Mac travis adventures bo.., p.54
Mac Travis Adventures BoxSet, page 54
part #4 of Mac Travis Series
“Come on, Mac Travis. We ain’t got time to sit and wonder why, babe,” she said, humming the Dylan song.
“Let’s do it.” He pushed down on the throttle, stopping at a fast idle. The depth finder showed eighteen feet and steady, the dredged bottom starting well before the canal entrance. The bottom continued to hold and he accelerated slightly as they met the current from the canal. Pushing through the inlet, he saw several fishermen on the banks, their cars and trucks parked on what appeared to be an access road behind them.
“Look up there!” Pamela warned.
He’d lost focus for a second, watching one of the fishermen bring a fish to the bank. Ahead were a half dozen huge culvert pipes.
“What now?”
She went back to her phone. “They’re eighty-four inches in diameter. What’s that mean to us?”
Mac was thankful the cuddy cabin didn’t have a tower. He pushed down on the throttles, wanting enough momentum to maintain steerage, expecting the current to be stiffer as the canal narrowed. As they got closer, he could see ripples on the surface as the water exited the restriction. Powering up again, he slid the boat into the pipe. It was an eerie feeling with only inches to spare on each side, but the culverts were only ten feet long, and he could see light ahead. Before he knew it, they were clear and the canal widened again.
The waterway stayed dead straight for a few miles, giving him a chance to look at the map on Pamela’s phone. “There’s another test station right up here.”
Trufante woke in darkness, then remembered the room had no windows. He turned toward the only source of light, a thin band coming from under the door. He moved around, trying to stretch, and gaining his feet he used the wall to push himself up. Just as he rose, he slammed his head into the low ceiling and winced in pain. Ducking now, he went to the light, twice tripping on pipes before he reached it. With both hands he tried to turn the handle, but it was locked.
In the darkness it was impossible to see if there was another way out, and he started to worry. Sealed inside of a concrete building in the middle of the Everglades was not a good scenario. He went back to the door and froze when he heard something. There were voices outside, and he strained to hear what they were saying. It sounded like a large group, and out of desperation he started banging on the door. The voices were coming closer and he heard something on the other side.
“Do you think it’s a trap?” someone asked.
“You know that team plays dirty. Must be one of their guys trying to draw us into the open.”
Trufante tried to figure out what this army talk was all about, and then it dawned on him. “Hey, guys, it ain’t a trap. I’m stuck in here,” he yelled, banging on the door again. He could hear them talking quietly.
“I’m telling you right now, if this is a trap, the game’s over, and you’ll lose for cheating,” someone said.
“Right. No cheating. Really, I ain’t got no idea what y’all are up to, but this she-devil of a woman stuck me in here last night.”
He could hear activity outside the door, then he heard a crash and the door vibrated. It fell away from the rusted steel hinges and light entered the room. It took a minute for his eyes to adjust to the brightness, but when he did he saw a half dozen teenagers surrounding him, each with a weapon pointed at him. The first thing that came to mind were the gang shootings, but after a closer look the guns looked different, and he remembered the conversation.
“Y’all can put those down ’fore you hurt someone,” he said.
The leader stepped forward and holstered his pistol. Trufante’s eyes followed the weapon and he relaxed. In a small compartment to the side of the gun were several CO2 cartridges. He looked around at the other weapons and saw the standard paintball paraphernalia.
“What are you doing here?” the leader asked.
“Same could be asked about you boys,” he said, with an emphasis on boys.
“I asked you first,” he said, boldly.
“Hey, Max, forget this dude. Ethan’s team’s gonna get the drop on us,” one of the other guys said.
“Y’all need to post some guards. Tell you what,” he said, thinking how he could play this to his advantage. “I help you take down this Ethan cat, and y’all get me back to civilization.” He scanned the gutted building. Conduits and ductwork hung from the ceilings and walls. The electrical panel had been jimmied open and all the copper wire pulled.
