Supersonic Thunder: A Novel of the Jet Age (40 page)

Vance listened thoughtfully. It was all so predictable, all so normal. How could they not have anticipated this? He had warned both Trippe and Allen, told them to wait a bit, let things mature. If only he had not fallen ill, he might have been able to prevail on them a little.

Harry went on, “The orders for the 747 dried up, and when they did, Boeing had to start laying people off. And so, of course, did all of Boeing’s suppliers, most of them right there in Seattle. It was an economic disaster for the city. Some joker put up a billboard sign saying: ‘Will the last person to leave Seattle turn out the lights?’”

Shaking his head, Vance asked, “And what has been going on at Pan Am?”

He had been following the problems through
Aviation Week,
the only magazine he still read regularly, but he didn’t read everything, and his retention was diminishing.

“It was just as bad there. They bought the 747 thinking that airline travel was going to increase by maybe twenty percent by the time they are delivered. Problem is that more people are traveling but only about five percent more. So they will have 747s hanging around, full of empty seats.”

“And then there’s the new overseas carriers.”

“Right, Dad, for the first time, there are other American carriers flying transoceanic routes, and every one of them has domestic lines to hook up to. Pan Am doesn’t. Your old pal Jeeb Halaby said Pan Am was an airline without a country and he was right.

“What’s Jeeb doing?”

“He’s being groomed to be president of Pan Am, probably within a year or so.”

Vance was feeling pretty bad by the time they got off the airplane, but his reception by old friends at Boeing buoyed his spirits. And it made him feel good simply to walk around the huge transport, aware of his and Harry’s contributions to it. Planes had come a long way from the Curtiss Jenny Vance had trained on in 1917.

The takeoff was watched by thousands of spectators lining the airfield, but the forty-five-minute first flight was a bit of an anti-climax. A flap malfunction forced Jack Waddell, the pilot, to make the entire flight with the flaps down. Still, there it was, the world’s largest, fastest airliner, a mammoth airplane intended to change air travel forever.

In Seattle, Harry had tried to persuade Vance to go to Toulouse, to see the first flight of the Concorde. He was tempted to go, but Jill talked him out of it—she wanted him where she could keep an eye on his health and, he thought, she probably didn’t want him traipsing around France, where he might run into Madeline. Good thinking on Jill’s part!

Madeline. He wondered how she was doing after all these years. He hoped she was well. She was probably better than he was, for sure.

CHAPTER FIFTY-EIGHT

September 1969

Hao Lo Prison, Hanoi, North Vietnam

T
he North Vietnamese catalog of cruelties included starvation, systematic torture, and crude but continuous attempts at brainwashing. In many ways it was strictly business to the Vietnamese, who had an ordered hierarchy for dealing out punishment. At the top were officers and civilian officials whose task it was to gather information for either military or propaganda use. Below them were less well-educated guards, who handed out pain and punishment in part as prophylactic discipline, in part in response to any slight, real or imagined. Underlying their efforts was the unreasoning, frightened hatred of small, uneducated men for large, professional men.

There was an almost irrational insistence that the prisoners of war have no verbal communication. A prisoner speaking a language their captors could not understand was a mammoth affront, an insupportable insult. Whenever possible, prisoners would find themselves in a position to talk through a wall or over a fence, but the guards were vigilant and interrupted forcefully.

Tom had feigned illness long enough to gather a little strength as Pavone and he were switched around from one miserable holding pen to the next. He was unable to tell whether he remembered the long, agonizing trips from one squalid “jail” to the next or he only remembered what Pavone had told him about them. They were all similar, either bamboo cages or damp concrete cells, and all were liberally populated by rats that seemed invisible to the Vietnamese. As Pavone recalled it, the jails all must have been within twenty or thirty miles of Hanoi. They learned later that the Americans gave the jails popular names that the Vietnamese sometimes used themselves—“the Zoo,” “Alcatraz,” and so on.

