Chapter Five
Thursday 7:30 a.m.
Andrei Petrovich Androv, director of propulsion systems, gazed out across the windy strait, feeling the chill of the sea air cut through his fur-lined trench coat.
Physically, he was almost mythic, a giant from Grimms' fairy tales. He had a heavy face nature should wish on no man, tousled gray hair, bushy eyebrows eternally cocked in skepticism, and a powerful taste for Beethoven's string quartets, which he played incessantly in the instrument room. He bore, in fact, more than a passing resemblance to that aging, half-mad genius. Now seventy-one, he, too, possessed a monumental mind and was acknowledged worldwide as the founding intellect behind the Soviet space program.
Yes, he was thinking, this location had been ideal. Here in remote Hokkaido they had constructed a high-security facility surrounded by wind-swept wilderness-virgin forests and snow-covered volcanoes. Even for him, a man long used to the harsh winters of Baikonur, the almost Siberian weather along this coast was intimidating. This was the most isolated, austere, and yes, lonely spot he'd ever known.
But it was the perfect site. Mino Industries had insisted, rightly, on this northernmost point of Japan for the facility, here in a national park on Cape Soya, fifty kilometers west of Wakkanai. The facility itself had been constructed entirely underground, excavated beneath this rocky northern coast in order to be secure and invisible to satellite reconnaisance, both Soviet and American. Such excessive precautions, hardly a problem in the New Mexico desert when the first atomic bomb was tested, were the order of the day in this new era of space photography. Nowadays you even had to find ways to mask telltale waste heat expulsion, which always betrayed an unmistakable infrared signature.
In that respect, too, their choice of this spot was strategic, with the freezing currents of the La Perouse Strait between northern Hokkaido and Sakhalin providing a continuous and thermally stable 12 degrees Celsius feed for the heat exchangers. Only the ten-thousand-meter test runway could not be concealed full-time, but it had been carefully camouflaged and was used only at night.
A massive breaker crashed against the rocks at the north end of the shore, sending ice-flecked spray upward into the morning mist. As he watched the freezing cloud and felt its ice collecting on his cheeks, he glanced at his watch. It was seven-forty. He took one last survey of the choppy gray sea and turned back. His daily morning walk down to the shore had achieved its purpose: His mind was as sharp as the icy wind whistling through the rocks. He needed to be at Number One by 0800 hours, when the final test run was scheduled to begin.
As he did every morning, he retraced the concrete steps that led down to the stainless steel entry door leading into the West Quadrant. When he reached it, he inserted a coded plastic card into the slot, pronounced his name into the black microphone flush with the metal doorframe, and signaled the TV eye. Two seconds later a simulated voice from the computer granted him access, the door sliding aside.
He nodded to the guards, then moved on down the long neon-lit, gray hallway. When he reached the unmarked door of Number One, he paused to listen. The whine of the fans was still a high growl as the engineers ran through the warm-up preparatory to bringing its six 25,000-horse- power motors to full power. Contenting himself that vibration in the fan housings remained at acceptable levels, he flashed his ID to the guard, inserted his magnetic card, and shoved open the door.
Without a word, he marched to his desk by the main video panel and slipped a scratched old Melodiya disk onto his ancient turntable. Moments later, the first movement of Beethoven's Quartet in A Minor boomed from the speakers.
"We are ready to switch on the laser field, Doktor Androv." A young Soviet technician approached gingerly. "If you wish, we can direct the holograms here to the master terminal."
"More of your pretty pictures?" He was examining the data on the video screens. Then he nodded. "Da. Ya gotov. When you will."
As he stared at the screens, he again found himself growing pensive. The project was all but finished now. His lifelong dream.
He silently counted their breakthroughs. The new material being used for the leading edges and scramjet struts, a proprietary titanium alloy coated with a ceramic skin, had turned out to be much lighter than aluminum and eight times as strong. Full-scale sections of the leading edges of the wings and the engine struts had been subjected to ten- minute blasts of 3,500 degrees Fahrenheit air at Mach 7 in the high-temperature tunnel with no deformation or structural failure.
