Supersonic Thunder: A Novel of the Jet Age (37 page)

Harry thought for a moment. Six weeks was cutting it close. He had to leave Everett and go directly to Fort Worth to the General Dynamics plant. The F-111 had been deployed to Vietnam and been an instant disaster, with three aircraft disappearing on combat missions. The airplanes were withdrawn from combat, and there was an all-out push on to discover the cause. Still, there were always nights and weekends, so Harry said, “Six weeks it is.”

Harry started to go and Williams said, “Maybe I shouldn’t be asking you, Harry, since I’ve got my own sources in the company, but how’s it going in the great SST race?”

“Ah, Gordy, you know the Boeing team is still working hard, but I can’t get the sense that anyone believes there will be an American SST, not even after all that’s been spent on it. What do you say?”

“I say you are right. We won’t even be ready to start on the prototype until next January. But what are our friends the Brits and French doing, and our old Commie buddy, Tupolev?”

“They’ve got a real horse race going. I keep getting feedback on it, and the Anglo/French cooperation is better than anyone has ever seen, in spite of themselves. The bigwigs get in major dustups, one crowd walks out of one meeting, the other the next, but the troops on the factory floors are getting along, trading information, making it work.”

The Concorde was being created by the French firm Aérospatiale and British Aerospace. The French built the wings and control surfaces and much of the internals. The British built almost all of the fuselage, the vertical tail surfaces, and the engine installation. Four of Stanley Hooker’s Olympus engines had been fitted, improved, and enlarged to provide 38,000 pounds of thrust each.

Harry went on, “In fact, even if they never built a single SST, they’ve forged a pattern for European cooperation that’s a real threat to Boeing. And I’ve heard talk about an international consortium being formed to take build airliners.”

Williams snorted. “They’ve tried that in the past, especially the Brits. Except for the Viscount and the Caravelle, the Europeans have never been a threat. I think they’ll lose their shirt on the Concorde and there will be no follow-up airliners. Mark my words.”

Harry never argued with a customer but went on, “Well, the first SST to fly will get a lot of press. It will probably be the Concorde, because we hear there’s trouble with the Tupolev job. But who knows?”

Williams laughed and said, “Harry, you’re just like your dad. Informative, but always politic! One thing for sure, whatever happens, you’ll be among the first to know.”

CHAPTER FIFTY-THREE

May 16, 1968

Hanoi, North Vietnam

T
he huge block-square Hoa Lo prison was located virtually in the middle of Hanoi, the shabby, run-down North Vietnamese capital. The prison was built by the French, and the name meant “portable earthen stove,” because the hibachi was the principal industrial product of the area. Most of the North Vietnamese government had been imprisoned in Hoa Lo by the French. Now it served primarily as a catch basin for the increasing numbers of U.S. airmen shot down over Vietnam.

With its dirty, cream-colored stucco walls and muddy-red tile roof, the prison was run-down like all the Vietnamese public buildings. Inside, the bottom halves of the walls were painted black, while the tops were the same dirty cream as the outside. Every wall was worn, with the paint stained from the salts weeping through the concrete. When the wind blew, the air was filled with the open-sewer odor that pervaded Hanoi. When the air was still, Hoa Lo generated its own foul smells, a mélange of unwashed prisoners, open latrines, and the decades of filth and mold, a living, breathing petri dish of bacteria that coated the prison’s walls, ceilings, and floors.

It had not been difficult to feign unconsciousness at first. Tom’s internal injuries hurt so much that he just lay still, minimizing all movement. They knew the prison housed other airmen—Pavone reported hearing one whistling “Yankee Doodle” and at night there was an almost jungle rhythm to the prisoners’ communicating by tapping. But Tom and Pavone were kept completely isolated from the others, living in a damp concrete world of their own.

Their cell—Pavone had noted that it was Number 44, according to the door—was about ten feet square. Their beds were concrete blocks, fitted out with metal and wooden stocks for their feet—in case they needed to be restrained. A battered bucket placed against the wall was their toilet, patiently brought into position and held by Pavone when Tom needed it. A wooden door, so worn that it was reinforced with strap iron, had a peephole. Opposite it was a window with bars. Pavone said he could see the prison wall from it, but Tom had not yet tried to get up to do so.

They listened constantly to the tapping, trying to get in on the communication flow, to let someone know who they were and to find out who else was suffering with them. Both men strained to catch any sound of a guard coming. The slim rations, watery rice with an occasional fish head floating in it, were inedible at first, but by their second week of imprisonment it took all of Pavone’s sense of duty to divide the rations equally and not sneak an extra bite for himself.

Two days before, a guard had sneaked up on them and caught Tom whispering to Pavone, and the game was over. The first thing the Vietnamese did was play catch-up with Pavone, who had been almost immune from torture as long as he was taking care of Tom. Two guards, inexplicably led by a vociferously profane brute of a Cuban, pulled Pavone out of the dank cell and carried him away.

For almost forty minutes Tom heard the steady stream of blows raining down on the screaming Pavone until, suddenly, he went quiet. Tom wondered if they had killed him.

Two guards came back to his cell and dragged Shannon down the hall, showing him an unconscious Pavone, trussed up, his hands manacled, ropes tied around his upper arms until they forced his elbows to touch. Another rope was looped around his neck and his ankles and tightened so that even unconscious, on his side, Pavone’s back was painfully arched.

They took Tom back to his cell, shoving him to the floor. Not until the next day did they dump Pavone’s horribly bruised body in Tom’s cell, the Cuban guard saying, “Now you have to take care of him.”

There wasn’t much Tom could do. After checking Pavone for broken bones, he laid him out on the hard concrete bed. To Tom’s surprise, a Vietnamese guard handed him a bucket of water without his asking, and he tried to wash his friend’s battered face. Pavone’s eyes were swollen shut and his tongue bulged from his mouth. Tom drizzled water on Pavone’s tongue, saw where he had bitten almost through it in pain, and stopped, afraid to start the bleeding again.

The Cuban came back later in the day and motioned to Tom.

“Tomorrow it will be your turn. Then you’ll learn how we get information in Cuba.”

There was nothing to do but wait. Tom sat with Pavone, talking to him constantly. About noon, he seemed to be able to swallow and Tom carefully daubed the water back behind the cut in his tongue. That afternoon Pavone regained consciousness. After a few hours of moaning, he stirred himself to say, “Tom, I broke. Second goddamn day, I couldn’t take it and I broke.”

Tom stroked his forehead. “Don’t worry about it. They can break all of us. It doesn’t matter. We don’t know anything they don’t know.”

“It was strange; I tried to give them phony stuff about where we were based and what kind of airplanes we were flying. I said we were flying T-33s. But they didn’t seem interested in the military stuff; they kept talking about war crimes.”

American prisoners of war were operating under a strict Code of Conduct, established by President Eisenhower after the Korean War when it was learned that some prisoners of war had been broken by fiendish torture. Under the Code, you could tell the enemy only your name, rank, serial number, and date of birth. You were obliged to try to escape. You could not help the enemy, of course, or accept any favors from them. Most importantly, you were forbidden from making any disloyal statements about your country. Korean torture experts had extracted confessions of war crimes from some U.S prisoners, and it had rocked the services. But the Code had no provision for the hard fact that sustained brutality could ultimately break anyone.

The Cuban came back the following morning, with two of the khaki-uniformed guards. They picked Tom up and forced him to walk down the hall, certain that the long-deferred torture was coming. To his surprise, the Cuban abruptly left and Tom was placed on a chair in the center of a room about twice the size of his cell. Opposite him, behind a worn wooden table, were seated two North Vietnamese officers. What followed might have been scripted for a B movie about Nazi interrogators. The Vietnamese on the left was about five foot eight, thin and severe looking. He was obviously the bad cop. To his right sat a shorter man, quite rotund for a Vietnamese, who seemed cordial and concerned—the good cop.

Tom expected them to question him about Operation Toro. He intended to follow the Code of Conduct as long as he possibly could when they tortured him, but he also prepared an elaborate story, totally false, about the mission.

