian space company, and won the ten-million-dollar X Prize in a convincing way, for
SpaceShipOne
could have flown again, if required.

Richard Branson, the iconic iconoclast of Virgin Atlantic Airways, promptly announced that he would invest twenty-five million in a new space tourism venture called Virgin Galactic. His goal was to sell suborbital flights to tourists for about $200,000 a trip. It was insane, but it was also Richard Branson, whose track record for successful insane ventures was admirable.

Bob Rodriquez was immensely happy for the whole crew, and happier still that they had pulled off the daring venture safely with no loss of life and no injuries. Given the scope of their achievement—
SpaceShipOne
had broken the X-15’s altitude record of 354,200 feet—it was little short of miraculous that it had been done safely.

He knew that Burt Rutan would have disagreed with him about its being “miraculous.” Burt, his engineers, and his pilots had carefully calculated all the risks, and taken engineering steps of such sheer brilliance that the National Aeronautics and Space Administration paid unabashed homage to them. Rodriquez hoped he would be able to do as well with the Hypersonic Cruiser.

If only the cruiser could go as well as the UAVs and the cruise missiles of RoboPlanes,
Bob mused. The company now had a full line of UAVs that ranged from dragonfly-sized miniatures to stealthy, long-range aircraft that approached the Global Hawk in size and capability. They were in use all over the world, and had become so versatile that they had an online catalog where prospective customers could pick and choose their own UAV just as they might pick an automobile and its options.

The cruise missile and anti-cruise missile had evolved almost painlessly, with a half-dozen successful test flights and the prospects of contracts for both of them almost certain with the U.S. Navy. As pleased as he was by these results, Rodriquez took special pleasure in the fact that the Hypersonic Cruiser used many of the design features that had proved themselves in the missiles. They were, in fact, miniature test vehicles, and he had designed them to be so.

Since both V. R. and Steve had committed themselves to flying the aircraft, Rodriquez had been able to make up time on the schedule. The Hypersonic Cruiser could roll out anytime, but the internal installations, the guidance and control systems, would not be proven until early 2007. First flight, at best, would be the fall of that year, within three months of the original schedule.

It didn’t bother Rodriquez at all that Boeing had successfully flown a larger X-43A for NASA at a speed of Mach 9.6. A flood of glowing press releases showed how the X-43A had been released from the venerable Boeing B-52 carrier plane, on its last scientific mission, and was then powered by a Pegasus rocket to a speed of Mach 10. At that point, the X-43A’s fuel system was activated and a ten-second flight followed after which the X-43A then glided down to a crash in the Pacific test range.

What pleased him most was a comment from a NASA official saying that “the next step is to take a turbine engine and a ramjet or scramjet engine and combine those propulsion cycles and put some hardware together and start testing it. Maybe in a couple of years we could put an airplane around that technology. There are a lot of paths you can take from this point, and they all lead forward.”

Rodriquez came as close as he ever did to chortling, thinking,
RoboPlanes is doing exactly what NASA was proposing for some years in the future. RoboPlanes is doing for hypersonics exactly what Rutan had done for spaceflight. God grant that they have the same success
.

Steve O’Malley blew into the room, sweating from his jog up and down the tarmac, heading for the shower. Over his shoulder, he said, “Big news for you today, Bobby boy! I’ve got an offer I hope you can refuse.”

Twenty minutes later he was back, polished and relaxed, thirty pounds lighter than he had been six months ago, and ready for another two-hour session in the cruiser simulator.

“What’s your big offer?”

“It’s our big offer. I got a call from Whit Robinson this morning, very mysterious. He has a foreign buyer willing to offer a billion cold cash for the work we’ve done on the Hypersonic Cruiser. Not the UAVS, not the cruise missiles, just the Hypersonic Cruiser.”

“Who the hell is it? Is he serious?”

“Whit is always serious when it comes to money, and he would stand to make millions if he brokered this deal.”

“But who would offer that kind of money without knowing where we are, or what our prospects of success are? It doesn’t make sense.”

“Nothing makes sense, nowadays, Bob. Who would ever have believed that Airbus would sell more planes than Boeing, but they did it in 2003 and again in 2004. And who would believe that Airbus would come up with something like its A380 while Boeing is putzing around with the Sonic Cruiser? And who would believe that we would be bogged down in Iraq, winning the war there but losing it in Congress and in the media? None of it makes any sense—but there it is.”

“When are we going to know more about it?”

“Whit is going to call me this afternoon and tell me who the buyer is. But I told him the chances ran from slim to none that we’d even consider it.”

