Razing Beijing: A Thriller Read online

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  R A Z I N G B E I J I N G

  SIDNEY ELSTON

  Copyright © 2012 Sidney Elston III

  Cover Design by Juli Watson

  Edited by Emily Bestler

  First eBook Edition 1.3

  This title is also available in print. Simply visit:

  http://www.amazon.com/dp/B009GGX204 or

  http://www.SidneyElstonBooks.com

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  TABLE OF CONTENTS

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 45

  Chapter 50

  Chapter 55

  Chapter 60

  Chapter 65

  Chapter 70

  Chapter 75

  Chapter 80

  Chapter 85

  Chapter 90

  Chapter 95

  Chapter 100

  Chapter 105

  Chapter 110

  Chapter 115

  Chapter 120

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgements

  About the Author

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  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, or locales is entirely coincidental. The author does not have any control over and does not assume responsibility for third-party websites or their content.

  License Notes

  Copyright © 2012 Sidney Elston III

  All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever. Doing so without the permission of the publisher constitutes unlawful piracy and theft of the author’s intellectual property. If you would like to use material from the book (other than for review purposes), prior written permission must be obtained by contacting the publisher.

  Published by Sidney Elston III

  http://www.SidneyElstonBooks.com

  ISBN : 978-0-9882540-0-8 (eBook)

  ISBN: : 978-0-9882540-1-5 (Paperback)

  eBook Edition 1.3, November 2012

  Cover Design by Juli Watson

  Edited by Emily Bestler

  The production of this eBook is neither sponsored by, endorsed by, nor related to Simon & Schuster and Emily Bestler Books.

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  For Lynn

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  The nooses have been fashioned by the Americans themselves and by nobody else, and it is they themselves who have put these nooses round their own necks, handing the ends of the ropes to the Chinese people, the peoples of the Arab countries and all the peoples of the world who love peace and oppose aggression.

  If the U.S. monopoly capitalist groups persist in pushing their policies of aggression and war, the day is bound to come when they will be hanged by the people of the whole world.

  —Mao Zedong, speaking to the Supreme State Conference, Beijing, September 8, 1958

  We Chinese will prepare ourselves for the destruction of all of the cities east of Xian. Of course the Americans will have to be prepared that hundreds of cities will be destroyed by the Chinese.

  —General Zhu Chenghu, Peoples Liberation Army, July 15, 2005

  1

  Monday, March 23

  Mojave, California

  SANDRA COLE SWEPT HER EYES over the instruments, searching for proof of the disturbing vibration while fearing she might actually find it. Like the proverbial gremlin of aviation myth, the aircraft engine designer’s worst nightmare defied her every effort at hunting it down, except through the seat of her jump suit, where it seemed to be getting worse. Her mounting sense of loss of control tightened the tendrils of panic around her chest—she envisioned the erupting fireball that would end her life miles above the Sierra Nevada mountains.

  Sandy took a breath, sat back from her instrument console and rubbed her eyes. Summoning calm, the flight test engineer gazed out over the cavernous, military-style austerity of the airliner’s cabin. All of the passenger seating and overhead compartments had been removed; bolted down to the bare aluminum deck in their place was row after waist-high row of sophisticated electronics cabinetry. The ground test program had yielded three fairly spectacular engine explosions. As a result, of the company’s two-hundred or so qualified engineers only she had volunteered to board the flight with the pilots today. And while hurtling across the sky at 500 miles per hour was no time to doubt her own judgment, she could not help but acknowledge that this would be a decidedly lonely place to die.

  Sandy brushed aside her macabre thoughts. She lifted her headphones clear of her ears but heard nothing aside from the peculiar drone of the prototype engine. Among her array of electronics was a fast-Fourier analyzer, a device that reduced measured vibrations to their discreet harmonic constituents. She scrolled through the various channels, and that’s when she saw it. The frequency spike was lower than expected. No, she thought, frowning, running the numbers in her head. Not low, sub-harmonic. She tapped the monitor with her fingernail. However unexpected, the worst part was that she could feel it building through her seat.

  She toggled the microphone switch to speak with the pilots. “Chris, Sandy.”

  “Go.”

  “I found some sort of anomaly. Can you pull up channel fourteen, or eighteen?”

  “Vibration? Where?”

  “The engine rear bearing support.”

  “No, we can only monitor a couple of fan blades up here.”

  Outside the oval window to Sandy’s immediate right was the forward nacelle of the prototype engine. Glancing back she could see the swirling blur of counter-rotating propeller blades to which the pilot referred, the sophisticated engine’s most prominent feature. Strapped in her military four-point restraint chair, all that separated her from the tips of the blades were several layers of Kevlar, aluminum, and sixteen inches of air.

  “Sandy?”

  “This vibration appears to be within limits. I still don’t like it. I’m calling it in.”

  “While you’re at it, dial me up a pepperoni with extra cheese, would you?”

  Sandy smiled. “Anchovies for you.”

  “I’d settle for a bag of peanuts. Keep us in the loop.”