Then the turboramjet-scramjets, four meters in diameter and nine meters long, had all been given full-scale static tests at the aeropropulsion facility in the south, where they were operated to Mach 8 at temperatures ranging from minus 100 to over 1900 degrees Fahrenheit. Massive refrigeration units and gas heaters had been used to achieve the temperature range, while liquefied air was pumped into the intakes to duplicate a complete hypersonic duty cycle.
Maybe, he thought, they were ready for a full-scale test flight. Only one problem remained: a hint of supersonic wave drag the low-temperature helium wind tunnel had shown could develop behind the leading edges. He had ordered the project director to run a computer simulation examining the performance of two new ceramic spoilers, modified canard foreplanes, and the preliminary results indicated the drag would be effectively damped. Still, he was determined to test that design modification with a full run-up here in Number One, the massive hypersonic tunnel that contained a ten-meter scale model of the vehicle.
As he sat thinking, he neglected to acknowledge the arrival of the project director, now advancing down the concrete steps that led from the steel entry door.
"Dobriy utro, Doktor Androv." Taro Ikeda's good-morning greeting was heavily accented. "Kak pashaviatye?"
"Khoroshau." Andrei Petrovich Androv nodded absently, still engaged in his thoughts. "Dobriy utro."
"Today I have more good news," Ikeda continued as he headed for the coffee urn. "My 0730 briefing included a report that during the night our Tsukuba team completed a simulation of the aerodynamic performance of your suggested modification all the way to Mach 25. Just as you envisioned, leading-edge deformation and vortex bursts were reduced to values well within the acceptable envelope." He looked back. "Which makes me question whether we really need to proceed with this morning's run."
"Your SX-10 only tells us how a fuselage performs if airflows are ideal," Androv replied. "At hypersonic temperatures and velocities air doesn't behave predictably, like a perfect gas. Fluid dynamics models can only give us approximations of actual characteristics." He glanced up from the video control panel, his face determined. "It is my son, Yuri, who will be in the cockpit of these vehicles, and my experience is you never put your faith in simulations. In the hypersonic regime, computer simulations are just guesswork, a shortcut not worth a drozhky driver's fart."
"As you wish," Ikeda replied evenly, taking his first sip of coffee.
In truth, Andrei Androv did not dismiss simulations out of hand. He knew their Fujitsu supercomputer was truly a marvel, capable of replicating the aerodynamic characteristics of a given fuselage component, modifying it, testing it, over and over millions of times, iterating to the optimum design in almost the twinkling of an eye.
In every respect the high technology available here was astonishing. Take their hypersonic wind tunnel. Its laser probes shone thin slices of coherent light through the swirling air currents, revealing complexities otherwise hidden amid whorls of turbulence. These data were then enhanced through holography, which used the laser light to create colored 3-D representations of the flow around the model. Finally those holograms were fed into the supercomputer and analyzed from all angles.
This project would have been impossible anywhere else on earth. But here, the foreign team had created a feather-light hypersonic airframe that used turbo-ramjets for horizontal takeoff and then changed their geometry into fuel-injected supersonic combustion ramjets, or scramjets, which combusted fuel and atmospheric oxygen using an inter
nal shock wave instead of conventional compressors to achieve orbital velocity, Mach 25. It was his dream come true.
"Brief me again on the simulation." Androv turned back to Ikeda. "You say you went all the way to our maximum design objective?"
"We ran through the entire flight profile in real time," the other man replied. "There were no stability problems whatsoever. Either during the power-up or during the switch-over to scramjet engine geometry at Mach 4.8."
"Encouraging, encouraging." Androv turned back to his video panel as the fans continued to accelerate. The violins of the A Minor quartet, his favorite of all Beethoven's late works, washed over the room. "All the same, we must run a complete sequence here for any design alterations."
He then fell silent, studying the screens. Mach 25. That was-yes-almost seventeen thousand miles per hour. A velocity greater than any existing missile. And it was air-breathing!
