'Launch on Warning': A Novella

NOVEMBER 9

48.49.28 N 101.16.55 W

0735 HOURS LOCAL

1335 HOURS ZULU

The blue pickup sped down the featureless road, past the billiard-table flat farms, full of stupefied, staring cattle, leaning against the harsh wind.

A local would have guessed who they were and where they were going. Anyone else might have considered them farmers, like everyone else was within a hundred miles unless they had looked a little closer.

It took a practised eye to make out the weird little fenced off bungalows with their antenna farms and warning signs. The locals knew to steer clear of the fences, with their hair-trigger intrusion sensors and stern, “You Will Be Shot” signs.

A tourist from New York, should one ever find a reason to visit Maxbass, North Dakota, would think he had wandered into a Twilight Zone episode.

The thought had occurred to Fred Howe once or twice, too. What am I doing out here? Who does this? There are just farmers, and us.

One profession feeds people so they can live. The other prepares for the unthinkable and hopes they never get to do their jobs. Twilight Zone shit.

He felt a little drift in the wheel and slowed down. No use getting into it with the local Sheriff, who had complained to the Air Police a couple of times about Fred’s driving.

Driving. Sure, that’s all it was. He smiled a sideways grin to himself, the same one he always put on when he really wanted to say “Go fuck yourself” out loud. Daddy would not have that. A Southern man does not lower himself so. He saw the antennae of Site Oscar-01 glinting in the cold sunlight and made the last turn.

“Wake up, Olerud,” Howe intoned deeply. “You’re on duty now, son.”

The big-boned blond kid jolted his head off the drool-stained side window and bounced his head off the ceiling. “Ow!”

Howe chuckled. “General LeMay is watching, Lieutenant. He takes a dim view of such dereliction of duty.” Fred Howe had loved to play with his voice, ever since he’d realized that people couldn’t tell he was black over the telephone.

How easy it was for a fourteen-year-old whose nuts had just dropped to arrange bank loans, scholarships, job interviews… it was fun for a while. Until Colonel Howe found out.

Colonel Frederick Douglass Howe Senior, USAF. One of LeMay’s warriors, Korea and Vietnam vet, and the living symbol of the black ascendancy. Fred Junior had hated his guts. He was on his way to becoming a Deejay when he got around to seeing a movie about his father’s profession.

That movie was Doctor Strangelove.

Fred Howe made a point of never mentioning this in his Reliability interview, but when he saw James Earl Jones flying off to bomb the shit out of the Russians, he thought to himself, “I can do that.”

Shit. A black man with that much power? No wonder his old man got a hard on every time a B-52 flew over Barksdale.

Too bad his eyes couldn’t match his enthusiasm. So now, he was a missileer.

“Oscar Control, Trip 14-01 on your access, Captain Howe plus one.” He replaced the microphone in its cradle. Always call ahead.

“Wow. How long was I out, sir?” Olerud rubbed his eyes.

“I told you, Arne. You don’t have to call me sir, in here. We’re partners. One day we may need to kill twenty-million people together. To answer your question, all the way from Minot.”

“Oh. Sorry.”

“That’s okay, Arne. We have 24 hours to catch up. I’m all ears.” He touched his jug ears. A running joke. Howe flashed his ID at the gate camera. The electronic door slowly rolled to the side. He drove up to the bungalow, which might fool a sleepy onlooker into thinking it was a regular home.

A regular home owned by man paranoid about burglars (in North Dakota), and fanatical about ham radio. Of course, the Russians had the place scoped out. Like every missileer, he was under no illusions.

If war came, his lifespan was measured in minutes. “Home sweet home, Arne.”

“Good old Oscar the Grouch.”

“Our garbage can in the ground.” They retrieved their heavy bags from the back of the truck and presented themselves to the Air Police in the foyer. Howe looked through the bulletproof glass at the on-duty team. Winslow, Hawkins, and Royer. He smiled. Relaxed cats. Not all of them were. Some acted like every day was day two of the Tet Offensive.

“Captain Howe reporting.” He flashed his identification at Royer, a sleepy-eyed lifer with massive shoulders. “I’ll vouch for Lieutenant Olerud.”

