Command and Control (54 page)

The television was on in the living room, and Rutherford noticed that a good friend of his, Frank Thomas, a twenty-seven-year-old correspondent for Channel 7, was standing across the road from the Titan II site in Damascus. He was repeating the Air Force claim that everything was under control. Rutherford picked up the phone and called Bob Steele, the news director at Channel 7.

“
Bob, listen to me,” Rutherford said. “This is totally off the record, but you tell Frank to get the hell out of there.”

“What?”

“
Tell Frank to get the hell out of there. He is a friend of mine, and that missile, Bob, is going to explode.”

“
How do you know?”

“
You have your sources, I have mine,” Rutherford said, beginning to feel a little frantic. “And I'm just telling you, I'm sitting over here watching my friend Frank Thomas on your station standing right before a death trap. And I don't have a way to get to him, but you all do, and you've got to get him out of there.”

Steele got the message. But Thomas was about to leave Damascus, anyway.

T
he outer door was a real bitch.

The entrance to Launch Complex 374-7 wasn't protected by high-tech security devices, invented at a top secret weapons lab—just by a heavy steel door, with an electromagnetic lock. And it was hard to open with a crowbar.
Greg Devlin and Rex Hukle took turns, one holding the flashlight, the other trying to pry the door open. Nobody had told them how to do it. There wasn't a checklist for breaking into a Titan II complex, and so the two airmen improvised. They used brute force. Devlin was in pretty good shape from boxing, but the air pack and the RFHCO suit made the work more difficult.

Hukle felt uneasy. They'd walked beneath a thick cloud of fuel vapor to reach the access portal. Now the outer door wouldn't open. And once they got past this door, they'd have to go downstairs, break open the door in the entrapment area, and open three blast doors with a hand pump to reach the control center. All of that would have to be accomplished within half an hour; their air packs were considered too unreliable after that point. It was about five after two in the morning. They were the only people on the complex. Hukle figured anything could happen and prepared himself for the worst.

Devlin wasn't having dark thoughts. He just wanted to open the damn
door. He felt focused and alert, ready for whatever may come. Devlin's attitude was: somebody's got to do this, so it might as well be me.

After fifteen minutes of pulling and prying, the steel door swung open. Devlin and Hukle broke through the entrapment door in about thirty seconds. They left crowbars in both doorjambs to prevent the doors from closing, went down the stairs, and got to work on the first blast door, attaching hoses to its hydraulic valves. Neither of the men had ever used the emergency hand pump before—and the blast door wouldn't open, no matter how hard they pumped. The fine threads on the hoses were tricky to connect in the dark while wearing rubber gloves. And the pump was an elaborate contraption that didn't seem to do anything, no matter what they tried. Another fifteen minutes passed, and the blast door was still shut. Their time limit was up. Over the radio, Sergeant Michael Hanson ordered them to quit. Feeling frustrated and defeated, they left the pump beside the door, climbed the stairs, and walked back to the hole in the fence.

Sergeant Hanson, the chief of PTS Team B, led the effort to reenter the control center. He told Devlin and Hukle to read the instructions for the hand pump, grab fresh air packs, go back down there, and try the door again.

Jeff Kennedy thought the whole plan was idiotic. They should be going through the escape hatch, not the access portal. They should have done it at ten o'clock in the evening, not at two in the morning. Almost eight hours had passed since the skin of the missile was pierced. Entering the complex was much more dangerous now—and if something went wrong underground, Devlin and Hukle would be close to the missile, surrounded by fuel vapors, vulnerable to all kinds of bad things.

Let me do it, Kennedy said. I know how to work the pump.

Hanson had tried to send Kennedy back to Little Rock a few hours earlier. He hadn't asked Kennedy to put on a RFHCO suit; and he hadn't invited Kennedy to join them at the complex gate. The two men didn't get along. But Kennedy sure knew a lot about the missile, and he was volunteering.

I'll go with him, David Livingston said.

Hanson told them to get ready.

While Livingston and Kennedy checked their radios and air packs, Major Wayne Wallace, Sergeant Archie James, and Sergeant Silas Spann left to set up a decontamination area in front of the water treatment building, at the northeast corner of the complex, just outside the fence. When they got to the building, the door was locked, and the combination they'd been given didn't work. Wallace had to break into the place. Inside, they found a short rubber garden hose. It wasn't ideal—Livingston and Kennedy would have to walk about a hundred yards to get rinsed off. But it was better than nothing. Spann and James drove over a light-all unit and began to set it up so that the men wouldn't have to be decontaminated in the dark.