Their supercomputer's revolutionary aerodynamic design had made it possible. Problem: at velocities higher than Mach 5 unprecedented airflows were required, due to heat buildup in the fuel-injection struts and the shortage of oxygen at rarified altitudes. Solution: the entire underside of the vehicle had been shaped to serve as an extension of the intakes for the twelve massive scramjets. The fuselage of the plane itself was going to act as a giant funnel, scooping in air. And it had appeared to work, at least in the computer. Then finally the Japanese engineers had perfected the liquid-air-cycle process, permitting the cryogenic hydrogen fuel to be used to liquefy a portion of the incoming air and inject it under high pressure into the engine. The final, essential breakthrough.
Andrei Androv was both an idealist and a pragmatist. In Russia you had to be. That education began almost half a century earlier when, as a student, he had been on hand to assist in the first free flight of a Russian-made liquid fuel rocket, at an army base just outside Moscow. He had experienced the exhilaration of a new frontier, and plunging himself into the new science of rocketry, he had become a self-taught expert who published theoretical works read and praised by men three times his age.
Ironically, therefore, Andrei Petrovich Androv had not enjoyed the luxury of being ignored, as the American rocket pioneer Goddard had been. Joseph Stalin, always paranoid, decided that the rocket researchers' "fireworks" were "dangerous to the country." Consequently, Andrei Petrovich Androv was arrested, interrogated at Butyrskaya Prison in Moscow, and dispatched on the Trans-Siberian Railroad to a convict coal mine on the Pacific coast.
Eventually the political winds shifted. As a recognized rocket expert, he was part of the 1946 Soviet team that shipped German scientists and V-2 launchers back to Russia. Finally, under Khrushchev, he rose to genuine prominence, since that general secretary believed that only rockets, not manned aircraft, had the range to drop bombs on the U.S. Nikita S. Khrushchev put Andrei Androv in charge of all Soviet rocketry, and Andrei Androv put Russia in space.
He'd been in charge of constructing the sprawling Baikonur Cosmodrome, near Tyuratram in Kazakhstan, central Asia, still the world's largest space center. From it he orbited the world's first satellite, Sputnik, and the world's first astronaut, Yuri Gagarin. He knew the byways of that top-secret facility almost better than he knew his own living room-the gantry systems, the fueling apparatus, the clean rooms, the rocket assembly areas, the sectors where satellites were readied. Most recently, in 1987, he had been in charge of the successful first test launch of the most powerful vehicle the world had ever seen-the Energia, propelled by liquid hydrogen engines capable of lifting a hundred-ton space platform into orbit.
Also during that time his only son, Yuri Andreevich, had become the Soviet Union's leading test pilot. Yuri was rarely home, and then, nine years ago, Andrei Androv's wife had died of pneumonia. Isolated in the long, snowy nights at Baikonur, he'd consoled himself with string quartets, his studies of classical Greek, and his designs, his dreams of the ultimate space vehicle.
But he knew Russia would never be able to build it alone. Soviet computer and materials technology already was slipping behind those of the West.
He grimaced to think how his country had been brought to today's humiliating state of affairs, reduced to bargaining with foreigners like Arabs in a medina. Eventually, though, pragmatism had overruled all. Underlying this bizarre new alliance was one simple reality: the USSR needed Japanese high technology desperately. And it needed that technology now.
It had begun two years earlier, when the president himself had paid a surprise secret visit to the space complex at Baikonur, supposedly to review the Energia launch schedule. That, however, was merely the official excuse. He actually had an entirely different agenda.
Without saying why, he had invited his old friend Andrei Petrovich Androv to join him at the secluded hunting lodge where he was staying-to talk, one-on-one, about the future of Soviet science. As that long snowy evening wore on, wind whistling through the log walls and pine smoke clouding the air, their conversation had turned to hard truths and blunt language.
In vino, Veritas. By midnight, the uniformed bodyguards outside were stamping their heavy boots to keep warm, and Andrei Petrovich and Mikhail Sergeevich were both drinking vodka directly from the bottle, had flung its tinfoil cap onto the rough-hewn boards of the cabin's floor. By then, too, the revered Andrei Petrovich Androv was boldly speaking his mind.
"Mikhail Sergeevich, time has run out for Russia. There is nothing to buy, almost nothing to eat, and prices are soaring. There is so much corruption you will not leave a Russian hospital alive unless you've bribed everyone, right down to the drunken orderlies. And those bribes can't be money. Who wants rubles? They are worthless. These days you have to bribe with vodka." He'd laughed sadly, then picked up an old copy of Pravda there by the fireplace, waved it in the air, and tossed it into the crackling flames. "When we start cooperatives, they are immediately taken over by our new mafia, Russia's ruble millionaires. Everything-"
"Perestroika will succeed in time, Andrei Petrovich," the president had insisted perfunctorily, still not having explained why they were meeting. "We are moving as rapidly as circumstances will permit. The bureaucracy-"
"Perestroika!" Androv had roared back. "Have you heard the latest joke from Moscow? Perestroika is like a country where everyone is switching from driving on the left side to the right side-gradually. Our half-measure concessions to a market economy have produced the worst of both systems. We now have a land with socialist initiative and capitalist conscience." He paused to laugh again, then sobered. "And soon, very soon, we're going to find ourselves in the technological Third World. We need a vision. Even more, we need hard currency, and Western technology now. And we need massive amounts. Nothing less can save us."
That was when the president had nodded silently, then lifted a top-secret document from his black leather briefcase. He explained that it was a proposal from a consortium of foreigners. He wanted Andrei Androv's honest assessment.
"Read this, Andrei Petrovich," he said, passing it over, "and tell me what you think. It may well be a terrible thing even to consider, but I must know your view. You, my old friend, are one of the few men I know I can trust. This proposal, can it work?"
As he squinted by the flickering light of the fire, Andrei Petrovich Androv almost couldn't believe what he was reading. Among other things, the dream he had dreamed so long was there, his for the taking. The dream of a bold venture in space achieved with a whole new level of technology.
Along with it, the Soviet Union would receive everything it needed. The foreigners would provide billions and billions in long-term, low-interest loans and a flood of subsidized consumer goods to erase the pain of perestroika, providing the president with the badly needed financing, not to mention popular support, he needed to bring it off. But there were price tags, several of them. The first would be total access to all Soviet space and propulsion technology. That component would actually make sense technically, but the others were higher, much higher. Could it be done? Should it be d
one?
"What do you think, Andrei Petrovich?" the president had finally spoken, his voice a whisper above the snap of embers and the howl of wind. "Do we dare?"
The room had fallen silent for a long moment. Was this some kind of trap? he almost wondered, like the old days. No, he'd quickly concluded, this time Russia was different. He would have to trust Mikhail Sergeevich. Most of all, though, he was holding his life-long ambition in his hand. At last he replied, hope mingled with apprehension.
"I think we have no choice." He had looked up at the president's troubled eyes. "You have no choice."
"Unfortunately, I think you are right." He had sighed and turned his gaze to the blackness outside the snow- banked window. "Ve tyomnuyu noch, ya znayu. Yes, Andrei Petrovich. On this dark night, I finally know what we must do."
After one final vodka, they had set about devising the scenario that would change the world forever. . . .
The airflow around the model continued to accelerate, while laser holograms of its complex aerodynamics were now being converted by the computer into multi-colored graphic art. Androv watched the wall-size liquid crystal display screen in the control room begin generating a vivid depiction of the streams whirling past the model, simulating the incremental stages of hypersonic climb. It was like watching a hallucination, he thought, as colors swirled around the fuselage of an object seemingly composed of 3-D lines and curves.
"We are now at Mach 6, Comrade Doktor Androv." The voice of a Soviet technician interrupted his thoughts. "The laser data show that the supersonic wave drag peaks at Mach 3.8, then subsides. Your new canard foreplanes appear to be working, at least for this portion of the flight envelope."