“Enter, gentlemen.” A buzz announced the opening of a metal door. Royer was already on the phone to the Combat Crew below. “Relief’s here, sir.”

Their .38 calibre revolvers were already sitting on the desktop, ammunition beside them. Howe and Olerud signed the ledger, loaded, and holstered their little guns.

What were they for? The Russians? Each other? The ritual? Howe could never get a straight answer. But the moment he strapped on that revolver, he felt like he was part of a Combat Crew.

Then, he pulled the key over his head and pressed it to his chest. The key.

Olerud pulled open the grate on the freight elevator. Howe stepped inside. He turned and caught the last glint of light from the surface. Then, creaking and groaning, the elevator began to descend.

Howe looked over at Olerud. The man was irrepressibly polite and devoutly Lutheran. He wondered about what the hulking kid from Minnesota was doing down here as much as he was sure people wondered about him. Still, it was only his third rotation with the guy.

Looking at Olerud, it was hard to imagine him fitting into the cockpit of an F-15. Maybe that was it.

His old partner, Beck, had gotten a do over on his eye exams (that never happened) and was off to flight school. Howe had been so jealous he’d gone into a funk for a week, and he was considering reporting himself to PRP. They were supposed to do that when they weren’t mentally right for duty.

He’d talked it over with the Colonel. “Are you fucking crazy, son?” That was what he’d expected. “You know how hard it was for me to even get you into that uniform?”

That had stung. Howe had prided himself on his own hard work and initiative. But a part of him knew his father was right. “Son, there’s a lotta changes that have been happening in this country. But we ain’t there yet. Never let them see your weakness. Just stay off the bourbon.”

So, he’d taken the Colonel’s advice. He’d kept his mouth shut, and started working on his Master’s again.

Rand Corporation, here we come. Mein Fuhrer, I can valk!

They hit the Combat Capsule floor with a shudder. Howe pulled open the grate. A massive blast door squatted in front of them. Stencilled on the door was the emblem of the 91st Missile Wing and the stern warning:

NO LONE ZONE. MINIMUM TWO MEN AT ALL TIMES. BY AUTHORITY, SAC C-IN-C.

Howe punched in a memorized code on a keypad. A circular squawk box with a single red light floated, HAL-9000 like, over the keypad. “Stand clear.”

The bank-vault door swung open with a klaxon on its massive steel hinges. As always, the old crew was only too eager to depart. Clark, the Crew Commander, was first out the door.

Clark was tall and skinny, a General’s kid who was pissed about his lack of flying aptitude, and took it out on everyone else. Howe had trained him, but now he showed little deference. “How is it up there, Fred?”

“Nice and sunny. Almost free love weather.”

“Yeah, I’m gonna go home and fuck my Sealy Posturepedic.”

“Hey, Arne?” Skelling was a hard-bitten ex-Air Police enlisted man who’d served in Nam. His eyes were permanently shifting back and forth. Nobody could figure out how he’d beaten the PRP boards.

“Yeah, Billy?”

“I finished that book you lent me.”

“What’d you think?”

“That you’re a fucking communist.”

Howe guffawed. “Guess we’ll have to shoot him then. But you’ll have to finish his shift, Billy.”

Olerud looked around, uncertain, going red.

“On second thought,” Clark interjected. “The boy seems like a loyal American to me. Have a good shift, gentlemen. And remember…”

“Peace is our profession!” Howe sang the phrase out as the blast door closed behind the departing crew. “Assholes.”

“That Billy Skelling is something else, Fred.”

“Nam will do that to you.”

“Even Air Police?”

“Air Police who were on the front gate at Tan Son Nhut in January ’68. Yup.”

“Oh. Wow.”

“Yeah. My dad was commanding an F-100 squadron then. Said they were taking off, circling the airfield, and dropping napalm right outside the front gates. So give Billy a break.”

“Whatever you say, Fred.” Olerud looked like a linebacker waiting for the team bus, standing in the entry hallway, waiting for his word to go further. Behind him, a giant mural of Oscar The Grouch, the flight mascot, clutching Minutemen in his fists, covered the wall.

