Supersonic Thunder: A Novel of the Jet Age (39 page)

Despite his voluminous coat and fur hat that fit down well over his ears, the bitter cold gnawed at him. Glancing around the field, Tupolev could see the rooftops of the field’s buildings and all the hangars crowded with people eager to see this massive airplane fly.

Andrei was talking to the press now, reciting the formidable statistics of the Tu-144. “The Tu-144 will fly from Moscow to New Delhi in just over two hours. A passenger taking off from Moscow at noon would land at Montreal at nine the previous morning—the Tu-144 will outdistance not only sound, but the sun.”

It was all necessary. No one knew better than Andrei the shortcomings of the prototype, but no one but his son, the so-called Czarevitch, could have had a prototype ready on this last day of the year. He had planned, argued, threatened, and cajoled as he traveled back and forth across the country to get the suppliers of the myriad parts to put out the extra effort necessary. This was really Alexie’s airplane in every sense of the word.

Now V. N. Benderov and engineer Yu Silverstov were onboard and the four enormous NK-144 engines, which would soon be capable of almost half a million horsepower at top speed, began their roaring rumble of a start.

The aircraft taxied out with remarkably few preliminaries, the controls being exercised and the pilot making one simple S-turn, checking the steering. As it did so, Andrei Tupolev moved along the tarmac to be exactly opposite to the point where he thought the Tu-144 would break ground. He stood there with Alexei watching, as he had watched so many of the products of his genius in the past.

The Tu-144 turned onto the snow-covered runway and applied power, lurching forward, followed by huge snow vortexes that blanketed it from the crowd as it gained speed. Then it was off, at the spot Andrei had predicted, and climbed, the nose drooped for visibility.

Alexei turned and embraced his father. They had done the impossible. The Soviet SST was flying, the first SST in the world to do so.

The Tu-144 flew for twenty-eight minutes, its landing gear never retracted, just as had been planned those many months ago. The unpressurized fuselage was filled with hundreds of recording instruments, all telemetering their information back to the ground. The pilots’ and engineer’s voices were heard plainly and were taped—if anything went wrong, the engineers on the ground wanted to know what was happening.

But it was an uneventful flight for an airplane that would ultimately exceed 2,500 kilometers per hour. Andrei knew what would follow, joyous celebrations in
Izvestia
and
Pravda,
boastful comments from the Kremlin on the coming prosperity of the Soviet Union, and a general national euphoria about yet another technical success.

Andrei shook his head. The Tu-144 had flown before the Concorde, but other things were happening. The Americans were making amazing progress in space, doing much more now than the Soviets were. Only a few days before this flight, the American
Apollo VIII
had orbited the moon with three men aboard. Think of it! Orbiting the moon with a manned spaceship. He knew from his contacts that the Soviet Union was years from being able to do this.

He turned once again to look at his Potemkim SST before climbing back into the welcome warmth of the Zil. It was a beautiful airplane but not yet a good one. With time, however, it would be both.

CHAPTER FIFTY-SEVEN

April 14, 1969

Palos Verdes, California

J
ill Shannon stood with her arms wrapped tightly around a sobbing Mae Rodriquez. Mae’s three-year-old son played in the corner with the enormous set of smoothly finished blocks that Tom and Harry had played with many years before.

“Take it easy, honey. Bob will be all right, and one of these days he won’t have to work so hard or travel so much.”

Mae gulped and said, “I’m so embarrassed to do this. I should be tougher. But in the last year he’s only been home about thirty days, total. It’s not fair.”

“It’s this crazy business they are in, Mae. Men get wrapped up in aviation, and it becomes their life, and their families get short shrift. It happened to me, you know.”

Mae nodded. More than once Jill had related the story of her marriage at eighteen to a young pilot, Jimmy Abernathy. They were happily married for six years before he was killed, not in an airplane but in a stupid car accident, smashed by a drunken driver on Highway 1.

“Jimmy loved me, I know that, but flying is demanding. He was gone for months at a time, trying to sell airplanes in South America. The competition is tough, and there’s something about it that screws up men’s minds.”