Androv studied the screen, noncommittal. "Thus far it would appear to be so. Perhaps the SX-10 was correct. All the same, at Mach 7, I want to switch on the enhancer, then capture those data and analyze them to be doubly sure."
The hypersonic enhancer permitted wind-tunnel burst tests at far higher velocities than a conventional facility could achieve. More high tech.
"There could still be a problem," Androv continued, "when the vortex of air currents shed from the nose of the fuselage encounters the shock waves from the wings, particularly around Mach 11." He turned to Ikeda. "Those vortexes have been responsible for significant damage to several American space shuttles during reentry phase. I need to see the data."
"As you wish." The director walked to the thick glass window that looked out onto the model suspended in the airstream. The crew of technicians hovered over the controls, watching for any signs of vibration. He studied the screens for a few moments, then spoke quietly to the head of the technical team, an intense young man in spectacles. This lieutenant turned and passed the order to his colleagues, who nodded gravely and stationed themselves at the switches.
Above the roar, a brilliant arc of electricity suddenly exploded just in front of the nose of the model, adding an additional burst of pressure at Mach 6 to the velocity already passing across. It was a blinding, microsecond pulse that momentarily boosted simulated vehicle velocity to Mach 13. The lasers registered the data, then passed it directly, via microwave link, into the memory banks of the powerful SX-10 operating hundreds of miles away.
Seconds later the turbulence data appeared in visual form on the liquid crystal screen above them. As the colored numbers flashed, a cheer went up from the normally somber technicians.
"Still no sign of any wave drag outside the theoretical envelope, not even at Mach 13," the young head-technician beamed.
"Just as we simulated," Ikeda noted quietly.
This time even the grave Androv smiled. "I must congratulate all of you." He was rising from his chair, the central one facing the main controls.
"Then I will order the modification installed," Ikeda nodded, "if you formally authorize it."
"Authorized. I think you are right. Perhaps we are ready for a hypersonic test flight." Androv reached to switch off his turntable. "I would like to go down to the hangar now myself, in fact. Perhaps celebrate this moment with a glass of tea."
"Of course." Ikeda spoke quickly to his Japanese technicians, then followed the Russian out the door.
The hallways were a connected maze of brilliantly lighted and scrupulously clean tunnels. They moved down the main corridor to the central checkpoint, then turned and entered the South Quadrant, passing the various assembly sections. Those sectors were mostly quiet now, since the final work had been completed several weeks earlier.
Androv said nothing as they walked toward the doorways connecting the South Quadrant with the underground hangar. He merely whistled a portion of the third movement of the A Minor quartet, Beethoven's hymn of thanksgiving in the Greek, Lydian mode. He recalled that the English writer Aldous Huxley had once suggested that particular movement was proof of God's existence.
Was there a God? He wasn't sure. The only miracles he knew of on this earth were performed by men. He was on the verge of performing one himself.
The history of space exploration had been played out entirely in his lifetime. He himself had been the architect of much of that progress. But putting a man into space remained an expensive and dangerous proposition. Launch vehicles still exploded with alarming regularity. Man was trapped on this planet. God was still in the heavens.
Man's hope of reaching God at will required a special creation, one that could taxi off a runway just like a normal aircraft, then accelerate to hypersonic speeds, reaching low-earth orbit. An air-breathing space vehicle. Its potential for the peaceful exploration of near-earth space defied imagination.
Peace. All his life, Andrei Petrovich Androv had worked in the shadow of war. Now, at last, he had created the ultimate symbol of peace.
The entry to the hangar was secured, but when the guards saw Dr. Androv and the project director approaching, they saluted and punched in the codes on the locks. Moments later the heavy steel doors slid aside, revealing the brilliant lights of the hangar. It was cavernous, over a hundred feet high, with gantries now standing idle along the walls. White-coated technicians swarmed over the two prototypes, checking the final seals, while others were on twenty-foot-high trucks servicing the engines.
