Founders (2 page)

Ben waved her off and said, “No, thanks.” He turned to Adrian and said, “I’ve got to get home to Rebecca and the kids.”

Adrian nodded. “I understand.”

They both stood up, and Ben picked up the bag. The tip of the screwdriver was poking through the paper bag, so Ben shifted it to his coat pocket.

They went out the bar’s front door and shook hands. Adrian gave Ben a wink, and said, “You take good care of yourself, Ben. Where you parked?”

“Around back.”

Adrian pointed to his BMW across the street and said, “I’m right here.” He waved and dashed across to the car, taking advantage of a gap in the traffic.

As Ben walked to the back parking lot, he was thinking about some of the things that Adrian had said about his ex-wife. He wondered if there was anything that he would have done differently, under the circumstances.

Two tall figures loomed up in the alley in front of him. One of them said, “Give me your wallet, ’tard.” The man raised his hand, and in the glow of the vapor light Ben could see the bare edge of a knife.

Instinctively, Ben swung with the hammer, still in the paper bag. The hammer connected with the man’s forearm in a half-glancing blow, and he dropped the knife. The other man moved in. Ben assumed that he also had a knife, so he swung with all the strength he could muster, and planted the hammer’s head in the side of the man’s neck. The attacker went down in a heap.

The first man shouted at Ben, “You’re dead, ’tard!” He reached behind the small of his back, as if pulling a gun. Ben stepped in and swung, again aiming for the neck. But the robber ducked. This time the hammer hit the man in the side of the head, making a strange slapping noise. The man fell to the ground next to the other robber.

Ben didn’t wait to see if they’d get up to charge at him again. He ran for his car, hopped in, and zoomed out the back of the parking lot.

His mind was racing. “What on earth just happened?” he asked himself aloud. He quickly got on I-65 and set his Ford’s cruise control at sixty. He was afraid that he might speed if he didn’t. He started praying. Ten minutes later, he was safely parked in his driveway. When he turned off the ignition, his hands were shaking. Growing up, Ben had never so much as been in an elementary school hallway fistfight. He felt overwhelmed by the enormity of what he’d just gone through. He fought to keep control of himself.

Ben picked up the hammer—still in the paper bag—and examined it under the car’s map light. There was no blood on the bag, but he decided to burn it regardless. He turned off the map light, and tried to get his breathing under control. He decided that it was best that he didn’t tell his wife what had happened. “I can’t burden her with this,” he said resignedly.

It took him a long time to get to sleep that night.

It wasn’t until two days later that Ben read in the online edition of the
Tennessean
that both of the robbers had died. One was dead at the scene, and the other died in the hospital emergency room of
internal bleeding. The paper reported that both of them had long criminal records. Two knives and a .380 pistol were found on the pavement. Ben was amazed that just one hammer blow to the head or neck could kill a man. But obviously it could.

After much prayer, Ben decided not to talk about the events with the police. He burned the bag and ran the hammer through an ultrasonic cleaner just in case. Then it went into his tool chest. He didn’t use it again, until after the Crunch. Whenever he saw the Winchester screwdriver or the hammer, they reminded him of that night.

Joshua Watanabe was bored. As he told his squadron mates, “There’s bored, and then there’s world-class bored.”

Alerts were always interesting for the first couple of hours, but once the two duty officers were sealed in behind a blast door down in the launch control center (LCC) capsules, seventy-five feet underground, and after all the systems checks were complete, the boredom set in. Joshua had watched all his DVDs several times each. He disliked playing cards. Instead, he often read his Bible and by-subscription Bible study and devotional magazines.

Joshua was a senior airman missile maintenance NCO stationed at Malmstrom AFB, Montana. Malmstrom had the largest ballistic missile field in the United States. The array of silos was spread out over 23,000 square miles. The LGM-30 Minuteman missile launch facilities and LCCs were each separated by several miles, and connected electronically. This distancing ensured that a “full exchange” attack by incoming nuclear missiles or bombs would disable only a few of the ICBMs. This would leave the rest capable of being launched in retaliation. The downside of this wide separation was that huge distances had to be driven by alert
crews, security response teams (SRTs), and maintenance personnel. Montana was a huge state, and at times it seemed as if the missile fields occupied half of it.

