Roaring Thunder: A Novel of the Jet Age (25 page)

Vance knew Schairer well enough to insist that he needed Tom on the project. After the usual corporate bureaucratic hand-wringing, Schairer got approval, but only after negotiating a cut in their combined rate. The truth was, he did need Tom’s insight, and he also had to help him get away from home. Marie had turned almost overnight from a charming girl, outgoing, even flirtatious, into a religious fanatic. Although he did not say so directly, Tom implied that their sex life had started badly and dropped off to zero within weeks of their marriage. They had been to see a priest, but he had only cautioned Marie to fulfill her marital vows, while telling Tom that he had to stop being so demanding.

Shannon hated to leave California, but he, too, needed to get away. For the first time since they had been together, Madeline had become cold and distant. Instead of the lingering feeling of sexual inadequacy that had haunted him for most of their time together, he now wanted her far more often than she wanted him. Their lovemaking had long since gone from the torrid to the routine, but she had always remained responsive. Where before he had but to extend his hand to have her roll over to him, now she would often turn away. She had even used the classic, “I have a headache,” on him, even though in the past she had made love no matter how she felt. The worst thing was that they had lost that sense of communication, the ability to each know what the other was thinking, to finish sentences for each other. Somehow they were strangers, for the first time in their relationship.

He groaned to himself, “I hope Harry is getting some loving; the rest of the family is striking out.”

Still there were no signs of her being interested in anyone else. There were no strange phone calls; she was always at home whenever Vance called or came in; there were no strange expenses, no signs of guilt. They were older, it was true, but she was still a young woman, thirty-four, in her prime. When he suggested that she might like to see a doctor, she became furious, one of the few times she had ever lost her temper with him, telling him that there was nothing wrong with her and if anyone should see a doctor it should be him.

Perhaps it was a mistake to have located his office in their Palos Verdes home. She might have been happier going in to work at an office on an airport. But it was she who had picked the lot, and she had supervised the planning, making sure that there was plenty of space for his office, with a private entrance. He liked it because it positioned him near to North American, Northrop, and Lockheed and still close enough to San Diego to meet any Convair requirements. He could cover jobs in Los Angeles, San Diego, and Edwards Air Force Base in a single day if he flew in his Navion. Seattle meant using the airlines, which was a pleasant relief, having a stewardess attend to you and someone else doing the flying.

The trip to Seattle might settle many things. He hoped that Madeline might agree to go with him, leaving the new house to a caretaker, but he doubted it.

January 24, 1948, Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, Ohio

Harry had not believed the recall notice when it arrived. There were thousands of pilots trying desperately to stay in the new and independent Air Force, and suddenly someone found that Harry had to be back in service. It
was so totally unfair, and it did not sit well with Anna. He called his father and the mystery was soon resolved.

“You are getting a reputation, Harry, and Al Boyd must have decided that he wants you back in the Air Corps to help him.” Like most people, Vance still called the Air Force the Air Corps, by force of habit.

The name was familiar to Harry, for Boyd had brought the world’s speed record back to the United States in 1947, flying a Lockheed P-80 at 623 mph. “What does Boyd do?”

“He’s at Wright-Pat, but he also runs the test programs out at Edwards. He is a terrific officer; you’ll like him.”

“Should I try to get out of this, Dad? Anna and I have been looking for a house. . . .”

“Don’t you dare even think about not going, Harry. If Al Boyd needs you, you go and go with goodwill. It will only be for a couple of years probably, and you’ll get more and better flying than you ever dreamed of. Anna will like Dayton, I’m sure.”

To his surprise, Anna took it like a trooper, even though it meant giving up the circle of friends and family she had charmed for all her twenty-two years. Marie protested at first, for she was busily engaged in trying to raise Anna’s level of Catholic consciousness. Tom protested, too, not so much because they were leaving but because he wasn’t recalled.