“God, Steve, what a relief it would be to walk away from it with a billion in our pockets and all the experience, and no worry about killing you or V. R. It would add five years to my life and maybe twenty or more to yours and V. R.’s.”

“You serious?”

“Of course not. The only people who could come up with money like that are either a European consortium or some Muslim consortium. I wouldn’t dream of selling to either one.”

“What if it is an American company, Boeing, say, or General Dynamics, Northrop Grumman, even?”

“Then we’d have to take a look at it, not for the money, but for their resources, and the probability of their being able to do what’s necessary to get it sold after the first test flight. Or maybe even letting them test-fly it and getting the monkey off my back about killing you or V. R.”

Whit Robinson called that afternoon, revealing only that it was a European consortium, probably backed by Muslim money. O’Malley turned him down politely, saying, “That’s out of the question. But you might nose around some domestic firms and let them know there is foreign interest. Maybe we can get one of the big guys on our team to buy in.”

They chatted for a while until a very disappointed, very dubious Whit Robinson hung up.

O’Malley told Rodriquez about the call.

“A European consortium, backed by Muslim money. That’s encouraging. It means they have faith in us delivering a usable product. More faith than our government has shown.”

“That’s not fair, Steve. We haven’t allowed our government to know what we are doing, and we haven’t solicited their interest. But it’s more than encouraging—it’s terrifying. It means we’ve got a leak somewhere in the company. Somebody, at some level, knows enough about the project to sell it to the consortium. And that is a problem. We are going to have to really sit down and analyze who might be the culprit, and see what we can do about it. We have at least a half-dozen proprietary ideas invested in the cruiser that have value of their own, even if it never flies. I don’t want them siphoned off by some spy.”

O’Malley was nonplussed.

“We know all our guys personally, Bob, you handpicked them. I can’t believe we’ve got a spy in our midst.”

“A spy or a damn good hacker. Something is going on, and we’ll have to be alert. Let’s see if we can set up some bogus information and see where it appears, then find out who had access to it. It will be a start.”

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

THE PASSING PARADE
: Aid continues to pour in for tsunami victims in Asia; George W. Bush enters second term as President; elections in Iraq successful, 275-member National Assembly in place, 58 percent of eligible population voting; Pope John Paul II dies; Benedict XVI new pope; Lebanon free of Syrian military after almost thirty-year occupation; Tony Blair wins third term; France and Netherlands vote against ratification of proposed European constitution; new Iranian president is Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, advocate of Iranian nuclear arms; first woman Supreme Court Justice, Sandra Day O’Connor, to retire; comet Tempel 1 struck by NASA Deep Impact spacecraft; Islamic terrorists kill 52, wound 700 in London bombing; United States plans to withdraw from Iraq based on ability of Iraqi police force to maintain security; IRA, long bane of Great Britain, announces end to campaigns of violence; much debated Central American Free Trade Agreement signed by President Bush; Israeli settlers numbering about 9,000 evacuated from Gaza Strip; devastating Hurricane Katrina inflicts widespread damage on Gulf Coast, killing more than 1,800 and destroying New Orleans; William H. Rehnquist, Chief Justice, dies; replaced by John Roberts, Jr.; Texan Tom DeLay, House majority leader, steps down after accusation of violation of Texas’s election laws; 80,000 killed in Pakistani area of Kashmir by devastating earthquake; Germany elects first female chancellor, Angela Merkel; Saddam Hussein on trial for murder of 148; 2,000th American combat serviceman killed in Iraq; Vietnam War ace Randy “Duke” Cunningham resigns as congressman after pleading guilty to taking bribes.

May 13, 2005

Mojave Airport, California

F
riday the thirteenth was an appropriate date. After six weeks of gentle nagging, Mae Rodriquez had maneuvered her husband into speaking to the Mojave Rotary Club. Filled with the up and coming young businessmen and women of Mojave, the club asked her to have Bob fill them in on what RoboPlanes was doing in UAVs and, surprisingly, in hypersonic flight. The request for information on hypersonic flight really was innocuous. RoboPlanes was always explaining the horrendous noise its engine cells caused. But to Bob, chronically suspicious since Whit Robinson had inquired about purchasing the company, it smacked of snooping.

He compromised with her by agreeing to speak on the topic of “What’s New in Aviation,” with the specific understanding he would not talk about anything RoboPlanes was doing, even information already in the public domain. He also specified that he wasn’t going to talk about the war in Iraq. Steve had already colored RoboPlanes’s reputation with his outspoken comments on the war and on the threat of Muslim fanaticism. Bob didn’t want to stir the pot any more.