1968 - A Matter of Returns
Posted: Tue Jan 24, 2023 12:42 am
A Matter of Returns – 1968
Kozlowski Air Force Base, Limehouse, Maine
"Put down that wench!" Command Chief Master Sergeant Gibson's call echoed across the parking ramp where Sigrun was parked after her most recent test flight. Major O'Seven was standing on the maintenance gantry under the long nose that stretched unsupported over the ground. His hands were cupped and appeared to be supporting a pair of legs that vanished into the electronics bay. There was a muffled voice from inside the nose and he lowered the legs down. On closer inspection they appeared to be attached to a young black technical engineer. She turned around to face Gibson.
"The damned thing has failed again, Command Chief. There's nothing in the memory, nothing at all. It's as if the system wasn't even turned on. I've been checking through that compartment for an hour now, and there's nothing I can see that's wrong. There's nothing hanging loose that shouldn't be." Technical Sergeant Selma Hitchins swore quietly to herself. The problems with the ESM system on the B-70A had been going on for months now and the 100th Bomb Group wouldn't be fully operational until they were solved. That was more than embarrassing, it was a risk to national security. The B-70A was leaving the production lines at last, the 100th already had 25 of the aircraft on strength and was scheduled to receive another 50, Further south, at MacDill, the 307th was receiving its first aircraft also and they couldn't get the electronic warfare quite to work either. Major O'Seven handed Hitchins a rag. She hadn't realized it but her hands were bleeding where she'd nicked them on the metal edges inside the bay. She smiled her thanks and looked up at the maw of the electronics bay. The two men joined her and stared as if concentrated willpower would solve the problem that stopped Sigrun's electronic warfare suite from functioning.
The B-70 relied on electronic warfare and its blinding speed to get through enemy defenses. Its over-target maximum, 80,000 feet up, was Mach 3.4. 2,250 miles per hour. Or, more importantly, 37.5 miles per minute. The best anti-aircraft missiles in the world were capable of reaching 90,000 feet and could do 66 miles per minute. There were longer-ranged missiles but they didn't have the speed; there were faster missiles but they didn't have the range. The threat assessment people had defined those threat characteristics as presenting the most dangerous overall threat envelope to Sigrun and her sisters. So, on paper, Sigrun was within their reach. The catch was that the missiles were part of a system and the key wasn't the performance of the missiles, it was the performance of the system. Those systems took several minutes to go through the process of responding to approaching aircraft and launching the missiles; in fact, the time taken for the missile to reach its target was the smallest and least significant factor in the equation. Against the B-52, the system provided a reasonable chance of getting the missiles off in time but against the B-70? The aircraft would be 75 miles behind the missile launcher before it fired and that would commit the missile to a long tail chase even with its speed advantage, the missile couldnt close the gap before its target was out of range. The threat analysis was quite convincing; the reaction time of the system would have to be halved, the speed of the missile increased to Mach 9 and their range doubled before they could seriously threaten the B-70.
The missile development was just that development. Already anti-missile missiles had that sort of performance but shooting at missiles coming in on a fixed, unvarying trajectory was one thing, trying to hit a twisting, turning bomber was quite another. The system development was the real problem. Some solutions seemed obvious for example the search radars could be put out far in advance of the missile launchers the problem was, that left the radars undefended to be picked off by anti-radar missiles. That was another problem for the defenses; the B-70s wouldn't be coming in alone. They would have RB-58s out in front to map the defenses and take down the radars and any defending fighters that tried to interfere. The F-108s would be sweeping through the area, searching out the defending fighters and airborne radar aircraft. Nobody claimed that SAC's bombers were invulnerable, merely that enough would get through even the heaviest defenses to consign a country to the same black smoking hole presently occupied by Germany.
For the B-70s, the key was their ESM system. The RB-58s and B-52s had mechanically scanned systems that were limited in the number of emitters that could be isolated, tracked and eliminated at one time. The B-70 had the new phased array system that could track hundreds of targets while still scanning for more and could identify them faster than the old equipment. They could isolate a specific radar with an accuracy and at ranges the older aircraft could only dream about. Once the system was working, any radar that revealed itself to Sigrun's ESM equipment and was in the 200 mile range of her AGM-76 nuclear-tipped anti-radar missiles was doomed. When it worked, that was the catch.
