Billy slides an ID card through a tray, and Lieutenant Valoppi pushes it back without looking at it. He is a handsome, dark-haired 22-year-old with an open collar and loosened tie on his Class A blue uniform. “Billy, you don’t have to show me your ID. You don’t have to give me a voiceprint, fingerprint, or urine sample. You don’t have to thank me, kiss me, or blow me. Just get the hell down the hole.”
“It’s in the T.O. I show you my ID. You visually confirm, and if there’s a question as to either my identity or authorization to proceed, you secondarily confirm by asking me the password of the day.”
“Look, Billy, I haven’t had my morning coffee, but I’ve seen your pathetic face every day for the last fourteen months, except when you’re on leave and disappear to God knows where, so I don’t have to visually confirm, secondarily confirm or otherwise confirm. Besides, you don’t know the password.”
“I must disagree, Lieutenant Valoppi. This is my duty shift, and I have lawful access to the password, which I memorized yesterday.” Billy takes back his ID card and carefully places it into a sleeve pocket which he zippers shut.
Valoppi shakes his head, tired of dealing with the little dweeb, but bored enough to want to have some fun. Behind him, two airmen at desks have stopped shuffling their papers to listen. “Oh yeah? All right, Riordan, if that’s really your name, I challenge! What’s the password of the day?”
“Sky King,” Billy answers.
“Wrong. Is your name Ivan? Are you some filthy Russian spy.”
“Nah,” says one of the airmen behind Valoppi. “The Russians are our pals.”
“Okay, smart guy, then who the hell’s the enemy?” Valoppi asks.
“How should I know?” the airman says. “I only work here.”
Billy is tapping on the window. “The password is Sky King. I’m never mistaken about—”
“Wrong!” Valoppi shouts, “because I just changed it. From now on, until they close this sucker down, the password is ‘bite me.’”
Annoyed, Billy stands silently at the window, waiting.
“Say it, Riordan.”
Still no response.
“You’re going to be late. Captain Puke won’t let you lead chapel services on Sunday, Billy boy.”
Billy shoots a nervous glance at his watch.
Valoppi smirks at him. “C’mon, say it.”
“Bite me,” Billy whispers.
“Can’t hear you,” Valoppi sings out.
“Bite me!”
Laughing, Valoppi hits a button, and the electronic latch opens on the steel door.
Billy pushes through the door and chugs at double time across the security bridge toward the elevator housing, an enclosed steel hood that shields the entrance to the elevator. Once there, he quickly punches the day code into the Permissive Action Link pad, and a reinforced steel door rumbles open. Billy steps inside, and the door closes.
The elevator is built to withstand earthquakes, direct hits by conventional weapons, and indirect hits by nuclear warheads, so it is a slow but solid ride down through the hard rock of Chugwater Mountain. “The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want,” Billy recites, looking into the lens of the TV camera overhead. “He causes me to lie down in green pastures. He leads me beside still waters. He restores my soul. He guides me in the path of righteousness for His name’s sake.”
The elevator comes to a smooth stop, the door opens, and Billy heads across the underground catwalk, his boots clacking across the steel steps. A sign warns, “No Lone Zone.”
Along the catwalk to the capsule, another sign is posted: “Safety first. There is no substitute for safety.” He can see the light from the launch control capsule fifty yards away. The blast door, required under Technical Order A-17 to be closed at all times, is open. As usual. “Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil, for thou art with me. Thy rod and thy staff, they comfort me.”
Billy wordlessly enters the launch control capsule and nods to his crewmate, Owens, who stands drinking coffee behind the two missileers about to go off duty. Owens’ sandy hair is cut close on the sides, but he’s let it grow on top. A cowlick in front gives him a Huckleberry Finn look. He yawns and watches the two missileers make entries in their log books. Sanders, the crew commander, is nicknamed Curly. He is a black 1st lieutenant with a shaved head. His teammate, Lauretta, is a female missileer, a 2nd lieutenant just overweight enough to be considered voluptuous by the men in the hole. Both are strapped into B-52 flight chairs, which are attached by rollers to a metal railing.
Lauretta, the deputy, sits directly in front of a series of olive green communications racks seven feet high. If the United States were under attack, she would have received the Emergency Action Message from the President or the National Command Authority by any of a variety of communications gear, some high tech, some still with a utilitarian, pre-computer age feel. Messages are received in code. The decoding manual, the Sealed Authentication System in Air Force lingo, is located in a simple red metal box above her head. Sanders has a matching box and manual. Each box is secured with a combination padlock that would cost less than ten dollars at the local hardware store. The missile crew is unarmed, the .38 caliber revolvers of yesteryear having been mothballed. Contrary to popular myth, the guns were not intended to force a recalcitrant crewmate to turn the key. Rather, in the unlikely event that security was breached in the launch control capsule, they were to be used against trespassers, protesters or terrorists.
But it never happened.
Not once since the beginning of the ICBM program.
So now, the basic security at launch facilities is intended to protect airmen and equipment from deep penetrating enemy warheads, not from homegrown terrorists, though at this point, no one really believes that either danger is real.
The missile crews of the 1970’s and 1980’s had another explanation for the sidearms, one never found in the four hundred page launch manual called the T.O., or Technical Order. In the event of thermonuclear war, each U.S. launch facility would be targeted by one or more Russian ICBM’s. The launch control capsules are steel cylinders fifty feet long and twenty feet wide, their interior ceilings curved like old-fashioned lunch diners. They are buried deep in the rock and attached to the roof of underground caverns by four hydraulic jacks intended to act as shock absorbers. In the event of anything but a direct hit from a Russian SS-18, the capsule and the PK missile should still be operational for a counter-strike if one has not already been launched.
In theory.
As with nearly all evidence related to nuclear war, everything is theory, conjecture and supposition. The crew members could be injured or trapped inside a damaged capsule. A deep penetration ICBM would surely destroy the elevator shaft and seal the emergency Personnel Access Hatch, turning its insulation of sand into fused glass. The missileers who survived a direct hit would be trapped in their capsule. The sidearms, the missile crews concluded long ago, were to be used on themselves.
Now, Billy Riordan, the deputy on the next twenty-four hour duty, stands behind Lauretta. In front of her, the vintage 1965 teletype clacks out a message that will need to be decoded. It is surely one of an endless stream of tests. That is life in the hole, interminable preparation and repetition of routine procedures. Nothing, it seems, is ever real.
Lauretta tears off the teletype message and lays it to one side. It’s not an EAM, so there’s no possibility that the country will be at war in fifteen minutes. If it had been, she would be opening the padlock, grabbing the SAS manual, and decoding the message. Then, if it turned out to be a launch command, she would enter the six-digit Enable Code and the four-digit Preparatory Launch Command. In addition to the one PK just down the tunnel, they control another nine located in separate silos several miles away.