Supersonic Thunder: A Novel of the Jet Age (18 page)

The only fly in the ointment was the difficulty of working with Bill Lear, senior. An unpredictable bear of a boss, he was demanding and contentious one minute, easygoing and amiable the next. Lear surrounded himself with the top people money could buy—and then expected them to earn their salaries and more. It was exhilarating being around him, but exhausting if he was challenging your ideas—and he always was.

Tom’s assignment today was especially tough, bailing Lear out of a jam with his board of directors. The Learjet was supposed to be Bill Lear’s private project, totally unrelated to Lear, Incorporated, but Bill Lear had raided his corporation’s resources to fund the Learjet and “borrowed” many of its top engineers. The board was justifiably concerned—they were as liable as Lear, and they had to take action. Bill Lear didn’t see it that way. He had created both firms, and the rules be damned!

Ordinarily, his son, Bill Junior, would have represented him, but they were both cut from the same bolt of cloth, and Lear was wise enough to know it. He’d asked Tom to brief the board on the Learjet’s potential, in the hope that he could convince them that it was time and money well spent. And he gave Tom a backup position. If the board didn’t agree with him, he was to tell them that Lear would sell out his entire stock in the existing organization and build the Learjet with his own funds.

The board had made its position quite clear to Tom in some preliminary correspondence. They felt the Learjet was far too risky and expensive. The money needed to design, build, and certify an executive jet was beyond the capacity of Lear, Incorporated. Many of the board members could remember how much money the firm had lost on the Learstar. They knew it could not survive creating a Learjet, successful or not.

Tom groaned inwardly. The board of directors didn’t know the half of it. Things were also not going well in Switzerland, where the workers had a leisurely attitude to the job and were totally unresponsive to Bill Lear’s brand of driving enthusiasm. As a result, the Learjet was months behind schedule. The only bright spot was the release of the General Electric CJ610 turbojets for civilian use. They were perfect for the Learjet, powerful, economic, and with a world of military experience behind them.

And that’s how Tom started the briefing! “Gentlemen, I’m happy to tell you that the most important element of the Learjet project that was still pending has been resolved. The government has released General Electric’s little turbojet for public use, and it is perfect for the Learjet.”

This went over well, and he went on. “As we surmised, the competition is simply not there. Morane Saulnier is having trouble selling its Paris jet, and to my knowledge, Aero Commander does not have one order for its new Jet Commander. That, incidentally, is a much bigger airplane, just a piston-engine design with jet engines applied to it. Learjet, on the other hand, has more than a dozen firm orders, and it looks like we will hit one hundred before the first one flies.”

He knew this was probably sheer puffery, insisted on by Bill Lear, and while Tom doubted it, he could not say for certain that it was not true.

Talking swiftly, Tom went on to the more painful discussion of the Learjet production, stunning them with the announcement: “Mr. Lear has decided to move production of the Learjet from Switzerland to the United States. Labor costs are higher here, but the workers are far more productive. He has studied several possible venues, and will make an announcement of his choice at the Reading Air Show this summer.”

The room exploded in outrage. Tom had been in combat in two wars and rarely felt more in danger. Talk about killing the messenger.

Al Handschumaker, an old friend of Bill Lear since the war, ran the company in his absence and was in the process of trying to rehabilitate its image on Wall Street, where Lear’s personal eccentricities had depressed the firm’s stock value. Al stood up and called a fifteen-minute recess, grabbed Tom by the arm, and took him into his own office, slamming the door.

“Tom, I know it’s not your fault, but this is no way to run a company. What is Bill thinking of?”

Tom couldn’t dissemble with Handschumaker, a smart, tough, well-intentioned man who liked Lear and was personally loyal to him. Tom said, “Bill needs ten million dollars to get the aircraft factory started, and he needs it now. He wants to merge the two companies, and concentrate on production of the Learjet.”