“Why did you marry Vance, knowing that?”

“Honey, when I married Vance, I was totally in love again, and he was older and more settled. If I had ever had daughters, I would have taught them not to marry anybody in flying. The wife always winds up second-best to the airplane. They cannot help it, they are good providers otherwise, but when that damn engine starts, they are gone, off to fly.”

“But Bob’s not doing much flying himself anymore; it’s just business, always going down to Florida, or off to Houston, or overseas. I can’t go along because of Bob Junior.”

“He’s not flying the airplane, but he’s in aviation, and the passion carries over. These guys only know one way to operate, full throttle, be there fast, be there first, and stay there until you get the job done. In a way it’s admirable, even when we know they are not doing it for us; they are doing it for their own goddamn fascination with flying. So we have to be admirable, too, and put up with it and support them, even though it’s tough.”

“You’re describing Bob exactly.”

“Worse, I’m describing Vance even now. Every day that he is better, he tries to do more in running the business. It’s tough on Harry, because Vance sometimes steps in and overrules him, or interferes. And apparently his judgment is not quite what it was. Harry often has to go back and mend fences, make changes, and somehow keep Vance from knowing about it. But Vance is even worse about Vietnam. Since Tom has been shot down, he has been steadily getting more rabid about the way the war is being fought. Not hearing from Tom, not knowing whether he is alive or dead, is a nightmare. Vance wants to tell the government to bomb North Vietnam until the war is won, and I think it is because he secretly believes Tom is dead. He claims to be sure that he knows Tom is alive, but if he really believed that, he wouldn’t advocate bombing Hanoi.”

“I’ve never seen this side of him.”

“No, he conceals it from most people, and only lets go with Harry and with me. He knows that he sounds a little round the bend, but with us he doesn’t care.”

Mae carefully folded her handkerchief, put it in her purse, and looked straight into Jill’s eyes. “Jill, I’m being honest with you. I don’t know if I can go on.”

“Are you talking about getting a divorce?”

Mae looked horrified. “A divorce, never. But Bob’s got to give in a bit on this. He wants me to have another baby, but I couldn’t handle two of them by myself, being alone so much. You are a godsend, but I cannot off-load my family on you.”

Jill wouldn’t have minded if Mae had off-loaded her family permanently. She had never had children, always wanted them, and adored Tom’s little V.R. and young Bobbie.

“I know it doesn’t help, but look at Nancy. Tom’s in Vietnam, we don’t know if he’s dead or alive, and she’s coping. She’s even helping Harry with Anna, making sure she stays on the wagon.”

Mae felt ashamed. There was no comparison. She knew where Bob was, he called every day he was away, and he was safe. Poor Nancy. Mae pulled herself together, gathered up Bobbie. Jill walked her out, patting her on the back, picking up the just-delivered mail in the process. It was the usual big bundle of letters, bills, and magazines. Vance still subscribed to every aviation magazine in the country and a few from Europe, though he rarely took time to read them anymore. Most of his time was spent in front of the television set, ranting at the news. When he felt up to it, he had Jill drive him to the office for a few hours.

Carrying the mail on her way into Vance’s study, Jill riffled through the envelopes. She came to a sudden halt when Madeline’s familiar handwriting leaped out at her like a cobra striking. The letter was postmarked in Paris and addressed to Vance.

Without a moment’s hesitation, Jill tucked the letter into her apron pocket and brought the rest of the mail in to Vance, who was reading the proofs on yet another article on his test work by Warren Bowers.

“Anything good, like a check?” he asked.

“No, just the usual bills and advertisements. There is one good thing, a letter from Bob.”

She realized she had never lied to Vance before, not ever, not about anything, and Madeline’s letter was suddenly a time bomb ticking in her pocket. Anxious to get away, she asked, “Would you like some cocoa?”

Ripping open Bob’s envelope, he replied, “No, but how about some tea? With a couple of Oreos on the side?”