The ESM set was only one part of the electronic suite, there were deception jammers and barrage jammers and a slew of other equipment, all operated from the Electronics Pit behind the flight deck. The ESM system was the core though, without it the other equipment was blind. And the ESM equipment just wasn't working. When Sigrun and her sisters were tested on the ground it worked. When they tested subsonic it worked, when they tested it at operational speeds and altitudes, it failed. Completely and totally. Why, nobody could work out. Sigrun had been flying almost daily for weeks now, trying to find an answer. She'd flown the test range, brought the data, or rather the lack of data, back and everybody scratched their heads.
"Command Chief, we're wasting time. We're not going to get an answer just by taping the blackout and staring at an empty page that should have output data on it. I've got to ride one of these flights and watch the system as it fails."
"Selli, can't be done. We all love you dearly but you're a woman and women are not allowed to fly on combat aircraft. Rule from the top."
Hitchins thought for a second "But Sigrun isn't a combat aircraft is she? She hasn't been declared operational yet and won't be unless we can get this fixed. So why not ask? The worst the bosses can do is refuse and we get to look at more blank paper."
The Electronics Pit, B-70A "Sigrun
Hitchins wriggled slightly in her seat. She'd pulled it off. Gibson has asked the group commander if the electronic staff could fly the range tests and if she could be on the flight roster. The query had gone all the way to the top and come back with a single "yes" which he'd interpreted to apply to both questions. Then, he'd put Hitchin's name at the top of the list of electronics warfare engineers to go on the test flights. And that was why Selma Hitchins was sitting in the Electronics Pit of a B-70 Valkyrie. Sigrun was edging slowly forward, one of the problems that still hadn't been fixed on the B-70 was its brakes at low speeds. They chattered violently causing the B-70's braking distance from just 5mph to be 400 feet. Another weirdness was the way the cockpit was porpoising up and down as the aircraft moved. It was inevitable of course, the cockpit was so far forward of the nosewheel that the effect of every slight bump was magnified.
Up in the cockpit, Major Charles John O'Seven advanced the six throttles to maximum afterburner, and Sigrun began her takeoff run. At 193mph, he rotated her into the air, establishing a nine degree Angle-of-Attack for the wing. At 205mph and 4,853 feet down the runway, the 387,620 pounds of Valkyrie lifted into the blue sky for on route for the Westinghouse Electronics test range down in Maryland. As soon as Sigrun was over the sea, she'd hit triple-sonic for the run, strangely, her engines ran as economically at those speeds as they did when she was cruising subsonic.
"How are you doing down there Selli? No sickness?"
"I'm fine Major, Felt a bit queasy when we were bumping on the runway but I'm fine now."
"Its Seejay, Selli, we're up here now. Nobody around but us flying critters. Copilot's Andy, Bob's over in the Bear's Den beside you. You know this is where Honey Pot would have been nice.
"Honey Pot S - Seejay?"
"The B-60 we had when I was with the 498th. She had a fully-equipped galley aft, you could have made us some coffee."
Hitchins gave a long-suffering grin to herself. Why was it always expected that she would make the coffee? Didn't matter here though, for all her size, Sigrun had no space for niceties like a galley. They had coffee on board, and sandwiches, but the coffee was in a thermos and the sandwiches were cold. Then she felt a thump in her back as Sigrun accelerated and went up to her normal cruising speed. There was a creaking groan from her wings as the tips folded down into the hypersonic cruise configuration, now she was riding a wave of compressed air, just like surfer rode a sea swell. The ride from Limehouse down to Baltimore would take less than 15 minutes and Hitchins would need all of that to get her equipment set up.
Nevertheless it was ready when Sigrun swung in towards the Westinghouse range. Situated just off I-95 between Baltimore and Washington, the research laboratory was in a valley with the hill behind covered with every sort of radar that could be procured. The lab would light some of them up and Sigrun would try to identify and isolate them. She was running straight to the shore now, approaching the emitter array fast. As she did so, Hitchins heard the range officer transmit "testing now". In front of her the big emitter display lit up then went dark as the whole system crashed.
