“My dad?” I asked.
“You know, your dad knows all about this nuclear weapons business?”
“He doesn’t talk about it.”
“You mean, he can’t talk about it.”
“Yeah, can’t.”
It was a lie. Dad once talked about it.
My dad was a member of the 374th Strategic Missile Squadron, the United States Air Force unit that was assigned to the 308th Strategic Missile Wing, stationed at Little Rock Air Force Base. The 374th Strategic Missile Squadron was equipped with the LGM-25C Titan II Intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM), with a mission of nuclear deterrence. The squadron was responsible for nine missile sites. Well, eight now. The ninth was at 374-4 at the underground missile launch facility near Damascus, Arkansas, population three hundred.
The missile they were “guarding” until they got the orders to “deploy” was a silo-based, liquid-propellant ballistic missile. It was the largest ICBM ever deployed by the US Air Force. It carried a W-53 9.0 MT nuclear warhead. The missile had a diameter of 3.05 meters, a length of 31.30 meters, and a launch weight of 149,700 kilograms. The missiles had a two-stage liquid propellant design and reached a speed of twenty-five times the speed of sound by the time the engines cut off. Meaning kaboom rather quickly. After the “incident,” it was found later in a ditch. On that day three years ago, the Damascus site became decommissioned and disassembled. Now there were nine ICBMs[33] that Dad’s unit was responsible for.
Dad lived on base now, full-time since the divorce, and he couldn’t really call, so he wrote. The government liked to leave me with my imagination running wild, since there were a lot of black marks on his letters. Once he said he had been at the site at Damascus, and the United States government messed up one time and blacked out Arkansas instead. One time he let it slip after too many beers (this was after Mom’s illicit affair with Dennis was found out) that when (he said when, not if) a nuclear war happened, he would be in the bunker. He was the one who typed in the codes and turned the key to annihilation. The next morning, he asked if he’d said anything incriminating. I lied because I didn’t want my dad to get in trouble, but he could tell I was lying. I didn’t want my dad to be transferred because he couldn’t keep a secret.
And I could. I knew the secret eight-digit code.
“Can you imagine the big red button sitting on the president’s desk, ready to be pushed?” Max asked.
I glanced up from my notebook and scowled at him. “I don’t think it’s a big red button, and it’s certainly not on the president’s desk.”
He winced dramatically, as if he’d just been slapped. “I know… but it’s funny to imagine.” He laughed.
“It’s just keys and codes.”
“How do you know?”
“Um, the beginning of WarGames.[34] You remember the beginning of WarGames,” I said, changing the subject.
“Yeah, the beginning of WarGames.”
“So—our script,” I said, hoping he’d finally take the hint.
I couldn’t tell Max what my dad had said while piss drunk. My dad could have been tried for treason. It was an accident, what happened at Damascus. A socket fell in the silo and hit the side of the missile, causing a major leak of flammable rocket fuel, and it nearly went BOOM. He didn’t die, but he could have. He still worked on the ICBMs. And the ICBM was six hundred times more powerful than the bomb that destroyed Hiroshima. My dad didn’t have anything directly to do with the “accident,” but he was on location with the ICBM at the time. And he still worked on them. If he had everything to do with it, they wouldn’t keep him on, right? Right?
“What if the government is hiding something from us?” Max asked out of nowhere. Well, not out of nowhere. He was smart.
“Like before?” I asked.
“Didn’t your dad get into trouble?”
“It was an accident,” I said.
“Accident? I’m sure it was the Russians,” he said with a wink.
“It was an accident.”
“Sure it was, Laura. How many times have we accepted these ‘accidents’?” he asked, using finger quotes. “We should be a part of the resistance, not a part of the propaganda machine.”
Max went back to drawing but left me thinking about the plot to our comic, which we were calling Big Sister. He wouldn’t allow me to see his drawings. Only when they were perfect, but according to him, they never would be.
After each drawing, he’d crumple it up into a ball and drop it into the waste bucket he kept beside him. He would take the trash bag home when he left after each work session—or what Max’s mother would describe as a playdate. He was a budding tortured artist.
“One little peek?” I would ask.
And he would say no and then get defensive. I would only see what he’d drawn when it hit the comic bookshelves at Dewayne’s.
“So you want to change the main character from a boy to a girl superhero?” he asked.
“Or a villain?” I said.
“Or a villain.”
Our script was about done. (And by “done,” I mean we’d started over a few times. But our first line remained the same: And with a big, loud bang, everything was gone. Max and Laura’s untitled comic had fun promising the apocalypse.) Also, our plot was simple: A few teens got trapped in the cellar of Old Barnaby’s Farm in a small town called Seaside during a nuclear exchange between two opposing foes. (Max and I were afraid to say who the two opposing foes were; we didn’t want our sales to be compromised, and if we kissed and made up with the USSR, then we’d be screwed financially.) Some went mad, some tried to escape, some fell in love. But all got superpowers. When they emerged, they saw a changed world. It was overrun by an organization called Big Sister. Big Sister keeps order in the wasteland that it created. Chocolate was distributed for radiation sickness. We couldn’t decide if our characters were going to be superheroes or supervillains in the new world order.
“Godzilla was created because of nuclear radiation, and he’s a monster, and yet our superheroes are created nearly the same, and they’re not,” he said.
“It’s like they see nuclear fallout quite differently than we do,” I said.
“You think?”
“I was being sarcastic.”
“Me too.”
“You know, if we were born one year later, we would have had completely different sets of friends at school and be completely different people.”
“I think about that a lot.”
Chapter Eight
According to Tom Brokaw, the Doomsday Clock was set at three minutes to midnight. 11:57. They might as well have moved the hands to midnight because that was what it was like at church that Sunday morning.
Mom skipped church. She still had a mile-long list of stuff to do, and a big crew was showing up on Monday. Terrence was with his mom, so I went with Dennis to church. We were late and sat in the front pew in the sanctuary. After the service we went to the fellowship hall and waited for the potluck.
I watched as Dana approached, homing in like a missile homing in on its primary target—Moscow, or Leningrad, or… Laura.
“Dana Cobb, daughter of Nathaniel and Melanie Cobb, sister to David Cobb and Daniel Cobb, friend to everyone except you,” she said.
“Why are you talking in the third person?” I asked.
“No, Dana has once again decreed that the friendship with Laura Ratliff is over.”
33
374-1 Blackwell, 347-2 Plummerville, 347-3 Hattieville, 374-4 Springfield, 374-5 Wooster, 374-6 Guy, 374-7 Damascus,* 374-8 Quitman, and 374-9 Pearson.
*On September 18–19, 1980, a Broken Arrow happened.
34
A 1983 major motion picture starring Matthew Broderick. David Lightman hacks War Operation Plan Response with the help of Jennifer, played by Ally Sheedy, and we as planet Earth almost went to DEFCON 1 and World War III.