Eric Schlosser - Command and Control

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

The 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.