Sergeant Ronald W. Christal showed Livingston and Kennedy the tech order for the emergency hand pump. Christal was a missile pneudraulics technician. He often worked on the blast doors and knew a few tricks to open them that weren't in the book.

Livingston and Kennedy planned to communicate with each other using hand signals instead of the radios in their RFHCO suits. Only one person at a time could speak on the launch complex radio system—and they wanted to keep the line open as much as possible. One of them would speak to Hanson on the launch complex radio; Hanson would relay the information to Colonel Morris, who'd be right next to him at the pickup truck near the gate. Using the radio in the truck, Morris would speak to Colonel Moser, who was at the command post in Little Rock; Moser would talk to SAC headquarters in Omaha. And, hopefully, as the words passed from one person to another, nothing would be garbled or misunderstood.

At about ten minutes before three, Kennedy and Livingston reached the first blast door. Christal read the instructions for the hand pump to Hanson, who conveyed them over the radio.

The blast door opened.

Livingston took an air sample with a portable vapor detector. They'd been told to check the fuel vapor level every step of the way. If the level
exceeded 250 parts per million, they were supposed to leave the complex. The vapor level was 65 ppm in front of the first blast door. As they walked through the door and entered the large blast lock, the level rose to 181 ppm.

At the command post in Little Rock, Sergeant Jimmy D. Wiley heard the vapor level and thought that Kennedy and Livingston should get out of there immediately. Wiley was part of the K crew, the backup team assembled to advise Colonel Moser. Another member of the K crew, Lieutenant David Rathgeber, agreed—if the vapor level was that high after the first blast door, it was bound to be even higher after the second one, as the men got closer to the missile. Wiley and Rathgeber told Colonel Moser that the reentry should be terminated, that the men should be withdrawn from the complex.

The issue was discussed with SAC headquarters. Livingston and Kennedy were ordered to proceed. If they could reach the next blast lock—the small area between the door to the control center and the long cableway to the silo—they could check a panel on the wall that displayed readings from the Mine Safety Appliance. The panel showed the vapor levels in the silo. Kennedy removed the breathing nuts from the second blast door and inserted the probe of the vapor detector through a small hole in the door. Sticking the probe through the door would give a preview of what awaited them on the other side.

The fuel vapor level was about 190 ppm. SAC headquarters told Livingston and Kennedy to open the door, enter the next blast lock, and check the readings on the panel. They opened the door. The room was so full of fuel vapor that they could barely see inside. It looked like a steam room. The portable vapor detector pegged out—the vapor level was far beyond 250 ppm.

Kennedy walked over to the panel. For the first time, he was scared. The blast lock had eight emergency lights, some of them bright red, and he could barely see them. The cloud of fuel vapor floating around them was highly flammable. The slightest spark could ignite it. The RFHCO suits and tools abandoned by PTA Team A were lying on the floor. This is the
kind of place you don't want to be in, Kennedy thought. He looked at the panel, and the needles on the gauges were pointing all the way to the right. They'd pegged out. The gauges said the fuel vapor level in the silo now exceeded 21,000 ppm—high enough to melt their RFHCO suits.

Back out, Hanson said, back out.

Livingston and Kennedy left the blast lock, hurried through the two blast doors, and went up the stairs.

Hanson had an idea: maybe they should turn on a ventilation fan to clear out some of the fuel vapor. The switch for the fan was on the wall of the access portal, at the bottom of the first flight of stairs.

Livingston and Kennedy were almost out of the complex when they heard Hanson say, turn on the fan. They looked at each other. Livingston patted himself on the chest, signaling that he would go down and do it.

Kennedy reached the top of the stairs and stepped into the night air. It felt good to be out of there. That cloud of fuel vapor was insane, he'd never seen anything like it. Kennedy was tired. He decided to sit for a moment on the concrete curb outside the access portal. It had been a hell of a night.

Livingston switched on the fan and came back up the stairs. He was a foot or two behind Kennedy when the Titan II exploded.

At the command post in Little Rock, the radio went dead. And the open phone line from the control center at 4-7 became silent. The sound of the tipsies—the intruder alarm that had been ringing ever since the missile crew left—was gone. Nobody at the launch site could be reached on the radio.
For the next eight minutes, the command post did not hear a word from anyone in Damascus. Colonel
Moser thought the warhead had detonated.