  Her smile faded when her eye was drawn to a yellow no. 2 pencil on the workspace in front of her. The pencil had begun to bounce end-to-end of its own accord, ever so slightly, and drift toward the edge of the countertop. Our gremlin is baring his teeth, she thought.

  ROBERT STUART WALKED in the desert brush beneath an oppressive sun, from which only the small cluster of buildings behind him harbored relief. Eventually he was far enough away from the municipal airfield that only his cell phone or the occasional departing aircraft could disturb the silence. Before long the myriad distractions that competed to dominate his life began to fade away. He and his team had accomplished their mission—the flight test of the most fuel efficient jet engine in commercial aviation history—on exactly the day agreed to some three years earlier.

  His reprieve ended with the sight of a man, recognizable in the distance by his gait, approaching from one of the buildings. Stuart suspected the young man’s annoyed frown had little to do with having to venture out into the heat.

  The news delivered by his trusted colleague was, indeed, not good.

  Stuart turned from the engineer and squinted...there, still barely visible to the north was the jet, two hours into its flight, a lone silv
ery speck of reflected sunlight high over the Sierra Nevadas. He also recognized a much closer source of reflected light. Beyond the phalanx of concrete administration buildings and through the shimmering heat of the runway was what the locals called the ‘airplane graveyard.’ He had heard that, in the current economic downturn, the desert repository for sun-bleached hulks of surplus passenger jets was turning a respectable profit.

  Stuart turned toward Ian Vickers. “Do we understand the source of the problem?”

  Vickers stood with his arms hanging loosely at his sides, shirtsleeves rolled up and weary eyes in a face that looked older than his thirty-five years. “Like I said, it’s still within allowable vibratory limits. We don’t know exactly why it’s gotten worse. I’d have paged you if I really wanted to sound the alarm.”

  Stuart nodded—Vickers was one engineer whose opinion he trusted, despite the Brit’s former alliance with those who were hostile, often openly so, with Stuart’s approach to management. Any prescribed action was usually pretty obvious, but he made it a point to first listen to people whose job it was to diagnose data. So he listened to Vickers’s assurance and thought: yet it’s important enough that you walked out here to tell me about it.

  “Has anyone else seen anything unusual?”

  “They’re all checking a little more closely now.” Vickers ran his hand up his glistening forehead and back over his hair. “Maybe we should go and see what they found.”

  TWO DOZEN or so engineers bantered and joked as they shuffled into the conference room—the young ribbing the old, the Brits scoffing at the Americans, the Japanese simply polite while the Italians along with everyone poked fun at the French.

  Stuart would have preferred not to deny them this moment. Their successful race against time had begun some three years earlier outside Ensenada, Mexico, with Thanatechnology International’s bargain-basement purchase of a thoroughly scavenged and abandoned airliner, by then the adoptive home to an unyielding pack of coyotes. The jet engine company’s crack technicians managed somehow to get the old hulk airborne and limp it over the border. Several dozen aerospace engineers—many of them here in this room—and a team of technicians stripped and refurbished the plane, equipping it with $33 million worth of computer and monitoring gear. They removed one of the two Pratt & Whitney turbofans from the rear of the fuselage and then—finally—attached in its place the product of over $1 billion in development, upon which all of their futures depended. Today they celebrated what for most would be the climax of their careers; such was the infrequency of groundbreaking projects.

  Using the rolled-up blueprint clenched in his fist, Stuart swept discarded sheets of paper and coffee cups from the conference table onto the floor. The men crowded around the table and eyed Stuart apprehensively as he instructed Vickers to describe the situation for them.

  The engineers huddled for several minutes while mulling the news. Vickers removed the pencil from behind his ear, leaned over and pointed to a spot on Stuart’s blueprint of the engine cross-section. “Here on the aft bearing support, both sensors registered the vibration increase to about 90% of limits.” Vickers’s British accent, slurred with fatigue, reminded Stuart of the risks of exhaustion. Glances exchanged around the table revealed similar concerns.

  “Asynchronous vibration, tracking just below the forward spool rpm.” Vickers straightened from leaning over the blueprint. He looked his boss in the eye. “It might be due to the increased physical speed during flight.” He shrugged. “It’s just as likely some benign effect related to pressure altitude—”

  “The spool’s filling with oil,” Stuart interrupted.

  The conference room fell deathly silent, all eyes on Vickers. He scratched the back of his head. “I guess that’s possible.”

  “But this is a very rash deduction,” announced the leader of the French engineering delegation, launching the room into raucous debate. He proceeded to insist that their computer simulations proved how engine sump pressures during flight would limit the possibility of oil leaking into the spool. Then the Italian project director rebutted, citing how the results of their forced vibration model made the French numbers moot. The debate intensified after Stuart’s lead structures engineer entered the room to announce more disturbing news, that Ian’s vibration had also been measured on the pylon where the engine attached to the fuselage.

