Roaring Thunder: A Novel of the Jet Age (4 page)

“Are you still doing any test flying, Vance?” There was respect in Gross’s voice, for Shannon had been, with Eddie Allen and Bill McAvoy, one of the top civilian test pilots in the country. When a new design was coming along, companies would call Shannon in early to get his ideas, then sign him up to be the test pilot. He had made
the first flights in hundreds of aircraft, military and civilian, all over the country—and commanded a healthy price for doing so. It always bothered him that he had a reputation for daring, for flying anything with wings. It wasn’t so. He calculated the risks on every flight and had refused many when the odds didn’t seem right. But when the odds were right, even if just by a hair, he’d fly, and he had always succeeded. Until the last one.

Shannon flushed. “Not since the accident, Bob. I just haven’t felt ready.” Six months before, Shannon had been testing a new trainer, built of Duramold, the plasticized wood product that the veteran engineer Virginius Clark had developed. A wing had come off in a dive, and Shannon had barely made it over the side, his parachute popping open just fifty feet off the ground. He wouldn’t admit it, but he was having trouble getting up the side of an airplane into the cockpit—just too many aches and pains remaining from the jump and the subsequent hard landing on a dirt field.

“It’s time you stopped, anyway—you are far too valuable to be jumping out of airplanes.” They laughed, somewhat ruefully, and Gross went on. “Vance, you know Nate Price and Kelly Johnson, don’t you?”

Shannon nodded; the two men were fantastic engineers, both geniuses, with Nate a little less disciplined and perhaps even more imaginative than Kelly. He knew they had difficulty working together. Kelly was too assertive. As a young man, fresh out of University of Michigan and brand-new to Lockheed, he had shaken older, more experienced engineers with his insights and a manner that bordered just on the wrong side of arrogance. The difficulty for the older engineers was that Kelly was always right, and now, at thirty-one, he was the dominant—but not the chief—engineer at Lockheed. Price was more withdrawn but very stubborn, always insistent on doing things his way. As partners, they inevitably had trouble.

“Sure. I worked with them a bit on the multi-seat fighter project—the competition the Bell Airacuda won.”

Both men were silent. Gross hated losing any competition, especially this one, where the airplane the Air Corps selected as winner turned out to be a total failure. Shannon was quiet because he had not been able to get along with either Price or Johnson. They were just too bright, too full of themselves, to permit an outsider to horn in.

“Isn’t Price one of your protégés?”

Gross winced; he knew he had a reputation for hiring maverick engineers he believed in, then giving them their head, not tasking them with assignments unless they wanted them, and allowing them to work however they wished. It was unusual in the economy-minded aviation industry. He knew that it upset most of the other engineers, who were conventional thinkers for the most part, and it upset all of the accountants, who hated to have a worker without fixed tasks for charging time and overhead.

“Yes, I give Nate a lot of leeway, just as I do Kelly, but it might be paying off.” He paused for a moment, then asked, “What do you know about turbine engines for aircraft?”

Shannon stirred in the big green leather chair. This was more like it. His whole body came alive as he leaned forward, broad fingers grasping the arms of the chair, blue eyes bright with interest, a confiding half smile registering. This was wine for his soul, a peek into the future; it was what he lived for, the constant quest to please clients by doing a good job.

But it was dangerous territory. The U.S. Army Air Corps called on his talents, too, and the latest request had come straight from the top, from his old friend Major General Henry H. “Hap” Arnold, who wanted him to oversee the transfer of information on the new British turbine jet engine to the United States. It was top secret,
and Shannon could not even talk about it to Gross, a trusted friend.

“Hap” Arnold was big, bluff, hearty, and always smiling in public, but in private he was an irascible boss who often demanded more results than could be delivered and always wanted them yesterday. After long service and some real political brawls, he now commanded Army aviation. Arnold was not much of an engineer himself, but he was nonetheless a visionary, always reaching for the latest technology and finding the top scientists to help him. Arnold found that he could talk in lay terms to Shannon, who could translate them into the appropriate engineering phrases. As a result, Arnold called him in on almost every project, some top secret and incredibly important, others just run-of-the-mill, but of interest to Arnold.

Shannon started slow, feeling his way. He would never willingly betray a confidence, but he knew how intelligent and well-informed Gross was and how quickly he could make the correct inference from the most casual remark. “Well, I’ve been following the developments in Germany, Italy, and England.”

Gross knew what he meant. They all read the technical journals and had foreign reviews, such as
Flugsport,
translated. But the real information came chiefly from the inner circle of military attachés, all of whom carried on as much covert activity as they could. They were always closemouthed about U.S. secrets, of course, but could be depended upon to reveal what they learned about foreign technology.

“I don’t have much on what’s happening in Germany, outside of the fact that there are two or three companies—Junkers, Heinkel, and maybe BMW—experimenting. You’ve heard that they flew a turbine jet, a Heinkel, a couple of years ago. I understand Heinkel is building a twin-engine fighter, but there’s nothing concrete about it coming in.”

“Vance, this is something I need to talk to you about, completely off-the-record. I only do it because I trust you, and you need to know. Don’t tell anyone, not even anyone in the Air Corps, about this, please. It is quite literally a matter of life and death.”

Shannon was impressed. Gross was clearly distressed, as if he were about to confess a fearful crime. He was noted in the industry for his integrity—when there had been a problem with his Lodestar airliners, he immediately took all responsibility and had Lockheed pay for all the necessary repairs. To see him in such a state was alarming.

“I’m afraid that what I’ve done might tarnish Lockheed’s name. The fact is that I have a paid informant—spy, that’s the only thing you can call it—in Germany. He has kept me informed through our Swiss office about developments in German aviation. I don’t know how he does it, but he gets me material from Heinkel and even from Messerschmitt on jet engines and planes that you would not believe.”

Vance was stunned. Just knowing this compromised him.

Gross saw his discomfort and went on. “I’ve done only one thing to protect myself. I went directly to J. Edgar Hoover and told him about it before I began. He is fanatically anti-Nazi, and he encouraged me. But that’s my only lifeline. If something would happen to him, I know I could go to jail for employing a foreign national for something like this.”

“How did you get in contact with him?”

“That, I cannot tell even you, Vance. He made contact with one of our people during the Volta conference at Rome in 1935. That’s all I’ll say, except that I know enough now that we had better get started on turbine power, or we’ll be hopelessly behind. Now, tell me what you know.”

“I guess it’s secret-trading time, Bob.” He paused, his
stomach growling as the clock neared eleven. Shannon was a big eater, and he’d missed breakfast today in his hurry to get to Gross’s office. He knew that he had to be careful with the next bit, as it dealt with his Air Corps contract. Shannon took a sip of coffee, wishing that Gross had put out his usual spread of pastries, and went on. “We know that the British Air Ministry published the patent of a jet engine by some RAF serving officer, his name escapes me for the moment, and Italy is flying a primitive jet, the Caproni Campini. I don’t think the Italian job worked out; I haven’t heard anything on it. It was in all the papers for a while, making a big to-do about flying without a propeller.”

Gross nodded. “That’s what our man said. We’ve had some other reports back from Germany, as well. Lindbergh’s visits created a lot of contacts with some people not too happy with Hitler, and they’ve been talking—some for a price. The most important thing about what they say is that they pretty well corroborate our informant.” He looked pained and corrected himself. “My informant. I have not told anyone but Hoover and you, not even Courtie.”

Courtlandt Sherrington Gross was his brother, his confidant, his adviser. If Bob Gross had not told Courtie, then Shannon knew how heavily the secret weighed on him.

Considering carefully how to phrase what needed to be said, Shannon went on. “As you must know by now, the Germans have flown a rocket plane and a jet, too, both by Heinkel. For some reason, they seem to be on the back burner right now, and I hope they stay there. We dug out the British patent—had to get it translated from
Flugsport,
by the way, couldn’t find the British originals—and we know the Royal Air Force flew a jet by Gloster on May 15 of this year. It had what they call the Whittle engine, after the RAF pilot who invented it. General Arnold is very interested in it.”

Shannon squirmed inwardly—Arnold was indeed interested. He decided that he would have to at least let Gross know that he had another connection to the subject.