•   •   •

S
ID
K
ING
AND
HIS
SALES
REP,
Tom Phillips, were sitting on the hood of Sheriff Anglin's squad car, talking with some of the reporters who'd gathered at the access road to the complex, off Highway 65. Nobody seemed worried about the situation. The Air Force had denied there was a serious problem and said everything was under control. But Van Buren
County didn't get a lot of big news stories, and King was willing to hang around a little longer just to see what happened.

A bright white flash lit the sky, and King felt the air around him being sucked toward the missile site. An instant later, a gust blew it back, and a loud sustained roar came from behind the trees, like the sound of a rocket being launched. A column of fire rose hundreds of feet into the air, tall as a skyscraper and towering overhead. The blast briefly turned night into day, pulled the launch complex apart, and lifted the debris into a mushroom cloud. King saw the flames and felt heat on his face and dove to the ground, terrified, as rocks and pieces of concrete began to rain down.

People were screaming, “
Get out of here, get out of here,” and a scene that had been calm and quiet a moment earlier became sheer chaos. King and Phillips hid under the taillights of the squad car, trying to avoid falling rocks—and then the taillights came on. Sheriff Anglin was backing out, and he didn't know they were behind the car. They leaped out of the way as Anglin floored it and pulled onto the road. State officials, highway patrolmen, Air Force officers, cameramen, and reporters were getting into their cars and speeding south toward Damascus. The scene had a primordial feel: every man for himself.

Just a few minutes earlier, Lou Short, the cameraman for Channel 4, had been showing off his brand-new, state-of-the-art, $30,000 RCA video camera. When the debris started to fall, King saw him toss the camera into the back of a truck like an old piece of wood and drive off. None of the news photographers got a picture of the explosion. Getting away from it seemed a lot more important. Larry Ellis, the cameraman for Channel 11, captured the only images of the blast—ten seconds of blurry footage, shot in 16mm, after the eyepiece of his camera was blown off. And ten seconds was long enough for Ellis, who stopped filming, jumped into the truck driven by his reporter, and joined the panicked exodus to Damascus.

King and Phillips headed the other way in the Live Ear, driving north on Highway 65 toward the radio station in Clinton. King had his foot to the floor, praying that his little Dodge Omni could outrun the radioactive fallout and whatever else had been released into the air. They knew the missile had a nuclear warhead, no matter what the Air Force said. But they
had no idea if that warhead had detonated. About half a mile up the road, an Air Force security officer stood in the middle of the highway, wearing a gas mask and holding an M-16.

Sheriff Anglin was ahead of them, driving erratically, going ninety miles an hour, slowing down to fifty, and then speeding up again. The cord of Anglin's police radio had gotten wrapped around his right leg, and every time he lifted the handset to speak into it, the cord pulled his foot off the gas. The sheriff stopped at the truck stop in Bee Branch, about six miles north of Damascus, and told everyone to get out of there, right away. Nobody argued with him. The place emptied, and big eighteen-wheelers peeled onto the highway.

Driving through Choctaw, King realized that neither he, nor Phillips, had spoken since the explosion.

“
We just left a bunch of dead people back there,” King said.

“Yeah, I know.”

•   •   •

S
AM
H
UTTO
WAS
COMING
HOME
to milk the cows when the missile blew. He was just north of Damascus, on a stretch of Highway 65 that looked down on the launch complex, about two miles away. The blast rattled his pickup. He saw the bright flash, the flames shooting upward like a Roman candle. And then he saw a little sparkly thing fly out of the fire, soar above it briefly, and fall to the ground. He decided not to milk the cows, turned the pickup around, and drove to his brother's house. And his father, who was spending the night there, seemed curious about what had just happened

“
Hop in here,” Hutto said to his dad, “and let's go up to the top of the hill so you can see.”

Hutto drove to the top of the hill and saw another incredible sight: the headlights of vehicles speeding toward them, bumper to bumper, filling both lanes of the two-lane highway. It looked like a NASCAR restart. As Hutto and his father sat in the pickup beside the road, a couple of state police cars flew past them, followed by news trucks and all sorts of Air Force vehicles—even an ambulance. Nobody stopped, slowed down, or
told them to evacuate. Once the vehicles were gone, the road was empty and still again, like it always was at three in the morning. But a fire was burning brightly in the silo.