Roaring Thunder: A Novel of the Jet Age (22 page)

It suddenly struck Shannon that neither of the men who had invented the jet engine independently but almost simultaneously, von Ohain and Whittle, had reaped any substantial rewards for having done so.

“This may seem personal, Dr. von Ohain, but I’d like to ask you how you were compensated for work. Do you mind?”

“No, not at all; it is all history now, anyway. When I started working for Dr. Heinkel he paid me a relatively low stipend, about what you would expect to pay a graduate student; it was three hundred Reichsmarks per month.” Shannon did a quick calculation—at the official exchange rate that was about $720 annually. Von Ohain went on. “After about a year, he raised the salary to five hundred Reichmarks a month. It was enough for a young unmarried man—I was working seven days a week, and had little time to spend money, anyway. Then he promised me a royalty on my engines as they were produced.”

Unashamed and having no need to know, Shannon pressed on, simply curious. “Was this significant?”

Von Ohain seemed genuinely amused. “It was significant but meaningless! After the war, in July 1945, he sent me a check for four hundred thousand Reichsmarks, which were, of course, by that time worth exactly nothing.” He laughed so spontaneously that Vance joined in, thinking,
The damn German bureaucrats treated him just like the English bureaucrats treated Whittle!
Then he decided that perhaps he could make von Ohain feel more at ease and perhaps comfort him a bit. They were going to be working together; they needed to be on good terms.

“You might be interested to know that your counterpart, Air Commodore Whittle, did little better. He received his pay as a serving officer, of course, and was given an award of one hundred thousand pounds. And that was it.”

He watched von Ohain’s reaction closely and was
pleased to see a combination of concern and genuine sympathy in his face.

“That is so unfair! His engine has been used by everyone, by Rolls-Royce, by de Havilland, even by your General Electric!” He made a sort of clucking sound and repeated, “That is so unfair!”

It was obvious to Shannon that von Ohain was not dissembling. He obviously felt genuine indignation that Whittle should have been treated so shabbily. It was also obvious that von Ohain had been keeping up on developments after the war.
And,
Shannon thought,
who would know better than von Ohain how much effort Whittle must have expended, how many difficulties had been put in his way?
The two men would have to meet at some point in the future—and when they did, Vance wanted to be there.

Vance probed again. “And not only those companies. The British government saw fit to sell fifty-five engines, thirty Rolls-Royce Nenes and twenty-five Rolls-Royce Derwents, to the Soviet Union. You can be sure that they will copy them down to the last safety wire.”

Von Ohain turned pale. “But that is not possible. How could anyone be so foolish? Do they not know what the Russians plan? They have great engineers of their own, but to give them Whittle’s engines is just impossible.”

Vance knew that unless von Ohain was the greatest actor in the world, he was anti-Soviet. Most Germans were, and with reason. Von Ohain’s reaction had another element to it, however—he was concerned about the injustice to Whittle as much as the effect on Western security.

There was a brief pause, each man lost in his own chain of thought, but Shannon soon got back to business, saying, “You did work for the U.S. Navy. I understand that engines you created for it were excellent, much more powerful than anything we have now.”

“Yes, that was my He S 011. Four years of development
went into it. But I’m glad that it never went into a Nazi warplane.”

This time he spoke more decisively. It was clear that he was sincere.

They chatted on and on and when Shannon glanced up at the clock he realized that they had talked for almost two hours and he had not written down a single note. Von Ohain was not just fascinating as an inventor, a brilliant physicist who had become an on-the-job trained engineer. He was also an innately charming human being to whom one immediately warmed. Shannon thought about inviting him to dinner, knowing Madeline would be delighted to meet him.

“I’m sorry, Dr. von Ohain, I know that you have other appointments in the building, and I’ve delayed you. Just one more thing, there is another gentleman arriving tomorrow, someone you undoubtedly know, Dr. Anselm Franz.”

Von Ohain’s face brightened. “Oh, good. He is a great man, a great engineer. Can you—”

Obviously unwilling to ask a favor on such short acquaintance, he caught himself.

“Go ahead, please; what is it?”