Looming above them were what appeared to be two giant prehistoric birds, streaks of gleaming silver over three hundred feet in length, with pen-sharp noses that dipped rakishly downward. Androv paused to admire them a moment, marveling in spite of himself. The long, sleek lines swept back in a clean curve, without the interruption of a windshield. The "cockpit," in fact, was deep inside the nose, where shock waves would not impact the computer guidance system. From the nose its lines burgeoned into a sharp, clean fan, and beneath the two abbreviated wings were suspended twelve massive turboramjet-scramjets. They had already been certified at Mach 4.5. In ten days one of these vehicles would achieve the ultimate. Mach 25, seventeen thousand miles per hour.
The Americans had code-named their fledgling design for a hypersonic space plane-still at least a decade away- the X-30. But no such mundane designation would satisfy Andrei Petrovich Androv, devoted disciple of the ancients. He had long believed the Americans were high-tech vulgarians with no poetry in their soul, no sense of history.
Across the towering tail assembly of both aircraft was an insignia that symbolized the joining of two of the world's great superpowers, a double ax. And along their titanium-composite fuselage was lettered a single word, in Cyrillic characters. Andrei Androv had insisted on that name, in celebration of the first human ever to soar above the earth, the dream of ancient man. Now, he had declared, four thousand years later, there was another dream, his dream, a hypersonic vehicle that could loft man directly into space from anywhere on the planet.
He had dreamed that dream. And the Mino Industries Group had permitted him to pick the name for the creation that would realize it, for the miracle that would master time and space, the earth itself . . .
DAEDALUS
Thursday 9:16 a.m.
Yuri Androv sto
od at the far end of the flood-lit hangar, staring up at the underbelly of Daedalus I and thinking. This morning's run-up in the centrifuge had gone well. At last he was convinced there was no physiological barrier to hypersonic flight, at least none he couldn't handle. The scramjets had all been put through their paces at the aero-propulsion facility. On the test stand, at least, they met their specifications.
Yes, he was thinking, this plane just might do it. He would ease through the Mach 4.8 barrier slowly, then convert to scramjet geometry, switch to liquid hydrogen, and go full throttle. It was scary, sure, but you only lived once. Fuck the danger.
The prospect was exhilarating and chilling. He looked up, again awed. Even for someone who'd seen and flown them all, this was an inspiring creation. Not only was it easily the most technologically advanced flight vehicle in the world, it also was stunningly beautiful.
Right now, however, there were two simple problems: first, without a hypersonic test flight nobody could really be sure it would do what it was supposed to; second, as of now both prototypes still belonged to Mino Industries and would continue to belong to Mino Industries until the final treaty and agreement were signed.
Actually, taking the Daedalus hypersonic might be the least of the project's worries. That was the part he knew how to handle. The unknowns lay in another direction entirely, the strategic direction.
Strategically, he still didn't trust Russia's new partner. From what he'd heard, the conditions demanded in return for all their high technology had been heavy, and that was just the short-term price. The long-term cost might be even greater. Was the Soviet Union about to become the financial and technological captive of a shadowy group of foreigners, men whose identities remained, even now, shrouded in secrecy? Was this a Faustian bargain?
Just then he noticed the doors at the far end of the hangar slide open and two men in white lab coats enter. Perfect timing, he thought. Even at that distance he knew immediately who they were: the joint venture's two top technical officers: his father, Andrei Petrovich Androv, and Taro Ikeda, the project director for the Japanese team. The men held equal authority. Supposedly. But in fact all the real decisions on this project were being made by somebody else entirely. The shots were actually being called from a skyscraper in Tokyo, by a mysterious CEO known as Tanzan Mino.
Now Ikeda and the elder Androv were headed his way. As he watched Ikeda, he felt himself involuntarily stiffen. Perhaps his unease about the man was his intuitive, right brain working, trying to tell him something. But what? All communications with the CEO were channeled through Ikeda. Fair enough, he told himself, he was accustomed to secrecy. Maybe Japanese industrialists were as careful about protecting their asses as the Soviet nomenklatura were. Maybe it was just part of the landscape here too. But still . . .