  Stuart noticed carbon seal designer Albert Federov standing safely beyond the ring of combatants who encircled the conference table, nervously biting his lip, eyes studying the blueprint. One odd thing about the Russian immigrant was that every now and then he emitted a terse little grunt, as if to make evident a concentration so profound that he could not possibly know there were people around to hear him. Stuart was reminded of the telltale signs of oil found on the tarmac following high-speed taxi tests earlier in the week. This had led to the discovery of oil pooling inside one of the sophisticated engine’s multiple spools. Consultation with Federov’s seal vendor led them to suspect a moderately leaky yet stable seal performance issue, conveniently explained by a decision five months earlier to relax surface finish requirements in order to meet the schedule. Now Stuart wondered if these initial warnings could possibly have been pointing to something far worse. Had he lulled himself into allowing the team to assume the lesser of two evils?

  Following Stuart’s gaze, Vickers shook his head.

  Stuart raised his hands for the meeting to become orderly. “Ian, tell us again why we don’t think that the carbon seal might actually be damaged?”

  “Well, as is standard op, we pressure tested the subassemblies at every level.” Vickers pegged his eyes on Federov. “Isn’t that right?”

  Federov averted his eyes. He stared wordlessly at the conference table, and then nodded his concurrence.

  Vickers bristled with anger. He turned toward Stuart. “I don’t know what more to tell you. We don’t have anything specifically to point to that might’ve resulted in a damaged carbon seal.”

  Like the onset of a dull headache, Stuart felt a sense of doubt descend over his decision that morning to proceed with the flight. Vickers had been among those who convinced him that they understood the oil leak, a position he accepted only after additional taxi testing indicated that it was not getting worse.

  “Assuming there is damage, what might be the worst case scenario?”

  “These vibration levels fall within limits, Stu.”

  “Humor me.”

  Vickers breathed a sigh.

  “So let’s talk about the limit. Just how did we define the limit for this particular mode?”

  Vickers looked at him and said nothing.

  “You did not predict and now you cannot explain why the vibration has jumped. So now I wonder if we even chose the proper criteria to establish the limit.”

  “I understand what you’re driving at. Look—I’ve got a proposal. Sandy says the vibration is lower at reduced engine speed. With the flight test already half over, and seeing how obviously queasy you are about this, we can instruct the pilots simply to throttle back the test engine. That way they can at least continue with some portion of the test plan.”

  Stuart considered Vickers’s proposal amidst a peppering of hushed conversation. “How much more time do we have in the flight?”

  “Ninety minutes, maybe.”

  If indeed he was over-reacting and the problem was benign, proceeding at reduced power amounted to additional margin. The sticky point was that they desperately needed the data being generated by the long-awaited flight—nobody liked the idea of putting themselves in the hot seat by canceling it, especially without clear justification. As vice-president of development operations, Stuart’s job was to view inputs through a lens that took this and the overall corporate picture into account.

  At that moment all conversation ceased as Emily Chang entered the room. The men stepped aside and the tall, slender woman made her way to the table opposite Stuart.

  “I am afraid we have another prob
lem,” Chang announced, strain evident in her voice. She brushed a long strand of hair behind her ear and handed a sheet of paper over the table to Stuart.

  The section of strip-chart was blank except for a lone, wavy blue line extending the full length of it. “What are we looking at?” Stuart slid the paper on the table for the others to study.

  “At first we thought it was a measurement error,” Chang replied. “The trace indicates an oscillation in the aft propeller pitch angle. I think the spool vibration is causing the entire rotor to wobble, and the control is responding by altering the propeller pitch.” The engine control to which she referred was in essence a digital computer, which among other functions established the many parameters necessary to deliver the level of thrust commanded by the pilot.

  “That’s a serious problem?” Stuart asked.

  “It is certainly an unusual problem. And like Ian’s vibration, given that it’s becoming more pronounced as the flight test proceeds, it is potentially serious.”

  Stuart narrowed his eyes. “You’re saying the computer is trying to keep engine thrust constant, but the wobble won’t let it?”

  “Yes, that is our suspicion. If the whole fan rotor is wobbling, then the incidence angle of air flowing across the propeller blades is affected. This alters their lift, their thrust. The control senses this and attempts to correct it.”

  “Then, are you saying the rotor wobble and control oscillation are feeding each other?” It was a question appropriately addressed to the expertise of several engineers in the room. It was Emily’s answer that interested Stuart.

  Chang riveted her gaze on him; she nodded. “Yes, that is what I’m saying.”

  Stuart raised his eyebrows. There was no mistaking what it meant: the carbon seal deteriorates, which leaks more oil into the spool, which increases spool unbalance and rotor wobble, causing the control to vary the propeller angle, which contributes to the rotor wobble and further deteriorates the carbon seal and leaks additional oil...

  The engine was shaking itself apart.

  Stuart turned toward the flight director, Bill Murdoch, who had stood by observing the exchange from just inside the conference room door. One ear of his headphone aside and the other in place, Murdoch remained in constant contact with the pilots over the radio clipped to his belt. Stuart asked, “Where’s the aircraft now?”