Hypersonic Thunder: A Novel of the Jet Age (48 page)

Heller went on, saying, “Normally we give our VIPs an hour in the simulator, but I know you both have done that. I thought you’d prefer just going into the ops area and meeting the troops. I know you have another meeting in a couple of hours.”

An hour later, on their way to their meeting in an aging Holiday Inn outside of Norfolk, O’Malley said, “That added ten years to my
life. What a bunch of winners. The pilots and the ground people are as good as the airplane.”

V. R. nodded. “It was a long twenty-five-year wait—the initial competition started back in 1981.”

“Yeah, but you have to look forward, not back, V. R. With its super-cruise and stealth capabilities, it will be the world’s premier fighter for the next thirty, maybe fifty years. Teddy Roosevelt used to send his Great White Fleet around the world to project power—it took him months. Right now, today, we could put a squadron of F-22s anywhere in the world in a few hours. It’s expensive, sure, but it’s worth it.”

“I wonder how long it will be till we get the next fighter.”

O’Malley said, “If we’ve done it right on the Hypersonic Cruiser, there won’t have to be a next fighter, and it won’t show the flag in a few hours, it will be in a few minutes. That is, of course, if we get the money to finish the airplane, and that’s why I’ve set today’s meeting up.”

“Why are we meeting here in Norfolk? I’d think that anyone wanting to invest in the project would want to meet us back at Mojave.”

“No. These troops have been conducting hypersonic research in Australia, and I think they are moving away from government backing to private backing. They have to be very careful what they do, and couldn’t afford to be seen at Mojave, or in our plant. They have official business here on the F-22, so it’s logical for them to be in Norfolk. Most people won’t connect the dots between our visit and theirs. I picked the Holiday Inn because it’s one that Bob Rodriquez used to stay in when he was on the road for our company, years ago. He didn’t want to come at all, but I persuaded him that this might be the salvation of everything—money, time, even some technology.”

“Well, I’m glad we’ll be there, but let’s be sure that neither one of us goes off on our anti-Muslim sentiments. You are too damn talkative, and I’m too intense, and it puts people off.”

V. R. was speaking from experience. He’d received an unofficial rocket from the Chief of Staff on the subject and was noticing how people shied away from him when he got on his political hobbyhorse.

O’Malley pointed to the bearded, dark-skinned taxi driver and said, “Once again, V. R., you really know when to shoot off your mouth.”

December 16, 2005
Norfolk, Virginia

T
HE
H
OLIDAY
I
NN
was like a time capsule. Signing in the night before, Bob Rodriquez felt as if twenty years had evaporated. Apparently nothing—wall paintings, rugs, furniture, smell—had changed, and even the dour clerk seemed identical to the man who had been behind the counter two decades before. Then he had always tried to get the cheapest room, but this time O’Malley had arranged for a suite, with two interconnecting bedrooms and a sitting room for the meeting.

Rodriquez asked, “Did you call down for coffee, juice, water? They should be here in the next five minutes.”

“Take it easy, Bob, no need to be nervous, these are prototypical Australians, good people. You are going to like them. John Honey is a retired Royal Australian Air Force pilot, flew everything from Wirraways to F-111s, and has a doctorate in aeronautical engineering. He teaches at Queensland University. His sidekick is Barry Martin, another Ph.D., a specialist in thermodynamics. I’ve gotten to know Honey pretty well, and I’ll vouch for him.”

There was a knock at the door, and Honey and Martin came in, cheerful, poised, and obviously ready to talk business. After a few preliminary comments, Rodriquez turned to the Australians and said, “Steve told you that we are in a bind, financially, and he has vouched for you personally. Still, I understand you are asking me to give you insight into almost a decade of work and nearly a billion-dollar investment.”

Honey smiled. “It’s not a one-way street, Mr. Rodriquez. We are not just offering you money for ideas. We are offering money and ideas, and I think it may be that the latter is more important than the former. You’ll have to decide that yourself. But before we go much farther, I have to know where you are in your approach.”

Rodriquez shook his head. “This is no way to do business. I don’t have any of my materials here, I cannot give you any of the mathematical backup, I don’t even have copies of some of the analyses we’d done from wind-tunnel data. I only agreed to meet you here, all the way across the country, because you insisted.”