“What do you know about tactics?” Max asked.
“First Bayou Brigade. Team leader,” Trufante said proudly.
“Louisiana?”
“Goddamn Everglades got nothing on the ole bayou. Now do we have a deal?”
Max looked around at the others. “Sure,” he said.
“I’ll be needing a weapon then,” Trufante said.
One of the boys handed him a rifle with a belt of cartridges and extra ammo. “All right, now where’s this Ethan dude at?”
Just as he said it, an orange splatter appeared on the concrete wall above his head. There was no First Bayou Brigade, and this was the first Trufante had ever seen of paintball. He wasn’t impressed. If it couldn’t take down a gator, what was the point? “Spread out. Everyone at least twenty yards apart. You two, go around the perimeter and find them, then report back.” He took control of the troops.
Another shot marked the wall behind him. Turning, he fired several rounds and heard someone cry out that they were hit. “Score one for us,” he said to Max. If the circumstances were different, this could actually be fun. “We need to pin them down somewhere, you know, push them into an enclosed space.”
“The rocket silo,” Max said. “It’s the building over there.” He pointed to a large steel building.
“Rockets? For real?” Trufante muttered.
“Don’t you know where we are?” Max asked.
“No, man. Told you that she-devil locked me up last night.”
“This is the old Aerojet rocket plant.”
Trufante gave him a queer look, smiling and showing his grin. He knew this was his best chance to get out of here. “Rally them troops and start moving them toward it.” He leaned over and drew a quick map of his plan in the half inch of dirt on the concrete floor. “This is how we’re gonna do it.”
18
Mel said goodbye and thanked Alicia for the ride to Miami International Airport. From here she would rent a car. The ex-CIA agent had offered to accompany her, but Mel had decided it wasn’t worth the risk if identities were checked. It was better to be a private citizen, although she expected there were files on her in more than one government office. After fighting the ACLU’s battles for years, her name was well known in some circles—not always for the right things. Her relationship with Bradley Davies and his law firm probably had a red flag on her as well. As she drove north on I-95, she wondered if her old boss was still locked up and where.
The town of Davie was just west of Fort Lauderdale and home to the US Department of the Interior’s Everglades Restoration Initiative. Already she had discovered a conflict between the National Science Foundation and the DOI. From her experience with government, this would only be the first of many, and she planned to use one to leverage the information she wanted. She had made several calls to some old contacts to both garner information and to see if she could get an appointment. Exiting I-595 at South University Drive, she breathed deeply, wondering what kind of reception she was going to get. The calls she had made during the two-hour drive had yielded more information than she knew what to do with about the history and political intrigue surrounding Big Sugar.
It was a twisted relationship, with both people’s health and the environment compromised. She already knew how it started from Alicia’s history lesson last night, but she soon found everything had escalated in the sixties. It seemed the sugar industry paid Harvard scientists to publish a study blaming fat and cholesterol for coronary heart disease while largely exculpating sugar. This study, published in the prestigious New England Journal of Medicine, in 1967, helped set the agenda for decades of public health policy designed to steer Americans into low-fat foods, which increased carbohydrate consumption and exacerbated the obesity epidemic as well as selling truckloads of sugar. This revelation was one of the first instances where the Big Sugar companies had worked together to buy influence.
Leaving the health matters aside, she called another friend, who gave her the political background. She drove with her jaw dropped, almost rear-ending two other cars as she listened to how it had started in the 1800s. Back then, the cornerstone of federal sugar policy was not a dietary guideline but a tariff on sugar imports. The sugar companies again banded together forcing a law that made a distinction between refined and raw sugar. Again this was to their advantage.