Gross refilled their coffee cups, saying, “Well, we are interested, too. That’s why I’ve asked you here. Nate Price has come up with a design for a jet engine, and he and Kelly have worked out a plane to fly it in. It would be a fighter, and they claim it will fly at six hundred mph.”

Shannon whistled. “Pretty sensational if it works.”

“I know. It is revolutionary. But I need an outsider’s opinion on whether to let them proceed with it or not. Lord knows we have enough to do now, but we have to look ahead. What’s your take on jet engines?”

“Well, let me say two things first. One I can only give you a hint about, just a heads-up, and that is that Arnold has filled me in more on the English turbine than I can tell you. Don’t ask me any more; I’ve probably gone too far telling you even that. And then, I must tell you that neither Kelly nor Nate will be very happy about your asking me to evaluate their program. They both think they are smarter than I am, and they’re probably right. Besides, we didn’t exactly get along on the other project.”

“I’m not surprised that Arnold has tapped you for information—you’ve been in on all the major Air Corps projects for years. By the way, it’s not the Air Corps anymore—as of last month, it’s the U.S. Army Air Forces.”

Shannon nodded. “It’ll take some getting used to.”

Gross went on, “As for Nate and Kelly, I don’t care what they think, Vance; I’ve known you a long time, and I know you’ll give me an objective answer. I’d ask internally, but Kelly is so smart and has such a powerful personality that he has the other engineers intimidated, even Hall Hibbard and Willis Hawkins, and he’d get an automatic thumbs-up. So what do you think?”

“All I know right now is that most people think the jet is impractical—that it requires too much fuel and is too heavy.”

Gross nodded. “Yes, but we have problems with piston engines, too. They take forever to develop—the Allison has been in work for more than ten years and still is not fully matured. I’ve seen studies on many of the big new engines—and there are at least half a dozen of them—and they are becoming much too complex. They have to have intercoolers and turbo superchargers and fuel injectors and everything adds weight and bulk and maintenance hours. Besides that, propellers are already giving us trouble, with their tips going supersonic. We need to find something to replace them.”

Shannon was struck by Gross’s vehemence; normally he spoke in crisp, short sentences, keeping his tone warm and personal, never emotionally charged. This was clearly an important subject to him, and he was absolutely right in thinking so.

“I’ll be glad to work with you on it, Bob, as long as it doesn’t put me crosswise with Hap. I’ll have to use my best judgment on that. But do you have the space and the equipment to build engines? They are not like airplanes; you can’t just rivet sheet metal together and fly them away.”

“No, I would go somewhere else, Menasco, maybe, to build the engines, but we could easily build the airframes. The Hudson will probably phase out in a year or two, and we need to have something to follow the P-38.”

As he spoke the roar of twin Allison engines split the air and a P-38 came roaring down the runway, fifty feet off the ground, then pulled back in a soaring climb that took it out of sight in the bright blue California sky.

Gross shook his head. “Tony LeVier. He thinks he’s racing at Cleveland. The CAA is going to get him someday.”

“Don’t worry about Tony; he has more friends than sense, and if the CAA came over, they’d just want his autograph.” Tony was just a “new guy” compared to Shannon, whose flying career went back to the Great War, where he had scored his fifth victory on November
8, 1918, becoming an ace just three days before the war ended. But both Shannon and LeVier had worked with John Nagel at the old Los Angeles East Side airport, and both men knew how to stretch a glide and stretch a dollar.

Grinning in agreement, Gross handed Shannon a briefcase bulging with papers. Some were pushing out the top, their borders cluttered with notes and columns of figures. He recognized the feathery, involved drawing style of Nate Price. Kelly Johnson’s drawings were always smaller, almost miniatures, and very precise, done in a spidery style that seemed to say he sought economy in everything, even paper and ink.

“Take this along and study it tonight and tomorrow, and come see me again on Monday, if you can.”

“Is this stuff classified? Will I get stopped by the guards?”

“No, it’s not classified yet—we’ve not even shown it to the local government representatives. But it is proprietary, of course. I’ll escort you to your car myself, so no one will stop you. And I need to have it all back Monday morning. Don’t copy any of it, and try to keep it as much in order as you can.”