Command and Control

The other members of Team B didn’t like hearing Livingston talk that way. He wasn’t a fearful or high-strung type. He was one of the most easygoing, laid-back guys at the base. If anything, Livingston was too laid back. He’d become legendary for his ability to sleep just about anywhere, anytime — and once he was out, it was almost impossible to wake him. Jeff Kennedy would sometimes have to bang on Livingston’s door in the morning and yell at him and literally drag him out of bed. But nobody really minded, because once he was awake and alert, Livingston worked hard. He knew how to fix things. He was constantly tinkering with mechanical objects in his spare time — with citizens band radios, lawn mower engines, transmissions, and the old VW Beetle that he’d bought a few years earlier, right after graduating from high school. He loved to ride motorcycles and could pop a wheelie, lean back in the seat, and cruise.

During the previous summer, Livingston had visited his family in Heath, Ohio, a small town surrounded by cornfields in the central part of the state, where his father drove a truck and his mother worked as a clerk at a nearby Air Force base. He’d ridden his motorcycle there and back for a long weekend, a round trip of about fifteen hundred miles. He lived off base in a double-wide trailer, planned to ask his landlord’s niece to marry him, and couldn’t decide whether to move with her to California or sign on for another four years with SAC. The hardest part about leaving the Air Force, Livingston thought, would be saying good-bye to his loud, rowdy PTS buddies. They felt like family.

Senior Airman Greg Devlin was riding next to Livingston in the truck. At first he thought Livingston was joking about the bad vibes and the premonition of death. But it wasn’t funny. And then Livingston said it again.

“Somebody’s going to die tonight, I can feel it.”

“Don’t even be kidding around with stuff like that,” Devlin said. “Don’t even be talking about that.”

Devlin wasn’t very superstitious. He just didn’t like to dwell on bad things. The job was full of risks, and if something dangerous had to be done, his attitude was: okay, let’s go do it. There was no use talking about it or thinking about it too much. He was the type of person who instinctively ran toward a fire, not from it. And he didn’t like to waste time worrying about it first.

Devlin, like Livingston, had grown up in Ohio, graduated from high school in 1977, and joined the Air Force that year. Devlin had to miss his high school graduation; it was held the day after he reported for duty. During basic training, he was seventeen years old. His father and his uncles had been Marines, but Devlin was drawn to the Air Force. He wanted to become a pilot or an airplane mechanic. The Air Force decided, instead, that he would become a Titan II propellant transfer system technician. At training school, he desperately missed his high school sweetheart, Annette Buchanan. With her mother’s blessing, they soon got married, and Annette joined him in Arkansas. She was sixteen. The newlyweds started out in a small trailer and then made a down payment on their first house, when Devlin turned nineteen. The house was in Jacksonville, not far from Little Rock Air Force Base. His friends didn’t like to throw parties in the dormitories, because they always had to worry about the dorm monitors and the dorm guards. And so almost every weekend, the parties were held at Devlin’s house. A fair amount of alcohol was consumed. And if a party got a little out of hand, Devlin knew how to deal with it. He was friendly, courteous, even tempered — and a Golden Gloves boxer, just like his father, his uncles, and one of his grandfathers had been. Devlin trained at a local gym. He fought as a junior middleweight and had recently scored five straight knockouts. When he asked people to quiet down at a party, they generally did.

* * *

At the command post, a checklist was slowly being prepared. Each step had to be discussed on the Missile Potential Hazard Net and then approved by General Leavitt. Colonel Moser spoke on behalf of his team, after listening to the recommendations of the K crew and everyone else on the net. At about eleven o’clock, a consensus seemed to have emerged, and Moser read the latest plan aloud: