Green thought that Roberts must have returned to their pickup truck. He walked over to it, but nobody was there. He started the truck and followed the southern section of the fence, looking for a hole big enough to drive through. But he couldn’t find one, and the pickup got stuck on some large pieces of cement. After ditching the truck, Green found a small hole in the fence, entered the complex on foot, and started calling for Livingston and Roberts. Nobody replied. It was hard to see anything, with all the smoke and dust. The lenses of his gas mask fogged up. He kept tripping over debris and falling down. He worried that something terrible had happened, that Roberts had fallen into a hole and gotten badly hurt. Green shouted for Livingston and Roberts and realized that he was lost.
Jim Sandaker had been dropped off at the access control point by the two security officers, and he didn’t plan to remain there for long. The men who’d just returned with Kennedy said that Livingston was still alive but the fumes were pretty strong at the complex. Sandaker looked around for a RFHCO suit, found one, and started to get into it.
Under the Category I rules, you needed at least one other person in RFHCO, as backup, whenever you put on the suit. Colonel Morris objected to Sandaker reentering the complex by himself.
Given the circumstances, Sandaker thought those rules were total bullshit. He was going to look for Livingston.
I’ll go with you, Richard English said, claiming to have been trained to wear the suit.
Sandaker had a feeling that English was lying. He couldn’t believe this old guy was going to put on a RFHCO suit. He worried that English would have a heart attack. Doing anything in a RFHCO was hard work; the whole outfit, with the air pack, weighed almost sixty pounds. The two men had never met, but Sandaker was glad not to be heading into the complex alone.
Colonel Jimmie D. Gray had returned to the site, after looking for water at a nearby farmhouse. Gray had started the night at the Little Rock command post, drove to 4–7 with food and supplies before the explosion, and stuck around after it. He helped Sandaker and English get into the RFHCO suits, and Rossborough drove them to the complex in the mobile command post. This time, he wore a gas mask.
Sandaker and English rode on the back of the truck, dangling their legs over the taillights. Rossborough dropped them off. The communications system on the complex no longer worked, and the two men wouldn’t be able to talk to each other with the headsets inside their helmets. They agreed to signal with their flashlights if one of them got into trouble. They found the hole in the fence and walked through it. From a distance they looked like astronauts exploring a hostile planet.
Jimmy Roberts hadn’t seen or heard Green slamming the Dodge Power Wagon into the fence. He’d wandered off, searched through Colonel Morris’s battered pickup for a flashlight, failed to find one, and stumbled upon a hole in the fence. Roberts climbed through it and, within minutes, felt completely lost. A couple of thoughts entered his mind: he didn’t want to fall into a hole, and he didn’t want that propane tank, hissing beside the road, to catch on fire and explode. He shouted for Livingston and Green, but got no response. He kept shouting their names — and then he heard someone reply.
“Okay, keep on yelling,” Roberts said, “and I’ll come to your voice.”
About twenty feet from the access portal, Roberts found David Livingston lying on the ground. His face was bloody, and he had a wound in his abdomen. But Livingston was conscious and alert.
Roberts picked him up and started to carry him toward the fence. It wasn’t easy to carry someone while breathing through a gas mask. Roberts started to feel dizzy, and his mask clouded up with sweat.
At the access control point, Don Green suddenly appeared in a pickup truck. Green got out of the truck, looking distraught, and said that Roberts was missing, that he may have fallen into a deep hole. Green needed a new gas mask, he needed to go back to the complex and find Roberts. The others thought Green was delirious, but he felt like they just didn’t understand. His gas mask was clogged, he had to get a new one and find Roberts. Mueller gave Green a shot of Benadryl and persuaded him to sit down for a moment.
Walking through the complex, Sandaker felt scared. He’d been told to watch out for the warhead and its high explosives. Debris was scattered everywhere, and in the darkness you couldn’t tell what any of it was. The explosion had stripped the concrete off steel rebar, and the rebar had been twisted into all kinds of strange shapes, looming out of the smoke. Sandaker had worked at 4–7 many times, but now nothing seemed familiar. The RFHCO helmet prevented him from calling out for English and Livingston. Within minutes, he was lost.
Roberts couldn’t carry Livingston anymore and put him on the ground.