The mission never came up. Instead, the two asked him the same questions over and over again. First it was what kind of a plane he was flying and where he had taken off. Then it abruptly diverged from the military, and they asked where his home was, what political party he belonged to, a whole series of non-military questions.

Tom replied only with his name, rank, serial number, and date of birth, refusing to answer anything else. After a long and boring two hours, he was taken back to his cell. Pavone was sitting up.

“What did they do to you?”

“Nothing. Just some softball questions.”

“They didn’t hit you?” Pavone seemed almost resentful.

“No, but I figure that’s coming soon enough.”

The next morning, the two Vietnamese who had interrogated Tom came to his cell with the same two guards. Without a word, he was half-walked, half-carried down to the same room. This time the two interrogators left and only one man was in the room. The Cuban.

CHAPTER FIFTY-FOUR

July 8, 1968

Palos Verdes, California

J
ill was in the kitchen preparing lunch, tears of happiness running down her face. It was a miracle. Vance had been almost helpless for months, unable to do more than grunt or to make a stroke on a pad of paper when she put a crayon in his hand.

Then that crazy Fritz Obermyer had showed up with a young amateur historian, Warren Bowers. Bowers was writing a series of articles for
Wings
and
Airpower,
two specialist aircraft magazines for history buffs. He wanted to interview Vance on his early test pilot days. Jill had said no at first, but Fritz had really persisted, and Bowers had been coming faithfully two or three times since early April.

At first it was painful. He would ask questions of Vance, framed so that they could be answered by a grunt for “yes” or a shake of the head for “no.” But within about two weeks. Vance began to be able to say individual words, almost always of a technical nature—things like “flaps” or “canopy” or anything related to airplanes. Bowers then began to expand his questioning technique a bit.

By mid-May, Vance was speaking in short sentences. He obviously delighted in being interviewed by Bowers on subjects everyone else had long since forgotten. Bowers had an encyclopedic knowledge of aviation and especially aviation people, and when Vance had a memory lapse Bowers would provide a name or a date that would set him off again.

Now Vance was speaking almost normally—hesitating sometimes but for the most part able to converse, not just with Bowers but with anyone.

Most of the interviews went right over Jill’s head, but she could see the pleasure in Vance’s eyes when Bowers hit on a subject particularly dear to him. For the most part, they were obscure people or planes of whom she heard—people such as Charles Rocheville, John Nagle, and Jean Roche or strange airplanes such as the Zenith Albatross or the McGaffey AV-8.

It didn’t matter to her. Bowers had literally pulled Vance back from the grave, and she would be forever indebted to him.

And to Fritz. He was in with Bowers today, listening with pleasure to Vance’s responses and planning a big surprise. While they were talking, some of Obermyer’s people were delivering Vance’s Cord, fully restored and running better than new.

AFTER THE USUAL two hours, Bowers, a polite and affable curly-haired young man of about thirty, gathered up the photos he used to spur Vance’s memory and excused himself.

Fritz said, “Come on, Vance; let me take you to the window. I have a surprise for you.”

He pushed Vance’s chair to the window overlooking the driveway, where he had parked the cream-colored Cord, its headlights retracted, its long coffin nose gleaming in the sun.

Vance stared at the car, then gripped Fritz’s arm.

“Is that my old Cord?”

“Yes—but it’s the same as brand-new now.”

“My God, it’s beautiful. Who restored it? You, Fritz?”

“Some of my boys. It was a labor of love; they really enjoyed it.”

“Look at that beauty, Jill; that’s my dream car. Can you get me a calendar?”

Fritz shook his shoulders and looked at Jill, who hurried to the study and returned with a wall calendar.

“Today’s what, the eighth of July?”

They nodded.

Vance riffled through the calendar.

“OK. Jill, mark the eighth of September. That’s the day I’m going to walk down the steps and drive that beauty. Fritz, thank you so much. You’ve given me an incentive, just like young Bowers did. I tell you, I’m going to be back working by the first of the year.”

They both believed him.

CHAPTER FIFTY-FIVE