Each squadron at Malmstrom was a grouping of fifty Minuteman silos, controlled by five missile alert facilities (MAFs). The MAFs housed the on-duty “60 Teams” and the off-duty “70 Teams.” Three squadrons constituted a “Wing.” Each MAF “Flight” controlled ten missile silos. The silos were also known as “launch facilities” (LFs). The MAFs each had several buildings, including a main office building, a garage building with roll-up doors, and two outlying radar buildings, each equipped with small white radomes. The taller of the two radomes was an EHF antenna shelter, designed to send and receive traffic using secure satellites via EHF radio. The short cone-shaped dome was a hardened UHF antenna, used for the line-of-sight UHF radio located in the MAF. The MAF crews used this radio to communicate with aircraft that were within line of sight.

Each MAF had a small sewage lagoon aeration pond, often positioned right in front. To a casual observer, these looked a lot like the livestock watering ponds that dotted the cattle ranches in the region, but they were constructed differently, with a rubber pond liner. At a staff briefing a few years before the Crunch, a major who had recently transferred into his first missile unit assignment from the Strategic Air Command (SAC) was watching an overview PowerPoint presentation about the LGM-30 system. Seeing a picture that included a sewage lagoon in front of an MAF, the major naively asked, “Do you ever swim in those ponds in the summer?” His question was answered by howls of laughter. Ever since then, the sewage lagoons were referred to as “SAC Officer Swimming Pools.”

Before the Crunch, there was almost always one or more camouflage-painted up-armored Humvees or ubiquitous Air Force Blue commercial pickup trucks parked out front of every MAF. During alerts, there would often be more vehicles.

The 341st Strategic Missile Wing was part of the Air Force Global Strike Command. There were three missile squadrons at Malmstrom. Joshua was assigned to the 10th Missile Squadron, nicknamed “the First Ace in the Hole.” They often jokingly called their headquarters “Burpelson” in honor of the fictional Air Force base in the movie
Dr. Strangelove
.

Joshua’s biggest frustration with the Air Force was the countless number of mandatory-attendance training sessions, refamiliarization classes, qualifications (“quals”), and briefings that he had to attend. Not only were these sessions often lengthy, but the requisite driving time was also onerous. Frequently, he would have maintenance tasks scheduled at a remote MAF or silo in the morning, but then he would have to drive more than two hours to attend a one-hour briefing in the early afternoon at the main Malmstrom complex. This would usually burn up the otherwise productive hours of the rest of the day. Most of the briefings were incredibly boring, with half-hour PowerPoint presentations on details of the latest Timepiece software, or documentation changes, or changes in regulations, or infinitesimally small changes to maintenance and repair procedures.

The Minuteman system hardware and software was relatively stable throughout Watanabe’s PCS tour at Malmstrom. The flurry of activity that had followed the 9/11 attacks was just a memory, and there were no major hardware or software changes during Joshua’s time.

Most Minuteman missiles carried a single warhead, although some were equipped with up to three Multiple Independently targetable Reentry Vehicles (MIRVs). Many of these MIRVs were only “penetration aids”—including radar-reflecting chaff, designed to confuse enemy missile defense radars. The missile warheads and penetration aids were a top item of interest for the logistics and maintenance staffs, and of course under extreme scrutiny and security procedures.

Most of the conversations that followed the logistics and maintenance briefings were more about the idiosyncrasies of the briefers, rather than the content of the briefings themselves. One of Joshua’s standard comments was “Gee, they crammed a twenty-minute briefing into two hours.” His NCOIC referred to such briefings as “Death by PowerPoint.” Whenever he heard this, it became a standing joke for Joshua to always correct him with “More accurately, that’s s
low
death by PowerPoint.” The same NCOIC’s favorite saying was “I seem to be rapidly approaching the apex of my mediocre career.”