"Seejay, it went down, the whole thing." Hitchins checked quickly. "And it took everything with it. I made some signal recordings as a check when we took off and whatever's happened took those out as well. Its as if the system was never on. I think when it resets, it deletes everything. I'll get it up again, then can we make another run please? And this time, ask the range to put just a single emitter on?"
"Sure, Selli." Sigrun orbited around and made her Mach 3.4 run again. Once more, the range started transmitting and the ESM system shut down. This time though, Hitchins thought it had stayed up a little bit longer, she'd caught a red dot flash on the screen as the location was displayed and vanished amid a blur of red. A few more circuits and she was sure of it. The system was picking up the returns, something was causing it to crash and lose everything.
"Seejay, can we do a subsonic run please?" Sigrun made her slow approach and, as Hitchins had expected, the emitter location was displayed perfectly. "Right. Now, lets do another hypersonic but this time ask the range to use the same radar they had on. I've recorded the returns and I want to do a comparison." Another triple-sonic pass and Hitchins was watching the display record the emitter. Which wasn't surprising, she'd adjusted the system so picking it up keyed the ESM set to display the recorded data, not the current transmissions. "Seejay, once more please, same emitter? I think I've cracked it."
Sigrun made her last pass. "What gives Selli?"
"I'll have to check this with the brainiacs but it isnt the equipment at all. Thet's why the Raytheon contractors haven't been able to find anything. They've been looking for faults in the processing system and the threat libraries but all that side seems to be working perfectly, More or less. I think the problem is the airflow around the aircraft. Over Mach 3.05, its stagnant, we're riding in a ball of superheated air. That's a sharp, temperature-determined transition point and, once we're past it, the air starts to pick up an electrical charge. I think its causing the emitter signals to flicker instead of being a steady beam. The ESM system is picking up each flash and because we're moving so fast, each has a slightly different bearing. Its interpreting the signal as being hundreds of different emitters and tries to display them all, only it hasn't got the memory and the system crashes. Its never worried us before because the older systems are mechanically scanned and the degree of resolution isn't fine enough for the variance to be significant. This system gives us very fine directional cuts and a very fine read-out of PRF and jitter so its more vulnerable to minor differences.
"I've recorded the signal we're receiving at 3.4 and subsonic and the brainiacs can compare them. Then they can work out a filter or something. I don't think its the whole solution but its somewhere to start."
"Well done that girl. Selli, you come from around here dont you?"
"Brandon, its a bit south of here though."
"Want to pay them a visit? We'll have to check with home and with local air traffic control then get in touch with the local police, let everybody know what is happening but its doable." Public relations flyovers were becoming more common in SAC now, especially after McNamara's attempt to scrap the bombers in favor of missiles. General LeMay never allowed such things but General Dedmon had allowed a few such flights and General McKenzie was strongly in favor of showing off the bombers at every available opportunity. Where, once, invitations from airshows and other public events, had been ignored, now they got the full treatment, aircraft for flying and static displays and ground shows of weapons and equipment. "Bob, make the necessary calls."
Police Station, Brandon, Maryland
"Brandon Police? This is Strategic Aerospace Command aircraft Sigrun. We are a B-70 out of Kozlowski Maine."
"This is Alice Delmar, dispatcher. How can I help? You're not in trouble are you?"
"No ma'am, we'd just like to give you a little private air display. One of the crew comes from Brandon and would like to see the ole homestead from up here."
"Oh my. I'll patch you through to my husband. We have a radio car now you know."
Cockpit, B-70A "Sigrun"
Hitchins and O'Seven exchanged grins. Surrounded by millions of dollars worth of fastest, highest-flying bomber in history and equipped with the finest electronics US industry could provide, the idea of a small town being proud because its police now had a radio car had a refreshing normality about it. Hitchins privately made herself a bet that Frank Delmar's radio car worked better than Sigrun's electronic warfare system. She was sitting in the co-pilots seat, watching as the countryside underneath grew larger and familiar shapes started to appear. Sigrun was doing less than 400 miles per hour now and had dropped to a round 4,000 feet. They had to keep it slow, the American population was tolerant of supersonic bangs but there was no percentage in pushing tolerance too far. The downside was that the engines weren't that happy, every so often one coughed and shot out a jet of flame but that was a known eccentricity and wasn't harmful. Then, the street plan of Brandon appeared in front of them.
