Fly Into Black
by Michael G. Crawford
Chapter Three
"Mother, this is Hen 1."
"Go Hen 1" replied the controller at Beale.
"Hen 1 outbound, angels six zero, on course" continued Major Deruse, his voice husky with the stress of watching the skin temperature, engine outlet temperature and the quivering fuel temperature. This was bird number 36038, one of the first birds off the line, and she still had the analog instrumentation.
He was flying her, not on a standard mission, but on a very special flight to Washington, D.C. His job was to pick up one Colonel Beckwith, the Commander of an Elite group of Special Forces types. His briefing had said that the man was to establish a new team of men in SEA - South East Asia - or Vietnam. Their job was not detailed to Deruse, his need-to-know only extending to the man's identity and destination.
Deruse would pick the Colonel up at Andrews, AFB, climb to max altitude and cruise at Max speed over the north pole to Clark AFB, Phillipines. There he would drop off the Colonel, who would ride an F-4 into "country". Meanwhile Deruse would take on a load of fuel, and then make two passes at 75,000 feet one over Haiphong Harbor and then one over the Capital proper. The camera mission was more like his typical run, but the landing made him nervous, as it probably did for his bosses back home. His RSO - Reconnaissance Systems Officer - would be welcomed on board of course, but only one SR-71 was usually out of the continental U.S. at any given time, and his landing in a far off place would have them all pacing in the Pentagon.
But this only implied that the Colonel's mission was important. Very important.
He was more happy refueling in the air, despite the yo-yo movements and jostling of low speed air-to-air refueling.
As he blasted across the U.S., he would receive a top off over Kansas, and then "glide" on into Andrews. The 8 hour flight would be boring, but he cared little for that. What bothered him was the thoughts that roamed through his mind on the blackbird missions he had flown.
After the initial speed demon feelings wore off, he had quickly tired of the routine. And routine it was, despite going faster and higher than 99 percent of the world's population. Last month he had logged 8 missions into Soviet Airspace, and 4 into Vietnam. In every case, he worried about what he would do for each of the even dozen emergencies they commonly found in flying the SR71.
For instance, engine shutdown. The highly instrumented and technical wizardry of the 71's engines sometimes betrayed her. With little notice, the bird could be flying along at Mach 3 when the electronics would sense some supposed borderline condtion, and shut one of the two engines down. The blackbird was a ground loving whore with two engines, with one she was a virtual grave digger. Twice in the last three months, he had spiraled in looking for a likely military base to park the bitch. Then he would stew there awhile waiting for his crew to arrive in their C-130 Hercules crammed full with diagnostic and repair gear.
Once they had found the trouble, he would taxi out to the runup area, fine tune the engines with the on board brains, then blast off back to Beale.
Of course he had a few good chuckles. He had played interceptor while testing the engines one day, and made a nice wide role around an F-106. The test pilot of the 106 was taking his maintenance commander for a job ride at Mach 2, the Delta Dart pointed "downhill" to get the extra help from gravity to cross the Mach 2 mark. Deruse had made a nice pass encircling the straining fighter, waggled his sluggish wings, then blasted off out of sight at top speed. Just then he had taken an "engine hit" and followed the 106 into their home at Castle AFB, near Merced, California.
After a few drinks with the 106 pilot and the Major in the back seat, he had made the decision that he needed to get back into the real Air Force again.
Forcing his attention back to the engine gauges, he wondered for the hundredth time if he was going to flame out again. He also wondered if this was the mission where the Soviets would choose to try to take him out with a missile. It hadn't happened since May 1, 1960 when his squadron had lost a U-2, and everyone was just waiting to be the next target. Of course, at Mach 3, and better than 80,000 feet, the SR71 was extremely difficult to catch.
With her anti-radar paint, and excellent ECM gear, she did not pose much of a target. But without his RSO to give him an extra pair of eyes, he was operating his Electronic Counter-Measures equipment from the Mission Console at his right hand. Not too elaborate, certainly not as fancy as the stuff the RSO had. But with Beckwith riding back there, Deruse would be have no choice, he would be flying blind.