As an “E-4 Over Four” Joshua’s base pay was only $2,266 per month. But he received $705 per month basic allowance for housing (BAH) and $348 per month for basic allowance for subsistence (BAS). He was able to rent a two-bedroom house on five acres for $950 per month. His rental house was on Red Coulee Road, two miles east of the hamlet of Fife. Though it was a named town, it was little more than a road junction. The Fife junction was six miles east of Malmstrom AFB, so his driving time to the main gate was about fifteen minutes in good weather.

The house had been built in the late 1980s, so it had double-pane windows and was well insulated. The woodstove in the house was rusty, but it still sealed tight and put out plenty of heat. The biggest attractions of the rental house were a small shop building, a combination horse and hay barn with two stalls, and good smooth wire horse fencing with a smaller-gauge top wire that was energized by an electric fence charger. Like his father, Joshua avoided pasturing horses inside barbed wire fences. He had seen too many horses injured by barbed wire.

Joshua’s specialty code was 2M0X2: Missile and Space Systems Maintenance. Most of his duties were preventive maintenance inspections, diagnostics, and LRU replacements at the MAFs. He also spent many hours assisting contractors as they swapped out the “limited life” components in each missile and its associated
systems. This included their peripheral part of the $2.5 billion program to replace Minutemen rocket engines.

Less than 20 percent of Joshua’s hands-on time was at the individual missile silos. And of that, it was nearly all just visual inspection, lubrication, and spot painting at exterior doors and in access stairways and tunnels. Very little of his time was spent around the missiles themselves. His standing joke was “Inspection complete: The bird is still present or accounted for.”

Joshua commuted to work in a re-engined four-wheel drive 1980 Dodge Power Wagon pickup. His squadron mates all jokingly called it the “Rust Bucket.” Joshua had bought the truck because he wanted a vehicle with four-wheel drive to negotiate icy roads, and one that could tow a horse trailer. His squadron’s NCOIC had encouraged Joshua to buy a late-model Toyota Tundra pickup like his own. But again following in his father’s footsteps, Joshua insisted on buying only American vehicles, and avoiding debt. Part of this stance, although he wouldn’t admit it, was that he didn’t want to be seen as a Japanese American who drove a Japanese-made vehicle.

The Rust Bucket had peeling paint on its hood and rusted-through spots at the top of both of the rear wheel wells. Despite umpteen wire brushings and spot paintings with brown Rustoleum, the pickup’s rust patches continued to grow. Mechanically, he kept the pickup in the best condition possible, given its age. From the exterior, the Rust Bucket looked like it was ready to expire, but under the hood it was in excellent condition. As the Crunch set in, there were only 22,000 miles clocked on the new engine.

Watanabe dreaded getting promoted to E-5. He knew that a promotion would mean that he’d probably have a headquarters desk job at Malmstrom, rather than his usual Maintenance Team member job out at the squadrons. Most likely he’d have several boring years as an NCO at the Base Trainer, an aboveground simulator
of an LCC capsule. Or he might get assigned as a liaison or “shepherd” for contractors, as MAFs were sequentially “de-altered” for equipment modifications or upgrades. That job would mean countless hours on the road, but without the fun of actually handling the equipment. With those prospects in mind, he applied for a slot at Officer Training School at the Air University, located at Maxwell Air Force Base, Alabama. But his application was still pending when the Crunch came.

Joshua had proposed marriage twice to Kelly Monroe before the Crunch. But each time she had put him off, saying that she wanted to finish her degree before committing to marriage. When the Crunch came, Kelly was just starting her second year in business administration at Montana State University, Great Falls. She was hoping to get a job in Great Falls after she graduated so that she could live near her family.

Living in Montana, the Crunch seemed less traumatic than it was being described on television. There were no big riots in Montana. Society remained more or less intact and functional. There were 2.5 million cattle in Montana, but only 990,000 people, so Joshua didn’t expect that he would experience starvation. But the big cities on the east and west coasts had him worried. Those folks could indeed begin to starve.

The scarcity of gasoline, the hyperinflation, and the collapse of the electric power grid were the biggest effects felt in Montana. Everyone seemed intent on the huge scramble to stock up while their dollars could still buy something. The gas stations sold out of regular unleaded gas first, then premium, and finally diesel. It became impossible to find propane cylinders or ammunition. Soon after, the grocery store shelves were stripped clean.