Pavone had long since confirmed that the North Vietnamese suspected that Shannon was the author of the trap over the Phuc Yen airfield. On one occasion three men had come to stare at him, one apparently a MiG pilot, judging by his gear and the fact that he surreptitiously left behind a small package wrapped in newspaper that contained aspirin, a grainy bar of chocolate, so old that it was chalk colored, and a small stone image of Buddha.

The long deceit gave Shannon just enough strength to survive the indiscriminate serial beatings that the North Vietnamese inflicted on all the prisoners. Yet hunger overrode even the pain from the beatings, and he was weak from a miserable diarrhea that was alleviated only by long periods of constipation.

Still there was change in the air. The relentless beatings and torture had diminished in the last few months, although either could be quickly provoked by something as simple as not bowing as swiftly as a guard thought you should. Tom was now well integrated into the tapping grapevine, even though he had not yet been in a position to talk to another prisoner. He was being kept isolated, and Fidel, as they called the Cuban, promised that he would never have a chance to speak to the other prisoners.

The tap code was utterly simple. Twenty-five letters of the alphabet, with
K
excluded, were laid out in a matrix of five lines and five columns, with
A
through
E
in the first line. One tap indicated the first line; two, the second; and so on. Thus one tap followed by one tap was
A;
two taps followed by one tap was
F
. While they never reached a telegrapher’s speed, the prisoners soon could “read” transmissions as fast as they were given. When the Vietnamese cracked down on the tapping, sneezes, coughs, hacks, throat clearings, et cetera, were all substituted for taps. Hand movements, flashing a scrap of paper or a twig, worked equally well. Tom was amazed by the facility he gained in just a few weeks. Still, the other Americans occasionally got a chance to talk to one another. He could not remember when he had talked to another American besides poor Pavone.

There was a lag time in prison news. New arrivals came in but were sequestered for weeks or months. Then it took a long interval to get them into the tap-code circuit. Once that was done, they were pumped for all news of home, not only political events, such as President Johnson ordering a halt to the bombing of North Vietnam.

The bombing halt was inexplicable to Tom. He knew that it was intended to send a signal to Hanoi that negotiations might be preferable to further bombing, but it missed its mark. The halt gave the North Vietnamese an immense boost to their morale. Instead of interpreting it as a gesture of peace, a possible basis for negotiations, they saw it properly as a sign of weakness. The North Vietnamese very sensibly used the “time-out” to vastly strengthen their anti-aircraft artillery and surface-to-air-missile strength, especially along the southern portions of the infamous Ho Chi Minh Trail.

Pavone was not adapting well. Tom feared that his last beating had caused some brain damage. Pavone could do the tap code only if he went so slowly that it was agonizing for the party on the other end and too often interrupted by a passing guard.

The communication, primitive as it was, was essential for security and morale. Just knowing who some of the other prisoners were made a lot of difference. Knowing how long they had been here was not. A Navy A-4 pilot, Ev Alvarez—Alvey, they called him—was the first American shot down, and had been a prisoner since 1964. Most of the names were unfamiliar to Tom. There was no reason to know the Navy pilots, but among the Air Force pilots the only name he recognized was that of Robby Risner, an ace in Korea whom Tom had flown with on more than one occasion. Most of the other men were younger, and he did not recognize their names.

Despite the mindless beatings and torture that had been meted out to him, Tom was still defiant, his resolve stiffened by the painfully tapped-out stories of Alvarez’s and Risner’s epic resistance to torture. Risner had been tortured continuously for twenty-six days and gave up nothing. Tom swore that if Robby could do it, he could, too.

Tom was amazed by the general optimism of the prisoners. Most of the tap-code conversations related to either resisting or the prospects of going home. There were few complaints about the wretched food and the uncertain length of their stay, although sometimes they give in to describe a fantasy meal. Contemptuous but apt names for the guards were coined, as in “Dipshit,” “Eagle,” “Cat,” and “Rabbit,” and these were the subject of usually wry jokes.

Tom learned early on that face was extraordinarily important to the Vietnamese and that it was wise always to be polite no matter how stressful the situation.