Harry and Anna packed their clothes in the huge trunk of his Buick Roadmaster convertible and headed out across the southern United States, stopping like a couple of kids at the tourist traps, rarely passing one of the snake farms on Route 66. The Buick cruised easily at sixty-five miles per hour, and Anna enjoyed teasing him as they drove, kissing his ears, running her hand inside his trousers, and in general preparing him well for a night of lovemaking in one of the roadside motels that they found each evening. The motels ran from squalid to functional, with the worst being the El Hidalgo in Deming,
New Mexico, where water from the mildew-laden shower ran across the floor to a drain in the center of the room.

They arrived at Dayton on the fifteenth, rented a furnished apartment on the sixteenth, and moved in on the seventeenth. They spent one day getting the necessities for housekeeping, and Harry reported in, anxious to start working at the Fighter Operations at the Flight Test Division of the Wright Air Development Center.

In his heart Harry realized that he wouldn’t have dared to ask for so sweet an assignment after all his bomber experience, and he was truly grateful to be back in fighters after so many years.

The charismatic Boyd was gifted with a dual personality that worked enormously to his advantage. At work he was stern, square jawed, with a commanding air that inspired just the right combination of fear and confidence. A former airmail pilot, he had over time picked up the ability to manage large organizations, and his operation at Wright-Pat, with all its disparate requirements, was noted for its efficiency. Yet off duty he was affable and friendly, able to keep a crowd laughing with the stories of his adventures. Tall, lean, and rangy, he ran a tight ship, sparing with a smile but quick with a scowl. He could not have pulled it off if his pilots, the cream of the Army crop, did not know that he would never ask them to do something that he wouldn’t do. More important, they knew that if he chose, he could probably do whatever it was better than they could.

It was Boyd who, after long calculation, ratcheted aviation another notch forward by carefully managing the quest to break the so-called sound barrier, personally selecting Chuck Yeager to fly the Bell XS-1 on the historic October 14, 1947, supersonic flight. Boyd selected Yeager as the test pilot on the same basis that he made all his decisions: who was best for the job. And Boyd knew everything about his test pilots, from the way they flew airplanes to the way they behaved—or misbehaved—at
Pancho Barnes’s notorious desert hideaway. His greeting to Harry was characteristically abrupt.

“Hello, Shannon. I know your father; he’s a good man. Don’t think you are going to be a test pilot here, because you’re not.”

The hopes Harry had harbored about doing just that withered.

“I have better things for you to do than flying hop after hop jotting instrument readings on a knee pad. I need a problem solver, and they tell me you are getting to be as good as your dad. I heard about how you handled that weird Massey airplane. That put them out of business, and they deserved it, coming up with a lash-up like that.”

Harry started to say, “What do you want me to do?” but Boyd cut him off at “What do—”

“I’ve got two main jobs for you. The first one will be fun. Jet airplanes are coming out of the woodwork! We have a whole stable of new planes here that we are running every sort of test on. And every damn one of them has a different cockpit layout, with the instruments all over the place, flap handles that work in different directions, switches that go up in one airplane and down in another. I want you to get checked out in all the fighters and the bombers and figure out what the best arrangement for instruments and controls should be. Then write up a specification we can give to manufacturers to start getting things standardized. We’ve had more than one guy pull up his wheels when he thought he was putting down his flaps.”

Boyd paused to carefully polish his sunglasses, breathing on them and then rubbing them with his silk scarf. “But the real problem we have with fighters and bombers is range. We could whip the hell out of Mexico or Canada, but if we had to fight Russia our fighters don’t have the range to get there. We have to do something about aerial refueling for the bombers. I want you to get started on that, but I want you to include fighters. They’ve got to
escort the bombers or Moscow will turn out to be another Schweinfurt.”

Schweinfurt was the scene of two costly debacles, both stemming from a lack of long-range escort fighters. The Eighth Air Force had lost sixty airplanes in August 1943 and another sixty in October. After that a decision was made not to fly the bombers deep into Germany unless escort fighters were available.

Without another word, Boyd grabbed his helmet and started out of the room. At the door he turned and said only, “Check in down the hall at Flight Ops; they know you’re coming, and they’ll get you all the manuals you need, and assign instructor pilots to check you out in all the different airplanes.”