Honey nodded. “There was no way we could be seen going to Mojave,
much less RoboPlanes. And we are not asking for proof, we are just asking to listen to your story. Barry and I know enough from our own experiments to be able to determine whether it makes any sense to proceed with a discussion. We are not trying to gain information from you, then cut and run.”

Honey’s manner was ingratiating—concerned, polite, and friendly. He was obviously the sort of man you’d want to have a pint with after the meeting. Still, Rodriquez stalled, considering his limited options. He could just say no, now, and forgo the possibility that the Australian’s interest was legitimate and possibly a way out. He could stall and risk the Australian being turned off. Or he could go ahead and give a carefully filtered description of the Hypersonic Cruiser and then try to determine from Honey’s questions what to do next. If Honey kept pressing, and was obviously just looking for free information, he could end the discussion. The risk would be significant, especially if the Australian was as astute as he seemed to be, and if his motives were wrong. But Steve had worked with him when Australia bought General Dynamics F-111s, and then later helped advise on the Aussie purchase of the Boeing F/A 18E Super Hornets. It wasn’t as if he were an unknown quantity. Martin was—but he doubted if Honey would have brought a ringer with him.

“Steve, did you have this place checked for bugs?”

O’Malley laughed. “No, I’m sorry, it didn’t occur to me. I only made the reservations for here yesterday—I doubt if the sharpest industrial spy would have had time to bug the room.”

Feeling faintly ridiculous, Rodriquez turned back to Honey, saying, “OK. I’ll give it to you in abbreviated form. You know that heat dissipation is one of the biggest headaches in hypersonic flight, and that remains our biggest problem. Fortunately we’ve made the airplane big enough, almost one hundred feet long, and the fuel load large enough so that we can use fuel as a heat sink. We turned the nose of the airplane into a radiator using two techniques. One is passing fuel lines through it to soak up the heat, much more efficiently than the SR-71, I’m glad to say. The other is brand-new. We’ve a heat pipe, same composite material as the aircraft itself, containing lithium. The lithium vaporizes as the wing heats up, distributing the heat evenly throughout the leading edge. When the aircraft slows for descent and landing, the lithium condenses back into a liquid.”

He paused, watching Honey for a reaction, then went on.

“We had to have a big airplane to hold the fuel to get the range we need, so there is ample tankage to dissipate the heat. We also needed a big airplane because of the real secret—I hope—of what we are doing.”

Rodriquez pulled a yellow legal pad from his briefcase and sketched the hypersonic liner’s long, narrow profile.

“You can see that we’ve stayed with the wave-rider design—I don’t know any way around it—but that we’ve extended the scramjet over a much longer, narrower portion of the undersurface of the fuselage. The entire structure is composite, and actively fuel-cooled, for we’ve established Mach 8.0 as the goal.”

Rodriquez kept looking up and staring at Honey the way boxers do as the referee gives them instructions at the start of a fight. Honey appeared not to notice.

“We’ve spent five years making some key discoveries in how to lay out the nozzles that turn the bottom of the fuselage into an engine. At the rear of the fuselage, we have a modified Pratt & Whitney F119 with about forty thousand pounds of thrust the way we have it tuned. It is mounted behind and below the main fuel tank.”

Rodriquez hesitated. The new element that had changed all the equations was radical—and at first glance, so apparently ill-advised—that he was sure Honey would laugh. If he did, the session might end right there.

“I’ve never shown this to anyone besides the major partners and to some key engineers and machinists. Don’t leap to any conclusions. Let me explain it.”

Honey concealed his impatience, nodding affirmatively. Rodriquez took the yellow pad and made another drawing. “Here’s what happens, believe it or not. The engine is moved up and forward into a flexible tunnel that is built into the bottom of the fuel cell. The cowling remains below and acts as a channel for the scramjet efflux. As the engine moves, the cowling is extended and reconfigured to maximize thrust. At the present time we are not introducing fuel into it to make it a genuine afterburner, but it still has the effect of increasing the thrust of the scramjet by about 50 percent—at no increase in fuel consumption. More important, it helps maintain a constant pressure, avoiding the ‘choke’ that has been the bane of most scramjets so far.”