Brandon, Maryland.
Officer Frank Delmar stopped his car outside the small house and ran up the steps to hammer on the front door. George Hitchins answered, his face wary. Frank Delmar was a good and a fair policemen but this side of town, the uniform still had a degree of suspicion attached to it. "Mister Hitchins. A B-70 from Maine is giving us a private air show in a few minutes. You and Mrs Hitchins will want to watch this, Selli's on board. You may want to call your friends up as well."
"What? Selli? But. Hey Momma, you gotta hear this. Selli's coming over. On one of them new bombers."
Within a few minutes the street started to fill with people. They'd heard of the B-70 and seen it on television but few had actually got to see one fly over. The lumbering B-52s and the sleek B-58s, they were common sights but not the B-70s. And everybody had heard about it, the controversy a couple of years earlier had seen to that. Another word spread quickly, Selma Hitchins, a girl from this side of town was one of the crew. They heard the aircraft long before they saw it, the strange bluish-silver paint seemed to take up the color of the sky but nothing could mask the roar of the six engines. Then, she was overhead, her nose up high, the big delta wings seeming to shadow the town as she passed over. As she did, she seemed to angle slightly and the people on the ground saw her turning.
The radio in Delmar's car crackled. All SAC aircraft had a frequency they could use to talk to police and emergency services on the ground in case of an in-flight emergency and Sigrun was using it to speak to police headquarters. Then Delmar's wife was patching it through to the car. It was a slight abuse of the system but one nobody would complain about. Delmar listened for a second then called Mister Hitchins over. "Somebody wants to talk to you."
Cockpit, B-70A "Sigrun"
"Poppa? Is that you? This is Selli. I'm right overhead. I can see our street everything. We've got.." O'Seven pressed his fingers to his lips, the capabilities of the high-definition camera were classified and even a hint was a bad idea. "really clear air up here." In fact Hitchins could see her parents and the police car on the ground on the display screen in front of her in perfect detail. Along with the other people who'd stopped to watch Sigrun strut her stuff in front of an admiring population. "We can't stay long, we burn too much fuel down here. I'm sitting in the co-pilot's seat so I can see everything."
Sigrun was doing figure-of-eight turns over Brandon, showing the aircraft off to the taxpayers whose earnings had paid for her. They'd been cleared for five circuits of the town before they'd have to go back up where they belonged. It wasn't just fuel, this was a heavily-traveled piece of airspace and clearing it quickly was safe as well as smart. Hitchins was talking to her parents, explaining she wasn't part of the regular crew, but was on board for some tests. Her mother had asked her what wearing one of the much-publicized pressure-suits was like and she'd had to explain that even up high and at maximum speed, the B-70 was a shirtsleeve environment aircraft. The pressure suits were custom made for each crew member, if theyd been required, she wouldnt have been able to ride the flight. Eventually Sigrun was completing her last circuit and she had to sign off.
Brandon, Maryland.
Mister Hitchins was crying, the tears streaming down his cheeks, when he handed the microphone back to Delmar. "That's my little girl up there. She's grown up but I never guessed she'd ride one of the big bombers. When I was a kid I never thought any of us would do anything like that, let alone my daughter. If my grandpappy could have seen this." Mister Hitchins' grandfather had been a slave in the South before the Civil War. "Thank you Officer, for letting me speak with my little Selli."
Overhead, Sigrun was climbing away and picking up speed. Twenty minutes later she would be back at Kozlowski AFB and the engineers could get to work deciphering the recording tapes and following up on the clues Hitchins had found. Back in Brandon, people were still talking in the street. Selma Hitchins wasn't unique in having gone away to join the military, Tom Jordan had gone and joined the Marines only last year, but for her to turn up overhead in one of the new Valkyries was totally unexpected. The crowd slowly started to disperse but before they did, some of the men shook Mr Hitchin's hand and the women hugged his wife. Selma Hitchin's return in a B-70 had done something for Brandon, something that nobody could quite define but everybody felt it. Some of the young women were looking up at the sky a bit thoughtfully as well. After all, if Selma Hitchins could get to be part of the crew on one of SAC's bombers, why couldn't they?
