Command and Control

Captain Mazzaro was still on the phone to the command post, where a Missile Potential Hazard Team was being formed. At the direction of the wing commander, the officers and airmen on the base who knew the most about the Titan II were being recalled to duty: maintenance and operations supervisors, the chief of safety, the chief of missile engineers, an electrical engineer, a bioenvironmental engineer, a backup missile combat crew, among others. Security police were calling homes and searching classrooms to gather the team. And a Missile Potential Hazard Net was being established — a conference call linking the command post at Little Rock with experts at SAC headquarters in Omaha, the Ogden Air Logistics Center at Hill Air Force Base in Utah, and the headquarters of the Eighth Air Force at Barksdale Air Force Base in Louisiana. One of the command post’s first decisions was to send a Missile Alarm Response Team (MART) to the launch complex. A pair of security officers stationed at a nearby missile site grabbed their gas masks and hurried to Damascus.

While Fuller was setting up the portable vapor detector near the blast door, he overheard one of the PTS crew say something about a dropped socket. Fuller asked what had happened in the silo. After hearing the story, Fuller said they needed to tell the commander. Powell stepped forward, admitted to dropping the socket, and began to cry. He described how it fell and hit the thrust mount, how fuel sprayed from the missile like water from a hose. When he was done, the room fell silent.

“Holy shit,” thought Holder.

Captain Mazzaro told Powell to come over to the phone and tell the command post exactly what had happened. Powell got on the line and repeated the story. The details were incredible — but plausible.

Things fell all the time in the silo: nuts, bolts, screwdrivers, flashlights, all sorts of tools. They always fell harmlessly into the W at the bottom of the silo, and then someone had to climb down and get them. You could drop a socket a thousand times from a platform at level 2 without its ever bouncing off the thrust mount and hitting the missile. And even if it did hit the missile, it would probably cause a dent, and nothing more, and nobody would ever know.

Half an hour after the accident, everyone realized what they were dealing with — a major fuel leak, maybe a fire. The Dash-1 didn’t have a checklist for this scenario. Now it was time to improvise, to figure out what could be done to save the missile and the warhead and the ten men in the underground control center.

* * *

Sid King was having dinner at a friend’s house when he got a call from the board operator at KGFL, the AM radio station in Clinton, Arkansas. It sounds like there’s something going on at the Titan II silo in Damascus, the operator said, a leak or something. King was the manager and part-owner of KGFL, as well as its roving reporter. His friend Tom Phillips was the station’s sales rep. Clinton was about seventeen miles north of Damascus, along Highway 65—and Choctaw, where Phillips lived, was even closer to the missile site.

Let’s run down there and check it out, King suggested. Phillips thought that sounded like a good idea. They said good-bye to their wives and got into KGFL’s mobile unit, a Dodge Omni that King had fitted with a VHF transmitter and a big antenna. The nickname of the subcompact, the “Live Ear,” was painted on both sides, along with the station’s call letters.

King was twenty-seven years old. He’d been raised in Providence, a town with a population of approximately one hundred, about an hour east of Damascus. His father was a jack-of-all-trades — a math teacher who also sold real estate, cut hair, and managed a movie theater to support the family and their small farm. King had an idyllic, small-town childhood but also dreamed of some day leaving rural Arkansas for Hollywood. At Arkansas State University, he studied radio and television, encouraged by a great uncle who’d been one of the first TV weathermen in Arkansas. During the summers, King was the drummer of the house band at Dogpatch USA, an amusement park in the Ozarks featuring Li’l Abner and other characters created by the cartoonist Al Capp. The house band played for hours every night, mainly Dixieland jazz, soft rock like “Joy to the World,” and show tunes like “Sunrise, Sunset,” from Fiddler on the Roof.