He would just have to make do. He made a slight course correction as the VOR signal from one of the commercial navigational beacons suggested he was catching a little jet- stream movement. Not that it mattered much. Deruse tuned in the commercial shit just for good luck. The intertial guidance on the 71 was a new addition to the blackbird fleet, and the only new change to this bird besides the upgraded engines.
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Deruse returned once again from his thoughts, only a second or two having passed, the lightning fast flashback running through his high speed mind almost as fast as the blackbird he rode in.
Below him, the North Pole's frozen and glaciered surface reflected sunlight into his darkened sun- visor on his suit helmet. He stretched his tired legs, and fidgeted in the bulky suit. The AL-4 atmospheric life-support suit was identical to the suit worn by astronauts during the critical phases of space flight. The suit was designed for zero G, zero atmosphere and both extremes of temperature. With its outside air conditioning equipment it could keep a man alive in the most hostile environments imaginable.
Under the ejection seat in his individual escape module, the briefcase like mobile power pack and cooling unit could keep him comfortable for up to thirty minutes without outside assistance. This was the theoretical limit that he would have to wait for the aircraft to cool before making an emergency exit, or the length of a free fall back to breathable atmosphere if ejected. No one had ever ejected at Mach 3 though, and he had never met anyone who was willing to try. He knew there were a few astronauts who had, as special part of their training, had jumped from a balloon ride at 75,000 feet to test the suit and power pack combination. They had almost died before the full safety features of the suit were developed, and Deruse was damned glad they had. It gave him a sense of security, if one could be secure blasting along in this rocket.
"Legs are stiff" radioed Benny, his RSO.
"Yeah, me two. What say we stop for a drink at Hilda's?"
"Right! Maybe get into a couple of fights" the younger man replied.
They both laughed as they reminisced together, thinking of Hunk Hathaway, their former compatriot in the 9th SRW. Hunk had been an exceptionally thirsty type who had spent hours in the Beale Officer's Club telling tall stories of his favorite brotherl in Nome, Alaska. Hunk had been assigned to a RC-130H which eavesdropped on the Soviets from their Alaskan Air Base. After a 16 hour shift overflying the Bering Strait and buzzing Wales on the western most tip of Alaska, Hunk bragged about how he and his cohorts would lounge around listening to (or probably in Hunk's case telling) stories about gold mining in the far north. Deruse had heard stories of a spectacular dering-do game of peg, where 10 inch hunting knives were thrown by your opponent to a position where you had to stretch out your foot to pull it out. The game, known by many youngsters back home, took on especially gruesome differences according to Hunk.
In any case, thinking of Hunk for very long soon wiped the smiles of their faces. There friend had been lost in a SR71 crash a few years back, killed by the ever present engine problem in the SR71.
Deruse admitted to himself that there really wasn't an engine problem with the SR71, it was just that the bird was on the edge of technology. Every three or four months some new improvement came along for testing, and every six months the whole fleet got scheduled for the addition. Trying to get engines to perform as these were required to, cruising at Mach 3, with outlet temperatures beyond the fatigue temperature of the metals used, and with incredible pressure differentials seen at 75 to 90 thousand feet, it was a wonder that Lockheed could have kept the birds in the air this long.
As if he was predicting disaster, the master warning light lit up and a buzzer sounded as the RSO shouted, "We've got a jump in temp on the wings".
Deruse scanned the engine temps, but all looked well. With nothing else out of the ordinary, he cycled the test switch to reset the skin temperature sensor suite, but the alarm sounded again. He performed an elaborate twelve step test sequence to insure the sensor suite was fully operational, and when this showed no errors, he asked the on-board computer to calculate the predicted rise in fuel temperature to match the over-temp on the skin. The calculation showed there to be an expected 35 degree centigrade temp rise in the fuel, but scanning his fuel temp gauges, he saw that the fuel was still within normal ranges. This was reassuring, since the fuel, acting as the coolant for the wings, was obviously pointing at a malfunction in the starboard wing temperature cluster.
Following Deruse's calculations on the ship board computer, the RSO agreed, "Okay, I say we shut down the damn starboard suite."
"Yeah, suppose so. Is there any way we can just isolate which sensors are nuts and cut them out?"