Rodriquez stopped again, looking closely at Honey, ready to fly off the handle if the Australian smiled or joked. This was too serious, it was his life. The man could choose not to believe it if he wished, but he’d better not laugh at it.

Honey said nothing. He reminded Rodriquez of Paul MacCready, silently running figures through his head, checking ideas, balancing out the pros and the cons.

At last he said, “You say that you’ve checked this out in wind tunnels? Your computer analysis confirms this?”

Rodriquez could not tell if his tone was friendly or derisive. “You’re damn right I did. I can’t tell you how many times I went over the numbers before I committed to the design.”

“You can stand the shift in the c.g., the center of gravity, when the engine moves?”

“It’s automatically offset by fuel transfer from the tunnel area. In the few seconds it takes to move the engine up and forward, fuel is transferred at high pressure from the bladder in the fuel tank out to the wings. It’s a zero sum transfer, the airplane never knows the c.g. is changing. When the engine moves back, it moves much more slowly, and the pilot can trim out the change in c.g. as it happens.”

“What about the engine’s heat? It’s like moving a flaming torch into the fuel cell.”

“The whole thing is purged with nitrogen. The tunnel is actually a bladder placed next to the main fuel cell. It contracts as the fuel is pumped out, so there is no fuel or fumes in contact with the engine during or after the move. There is some danger that the nitrogen will have some effect on the hot engine metal, but we’ve been experimenting with ceramic coatings on the most critical areas, and I think we have that beaten. Later, after reentry, the engine is moved back into place to start up for a powered landing.”

Honey was quiet again, a long, tapered finger going over the outline of the drawings, back and forth.

“I see you’ve elected not to have a conventional cockpit canopy, no doubt to avoid the heating—”

Rodriquez interrupted him, saying, “Exactly. We are using our own specially developed composite material creating a bonded pijoint structure. We’ll rely entirely on electro-optical means to create a virtual cockpit for the pilot. To Shannon, here, who will be flying, it
will appear just like the simulator, a big beautiful blown canopy but with 360-degree visibility. And we did it for safety reasons as well. The entire cockpit serves as an ejection capsule, if it were ever necessary.”

The ejection capsule had been a late addition, a sop to Rodriquez’s concern over V. R.’s safety.

There was again a long silence as Honey and Martin examined the sketches again. Neither man spoke until Martin suddenly nodded to Honey, who said, “Mr. Rodriquez, you’ve asked me to take a lot on faith. I’ve got to believe that you can get the aircraft to scramjet speed on fan-jet power, not using a rocket. I’ve got to believe that you can move an engine a full four feet up and ten feet forward and nestle it in a fuel cell, for God’s sake! And toughest of all, I’ve got to believe that the engine’s cowling, extended and shaped, is going to add thrust to the scramjet. That’s a lot to take on faith.”

Rodriquez’s temper flared, “Goddammit, I never asked you to take anything, you asked me, and I told you. And furthermore—”

Martin, Shannon, and O’Malley looked apprehensive, but Honey smiled, shook his head, and said, “Let me finish. You are asking me to take this on faith, and I do, for I believe what you’ve told me is true. I have the greatest respect for you and what you’ve done for aviation. Now, please, you are going to have to listen to me, and take on faith what I am telling you. These ideas are as radical as yours, and as proprietary. I am taking exactly the same risk with you that you are taking with me—but frankly I don’t think either of us believes there is any security risk involved. We wouldn’t be talking if we did.”

Rodriquez’s anger fizzled out in a wave of embarrassment. This man was being a gentleman—and, as usual, he was not. He was glad Mae wasn’t there.

“May I call you Bob? Bob, I’m going to do some sketching on the yellow pad, if I may, and I’ll show you what I’m proposing to offer you as an idea, in addition to some funds. A lot of funds.”

Honey sketched quickly and expertly, his drawing much more precise than Rodriquez’s. He deftly replicated the outline of the Hypersonic Cruiser in his own drawing, but changed the nose. Instead of the stilettolike needle of Rodriquez’s creation, there was now a wide, liplike
disk shape that extended out perhaps four feet before being streamlined back to the fuselage, serving as a chine where it merged into the meld of the wing and fuselage.

Honey handed him the sketch, laughing. “Makes it look like a bit of a platypus, eh, very appropriate for an idea from Australia.”