"Strastvitya, Yuri Andreevich." Ikeda smiled, extending his pale hand as he simultaneously bowed. "Kak pashaviatye?"
"Khoroshau. Spahcebo." He shook Ikeda's hand, then nodded toward his father. "If this is a good time, I'd like to discuss the scramjet power-up sequence with Dr. Androv for a few moments."
"If it's anything serious, then perhaps we should all confer with the prime contractors," Ikeda responded smoothly. "Right now, in my office. In fact, I was just on the phone with-"
"No need to bring them in. Just a few technical items, nothing more."
"Yuri Andreevich." Ikeda smiled and bowed again, his eyes trying to display a warmth they clearly did not possess. "Every issue here is of importance to us all. If-"
"Not every nut and bolt," he interrupted. "I just have some sequencing questions, that's all."
Ikeda bowed once more, quickly. "You know we are all depending on you. No one in Japan has the experience to take up a plane like this. At least not at this stage of the project. So be aware that any matter weighing upon the success of your test flight, or your safety-" he flashed another quick, concerned smile "-is naturally of gravest concern to me, and to the CEO."
"Then you should be glad to hear the power-up simulation in the centrifuge this morning took me right through Mach 9.8 with no problems. Which means the scramjet ignition sequence looks like a go."
"Congratulations." Ikeda nodded.
"One last thing. I'll be sending a memo to Engineering about a modification of the cockpit, to permit more latitude in the seat. Nothing major. I think we could still reduce vascular stress in the high-G regime."
Andrei Androv noticed the look of concern on his son's face. "Yuri, you seem troubled. This morning, did anything-?"
"Of course, send Engineering your memo by all means," Ikeda interjected. "I'll personally see it's taken care of. We want nothing to go wrong. Not even the smallest-"
"Good. That's all I want." Yuri turned and wrapped his arm around his father's aging shoulders, gently urging him in the direction of the trucks stationed beneath the silver nose of Daedalus I. He wanted to get rid of Ikeda so he could talk. After they moved a few feet, he yelled back over his shoulder. "But wait on the decision till you read my memo."
"As you wish." Ikeda nodded farewell. "I'll be in my office until 1300 hours if we need contractor input."
Which meant, Yuri knew, that no further communication with him was permissible after that time. Technical consultations were only held during mornings. Afternoons he seemed to have other pressing matters to attend to.
"Yuri, the run-up in Number One went well this morning. I think we've finally eliminated the supersonic wave drag." The elder Androv was heading over to check the hydraulic lifts supporting the landing gear and its heavy 22-ply retractable tires. Then he glanced back and smiled. "I'm beginning to believe in miracles. We might just succeed."
"If those damned scramjets up there," he pointed skyward, "actually achieve ignition when they're supposed to."
"I've studied the static-test data carefully. At the propulsion facility they routinely achieved ignition at Mach 4.8. The numbers were there and they looked all right. Temperature regime, pounds thrust, all the rest."
What's really happening, Yuri thought suddenly, is they've taken our engineering design and built it. But what if we're just being used somehow, having our brains picked, our expertise stolen? Then what?
He said nothing, though, just listened quietly as the older man continued.
"Also, the new ceramic composite they've come up with for the fuel injection struts was heated to thirty-five hundred degrees Fahrenheit and repeatedly stress-tested. Those data were particularly impressive. You know, the struts have always been the Achilles heel for a scramjet, since the fuel has to be injected directly through them into the combustion chamber. They have to withstand shock waves, and thermal stresses, far beyond anything ever encountered in a conventional engine. Nobody else has ever come up with a material that can do it. Not us, not the Americans, not anybody. But now, their high-temperature materials and liquid air cycle have finally made the scramjet concept a reality. The last roadblock is gone." He looked up, still marveling. "All we or the Americans can do is make engineering drawings of those engines, just pictures."