She walked rapidly from the room and ran down the hallway to the bathroom, locking the door behind her. Madeline had inflicted enough harm on Vance; Jill was not going to let her do it again.

There was a scissors in a basket near the sink. Jill carefully opened the envelope, shuddering at Madeline’s precise, ornate, almost calligraphic handwriting. She read:

Dearest Vance,

It must be so strange to get a letter from me, but I have to write you this one last time, and tell you why I was so heartless as to leave the man I loved.

Jill’s stomach contracted as she thought,
The man she loved! She means the man she deserted, the man she almost ruined. What nerve!

The letter went on:

You’ll remember that I never spoke of my family? It was because they had been collaborators—my father and brother, I mean, not my mother. I was the only one to serve the Free French. After Dunkirk, I made it to England on a fishing boat, and they got me a job in the American embassy to work in intelligence. You’ll remember that’s where we met, and how lucky I was.

But I remained in intelligence—call it being a spy; that’s what it was—all my life, as you know to your sadness. You are a patriot, and you must understand that I was a patriot, too.

But now it is over, not because I wish it, but because I am terribly ill with cancer. The doctors say that I have not long to live, and of course I am frightened. I did not want to die without writing you and telling you that despite my actions, I truly loved you. Not just when we were together, but always, to this day.

Give my best love to Tom and Harry; they were like sons to me, even though they did not think of me as their mother. Forgive me for having hurt you, forgive me for leaving you, but most of all, remember that I loved you until the end.

It was signed simply “Madeline.”

Jill took the scissors and methodically cut the letter and envelope into narrow, curling strips. Then she hurried down to kitchen, banging pots to indicate she was brewing tea. She put the butchered shreds into a frying pan and lit them with a match. They burned poorly and she used half a dozen matches to get them truly lit.

She knew she should feel guilty, but she did not. This was the right thing to do, for Vance and for their marriage. She knew how Madeline’s memory affected Vance and was uncertain what the image of a dying Madeline would do to him. As unwell as he was, he still might have picked up and gone to Paris, to find what?

Jill heard him moving down the hall, moved the frying pan to the sink, dowsed it with water, and threw the soggy residue into the fliptop wastebasket.

Vance walked in beaming, then asked, “What’s that smell? And what’s the matter with you? You look terrible.”

Jill sat down at the table and began crying uncontrollably. Vance stood behind her, rubbing her neck. Jill got up, saying, “Make your own tea,” and ran from the room.

VANCE SHOOK HIS head. It was unlike Jill, but Mae must have said something to bother her. That was strange, for it was usually Anna who got Jill upset.

He had enough worries of his own. Rodriquez was off again, down at Eglin Air Force Base, running a series of tests on the new bombs he and his team had devised. One was television guided; the other used a reflected light of some kind to guide the bomb. Fascinating as it was, it was beyond Vance’s knowledge. Worse, it meant Bob would be away for another month. Worse still, Vance was still not sure how they would make any money from it. It probably was a mistake to sell the simulator business off—but he didn’t understand that, either. It was better when things were simpler. When he was hired to test-fly a new airplane, he would look it over, fly it cautiously for a bit, then put it through its paces. When he landed, he’d write a report, they would pay him, and it was over. Now when they did something it involved contracts, partial payments, quality control, safety inspectors, a thousand ways to fill up paper.

Still he felt the routine pang of guilt that he was no longer pulling his weight, even though he tried to help Harry, who, as always, was overworked. They had a chance to catch up during the second week in February, when the two had gone to Seattle to see the first flight of the Boeing 747. On the way up, Harry briefed him on the problems the 747 was causing Boeing, Seattle, and Pan Am, all things that he had shielded Vance from while he was convalescing.

“Dad, just like you predicted, they kept revising the airplane and the gross weight kept going up until now it’s more than seven hundred thousand pounds. The Pratt & Whitney JT9D-1 engine was putting out the power it was supposed to—but that’s not enough anymore, and Pratt is advising Boeing to let them add water injection to boost power, at another one hundred thousand dollars per engine.”