“There’s no way that Lear, Incorporated, can get in the airplanebuilding business. He knows that better than I do. We don’t have the capital, the expertise, the plant, anything. But you tell Bill that if he wants ten million, he can have it. Tell him to agree to sell his shares. I’ve got a merger cooking with the Siegler Corporation. They’ll merge with Lear, Incorporated—but not if Lear is part of the deal. He has to sell out completely.”

Tom knew Bill Lear well enough to ask the right question: “Will that get him his ten million?”

“I’m sure it will. Hold on a second.”

Tobacco-stained fingers lighting a cigarette in the process, Handschumaker grabbed some papers and went to an old-fashioned crank-style calculator, an anomaly in a business now dedicated almost exclusively to electronics. He checked a few numbers and cranked away.

“Bill has about four hundred and seventy thousand shares of Lear, Incorporated. I think I can get Siegler to cough up at least twenty-two dollars a share. That puts him at a little over ten million. But he has some trust funds, for Moya and the kids, on the books at less than a million. I’ll insist that they get the same price, and that will net him another two million, more than a million pure profit.”

Tom was scribbling notes.

“Don’t bother; I’ll write this all out for you. The important thing is that Bill has to realize it will involve selling his name, too; it will be Siegler-Lear, or Lear-Siegler or something. But the big thing is, Bill Lear has to be completely gone from Lear, Incorporated.”

Unexpectedly, tears welled in Handschumaker’s eyes. “Tom, I hate this. It was more fun when we were making radios and autopilots. But Bill is killing the company. If he goes on, he won’t have Lear, Incorporated, or Learjet, either one. He is a genius, but he’s impossible to work for in a modern corporation.”

Tom nodded and stood up. “I want to send him a wire, with all this down on paper so that’s there no chance of his misunderstanding. Too much depends on him understanding it exactly the way you’ve laid it out.”

CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

August 21, 1962

Cambridge, Massachusetts

T
he weather was beautiful, the company’s campus was gorgeous, green as no factory could be in California, and Vance hated all of it. He would not have come at all, but Kelly Johnson was thinking light-years ahead as usual, and he had a new project that needed attention. Vance shook his head as he considered it—a miniature A-12, unmanned, was going to be carried on the back of an A-12 like a possum carries its babies. The A-12 would launch the miniature—they were calling it the D-21 for some reason—and it would fly a mission over hostile country, take photos, then go to a pre-designated point to drop the camera for retrieval. The D-21 would then self-destruct. It was a dangerous mission. The D-21 was powered by a ramjet and was to be launched at Mach 3.0, a speed where a misplaced rivet could cause a catastrophe, much less a complicated pyrotechnic launch system. Vance had tried to point out the hazards in his first conversation with Kelly but was overruled—there had to be some means of overflying the Soviet Union and China without the risk of the pilot becoming another Gary Powers, shot down and captured.

That’s why they were here at the Metaloid Company. The unimaginably expensive concept depended upon the incredible Hycon camera, which in the D-21 in turn depended upon special fasteners manufactured by Metaloid. These were failing at an astounding rate, and there was no apparent reason for it. The Hycon cameras had a great track record, working like a charm on the U-2. It was the best highresolution high-altitude camera in the world, but the model designed for the D-21 was having one problem after another during testing, and all the problems could be traced back to Metaloid parts.

Bob Rodriquez was lead on the project, but for the first time, he was not achieving what he set out to do. Vance didn’t know enough about camera engineering to second-guess him but wanted to meet the Metaloid project officers and get a reading on them and on their relationship with Bob.

Ironically, the flight out had given him more insight into Bob than he had imagined, almost more than he could handle. Although he was young, bitter about the treatment he felt he had received from the Air Force, and socially totally unconventional, Rodriquez had an unusually mature view of Aviation Consultants, the business Vance founded so many years ago. Vance hated the term “visionary.” It implied a mystical quality, and he knew that really brilliant long-range engineering like that of Kelly Johnson consisted of the fabled 1 percent inspiration and 99 percent perspiration.

