NINETEEN
They had left Lossiemouth Royal Air Force Base in Scotland, heading southeast, under the cover of a drenching rain and low overcast skies. The first sonic boom was sixty seconds after takeoff, where only a few fishermen and whales in the North Sea heard it. They stayed at high altitude and at Mach-two, flying in the same jet airways as the Concorde and other military flights, until over the Atlantic far off the coast of Spain, where the flight rendezvoused with a special U.S. Air Force KC-10 Extender aerial tanker. After fifteen minutes, fully fueled, the aircraft turned eastbound again, and let the throttles loose. Passing Mach-two, the normal turboramjet engines were shut down, and the ramjet engines were engaged. Now, twenty minutes and fifteen hundred miles later, they were screaming over the Adriatic at an altitude of one hundred thousand feet.
Every mission in the United States Air Force’s newest reconnaissance aircraft, the SR-91A Aurora, was not only an aviation record-setter — it was a totally new experience for mankind. The Aurora was a large, triangular-shaped aircraft made entirely of heat-resistant composite materials — the fuselage was both a lifting body, like a giant one-piece wing, and was also a critical component of the aircraft’s combined-cycle ramjet engines. Most of the 135-foot-long, 75-foot wide, three-hundred-thousand-pound gross weight aircraft was fuel — but not JP-4 jet fuel or even JP-7 high-flashpoint fuel as used in the Aurora’s predecessor, the SR-71 Blackbird, but supercooled liquid methane. It was the fastest air-breathing machine ever built.
For takeoff from Lossiemouth, the SR-91A burned gaseous methane mixed with liquid oxygen through the four large engine ducts on the bottom of the aircraft, much like the liquid-fueled engines on the Space Shuttle. At Mach-2.5, or two and a half times the speed of sound, the liquid oxygen would gradually be shut off, the rocket nozzles retracted, and the engines would switch to pure ramjet operation. A ramjet was a virtual hollow tube with a bulged interior that would compress incoming air like a giant jet turbine compressor; then methane fuel would be added and the mixture burned. The resulting thrust was four times more powerful than any other existing aircraft — Aurora was more like a spacecraft at that point. One more refueling over the Arabian Sea, and on to the destination in Okinawa, Japan. Upon approach to landing, the ramjet engines would be shut down, the turboramjet engines restarted, and a “normal” approach and landing — if a five-hundred-mile-long, two-hundred-mile-per-hour straight-in approach to landing could be considered normal — and the mission would be over.
In that mission, the three-person crew would have encircled one-third of the Earth in about three hours, and photographed over seven million square miles of the Earth’s surface, transmitting the imagery via satellite to the Defense Intelligence Agency in Virginia. The pictures — synthetic aperture radar, long-range oblique optical, digital charged-coupled device optical, and infrared linescan — along with data from dozens of electronic sensors, would be developed and analyzed long before the Aurora was parked in a special hangar at Okinawa, allowed to cool off — its skin temperature would easily exceed a thousand degrees Fahrenheit, and it would take about twenty minutes before anyone could even approach the plane — and the space-suited crew finally taken off the plane. The next day, another series of recon missions, more records set, and a final landing at their home base at Beale AFB, California.
It was often said by proponents of the SR-91A Aurora that crewmen were an unnecessary redundancy — everything done on Aurora, from takeoff to landing to all reconnaissance and navigation work, was fully computerized. So when the electromagnetic and particle sensors aboard Aurora went crazy as it passed over the Adriatic Sea, the reconnaissance computer merely recorded the data, reset itself, did a complete self-test of its millions of computer chips and circuits, and began recording more information, automatically repeating the process six times a second. There was no report to the human occupants, no warning, no flight plan alterations.
It was as if it were perfectly normal, an everyday routine occurrence, for a half-dozen solar flares to erupt simultaneously — on the surface of the Earth, over Eastern Europe.
“Whoa, baby!” Air Force Major Marty Pugh, the engineer and RSO (Reconnaissance Systems Operator), called out over interphone. Although the plane’s cockpit was fully pressurized, all of Aurora’s crewmembers wore pressure suits, like the astronauts they were, and they were strapped so securely in place that movement was all but impossible. Very little talking was ever done during the high-altitude, high-speed portion of the flight, so when something happened, an excited voice got instant attention from everyone. “Hey, I got some particle energy readings that just jumped off the scale.”
“Copy,” Colonel Randall Shaw, the mission commander, replied. “I’m running a flight control check, Snap. Stand by.” He got two clicks on the microphone from the aircraft commander, Graham “Snap” Mondy, who merely positioned his hands a bit closer to the side-mounted control stick and throttles. In a conventional aircraft, a flight control check would entail moving the stick, jockeying the throttles, perhaps turning off the autopilot and making a few gentle turns. Not in Aurora — a gentle turn might take them off course by two hundred miles, and flying without an autopilot at Mach-six could turn them into a blazing meteor in seconds. The flight control check was a simple voice command and a two-second self-check in which the flight control computer checked all of its circuits. “Check complete,” Shaw reported. “In the green.” Two more clicks meant that Mondy confirmed the report.
“Some shit is really going down there off to the north,” Pugh said. In the fifteen seconds between his first and second sentence, Aurora had traveled twenty miles, and the sensors had turned their attention to Croatia, Bosnia, Serbia, and was getting ready to take pictures of Greece, Turkey, and the eastern Mediterranean. “You guys see anything out there at your ten o’clock?”
Looking out the window in Aurora was usually an exercise in frustration. The hull glowed so brightly from the heat that it washed out much of the view, and ground features zipped by so fast that even prominent landmarks like a city at night or the Himalayas went by before you had a chance to say, “Look at the Himalayas.” But Colonel Mondy swiveled his head around in the Teflon helmet bearings and looked to his left …
… just in time to see a tremendously bright burst of light, like a laser beam had just flashed directly in his eyes. He blinked his eyes and turned away, but the spot was still there, etched right into the center of his field of view. “Dammit,” Mondy said, “I just got flashed by something — an explosion, or a laser beam, something. Damn, I got a spot in my eyes.”
“Massive electrical discharge,” Pugh reported, “like a … a nuclear explosion or something … no thermal energy, but particle energy discharges nearly off the scale. Portside CCD optical cameras are out — whatever hit you, Colonel, got our digital cameras too. I’ve picked up five or six of them.”
“Not now, Marty,” Mondy interrupted irritably. He lifted his visor and tried to rub his eyes with his right index finger, but the bulky inflated gloves of the pressure suit didn’t do much good. “Dammit, Randy, I really got hurt here.”
“What is it, Colonel?”
“That flash … I got a dark brown spot in front of my eyes, and it’s not going away,” Mondy said. “I think I got a retinal burn or something. You have the aircraft.”