Kozlowski Air Force Base, Limehouse, Maine
"Put down that wench!" Command Chief Master Sergeant Gibson's call echoed across the parking ramp where Sigrun was parked after her most recent test flight. Major O'Seven was standing on the maintenance gantry under the long nose that stretched unsupported over the ground. His hands were cupped and appeared to be supporting a pair of legs that vanished into the electronics bay. There was a muffled voice from inside the nose and he lowered the legs down. On closer inspection they appeared to be attached to a young black technical engineer. She turned around to face Gibson.
"The damned thing has failed again, Command Chief. There's nothing in the memory, nothing at all. It's as if the system wasn't even turned on. I've been checking through that compartment for an hour now, and there's nothing I can see that's wrong. There's nothing hanging loose that shouldn't be." Technical Sergeant Selma Hitchins swore quietly to herself. The problems with the ESM system on the B-70A had been going on for months now and the 100th Bomb Group wouldn't be fully operational until they were solved. That was more than embarrassing, it was a risk to national security. The B-70A was leaving the production lines at last, the 100th already had 25 of the aircraft on strength and was scheduled to receive another 50, Further south, at MacDill, the 307th was receiving its first aircraft also and they couldn't get the electronic warfare quite to work either. Major O'Seven handed Hitchins a rag. She hadn't realized it but her hands were bleeding where she'd nicked them on the metal edges inside the bay. She smiled her thanks and looked up at the maw of the electronics bay. The two men joined her and stared as if concentrated willpower would solve the problem that stopped Sigrun's electronic warfare suite from functioning.
The B-70 relied on electronic warfare and its blinding speed to get through enemy defenses. Its over-target maximum, 80,000 feet up, was Mach 3.4. 2,250 miles per hour. Or, more importantly, 37.5 miles per minute. The best anti-aircraft missiles in the world were capable of reaching 90,000 feet and could do 66 miles per minute. There were longer-ranged missiles but they didn't have the speed; there were faster missiles but they didn't have the range. The threat assessment people had defined those threat characteristics as presenting the most dangerous overall threat envelope to Sigrun and her sisters. So, on paper, Sigrun was within their reach. The catch was that the missiles were part of a system and the key wasn't the performance of the missiles, it was the performance of the system. Those systems took several minutes to go through the process of responding to approaching aircraft and launching the missiles; in fact, the time taken for the missile to reach its target was the smallest and least significant factor in the equation. Against the B-52, the system provided a reasonable chance of getting the missiles off in time but against the B-70? The aircraft would be 75 miles behind the missile launcher before it fired and that would commit the missile to a long tail chase even with its speed advantage, the missile couldnt close the gap before its target was out of range. The threat analysis was quite convincing; the reaction time of the system would have to be halved, the speed of the missile increased to Mach 9 and their range doubled before they could seriously threaten the B-70.
The missile development was just that development. Already anti-missile missiles had that sort of performance but shooting at missiles coming in on a fixed, unvarying trajectory was one thing, trying to hit a twisting, turning bomber was quite another. The system development was the real problem. Some solutions seemed obvious for example the search radars could be put out far in advance of the missile launchers the problem was, that left the radars undefended to be picked off by anti-radar missiles. That was another problem for the defenses; the B-70s wouldn't be coming in alone. They would have RB-58s out in front to map the defenses and take down the radars and any defending fighters that tried to interfere. The F-108s would be sweeping through the area, searching out the defending fighters and airborne radar aircraft. Nobody claimed that SAC's bombers were invulnerable, merely that enough would get through even the heaviest defenses to consign a country to the same black smoking hole presently occupied by Germany.
For the B-70s, the key was their ESM system. The RB-58s and B-52s had mechanically scanned systems that were limited in the number of emitters that could be isolated, tracked and eliminated at one time. The B-70 had the new phased array system that could track hundreds of targets while still scanning for more and could identify them faster than the old equipment. They could isolate a specific radar with an accuracy and at ranges the older aircraft could only dream about. Once the system was working, any radar that revealed itself to Sigrun's ESM equipment and was in the 200 mile range of her AGM-76 nuclear-tipped anti-radar missiles was doomed. When it worked, that was the catch.