Yet Rodriquez was visionary, laying out a path to the future for the company that was breathtaking, an expansion into technologies that were just beginning to be talked about in the journals. Bob spoke with passion about still having to do engineering with slide rules and calculators when there was a revolution in computers just around the corner. He was using words that he had to define more than once to Vance—like “hard drives,” “transistors,” “chips,” meaningless terms to a man brought up on “horsepower,” “wing area,” and “speed.”

Bob was conversant with the terms, while Vance was barely aware of the companies creating them. He had heard of IBM, of course, and Texas Instruments, but Bob was referring to Digital Equipment, Fairchild Semiconductor, and others that were unknown to him.

But there was another dimension to their conversation, unspoken but there nevertheless. Without saying a single word, Bob made it evident that this new era in the world of electronics was beyond the capacities of both Tom and Harry, so it raised immediately the question of succession.

And succession was heavy on Vance’s mind since his episode at Groom Lake the previous April. By coincidence, his annual flight physical came in the following month, and old Dr. Parry damn near took him off flying status, saying that the EKG showed some sort of anomaly. It took all of Vance’s persuasive powers, and a promise to check back in for another physical in December, to keep from failing his flight physical.

No one knew better than himself how foolish he was being. He didn’t need to fly anymore. He had more than twenty thousand hours’ flying time and could easily have given it up. But it was like sex; he was no longer as potent as he had once been, but he was damned if he was going to toss in the towel on that end anytime soon. Laughing to himself, he thought,
Well, with flying, I can always have another pilot along. Can’t do that with sex.

Vance’s distaste for the company resurfaced as they went through the process of signing in and getting identification badges for their day in the plant. On the West Coast, the reception desks always had beautiful young women handling functions like this. They were able to laugh or to flirt harmlessly, and they gave a decent start to a day sure to be dull. Here the signing in was handled by an officious middle-aged man, obviously overqualified for the job and resentful at having to perform it. He made the ID badges seem more like passports to prison than introductions to the plant.

The sense of hostility was emphasized when a severely dressed young secretary pounded down the hallway, her low-heel shoes rattling the expressionist paintings on the walls. Expressionist paintings! By God, on the West Coast they’d have pictures of good-looking airplanes on the walls. Sorrowfully, Vance’s mind went back to the beautiful young women at Boeing, Lockheed, Convair, everywhere, who were as efficient as they were pretty. One was not necessarily the enemy of the other. Her voice was coolly antiseptic as she told them, “Follow me please. Dr. Peterson is waiting in the conference room.”

Vance reacted badly again; the only people he liked to call “Doctor” were medical men like Doc Parry. In Vance’s world, engineering doctorates didn’t have the same cachet—you proved your engineering merit in your products, not on parchments hung on the wall.

There were half a dozen scientists and engineers waiting for them in the conference room, and as they went through the introductions Vance noted a curious split in their attitudes. Four were genuinely friendly and obviously had a high regard for Bob. Two of these had even heard of Vance and talked about some of his exploits.

Dr. Melville Peterson and his assistant, Dr. Arnold Koenig, were something else. They were cold to Bob, barely acknowledging him, and gave Vance a cold-fish handshake that clearly said,
If you are with him, we are not with you.

Vance could not fault the briefing, however. They were smart enough to recognize that he was new to the project, and they took it from ground zero, emphasizing the care with which they had modified the basic engineering of the Metaloid fasteners used in the U-2 to adapt to the D-21. They also clearly conveyed that they were not in the habit of being wrong and implied that the apparent failure must be in the Lockheed test procedures or test facilities. This trod directly on Vance’s area of expertise, and ego aside, he knew that the test procedures were valid.

There was something else going on. An old veteran of corporate games, Shannon saw that Peterson and Koenig knew something that they were not revealing, and he sensed that it had to do with Bob. Peterson was tall and slim, with a Yankee horse face that belied his southern accent. Koenig was almost the opposite, short, soft, but with a similar accent. Peterson didn’t quite say “you-all” but came close enough.

The meeting seemed to be ending inconclusively when Shannon stood up, saying, “I think this pretty well covers all we can do here. But I’d like to have a closed session with Dr. Peterson and Dr. Koenig, if I may.”