Dotty loved Oscar The Grouch. That mural always made him pause.

“Let’s get to work. Status check. And then clean-up. Those assholes always leave a mess.”

“They sure do.”

They entered the narrow Combat Capsule, passing racks of electronics which concerned only the maintenance men, arriving at the heart of the operation.

Two desks faced the wall in different directions. Thick red binders sat in front of each console. The mundanity of it always struck Howe. It looked like the control room in a power plant.

Like the pickups, like the Launch Control Facility Houses, it only revealed its function when you got closer. Howe peered at the rows at switches, indicator lights, and monitors over the Deputy Crew Commander’s station. A single key switch sat front and center, an emphatic instruction affixed with a label maker:

GENTLY

As a junior officer, he’d disregarded that instruction once during a readiness test, and had been left, as red-faced as he ever got, holding half a launch key in his hand while the Deputy Squadron Commander bellowed at him.

GENTLY. He’d never forgotten it, since. His eye caught a paperback sitting on top of the procedure manuals. “What’s this, Arne?” He picked it up.

Hiroshima. By John Hersey.

Howe whistled low. “Pretty dangerous, Arne.”

“How so?”

“We’ll talk later.” He pocketed the book. “Get comfortable.”

Howe walked over to his Commander’s station. He dropped his bag and took off his parka, hanging it on a hook nearby. He sat in the high-backed, red pilot’s chair, which rested on a wheeled track and had lap and chest straps to hold you in when the big ones hit.

He plopped down in the chair. He used to feel a sense of melancholy, wishing himself in the cockpit of a B-52 instead, but he’d learned to settle for this.

Because this was pretty goddamned awesome. Dotted throughout the Great Plains, capsules like his commanded ten missiles each, a total force of a thousand, America’s prime deterrent. Each missile held multiple warheads and decoys. Each missile carried many times the power of all the weapons fired in World War II.

And he’d wanted to be a Deejay.

Howe looked down at the binders. He felt the key around his neck. Time to check the merchandise.

The “merchandise” consisted of ten Minuteman III ICBMs, installed at silos all at least a mile apart from each other, in a loose cluster surrounding the Launch Command Center. Each squadron controlled five LCCs, for a total of fifty missiles. The 91st Wing commanded one-hundred-fifty missiles in total, forming a giant “C” shape across the northern half of the state, all the way to the Canadian border. It was an awesome force.

His daddy used to tell him, when he was little, and still didn’t know he wasn’t supposed to ask about daddy’s work: “Son, daddy’s job is to make sure nobody ever messes with America. And if they do, they are darn sure gonna regret it.”

He had to hand it to the old man. A pretty accurate job description. “Okay, missile readiness check. Sound off.”

Arne began reading off the readiness lights in front of his console. “One ready, two ready, three ready, four ready, five ready, six ready, seven: yellow light, maintenance stand-by, eight ready, nine, ready, ten ready! Nine missiles ready!”

“Okay, check LCC override. Enable switch to ‘set’.”

“Enable switch to ‘set’.”

“Launch switch to ‘set’.”

“Launch switch to ‘set’.”

“Cooperative enable to one second.”

“One second, set.”

“One-vote timer to 30 minutes.”

“One-vote timer to 30 minutes, set.”

“Check commlinks.”

“UHF: Ready. VHF: Ready. SLF: Ready. Looking Glass: Ready. EAM: Ready. HICS: Ready. All comm links operational.”

“What’s the status on seven?”

Olerud read from a teletype printout in the readiness binder. “Maintenance crew scheduled to arrive 0900 at Oscar-07. Problem is MIRV bus inertial tertiary guidance system.”

“Great. We can fire it, but we might hit Canada?”

“Yes, sir. Maybe kill a couple of moose.”

“I like moose. The non-radioactive kind. Let’s get it fixed. Intel summary?”

Olerud went back to the readiness binder. “Exercise Able Archer ’83 on day three. NATO units on simulated DEFCON-ONE starting today at 0700 Zulu. No noted increase in WARPAC readiness. SAC still at DEFCON-FIVE.”