The ESM set was only one part of the electronic suite, there were deception jammers and barrage jammers and a slew of other equipment, all operated from the Electronics Pit behind the flight deck. The ESM system was the core though, without it the other equipment was blind. And the ESM equipment just wasn't working. When Sigrun and her sisters were tested on the ground it worked. When they tested subsonic it worked, when they tested it at operational speeds and altitudes, it failed. Completely and totally. Why, nobody could work out. Sigrun had been flying almost daily for weeks now, trying to find an answer. She'd flown the test range, brought the data, or rather the lack of data, back and everybody scratched their heads.
"Command Chief, we're wasting time. We're not going to get an answer just by taping the blackout and staring at an empty page that should have output data on it. I've got to ride one of these flights and watch the system as it fails."
"Selli, can't be done. We all love you dearly but you're a woman and women are not allowed to fly on combat aircraft. Rule from the top."
Hitchins thought for a second "But Sigrun isn't a combat aircraft is she? She hasn't been declared operational yet and won't be unless we can get this fixed. So why not ask? The worst the bosses can do is refuse and we get to look at more blank paper."
The Electronics Pit, B-70A "Sigrun
Hitchins wriggled slightly in her seat. She'd pulled it off. Gibson has asked the group commander if the electronic staff could fly the range tests and if she could be on the flight roster. The query had gone all the way to the top and come back with a single "yes" which he'd interpreted to apply to both questions. Then, he'd put Hitchin's name at the top of the list of electronics warfare engineers to go on the test flights. And that was why Selma Hitchins was sitting in the Electronics Pit of a B-70 Valkyrie. Sigrun was edging slowly forward, one of the problems that still hadn't been fixed on the B-70 was its brakes at low speeds. They chattered violently causing the B-70's braking distance from just 5mph to be 400 feet. Another weirdness was the way the cockpit was porpoising up and down as the aircraft moved. It was inevitable of course, the cockpit was so far forward of the nosewheel that the effect of every slight bump was magnified.
Up in the cockpit, Major Charles John O'Seven advanced the six throttles to maximum afterburner, and Sigrun began her takeoff run. At 193mph, he rotated her into the air, establishing a nine degree Angle-of-Attack for the wing. At 205mph and 4,853 feet down the runway, the 387,620 pounds of Valkyrie lifted into the blue sky for on route for the Westinghouse Electronics test range down in Maryland. As soon as Sigrun was over the sea, she'd hit triple-sonic for the run, strangely, her engines ran as economically at those speeds as they did when she was cruising subsonic.
"How are you doing down there Selli? No sickness?"
"I'm fine Major, Felt a bit queasy when we were bumping on the runway but I'm fine now."
"Its Seejay, Selli, we're up here now. Nobody around but us flying critters. Copilot's Andy, Bob's over in the Bear's Den beside you. You know this is where Honey Pot would have been nice.
"Honey Pot S - Seejay?"
"The B-60 we had when I was with the 498th. She had a fully-equipped galley aft, you could have made us some coffee."
Hitchins gave a long-suffering grin to herself. Why was it always expected that she would make the coffee? Didn't matter here though, for all her size, Sigrun had no space for niceties like a galley. They had coffee on board, and sandwiches, but the coffee was in a thermos and the sandwiches were cold. Then she felt a thump in her back as Sigrun accelerated and went up to her normal cruising speed. There was a creaking groan from her wings as the tips folded down into the hypersonic cruise configuration, now she was riding a wave of compressed air, just like surfer rode a sea swell. The ride from Limehouse down to Baltimore would take less than 15 minutes and Hitchins would need all of that to get her equipment set up.
Nevertheless it was ready when Sigrun swung in towards the Westinghouse range. Situated just off I-95 between Baltimore and Washington, the research laboratory was in a valley with the hill behind covered with every sort of radar that could be procured. The lab would light some of them up and Sigrun would try to identify and isolate them. She was running straight to the shore now, approaching the emitter array fast. As she did so, Hitchins heard the range officer transmit "testing now". In front of her the big emitter display lit up then went dark as the whole system crashed.