“If it is possible, can you place Dr. Franz in my barracks? I can help show him how things operate.”

“I’ll see to it.”

Smiling, bowing, von Ohain left for his next appointment.

Shannon sat back at his desk, his pencil tapping its surface, his mind racing. With people like von Ohain, Franz, and this rocket chap, von Braun, all coming to the United States, the prospects for aviation were looking up. The next few years would be decisive in terms of getting a new generation of jet aircraft built.

He looked at the paper in front of him and carefully lined out all but one name. “Aviation Consultants, Incorporated.” He’d just have to put his foot down with Made
line on this one; the Lord knew she won almost every other argument they had.

July 18, 1947, San Diego, California

It had started three months before as an affectionate joke by Madeline, an attempt to ingratiate herself with Tom and Harry, to break somehow through their reserve.

In her years at Convair, Madeline had made many friends, and one of the best of them was Luigi “Lou” Capestro, an engineer who served as Issac “Mac” Laddon’s right arm in designing a long line of Consolidated aircraft. Capestro, a big, jovial man with a contagious laugh, was responsible for the signature retractable floats on the Catalina and had been a major advocate for including the Davis wing in the B-24 design. Lou, for all his good humor, was rigidly proper and vainly tried to mask the warm spot in his heart he felt for Madeline, a disguise she and everyone else saw through at once. His feelings were in part simple physical attraction—Madeline was lovely; there was no denying it. He admired her also for her ability at work, having used her time and again to explain contract details to the surly Russians who regarded everyone at the plant with suspicion—everyone but Madeline, who simply charmed them. But she had done more. When his wife, Catherine, became ill in 1945, Madeline had spent hours with her, helping her through an illness that was largely due to her anxiety over her four sons, all in the service. Even though Madeline worked long hours at the plant, she managed to come by to cheer Catherine, sometimes going to Mass with her and the identical twin girls, Marie and Anna. Born on March 15, 1926, the two girls were stunning brunettes, petite but with a wild, ribald sense of humor that they tried to conceal from their parents and their brothers. Extremely close, the girls never went on single dates,
always insisting that they had to be together. No suitor for one ever had a problem finding a friend for the other.

Madeline learned that Tom and Harry were going to meet in La Jolla in April to make arrangements for the sale of the Paseo del Ocaso Street house their father had deeded over to them. It was easy to persuade Lou Capestro to throw a party for two sons of Vance Shannon, who had many friends throughout the firm. For a kicker, she arranged with Lou for Marie and Anna to be their blind dates, thinking that the contrast of the tall, blond Shannon boys and the tiny, brunette girls would be a pleasant joke for all, even though nothing could possibly come of it. The Shannons were totally preoccupied with aviation, and despite being Lou Capestro’s daughters, the girls were more than indifferent to flying and flyers; they were actively hostile, having been pursued relentlessly from the age of sixteen by naval aviators. There was a religious problem, too. Vance Shannon had been Catholic, but Margaret was an Episcopalian and the boys had been brought up in her faith. The Capestros were devout leading members of the Our Lady of the Rosary Church, which the Barnabite Fathers ran with an iron fist in a steel glove.

Lou never did things by halves, and he invited more than a hundred people from Convair for the evening at his big house on Guy Street in the Mission Hills. It overlooked the ever-growing Convair plant and had a nice view of the Point Loma peninsula.

Madeline wandered out on the porch, and to her left the sun was setting into San Diego. She found Vance sitting in a chair, watching the evening activity on the water. She joined him quietly, slipping her arm in his, and pointed to the hundreds of little boats, skiffs, barges, and motorboats that crisscrossed the bay like pedestrians on Fifth Avenue at noon.

“What do you think?”

Vance smiled and squeezed her arm with his. “What do I think? I think how in the hell do you always do
everything right? I would never have thought that you could pull a party for the boys out of the hat like this, even from Lou. This is fantastic.”

“We’d better go inside. You can’t chance looking standoffish at an Italian party.”