Pavone and he had been kept isolated for their entire stay, but he knew from the tapped “office gossip” that they would be meeting some of the others soon. Half the tapped messages concerned this new sense of change, and no one could tell whether it was for good or ill.

With the relaxation of the beatings there came a new phenomenon, the utter boredom of being confined to a tiny cell with nothing to read. Tom knew how much he owed Pavone—his life, for openers—and busied himself caring for him. But it left time for thought and self-reproach. Tom now spent hours grieving that he had been so selfish as to leave Nancy with V.R., not because of the discomfort of being a POW, but because they must be suffering not knowing his fate. He also regretted his attitude toward Rodriquez. Tom’s anger had made his father’s life much more difficult than it should have been, for no reason other than jealousy, perhaps, or a desire to protect his turf.

But even in prison he could take satisfaction for the way in which he had turned the Sixth Tactical Fighter Wing around, converting it from a poorly performing, low-morale outfit into one that was, in current tap-code parlance, “S.H.” for “shit hot.” He remembered with pleasure breaking the back of the North Vietnamese MiG-21 strength with Operation Toro, even though that was now long years ago. He didn’t dwell on it because of an irrational fear that the enemy might somehow pick up on his thoughts and torture him to reveal details.

Almost on cue, he heard the sound of footsteps in the hall, and the usual visceral fear gripped him. He waited hopefully for the sound of another door being opened, realizing he was wishing punishment for someone else but not able to resist doing so. Then he heard what all prisoners dreaded—the turn of the key in the lock.

It was Fidel, with two guards.

“This time you will talk.”

Tom pulled himself to his feet. The two guards grabbed him by the arms and forced him to run down the hallway, the Cuban following slowly behind, knowing that a prisoner’s apprehension was a key element of successful torture.

It started simply enough. The cell was about fifteen feet square, with a desk and table at one side. In the center of the room, directly under a suspended electric light, a bare bulb, a white circle about two feet in diameter was painted on the floor.

The guards deposited him on the circle and the Cuban barked, “Stand at attention. Do not move out of the circle.” He spoke in a strangely accented Vietnamese to the two guards, who took up positions in front and in back of Tom. Fidel then left the room.

Though nothing had been said, Tom had learned from the tap-code circuit that stepping outside of the circle would be punished by blows from the long thin, round sticks carried by the guard. They were like pool cue sticks but not tapered and operated more as a cat-o’-ninetails than a two-by-four. Supple, they tended to chew up the flesh rather than break bones.

Like many of the other prisoners, Tom had long since turned to prayer, and never more than when under this sort of acute stress. He ran through the prayers he remembered. The Lord’s Prayer, both the Catholic and the Protestant versions. Hail Marys by the score. And most often, most ardently, Acts of Contrition.

Tom kept his eyes focused on a light spot in the paint on the wall opposite him. He flexed his toes and his knees as unobtrusively as possible, tried to move his muscles without obviously breaking the posture of being at attention. Memories of the old Charles Atlas system of dynamic tension came to him, and he tried working one muscle against another internally, without external movements. Pressure built in his bladder and he felt his bowels turning to water.

He put up his hand and said, “Latrine,” and the guard on his right jabbed his stick into Tom’s belly. He voided, and the guards roared, it was forbidden, and they both picked up a baseball stance, setting their feet, whipping their sticks back behind them, then simultaneously striking him front and back.

The pain ripped through Tom and he staggered back. The guard on the right stepped forward and swung again. Tom sidestepped, grabbed the stick, and struck the smaller man across the throat with it. He turned to hit the other guard, who dropped his stick and ran from the room screaming, slamming the door behind him.

Within a minute, the door burst open again, the burly Cuban leading the way. He charged directly into Tom, slamming him into the wall, knocking the wind from him.

The Cuban then stood over Tom and began kicking methodically, moving up and down his body with his boots as if he were playing a marimba, dealing out the punishment with a fierce gleam of pleasure in his eye. The pain was excruciating. Fidel knew where Tom had been most injured and kicked those places—his back, his arms and legs, with greater ferocity.