Command and Control

The silo door motors on level 1A had to be checked, as did the sump at the bottom of level 9B, and everything in between. The equipment areas of the silo tended to be loud, but the launch duct was lined with sound dampeners, so that the roar of the engines wouldn’t cause vibrations and damage the missile. It was so quiet in the launch duct that on hot summer days, when the air-conditioners were struggling, warm oxidizer could be heard bubbling in the tanks. The only problem that Holder and Fuller noted that day was a faulty switch on the hard water tank. The complex had two large water tanks: one inside the silo, extending from levels 3 to 6, and one topside beyond the perimeter fence. The tank within the silo was considered “hard” because it was underground, and therefore shielded from a nuclear blast. It held one hundred thousand gallons of water that would spray into the silo moments before launch. The water helped to suppress the sound of the engines and ensured that flames wouldn’t rise up the silo and destroy the missile. The two water tanks were also essential for extinguishing a major fire at the complex. Like a broken float in a toilet that allows only one flush, a faulty switch on the hard water tank could prevent it from refilling automatically. Holder and Fuller noted the problem on the checklist and moved to the next step.

PTS Team A reached the complex around 3:30 in the afternoon, but the platforms still wouldn’t lower. Having nothing better to do, the team hung out and played cards around the table in level 1 of the control center. Jeffrey Plumb, who was new to the group, lay on one of the beds. They’d been working since early in the morning and were ready to be finished with the day. PTS teams and launch crews didn’t tend to socialize. The PTS guys were a different breed. Outside of work they had a reputation for being rowdy and wild. They had one of the most dangerous jobs in the Air Force — and at the end of the day they liked to blow off steam, drinking and partying harder than just about anyone else at the base. They were more likely to ride motorcycles, ignore speed limits, violate curfews, and toss a commanding officer into a shower, fully clothed, after consuming too much alcohol. They called the missiles “birds,” and they were attached to them and proud of them in the same way that good automobile mechanics care about cars. The danger of the oxidizer and the fuel wasn’t theoretical. It was part of the job. The daily risks often inspired a defiant, cavalier attitude among the PTS guys. Some of them had been known to fill a Ping-Pong ball with oxidizer and toss it into a bucket of fuel. The destruction of the steel bucket, accompanied by flames, was a good reminder of what they were working with. And if you were afraid of the propellants, as most people would be, you needed to find a different line of work.

Although low pressure in an oxidizer tank could mean a leak, PTS Team A wasn’t worried about it. This was the third day in a row that they’d been called out to 4–7. The missile in the silo had recently been recycled. The warhead and the propellants were removed during a recycle, and then the missile was lifted from the silo, hauled back to the base, carefully checked for corrosion and leaks. Later, the same missile might be returned to the complex, or a different one might be shipped there from storage. The fuel and oxidizer pressure often didn’t stabilize at the proper levels for weeks after a recycle. PTS teams were accustomed to adding more nitrogen two, three, four times until the tank pressures settled.

At the conclusion of the recycle at 4–7, a Titan II was placed in the silo, filled with propellants, and armed with a warhead. The missile’s serial number was 62-0006. The same missile that had been in the silo during the fire at the complex near Searcy now stood on the thrust mount at Launch Complex 374-7 north of Damascus. The odds were slim that the same Titan II airframe, out of dozens, would wind up in those two places. Bad luck, fate, sheer coincidence — whatever the explanation, neither the launch crew, nor the PTS team, knew that this missile had once been in a silo full of thick smoke and dying men.