Bill headed for the metal staircase and descended into the boisterous throng. He shook hands as he made his way across the broad floor.
The craft into which Bill peered was smaller than he’d expected, but the cockpit was larger than a normal fighter aircraft’s. “This joystick,” the pilot sitting in the ejection seat below Bill lectured, “automatically switches from controlling your ailervators to the attitudinal thrusters based on air pressure and speed.”
“How does it fly?” Bill asked the chief test pilot.
“Well, sir,” replied the African-American colonel with a good-natured smile, “in the atmosphere I’d clearly rather be in an F-26. Of course, all we’ve had to date were unpowered dead drops from pretty low altitude. I’d say it glides a little better than the shuttle.”
“Did you know the pilot we lost on the drop last month?” Bill asked, then quickly amended his question. “I mean, of course you knew him.”
Without looking Bill in the eye, the pilot gave the answer with which he was comfortable. “Weather was minimum when the flight took off. Winds gusting thirty to forty-five. They flew around for about four hours before deciding to scrub. It was a key test, though, of the wing deployment system. Whether the hydraulics could deploy the wing from its stowed to its deployed position after reentry.” He glanced surreptitiously at Bill. “Best we could tell was that Doug accidentally hit the emergency drop lever.”
That wasn’t what Bill had heard in the official report. General Latham’s investigators had concluded that Major Douglas Crenshaw had violated range safety orders and gone ahead with the test flight. Latham had recommended that Crenshaw be court-martialed posthumously. Bill had instead awarded his young widow a medal.
“Have we fixed the hydraulic system?” Bill asked the colonel.
“I guess I’ll find out firsthand,” the smiling pilot answered, “next week.”
“Did the wind have anything to do with the crash?” Bill asked.
“Not with the hydraulics failing to deploy the wing, sir,” the colonel replied. “But there were stiff, gusting crosswinds at about twenty thousand when Doug tried to deploy the parasail.”
“I thought that parasail was supposed to be deployable at high speeds in case of battle damage to the spacecraft,” Bill noted.
“Yes sir, it is deployable at high speeds, but not at low altitude in the thicker atmosphere.” He looked up at Bill. “Besides, sir, I think I can speak for the test pilot corps in saying that none of us likes the parasail. We’d rather try to fly the Falcon in — battle damage and all — than pop that parasail. Doug’s ejection seat got fouled in the goddamn risers!” the man said before apologizing. “It’s just extra weight, sir. I’d rather have more fuel, oxygen, and ammo.”
Bill turned to the chief designer of the XF-36 Fighting Falcon, who immediately became defensive. “The parasail is just like every other system on the vehicle, sir. We’re working out the bugs, but we feel that the chute is a vital safety feature, Mr. President.”
“Don’t you think you ought to listen to the men and women who’ll be flying the aircraft?” Bill suggested. “They’re the ones who’re going to be heading into combat strapped into this thing.”
The engineer frowned, averted his gaze, and said, “We do have a team looking into the possibility of eliminating the parasail rescue system, sir.”
Bill nodded and stood upright. Gathered around the aircraft were the heads of the various departments working night and day on the crash program. The stubby left wing beneath Bill was deployed into the traditional “locked” or “aircraft” mode. The wing on the opposite side was upright and swept forward to the nose of the XF-36 in the “stowed” or “spacecraft” position. The titanium reactive armor on its underside would shield the craft as it streaked through shrapnel from Chinese antisatellite weapons.
But the craft’s principal defensive system was its maneuverability. Its unpainted, pewter-colored fuselage bristled with nozzles from its control jets. And from beneath the twin vertical stabilizers at the rear protruded two enormous hybrid engine exhausts. In space, the engines were liquid-fueled rocket motors. In the atmosphere, they were jets that breathed air through a giant intake that was slung under the fuselage. The air intake doubled as a reentry heat shield and gaye the XF-36 its name — the Falcon — because of its vague similarity to the old F-16, which last bore that name. But any similarities of the new spacecraft to prior combat aircraft ended with that lone intake. The ambitious vehicle was not intended to be a test platform for its half-dozen bleeding-edge technologies. It was intended to fly into combat, and soon.
“How long,” Bill asked to the gathering of men and women about the room, “until the Falcon will be operational?”
The engineer beside Bill — the head designer — cleared his throat, adjusted his glasses, and looked around to ensure that no one else intended to answer. “Three years, sir.” Bill’s head shot to the man. “Uhm, maybe, two, if we cut some corners.”
Bill was incensed. Two or three years! They didn’t have that long! It was the same estimate that the same man had given him when he’d asked the same question six months before when they’d had only a metal cage in the rough shape of the magnificent machine beneath him.
The chief test pilot loosed a sigh as he looked not at the engineer but at the brightly lit controls that ringed his cockpit. The sound that he’d made — evincing the same frustration that Bill felt — had been amplified by the total silence in the underground hangar.
“Do I hear any other estimates of when this vehicle will be certified airworthy?” Bill asked, staring down at the colonel. The man — jaw bulging — glared up at his commander in chief. Bill felt a sudden easing of his own aggravation on seeing the pilot’s even hotter anger. “Yes?” Bill asked the still silent colonel.
“This is a war, sir,” the man replied. “I’m ready to fly.” There was an eruption of objections from a dozen lab-coated experts, who were silenced by the pilot’s shouts. “We’ve got propulsion, guidance, and weapons!”
“Mr. President,” the chief designer said in a plaintive voice, “the XF-36 project dwarfs the arsenal ship construction program, not in size of budget, but in complexity. The only comparable program in man’s history was the Manhattan Project. Now, when you authorized us to get started, we identified over 10 million discrete milestones of research, design, construction, testing, and debugging. On your orders, we reduced that list by cutting corners everywhere that we possibly could to 2 million line items that are clearly set out along a critical path that is currently being followed by 250 subcontractors and over 100,000 engineers, scientists, and workers all across the country. For your information, we’ve passed a little under half those milestones!”
The man was growing red-faced and increasingly certain of his response.
“If we launch now,” he continued, “we’ll lose vehicles, pilots, and the element of surprise. The Chinese will begin working on counterweapons before our vehicle has even become useful!”
Bill wanted so badly to order one of the fighters to overfly China. To soar thousands of miles above the maximum range of their current antisatellite weapons, flaunting America’s technological superiority. It would be a morale boost to America and its embattled army, and there were those among the few who knew about the program who thought that morale was all it was for.