Watchlist (21 page)

She was at least relieved that he mostly served his time on the base. Larry was born, and Gordon worked his way up to captain, and when in 1957 he was offered the command of some kind of new offshore platform, he wanted to request another assignment—since what Air Force officer wanted to squat in a box over the ocean?—but he told Ellie that it was her decision, too. “You have a family, now,” she said. “I just want anything that keeps you closer.” “I wouldn't get home any more often,” he told her. “And safer,” she said. So after sleeping on it he told her he'd take the command, though afterward he was so disappointed that he wasn't himself for weeks.

By 1950 the Department of Defense had determined that the radars carried on navy picket ships and Air Force aircraft on station were not powerful enough to detect incoming Russian bombers sufficiently far offshore to enable fighter interception. The radar stations comprising the Distant Early Warning system arcing across the far north of the continent provided some security in that direction, but given that nearly all of America's highest-priority targets were situated inside its northeastern metropolitan corridor, protection from an attack launched across the Atlantic seemed both essential and entirely absent. The Air Defense Command in response urgently ordered the Priority One construction of five platforms along the northeast coast in a line from Bangor to Atlantic City. The platforms were called Texas Towers because of their resemblance to the oil rigs, numbered from north to south, and cost $11 million apiece.

They faced engineering problems as unprecedented as the space program's. Tower No. 4 in particular had presented a much greater challenge than the other towers since its footings would stand in 185 feet of water, more than three times as deep as the others. In 1955 the maximum depth at which anyone had built a structure under the sea was sixty feet, and that had been in the Gulf of Mexico. Because of that, the Air Force had decided that Tower 4 would require bold new thinking in its conception, and had hired a firm known for its bridge design. The firm had had no experience at all in the area of ocean engineering for marine structures.

Tower No. 4 stood on three hollow legs nearly three hundred feet long. The legs were only twelve feet in diameter and braced by three submarine tiers of thirty-inch steel struts. The main structure was a triangular triple-leveled platform that stood seventy feet above the waves. From its concrete footings on the seafloor to the top of its radomes it was the equivalent of a thirty-story building out in the ocean.

Oil-drilling platforms had weathered for the most part the storms and seas of the Gulf, but the Gulf at its worst was nothing like the North Atlantic.

And something was already wrong with Tower No. 4. Unlike the others it moved so much in heavy weather or even in a good strong wind that everyone who worked on it called it Old Shaky or the Tiltin' Hilton.

The first time Gordon had set foot on it he'd stood at the edge of the platform hanging on to the rope railings designed to catch those blown off their feet by wind gusts or prop wash and had looked down into the waves so far below and out at the horizon empty in all directions and had said to the officer he was relieving, “What the hell am I doing here?”

The tower housed seventy men. Besides its crew and officer quarters and workstations it had a ward room, bakery, galley, mess, recreation area, and a sick bay. Seven locomotive-sized diesel engines provided electricity, and ionizing machines converted salt water to drinking water on the lower level. Fuel was stored in the hollow legs.

The crew was half Air Force personnel and half civilian welders or electricians or technicians. For every thirty days on you got thirty days off. The military guys liked it because they got more time than they were used to with their families, but the civilians hated the isolation, and complained they were always away for the big holidays. Everyone seemed to be stuck out on the platform for New Year's and home for Groundhog Day.

But the tower shuddered and flexed so much in bad weather that whoever had painted
Old Shaky
over the door in the mess hall hadn't even been able to paint it straight, and the floors moved so much in the winter that everyone was too seasick to eat. Ellie had heard from Gordon in his first phone call that the medic who'd flown out with him hadn't served out his first day. When he'd seen how much the platform was pitching he'd refused to get off the helicopter and had taken the next flight out. Once he'd left, Gordon had found a crow hunkered down on the edge of the helipad, its tail feathers pummeled back in the wind. They got blown out here sometimes, the captain he'd been relieving had explained. Gordon boxed the crow up and carried it to his stateroom and then had seen to it that it was ferried back on the last copter out that night. “Well, at least the crow is safe,” Ellie said. “Unless he comes back,” her husband told her.