"Seejay, it went down, the whole thing." Hitchins checked quickly. "And it took everything with it. I made some signal recordings as a check when we took off and whatever's happened took those out as well. Its as if the system was never on. I think when it resets, it deletes everything. I'll get it up again, then can we make another run please? And this time, ask the range to put just a single emitter on?"
"Sure, Selli." Sigrun orbited around and made her Mach 3.4 run again. Once more, the range started transmitting and the ESM system shut down. This time though, Hitchins thought it had stayed up a little bit longer, she'd caught a red dot flash on the screen as the location was displayed and vanished amid a blur of red. A few more circuits and she was sure of it. The system was picking up the returns, something was causing it to crash and lose everything.
"Seejay, can we do a subsonic run please?" Sigrun made her slow approach and, as Hitchins had expected, the emitter location was displayed perfectly. "Right. Now, lets do another hypersonic but this time ask the range to use the same radar they had on. I've recorded the returns and I want to do a comparison." Another triple-sonic pass and Hitchins was watching the display record the emitter. Which wasn't surprising, she'd adjusted the system so picking it up keyed the ESM set to display the recorded data, not the current transmissions. "Seejay, once more please, same emitter? I think I've cracked it."
Sigrun made her last pass. "What gives Selli?"
"I'll have to check this with the brainiacs but it isnt the equipment at all. Thet's why the Raytheon contractors haven't been able to find anything. They've been looking for faults in the processing system and the threat libraries but all that side seems to be working perfectly, More or less. I think the problem is the airflow around the aircraft. Over Mach 3.05, its stagnant, we're riding in a ball of superheated air. That's a sharp, temperature-determined transition point and, once we're past it, the air starts to pick up an electrical charge. I think its causing the emitter signals to flicker instead of being a steady beam. The ESM system is picking up each flash and because we're moving so fast, each has a slightly different bearing. Its interpreting the signal as being hundreds of different emitters and tries to display them all, only it hasn't got the memory and the system crashes. Its never worried us before because the older systems are mechanically scanned and the degree of resolution isn't fine enough for the variance to be significant. This system gives us very fine directional cuts and a very fine read-out of PRF and jitter so its more vulnerable to minor differences.
"I've recorded the signal we're receiving at 3.4 and subsonic and the brainiacs can compare them. Then they can work out a filter or something. I don't think its the whole solution but its somewhere to start."
"Well done that girl. Selli, you come from around here dont you?"
"Brandon, its a bit south of here though."
"Want to pay them a visit? We'll have to check with home and with local air traffic control then get in touch with the local police, let everybody know what is happening but its doable." Public relations flyovers were becoming more common in SAC now, especially after McNamara's attempt to scrap the bombers in favor of missiles. General LeMay never allowed such things but General Dedmon had allowed a few such flights and General McKenzie was strongly in favor of showing off the bombers at every available opportunity. Where, once, invitations from airshows and other public events, had been ignored, now they got the full treatment, aircraft for flying and static displays and ground shows of weapons and equipment. "Bob, make the necessary calls."
Police Station, Brandon, Maryland
"Brandon Police? This is Strategic Aerospace Command aircraft Sigrun. We are a B-70 out of Kozlowski Maine."
"This is Alice Delmar, dispatcher. How can I help? You're not in trouble are you?"
"No ma'am, we'd just like to give you a little private air display. One of the crew comes from Brandon and would like to see the ole homestead from up here."
"Oh my. I'll patch you through to my husband. We have a radio car now you know."
Cockpit, B-70A "Sigrun"
Hitchins and O'Seven exchanged grins. Surrounded by millions of dollars worth of fastest, highest-flying bomber in history and equipped with the finest electronics US industry could provide, the idea of a small town being proud because its police now had a radio car had a refreshing normality about it. Hitchins privately made herself a bet that Frank Delmar's radio car worked better than Sigrun's electronic warfare system. She was sitting in the co-pilots seat, watching as the countryside underneath grew larger and familiar shapes started to appear. Sigrun was doing less than 400 miles per hour now and had dropped to a round 4,000 feet. They had to keep it slow, the American population was tolerant of supersonic bangs but there was no percentage in pushing tolerance too far. The downside was that the engines weren't that happy, every so often one coughed and shot out a jet of flame but that was a known eccentricity and wasn't harmful. Then, the street plan of Brandon appeared in front of them.
Brandon, Maryland.
Officer Frank Delmar stopped his car outside the small house and ran up the steps to hammer on the front door. George Hitchins answered, his face wary. Frank Delmar was a good and a fair policemen but this side of town, the uniform still had a degree of suspicion attached to it. "Mister Hitchins. A B-70 from Maine is giving us a private air show in a few minutes. You and Mrs Hitchins will want to watch this, Selli's on board. You may want to call your friends up as well."
"What? Selli? But. Hey Momma, you gotta hear this. Selli's coming over. On one of them new bombers."
Within a few minutes the street started to fill with people. They'd heard of the B-70 and seen it on television but few had actually got to see one fly over. The lumbering B-52s and the sleek B-58s, they were common sights but not the B-70s. And everybody had heard about it, the controversy a couple of years earlier had seen to that. Another word spread quickly, Selma Hitchins, a girl from this side of town was one of the crew. They heard the aircraft long before they saw it, the strange bluish-silver paint seemed to take up the color of the sky but nothing could mask the roar of the six engines. Then, she was overhead, her nose up high, the big delta wings seeming to shadow the town as she passed over. As she did, she seemed to angle slightly and the people on the ground saw her turning.
The radio in Delmar's car crackled. All SAC aircraft had a frequency they could use to talk to police and emergency services on the ground in case of an in-flight emergency and Sigrun was using it to speak to police headquarters. Then Delmar's wife was patching it through to the car. It was a slight abuse of the system but one nobody would complain about. Delmar listened for a second then called Mister Hitchins over. "Somebody wants to talk to you."
Cockpit, B-70A "Sigrun"
"Poppa? Is that you? This is Selli. I'm right overhead. I can see our street everything. We've got.." O'Seven pressed his fingers to his lips, the capabilities of the high-definition camera were classified and even a hint was a bad idea. "really clear air up here." In fact Hitchins could see her parents and the police car on the ground on the display screen in front of her in perfect detail. Along with the other people who'd stopped to watch Sigrun strut her stuff in front of an admiring population. "We can't stay long, we burn too much fuel down here. I'm sitting in the co-pilot's seat so I can see everything."
Sigrun was doing figure-of-eight turns over Brandon, showing the aircraft off to the taxpayers whose earnings had paid for her. They'd been cleared for five circuits of the town before they'd have to go back up where they belonged. It wasn't just fuel, this was a heavily-traveled piece of airspace and clearing it quickly was safe as well as smart. Hitchins was talking to her parents, explaining she wasn't part of the regular crew, but was on board for some tests. Her mother had asked her what wearing one of the much-publicized pressure-suits was like and she'd had to explain that even up high and at maximum speed, the B-70 was a shirtsleeve environment aircraft. The pressure suits were custom made for each crew member, if theyd been required, she wouldnt have been able to ride the flight. Eventually Sigrun was completing her last circuit and she had to sign off.
Brandon, Maryland.
Mister Hitchins was crying, the tears streaming down his cheeks, when he handed the microphone back to Delmar. "That's my little girl up there. She's grown up but I never guessed she'd ride one of the big bombers. When I was a kid I never thought any of us would do anything like that, let alone my daughter. If my grandpappy could have seen this." Mister Hitchins' grandfather had been a slave in the South before the Civil War. "Thank you Officer, for letting me speak with my little Selli."
Overhead, Sigrun was climbing away and picking up speed. Twenty minutes later she would be back at Kozlowski AFB and the engineers could get to work deciphering the recording tapes and following up on the clues Hitchins had found. Back in Brandon, people were still talking in the street. Selma Hitchins wasn't unique in having gone away to join the military, Tom Jordan had gone and joined the Marines only last year, but for her to turn up overhead in one of the new Valkyries was totally unexpected. The crowd slowly started to disperse but before they did, some of the men shook Mr Hitchin's hand and the women hugged his wife. Selma Hitchin's return in a B-70 had done something for Brandon, something that nobody could quite define but everybody felt it. Some of the young women were looking up at the sky a bit thoughtfully as well. After all, if Selma Hitchins could get to be part of the crew on one of SAC's bombers, why couldn't they?