Howe breathed in slowly. “Simulated DEFCON-ONE?”

“That’s what it says, Fred.”

“Let’s hope it stays ‘simulated’. Ol’ Ivan doesn’t always see things the same way we do.”

“You oughta be a General, Fred.”

“Well, then you will have to salute me. Okay, merchandise is fine. Let’s clean up this roach motel.”

“Sounds good to me. I think somebody left a baloney sandwich out since our last rotation.”

“That? I just thought that was Clark’s breath.”

48.45.43 N 101.20.54 W

0915 HOURS LOCAL

1515 HOURS ZULU

Another two blue pickup trucks pulled up beside a fenced enclosure a few miles from where Howe and Olerud passed the time in their hole in the ground with its Sesame Street mascot. The driver of the first truck stepped out and approached a camera outside the chain-link fence. His two companions waited, unwilling to step into the cold for no good reason.

The driver’s breath vaporized and hung just outside his parka. He was from Florida. Like so many other men in these parts, he wondered every so often what he was doing here.

Behind the first truck, the occupants of the second truck, Air Policemen, stepped into the road, their M-16s at the ready.

The driver waved his ID at the camera. A light on the metal box flashed green.

“Yesssss?” Ah, fuckin’ Howe. Not this shit again.

“Knock knock, Captain.”

“You’re late.”

“We’re freezing. Let us in.”

“Please let us in, sir.”

The driver gritted his teeth. This was his punishment for playing “Sweet Home Alabama” too loud in the LCC just one time. “Permission to enter Oscar-01 for maintenance, sir.”

“Thy wish is granted, peon.” The gate began to open. The driver waited until he was back inside before he blew off steam. One of the Air Policemen was black, too.

“Boys, I cannot stand that uppity nigger.”

OSCAR-01

Howe chuckled to himself as the pickup coasted past the camera into the Launch Facility. “I can tell you what he’s saying right now. I know.”

“I’m not taking that bet.” Arne looked up from a Time magazine.

“That I’m an uppity nigger.”

“More ‘up’ than he is.”

Howe laughed. “And I’ll never let him forget it.” He’d tried to overlook the subtle, sometimes not so subtle digs from Technical Sergeant Larkin, the beefy, pin-eyed, perpetually scowling good ole boy from Tallahassee who oversaw the flight’s maintenance. As their shifts only occasionally overlapped, it wasn’t so hard.

Fred Howe had a lifetime of turning the other cheek under his belt, after all.

But one, day, the man had brought a portable tape recorder into the LCC and had blasted that goddamned Lynyrd Skynyrd song at full blast.

It wasn’t just that it was racist. It was his LCC, and loud music was unprofessional, potentially fatally distracting, and totally against the regs. But it was mostly a chance to teach the cracker asshole a lesson if he was honest with himself.

Larkin’s face, when he had looked up from the equipment racks to see his boot grinding the tape recorder into tiny pieces, was something he’d treasure until he died. He’d looked down at Larkin and said, as calmly as he could: “No loud music in the LCC, Sergeant. Hate to ‘break’ it to you.”

Larkin had turned beet red, but he’d said nothing. Howe was an officer, and he wasn’t. Since then, the redneck had steered well clear of him. But he’d noticed dog shit on his windshield. Stars and Bars bumper stickers affixed to his Buick. Little things.

Still, he’d made it clear who was boss. It was 1983, not 1947. And he’d point that out, any chance he got. Colonel Floyd had no doubt heard all about it. There was little the man didn’t pick up on. But he said nothing. He might have been a racist too, but he hated Larkin’s guts anyway.

Howe looked at the monitors. The crew was in the access tunnel bored into the sliding hatch that covered the missile silo. “Verify safe.”

“Safe,” Olerud responded.

A scratchy voice came from the speakers. “Open the B-Plug.”

“Ah, part of your message is missing.”

“Open the B-Plug, please.” Howe pressed a button on his console to activate the heavy hydraulic door which granted entry to the silo and the weapon of war inside. He then set about disarming the enable switch that would allow him to ready 07 for launch.

Olerud laughed. “I really enjoy that, you know.”

“I do it just for you, Arne.”

“Sure you do.”

“Call Wing and tell ‘em dipshit’s inside 07 will you?”

“You got it.”

Howe watched the men clamber into the narrow silo gantry, dwarfed by the massive ICBM inside. The camera looked at an oblique angle down the nose, straight to the flame trench at the bottom of the silo. He let out a low whistle.

Arne hung up the phone. “Wing’s aware. What is it?”

Howe stared at the screen. “Look at that damned thing. Talk about power. It’s beautiful, isn’t it?”

“Ah, I don’t know, Fred. I kinda just don’t think about it.”

Howe took out Hersey’s thin book and put it on the table. “Oh really?”

Arne looked over at him. “Well, maybe I have thought about it. But it’s not a PRP thing, I promise.”

Howe turned in his chair. “Don’t sweat it, Arne. Half the things you’ve heard me say in here could get me rumbled too. I don’t play those games. It’s just…”

“Just what, Fred?”

Howe looked at the big man, a look of serious concentration, earnest desire to please, spread across his broad, Nordic face. The SAC missileer uniform, starched and pressed blue fatigues, bloused pants, spit-shined boots, topped off with a cravat bearing the squadron logo; it all looked like an affectation on the lumbering farm kid.

Then he thought of himself, gangly and thin-necked, Malcolm X glasses on his head, and realized he looked even less the part.

Yet here they were.

“Arne.” Howe spread his arms out. “You can’t think too much about all this shit. Or maybe you won’t be ready to do it one day. You can’t dwell on it.”

“I just wanted to know the real consequences of what we might have to do someday. It’s the honest man’s way, Fred. Haven’t you read the book?”

“Yes. I did. A long time ago. Anyway, who said you should?”

“I got a library card too, Fred. All on my own.”

Howe laughed at the subtle impression of a Warner Brothers’ cartoon doofus. “Was it that Pastor, that Valkmanstoop, or whatever the hell his name is…”

“Pastor Valkering. Yes, actually.”

“He’s a communist, Arne.”

“Socialist. And he knows I’m proud of what I do. I’m not the only missileer or bomber crewman in the congregation. But he argued, and I had to agree: If you think it needs to be done, you have to see what it is you’re talking about.”

“Not sure I agree, Arne.”

“Who got you to read it?”

Howe laughed at the irony. “The Colonel. And he said the same damn thing as your commie pastor.”

“Great minds think alike.”

“And fools seldom differ. Look, read what you like. But be careful. Somebody like Boom-Boom Billy Skelling sees you with a copy of Das Kapital and you’ll be off to Elmendorf to party with the Eskimos. I’ve got your back, though. As long as you can turn the key, that is. You can still do that, right?”

Olerud folded his arms. “I’d never show up for duty if I didn’t think I could.”

Howe went back to watching the monitor. Maintenance made him nervous. Three years ago, a dropped wrench in a Titan II silo in Arkansas had blown the nine-megaton warhead right out of the silo. “I believe you, Arne. I believe you.”

55.45.06 N 37.37.04 E

1928 HOURS LOCAL

1628 HOURS ZULU

Tall, stern men in olive-drab tunics guarded the doors of the conference room, while the old men inside argued with each other and the men on the other end of the line.

Despite the fact that they were deep inside a fortress with thick walls, guarded by thousands of loyal troops, in the center of a country where they possessed all the tools of suppression and control; they still spoke in a strange code.

“All of the indicators of RYaN are there! They are planning, just like the First Secretary says!” The thick-necked man wore a Hero medal and was growing increasingly impatient with the impertinence of the younger man who was arguing with him.

“It is just an exercise, RYaN is simply a theory, don’t get carried away!” The younger man with the strange birthmark on his head pounded his hand on the table, prompting frowns from the old guard.

“We cannot afford to wait and find out! Remember 1941!”

“Nor can we afford to miscalculate! Remember 1962!”

