Hypersonic Thunder: A Novel of the Jet Age Read Online Free PDF

in a fiery explosion. Kozlov fought with the now-useless controls for the last few seconds of his life, cursing Tupolev for the stupid changes that were killing him.
    The big SST broke apart as it fell, separating into incandescent chunks of wing, engines, and fuselage that rained on the village of Goussainville, engulfing homes in a deluge of flaming fuel.
    Tupolev and the still-silent crowd watched the twenty-second drama climax as parts from the transport continued to fall, spreading the rain of fire and debris. There was no need for an accident investigation. He knew in his heart that he was at fault. The rewired auto-stabilization unit had caused the breakup. Six men dead in the airplane, and God only knew how many more on the ground. And all his fault, his fault alone. He should have listened to Kozlov.
    He wondered if his father was watching down. He hoped not.

CHAPTER TWO
     
    THE PASSING PARADE : Oil prices force 55mph speed limit; Symbionese Liberation Army captures, influences Patty Hearst; Watergate scandal flourishes; Peter Benchley’s Jaws published; Solzhenitsyn exiled for The Gulag Archipelago ; Palestine terrorists kill 21 schoolchildren; Isabel Perón rules in Argentina; President Nixon resigns; Haile Selassie overthrown in Ethiopia; President Ford pardons Nixon; Upstairs, Downstairs big television hit; Jimmy Connors, Chris Evert tops in tennis.
     
    February 2, 1974
Edwards Air Force Base, California
     
    S unk deep in thought, Bob Rodriquez sat hunched in the back of the dusty staff car, worrying about today’s flight. So much depended on it; for him, for his company, but even more so, for Steve O’Malley, whose career was riding on its success or failure.
    As they rumbled along at the prescribed fifteen miles per hour ramp speed, they passed an almost complete catalog of Air Force aircraft—bombers, fighters, transports, helicopters—spotted along the Edwards ramp. Most of them were sitting idle, some with panels off or engine bays open, with a few attended by ground crews preparing them for today’s tests. His particular interest, General Dynamics’s new YF-16, was still in the hangar, waiting for its first official flight.
    Rodriquez knew that the test pilot, Phil Oestricher, was already there, making the minute preflight inspection that he always conducted,talking quietly with the GD mechanics who had inspected everything twice already, but understood Phil’s interest and had no objection to their work being so intently surveyed. O’Malley would be walking right behind him, double-checking the double check.
    “Jesus!”
    The startled driver glanced back in the mirror to see Rodriquez slapping his forehead.
    “You OK, Mr. Rodriquez?”
    “Sorry, I’m just such a jerk! I promised to call my ex-wife last night and I forgot to.”
    The driver shrugged. Everybody was an idiot if this was all it took.
    “You can call from the hangar, can’t you?”
    “No, not now, too late, she’s on her way to New York. Maybe I can catch her tonight.”
    He continued to flagellate himself in the usual manner, knowing that things like this were the very reason that his beloved wife Mae was divorcing him. Who wouldn’t divorce an insensitive clod like him?
    As he neared the huge hangar, he began to reflect on O’Malley and his presence here today. Instead of being on the line at Edwards, O’Malley was supposed to be on the Hill, flogging the GPS program, doing the hard-sell work he hated, visiting congressional staffers, reminding them of the program’s possibilities, but, more important, pointing out to them how many jobs it would create in their congressman’s district. That was the critical element; the staffers wanted their man reelected, to protect their own jobs, and that meant getting votes. The only real way to get votes was to demonstrate that the congressman was serving his district well when it came to the pork being dispensed from Washington.
    Nobody knew this better than O’Malley’s boss,