"Hold on, I'll check." The RSO called up the diagnostic system and began a quick peek at the instructions for testing the sensor suites, hoping to see a clean way to interrupt the sensor array. But after a few minutes he answered, "Nix that idea."
"Okay, then drop the hammer on the alarm only. Let the rest of the suite run, ignore the light. Just keep a closer look on the damn indicators so we don't miss another coming on. I don't want to have a real over-temp sneak by us."
"Rog" agreed Benny whole-heartedly.
They spent the rest of their eight hour trip worrying about the damn thing, their stress level corkscrewing into the danger zone right along with the temp indicator. Especially after remembering Hunk. Superstition didn't help to resolve their concern, and only after landing and waiting an hour for the maintenance report did they find out that indeed one of the sensors had gone non-linear. What a bitch.
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It had been rough back then, he thought to himself now, as he ended his thoughts of the past. He had wandered off again, thinking of his past, while the Northrup rep was boring them all with the inane details of the current engine problems. In fact the man had just now grinned at Deruse, perhaps expecting some kind of reward for what they had found in the vibration problem.
"You say that the engine problem was expected?"
"Yes Colonel. We were waiting for your test results to confirm our theory."
"Yeah, well so why did the Master Alarms bring the computer down?"
"That can't happen" said the engineer with a finality in his voice that fired Deruse right out of his chair.
"Oh yeah, you chowder brain. It can happen and it did. The son-of-bitch shut down, I had no power, and was in a 6 G longitudal, yaw induced spin, that just about killed me. Look at my eyes, Fuck Face. That's not from a 3 G pushover, you SOB, that's from the recovery from that spin. You go back to the factory and tell your buddies that when the two engines get differential air pressures, the computer gets screwed up and does a REPRAM HALT 4. Then your 6 million dollar heap of microprocessors is about as reliable as a heap of shit."
With that little ego-satisfying outburst, Deruse stomped out of the briefing room. Stopping at the small waiting room for the General, he flopped down into a chair there, trying not to notice the General's secretary's legs.
The General wandered in a few minutes later, and flopped down in another chair nearby.
"Did he take it well?" asked Deruse.
"Well you were a little hard on 'em. You know if he quits, we have to start training another one all over again."
"Well that couldn't be too damn awful. This one's a real loser. Buddy told him that the Velcro would never stand up to a severe flight oscillation, but that bastard convinced him it would stand up to 8 Gs. Well maybe Velcro will stick at 8 Gs in any one direction. But it certainly didn't hold up there. Hell I was scrabbling all over the damn floorboards. If it would have gotten stuck in the rudder pedals, your 23 million dollar airplane and I would have parted company."
"Well glad to hear you admit you might have punched out. You had us all a little worried."
"No Shit. Had me worried too. First time I've been that scared in a while." Then raising his voice so the secratary could hear, "Maybe you can con Sally into taking me out for a little medicinal Scotch. Doctors orders, I'm grounded for three days."
The lady with the nice legs smiled and said, "Forget it lover boy. The General says you're off limits. Something to do with National Security and Rabid Animals. And since I haven't had my Rabies Booster, well, you know..."
Deruse winced at the jibe, but figured he might at least get a steak dinner with her, if he promised to go Dutch treat. The lady could be a real hard ass when she put her mind to it, but he respected her for it. It was tough being a secretary in the Military establishment and remain aloof from the Man/Woman relationships of the older chauvinists.
But despite her tough facade, she really was a dream to go out with. Her conversations could be as technical as you liked, or as intelligent in world politics or simply local affairs. In essence, she was his equal in every area except flying. And that, he knew, was only because she didn't have the interest. If she had, well...he would probably be working for her. Boy she would be a tough boss.
"Okay you win. General, permission to Dutch Treat the lady to O-Club. Want to join us?"
"No you kids go ahead. I have to sit through a Hilton dinner with Mr. Engineer back there. Somebody has to put salve on his wounds, or we'll have another green one in here come next test. Go easy on the Scotch, DD. I expect we'll have several more sessions on the bird before we kick you loose."
"Yes Sir" replied DD, while keeping his eyes fastened on Sally's, the two of them warming up for another hour or so of sarcastic banter.