The tall, stern men out in the hallway shifted on their feet as the arguments inside the room grew ever more heated.

OSCAR-01

1048 HOURS LOCAL

1648 HOURS ZULU

“Petey eat all his breakfast, hon? Mmm. Mmm-hmm.”

Howe drifted between listening in on Olerud’s call to his wife, reading through the Procedures Manual, and watching Larkin and his crew on the monitors. Now, the three technicians were huddled over an avionics rack they’d pulled out of the side of the Minuteman.

The thought of a retrograde idiot like Larkin tinkering with a nuclear missile did not inspire confidence. But Howe had to grudgingly admit that the man, whatever his faults as a human being, knew his job. He suspected 07 would be back up and running within two hours.

“I miss you, sweetie. I know, I know. Hmm? Mmm-hmm.” Olerud was, despite having two small kids, still in the sickly-sweet lovebird phase of his marriage. Howe tilted his head back and closed his eyes, remembering when he and Sheree had been like that. It took some remembering. And they only had one kid.

He looked up at the clocks. Local time, Washington, Zulu, Moscow. Once, somebody had installed “Cabo San Lucas” as a gag and nobody noticed for three weeks. Proving how routine and zombified it was possible to get down here.

Major Quinones had gone on a tear, promising to revoke the pranksters’ PRP certification and write everybody else up for not noticing. Colonel Floyd, preferring calmer waters, had decided to let it die.

Quinones was on duty at Wing today. Better be careful. The man was a classic SAC Hardcase. Howe figured he’d gotten a lot of shit in his time for being a Beaner, but he had no sympathy. Why pass on the misery? He made a conscious effort not to be the Negro With The Chip On His Shoulder. He figured Quinones could try a little harder, too.

The main speaker sounded a high-pitched alert tone. Howe reached for the code binder and pulled out the grease pencil inside without even looking. “Gotta go, hon.” Olerud slammed the receiver down and went back to work.

SKYKING SKYKING DO NOT ANSWER

SKYKING SKYKING DO NOT ANSWER

The stentorian voice boomed out of the speaker. Some guys in Offutt did it better than others. This guy relished the part. The potential voice of doomsday. Howe’s pencil hovered over the message page.

JULIET KILO ALPHA

JULIET KILO ALPHA

TIME FOUR NINER

AUTHENTICATION JULIET ROMEO

AUTHENTICATION JULIET ROMEO

“Message authenticated!” Howe called out.

“I agree with authentication, sir,” Olerud responded.

STANDBY MESSAGE FOLLOWS

STANDBY

ALPHA LIMA KILO BRAVO ALPHA JULIET FIVE NINER CHARLIE ZULU BRAVO EIGHT NINER DELTA FOXTROT SIERRA ECHO SEVEN SEVEN HOTEL HOTEL KILO NINER ECHO VICTOR TWO TWO ROMEO THREE EIGHT

OFFUTT OUT

“Prepare to decode.” Both men stood up and approached a red safe in front of Olerud’s position. They entered combinations known only to them on two separate padlocks, then reached inside and retrieved red cards from a file marked “J”. They returned to their desks with the cards, which they snapped in half.

Howe transcribed his using a one-time cypher, changed every day. He sighed.

“Missile readiness test. Whoopee.”

“I concur with message. Whew.”

“Still get you nervous, Arne?”

“I guess it’s supposed to, right?”

“Ah, you only gotta start getting worried if you hear ‘Skyking’ three times. If you hear it four times, it’s war. That’s what they say, anyway.”

“You ever hear it three times?”

“Yup. In ’80. Iran crisis. We went up a DEFCON to show the towel-heads we meant business. Only time I’ve heard it.”

“Anybody ever hear four?”

“They say in ’62. Maybe LeMay wanted to kick the ball and Kennedy stopped him. Who knows?”

“What does your dad say?”

“If he knew, he’d never say. 100% SAC Blue, that’s his real color, Arne. Better call Wing, let Quinones know we aren’t on Cabo time.”

“Huh?”

“Just call him and acknowledge the test. Then call Carol back. Let her know it’s not ‘Duck and Cover’ time.”