While he was digesting Boyd’s rapid-fire comments, Harry went down to the Base Operations Officer and got permission to go up in the control tower that was built as a part of the building. Harry paused at the last landing to catch his breath, promising himself he’d get in shape. After climbing the last set of the interminable stairs, he introduced himself to a courteous but very busy team in the control tower, who were directing takeoffs and landings for a continuous stream of traffic.

Harry borrowed a pair of binoculars and began looking up and down the flight line.

Boyd was certainly correct about the airplanes, which crowded the field, lined some taxiways, and were even parked in the open area on the opposite side of the runway. There were plenty of piston engine fighters—Mustangs, Thunderbolts, Lightnings, even two of the new Twin Mustang P-82s, and Harry vowed he’d fly them all if it meant flying every weekend. All the transports were there, from the ubiquitous Beech C-45 and Douglas C-47s to bigger four-engine C-54s and even one of the huge new bug-eyed Douglas C-74 Globemaster transports.

But it was the jet aircraft that interested him. He called them off to himself, “Lockheed P-80, Republic P-84,
Lockheed T-33.” A grinning staff sergeant in the tower watched him. “You planning to fly them all, sir?”

Harry smiled back, said, “That’s the general idea,” and went on with his inventory. The strong bond between officer and non-commissioned ranks was one of the American Air Forces’ great strengths. They were the only services in which officers were sent in harm’s way, tasked with the primary duty of fighting the enemy, and there was not a pilot who did not know that his life depended upon the enlisted personnel who serviced his aircraft. There was a minimum of spit-and-polish discipline, just a nicely tuned atmosphere of mutual self-respect.

A beautiful North American P-86 was parked next to a strange-looking four-jet aircraft. “Sarge, what’s the big jet next to the Sabre?”

“That’s the North American XB-45; it just came in last week. I don’t know if it’s going to be here for a while or not. Good-looking airplane, though. Four jets! Imagine that.”

After Harry made the long climb downstairs he went into the Flight Operations section, where Master Sergeant Orbin Shackleford ran things with a crisp administrative efficiency. He took Harry to a row of ten-by-twelve offices plastered against the side of the hangar. “Cold in winter, hot in summer, but it’s the best we’ve got, sir.”

“Fine with me, Sarge.”

“Colonel Boyd told me to fix you up, sir, so I’ve got your office all set up, all the manuals in place, and a list of instructors for each plane, along with their phone numbers. They all have regular jobs, so you’ll have to work out your flight schedule with them. I expect you won’t get to fly more than four or five times a week.”

They spoke for a while longer and Harry knew he had made the most constructive move of the day, becoming friends with Shackleford, who, like all the top NCOs, really made the Air Force work. It was good to be friends with the Base Commanding Officer and with the chaps at
the personnel office, but if you really wanted to get along you made friends with the first sergeants and their like. They would still work with you if you didn’t get along, but only to the point that it was correct. But if they liked you, you could count on them to make something happen, no matter how the regulations had to be bent.

That night he took Anna to the Officers Club to celebrate his lucky new assignment. As they walked from the parking lot, Harry, as always, enjoyed the sensation of all eyes being on Anna. It gave him a smug sense of proprietorship, basking in the notion that he not only took this darling woman to dinner, he also took her to bed, and that was what they envied most. Heads turned as Harry and Anna walked through the big reception area and down the hallway toward the dining room, probably the best restaurant in Dayton. Anna pretended to ignore the admiring looks but clearly enjoyed them, the smiles and the nods and the quick greetings never getting old despite her long experience at being beautiful.

When she and Harry had ordered, she reached across the table, pressed his hand, and said, “I don’t think I’ve ever seen you as happy as this, not even at the wedding—not even on the honeymoon, not even on our trip across country.”

Suddenly this was clearly dangerous ground, and Harry looked closely in her eyes. Anna could be feisty, and the wrong word here might cause an argument. He was learning. “Honey, I’m just happy to be here with you. It was great to drive across country, but here we are, all settled in like an old married couple, a good dinner here at the club, with all the guys admiring you. And then to top it off, I get to take you home to bed. What could be better than that?”