"I hope you're right. But when we switch over from JP-7 to liquid hydrogen, nobody knows what can happen. It's never been done before."
"Are you really worried?" The old man studied him.
"Damned right I am. Who wouldn't be?" He looked around at the milling Japanese technicians, then lowered his voice. "And I'll tell you something else. There're other things around here worrying me too, maybe even more. Something about this project is starting to feel wrong."
"What do you mean?" Andrei stared.
"I'm beginning to suspect . . . I don't know. So far it's just a sense, but-"
"Yuri, let me tell you a hard fact," the elder Androv interjected. "Like it or not, this project is the only chance the Soviet Union has to ever own a vehicle like this."
"That may be true, but if we-"
"Remember the sad fate of the TU-144," he went on, "the supersonic passenger plane we built based on some engineering drawings f
or the Concorde we managed to get hold of. We copied it, but we got it wrong, and in 1973 we had that horrible tragedy at the Paris Air Show, when it crashed in a ball of fire. That was the end of it. We failed, and it was humiliating. The Soviet Union couldn't even build a supersonic passenger jet. The real truth is, we didn't have the computers we needed to design it." He looked up, smiling. "But now, all that humiliation will be undone."
Yuri suddenly realized his father was being swept up in his dreams. The same way he sometimes got lost in those damned string quartets, or reading Euripides in the original Greek. He was going off in his fantasy world again. He couldn't see that maybe he was being used.
"Have you ever wondered where this project is going to lead? Where it has to lead?"
"It will lead the way to peace. It will be a symbol of cooperation between two great nations, demonstrating that the human spirit can triumph."
"Moi otyets, it could just as well 'lead the way' to something else entirely. Don't you realize what's happening here? We're giving away our thruster engineering, Russia's leading technology. It's the one area where we still lead the world. We've just handed it over . . . for the price of one fucking airplane. And even if we eventually get our hands on these prototypes, we can't build more without begging the materials from them. We can't fabricate these composite alloys in the Soviet Union."
"But this is a joint venture. Everything will be shared." He smiled again, his face gnome-like beneath his mane of white hair. "It will also give us both a chance to overcome the lead of Europe and America in commercial passenger transport in the next century. That's what this is all about. The future of nonmilitary aviation, it's right here."
"Do you really believe that?" He stifled a snort of incredulity. "Don't you see what this vehicle really is? Let me tell you. It's the most deadly weapons delivery system the world has ever seen. And we're showing them how to build it, even testing it for them to make sure it'll perform."
"The Daedalus will never be a military plane. I would never have participated if I thought-"
"Exactly. That's what they want us to believe. But it sure as hell could be. And Mino Industries will be the only company on earth that can actually build more of them." He sensed it was useless to argue further. Nothing mattered to Andrei Petrovich Androv except what he wanted to believe. At this point, nothing could be done to expose the dangers, because nobody on the Soviet team would listen.
Or maybe there was something. Why not make a small revision in the test flight? Once he was aloft, what was anybody going to do? He would be up there, alone. If he could get around their flight computer, he might just show the world a thing or two. He'd been thinking about it for weeks now.
"All right." He turned back. "If this thing is supposedly ready to fly, then I'll fly it. But get ready for some surprises."
"Yuri, what are you planning?"
"Just a small unscheduled maneuver." The hell with it, he thought. "They've got seven days, and then I take it up . . . and power-in the scramjets. I'm ready to go. Tell Ikeda to prepare to have liquid hydrogen pumped into the tanks."
"But that's not how we've structured the test schedule." Andrei examined him, startled. Yuri had always been fiery, but never irrational. "We need ten-"
"Fuck the schedule. I'm going to take this vehicle hypersonic in a week, or they can get themselves another test pilot." He turned away. "Reschedule, or forget it. We don't have much time left. Once all the agreements are signed-"
"Yuri, I don't like this." His eyes were grave. "It's not-"
"Just tell them to get Daedalus I prepped. I think these bastards that call themselves Mino Industries have a whole agenda they're not telling us about. But I'm about to rearrange their timetable."