Vance went in and was soon engaged with Lou in a heated discussion over baseball, both men being ardent fans. Madeline circulated, as always, leaving smiles behind her as she went. Lou had not spared any expense. There were two bands, an enormous buffet catered personally by Mama Ghio of Anthony’s Seafood Grotto, and three strategically placed bars. One of these was dedicated to serving the currently popular “Atomic Depth Charge,” a potent combination of rum, gin, orange juice, and ginger ale. One was pleasant, two were dangerous to driving, and three were fatal to sexual inhibitions.

Madeline’s harmless joke had backfired at the introduction, where it was obvious that the Shannon boys were bowled over by the spectacular beauty of the twins, dressed alike in low-cut peach dresses. Marie and Anna were only a little harder to convince. By the end of their first dance, Tom was enchanted while Marie felt only that things were going better than she had believed they would. Anna was smitten by Harry, who, typically, was more reserved. None of it mattered. By the end of the second dance and the first Atomic Depth Charge, all the reservations were gone, along with many of the inhibitions. Before the evening was over, both couples believed themselves to be in love, and from that point on they were inseparable.

This posed a problem, as the Capestro sisters were well chaperoned by the Capestro brothers, all back from service in the Marines. The four brothers—Jasper, Augie, Sal, and Ross—were both openly menacing and ever-present until Tom and Harry proved their good intentions by buying engagement rings a month to the day after they met the twins.

The news rocked both families, especially the insistence of the young couples on marrying immediately, threatening to go to Mexico if an early date was not approved. To Vance Shannon’s astonishment and Madeline’s delight, both boys agreed to convert to Catholicism. They immediately began taking instructions and going to Mass. Lou Capestro assigned the conversion job as if it were a wartime rush order for armament to his old friend and drinking buddy Father William Trombley. Harry and Tom treated the instruction as if it were an aircraft manual and were ready for baptism by July 17.

The wedding had gone well. Tom’s and Harry’s reservations about Madeline evaporated in the light of the genuine affection in which she was held by the Capestro twins and by the inescapable fact that she had somehow engineered the whole happy transaction.

As the wedding reception drew to a close, Madeline was called on for a toast, and she responded with one she had been preparing since the two sets of twins had fallen mutually in love. A little unsteady from too much champagne, she rose and said:

“Here is to Anna, who has found her Marie in Harry;

Here is to Marie, who has found her Anna in Tom;

Here is to Tom, who has found his Harry in Marie . . .”

A wave of raucous laughter swept around the table with Lou yelling, “He’d better not find Harry in Marie!”

When the laughter and the cascade of increasingly ribald remarks had subsided, Tom and Harry spoke briefly together, and Harry stood up.

“It’s our turn now, Madeline.”

Tom and Harry filled their glasses and said in unison, “Here’s to Vance and Madeline; may the next wedding be yours.”

Smiling, Vance pulled Madeline to him. She backed away for an instant before kissing him. No one noticed her initial reticence but Vance. It troubled him. Something was wrong. Another man?

August 1, 1947, Wichita, Kansas

Sweating from his climb up the hangar stairs, Vance Shannon called his sons into the second-story office that the Massey Company had provided them at its factory building at its privately owned airport on the outskirts of Wichita. A whisper of wind blew the ninety-eight-degree heat through the open window, rearranging the dust on the ancient desks.

“Boys, I’m proud of you! Just married and you get the first—and only—contract that we have. But I’ve looked the airplane over, and I say that we back out. I don’t want you flying it.”

Tom raised his eyebrows at Harry. They had predicted as much. Their father had been concerned with their safety from the time they learned to ride two-wheel bicycles, and nothing would ever change him.

“Come on, Dad; we’ve been all over this. You are just spooked because we’re going to be making the first test flight, which strikes us as funny, because that’s how you supported us all your life.”

Harry chimed in. “You know yourself that Massey makes good aircraft—you used to fly us around the country in one.”

Vance shook his head. “That was then, and they were building conventional steel tube, wood, and fabric biplanes. This is now and this thing is a monstrosity.”

He went up to them; they were taller than he was now. He put his arms around them and guided them to the window that overlooked the factory floor. Below, ready to be rolled out for the test flight, was the Massey Double
Quad airliner. Workers were still scrambling over it, checking to be sure that every panel was closed, every screw tight, and nothing was leaking.