Betty Bakke's husband Roy was one of the medics who hadn't insisted on flying back to the mainland the first time he'd set foot on Tower No. 4, because he believed in fulfilling his responsibilities. He'd already made master sergeant and was two years older than the captain and nicknamed for his standard advice, which was Don't Sweat It, as in,
I thought I was coming down with something but Don't Sweat It said I was okay.
He'd transferred from the navy, where he'd served on a minesweeper during the Korean conflict. He told Betty in his phone calls that the only thing that fazed him was his separation from her. She was still stuck in their old bungalow in Mount Laguna on the other side of the country with their boy. Roy had put his friend and commanding officer Captain Phelan on the phone during one call, and the captain had regaled her with stories about Roy. Roy had stayed on duty eighty straight hours with an airman second class who'd had a heart attack, and he was even better known for having after a fall stitched up his own eyebrow while everyone had watched. He'd organized fishing contests off the deck and had also radioed passing trawlers so the guys could trade their cigarettes and beer for fresh fish and lobster. He'd also put himself in charge of the 16 mm movies traded from tower to tower and had scored big that Thanksgiving by having dealt
The Vikings
with Kirk Douglas for
The Sheriff of Fractured Jaw
with Jayne Mansfield. Betty had told the captain that her husband sounded like a one-man morale officer, and the captain had answered that that was what he'd been getting at. Betty had responded that she'd heard that long separations were the reefs that sank military marriages, and the captain had laughed and had said that he was going to pass the phone back to her husband. “Sounds like she needs a house call,” she heard him say to Roy.

The Navy Bureau of Yards and Docks had advised that the platform would need to withstand winds up to 125 miles per hour and breaking waves up to thirty-five feet, based on twenty years of data provided by the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution. The main deck's seventy-foot elevation should then provide plenty of clearance. A few engineers on the design team dissented, wishing to put on the record their belief that wave heights and wind speeds should be calculated on the basis of what might be expected once a century rather than once every twenty years. They were outvoted.

To extend its radar coverage Tower No. 4 had been given a location as close as possible to the very edge of the continental shelf, which meant that just to its east the bottom dropped away thousands of feet, and waves coming from the north or east encountered that rising bottom and mounted themselves upward even higher. And in the winter storms it had weathered, Tower No. 2, in much shallower water, had already recorded waves breaking
over
its deck.

But wait, Gordon told Ellie once he'd done a little more research: the news got even worse. Because the footings were so deep, Tower No. 4's hollow legs had been designed to be towed to their location, where they'd be upended and anchored to the caissons on the bottom before the main deck was attached and raised. But because the legs had been so long the design engineers had had to use pin connections—giant bolts—rather than welds in the underwater braces. Bolts were an innovative solution, but as a modification failed to take into account the constant random motion of the sea. The oil rigs and the other two towers had used welded connections for that reason. The moment the bolts had gone in, they had begun generating impact stress around their connections. And Gordon had further discovered that during the towing a storm had so pummeled two of the legs' underwater braces that they'd sheared off and sunk during the upending, and that everyone had then floated around until the Air Force had finally given the order to improvise repairs at sea to avoid having to tow the entire structure back to shore. Then in the swells the five-thousand-ton main platform had kept smashing up against the legs, and so reinforced steel had been flown out and welded to the legs over the damage. “Okay, I think it's time to put in for a change of assignment,” Ellie told him in response to that news. “Yeah, well, in for a penny, in for a pound,” her husband had responded, by which she took him to mean,
You got me into this, so I don't want any complaints
.

As soon as the tower had gone operational Wilbur Kovarick had asked to be assigned to it as senior electrician so he could be closer to his family on Long Island, and Edna had been so grateful that she'd kept him in bed the entire weekend.

By the time Edna had turned twenty-six all of her friends but two had married and she had been a bridesmaid five times. She'd told Wilbur on their first date that at the last wedding if the clergy-man had dropped dead at the altar she could have taken over the service. He'd been sweet and had thought she was a riot but after they had said good night she had found herself back in her little rented room with no radio or television and her three pots of ivy wishing that she'd thought to get his home address or telephone number. By the time he had called back she had had no patience for pretense and had told him to come over and when he had appeared at her door she had kissed him until he had finally pulled his face away and she had pressed her cheek to his and had said, “I'm not fast; I just know what I want,” and after a moment he had squeezed her even harder than she was squeezing him. Their first apartment after their marriage had been so small that one of them could get dressed in their bedroom only if the other stayed in bed, and Wilbur had joined the Air Force so they'd send him to electricians' school.

He told her that without him the whole tower went dark and the gigantic antennae stopped spinning and she answered that that was the way she felt, too. He told her that when the diesels altered their outputs at odd intervals, the voltage changes caused the radar transmitters to sound their alarms, and every single time the threat had to be assessed, the alarm had to be silenced, the transmitter readjusted, the alarm reset, and a Threat Assessment Report filled out. Some nights he was up nineteen hours straight. Then he was so wired that he called her when he went off-duty and talked. He told her that the wind chill was so bad some days that in the sun and behind some shelter he'd be sweating in a T-shirt but then out in the wind, water would freeze in a bucket. He told her that the space heater she'd insisted he take had made his part of the bunk room a big gathering spot, and that he'd also gotten a reputation as a good egg because instead of filing a report about an airman second class who'd dropped a transmitter drawer he'd spent the night repairing it himself so he wouldn't get the guy in trouble. She asked if he'd made any friends, and though it disappointed her, he said no, not yet, and there was an awkward pause, and then he added that he
had
been getting a kick out of one of the divers who was always sucking helium out of a tank and then telling everyone “Take me to your leaders” like he was the man from outer space.

After Gordon had been on the tower a month Ellie started hearing about his friend Captain Mangual. Gordon made it sound like he'd known him all his life. “Who's Captain Mangual?” she asked him, after having waited for him to explain. “And why are there two captains out there?” He told her that Captain Mangual didn't work on the tower but on the AKL-17, the ship that supplied the tower. “And he has time to visit you on the tower?” she asked. No, they got to know each other by radio, Gordon told her. So he was quite the guy, huh? she wanted to know, and then she got even more irritated when he answered that Honey, there was
nothing
that this guy could not do.

Captain Mangual's ship was specially outfitted to unload cargo between the legs of the tower, but it had to be positioned just so, in whatever seas, and it sometimes took three hours just to get its mooring set. And it was no small ship: 177 feet from stem to stern. He had to have the patience of a saint, boy. And then he had to hold the ship as steady as possible under the crane that unloaded the cargo or personnel onto the tower. The poor crane operator would just get a load in the bucket and the boat would drop fifty feet and then come back up just as fast. And when stuff was unloaded onto the boat, the load got dropped onto this bouncing and pitching cargo area and once it was free the deckhands had to get it lashed down before it squashed them flat. Ellie said it sounded like the crane operator and the deckhands had it harder than Captain Mangual, and Gordon said No no no as though he hadn't been getting through at all, and told her that Captain Mangual was the guy who made it all possible by doing a million different things to keep the boat in that one same spot no matter what. He started to give an example and then gave up. Oh, Ellie finally said, into the silence. After they hung up she caught sight of her expression in the mirror in the foyer, and snapped at herself: “Stupid.”

The butterfingers who'd dropped the transmitter drawer was Jeannette's husband Louie, and the first snapshot he'd sent back to her from the tower showed what looked like a circle of boys in lifejackets high in the air on a fairground ride, on the back of which he'd printed
On the Crane.
He'd explained later that that was how the guys got from the ship to the tower, and that spare parts and supplies were always unloaded first since if a load was going to be smashed or lost it was better that it be the Coca-Cola pallets. She asked how high the thing lifted them and he said over a hundred feet and she exclaimed that it looked dangerous and he told her that the rule was no lifting in winds over forty knots since at that wind speed the loads spun like tops. And besides, two guys were always on safety lines trying to control the bucket's swinging. She asked if they couldn't just go up the stairs. “Baby, from the ship's deck if I had a baseball I could barely hit the tower platform. And I was All-State,” he said. “Does anything ever
fall
?” she asked. “I think the crane operators drop stuff on purpose to shake us up before it's our turn,” he told her. When it was their turn, though, it was funny how everybody stopped joking once they were up in the air.