The miles flew by as she listened, and it only got worse. In order to protect domestic refiners, then the largest manufacturing employer in Northern cities, the tariff distinguished between two kinds of sugar: “refined” and “raw.” Refined sugar that was meant for direct consumption paid a much higher rate than did raw sugar crystals intended for further refining and whitening. But by the late 1870s, new industrial sugar factories in the Caribbean began to jeopardize this protectionist structure. Technologically sophisticated, these factories could produce sugar that, while raw by the government’s standard, was consistently much closer to refined sugar than ever before. The American industry now faced potential competition from abroad.
The country’s largest refiners mobilized on several fronts. They lobbied the United States Congress to adopt chemical instruments that could measure the percentage of sucrose in a sugar cargo, and to deem sugar “refined” only when its sucrose content was sufficiently high enough. Previously, customs officers had judged the purpose of a sugar cargo by its color, smell, taste, and texture, as people throughout the sugar trade had done for centuries. Now refiners argued that such sensory methods were ripe for abuse because they depended on a subjective appraisal. They demanded a scientific standard instead—one that would reveal some “raw” sugar to be nearly pure and thus subject to higher tariffs—and they prevailed. It was amazing to her that this wasn’t publicized. It read like a thriller novel.
Their plea for scientific objectivity may have sounded sensible, but it masked nefarious aims. If refiners were to bribe a customs chemist to shade his results in their favor—as they were routinely accused of doing for decades, beginning in the 1870s—such corruption would be much harder for the government to detect than it had been when everyone could see and smell the same sugar.
All the while America’s appetite for sugar grew. In the decades after the Civil War, Americans’ per-capita consumption of sugar more than doubled, from thirty pounds in the late 1800s to eighty pounds only thirty years later. As a result, by 1880, sugar subsidies accounted for a sixth of the federal budget.
Then there were the bribes. Her last call was to a friend at the Miami Herald. He revealed that in the last twenty years the industry contributed almost sixty million dollars to influence Florida elections, and that was the publicly disclosed amounts. Meanwhile, and not surprisingly, state officials had resisted efforts to make sugar companies pay for their damage to the Everglades.
With a pile of money and some powerful lobbyists, which Mel was not surprised to hear that Davies was one of, Big Sugar succeeded in bringing control of the Everglades back to the state level, where they could more easily manipulate it. Several measures were passed, all watered down and penned by the sugar companies’ attorneys. Cleanup costs were capped, and a proposed area of the middle Everglades was slated for restoration. That was during the Clinton years, and it was no different when the Republicans took control of Congress. Big Sugar didn’t care who was in power. They funneled money in whatever direction they needed to keep their subsidies in place.
With her head spinning, Mel pulled in and parked. Even for her brain, often tried by the craftiest minds in the legal profession, this was convoluted. Wishing for a change of clothes, she got out of the car and entered the building. In the office of the Everglades Initiative, she looked at the disinterested woman sitting beneath the seal of the Department of the Interior.
She announced herself and sat down to wait, trying to think if there was any other industry that had their hand in the destruction of the environment and of people’s health at the same time.
“Come on in, Ms. Woodson.” The woman who opened the door greeted her with a handshake, then escorted her to an office with a generous view of the parking lot.
Mel was about to ask what was up with the frosty reception, but once the door closed, the woman embraced her.
“Just an act for anyone watching. The big bureaucrat can’t be seen hugging the infamous Melanie Woodson.” They both laughed.
“Damn, Janet, you had me going there for a minute. How’s Jim?” Mel asked.
“Retired now. Only reason I still work is to get out of the house,” she said, laughing. “And the insurance.”
Mel thought that odd that a contemporary of hers, especially one in government service, could even think about retiring. After exchanging a few minutes of pleasantries, Janet pulled a legal pad in front of her and started taking notes. Mel explained what had happened since the storm.
“So there was no ID on the body you found?” Janet asked, underlining something on her paper.
Mel dodged the question. “Mac’s had some trouble with the local law enforcement from time to time. We’ve pretty much stayed away from the investigation.”
“But you thought he was a scientist?”
“From what we pulled off his phone, yes,” Mel answered, wondering why the questions were more centered around the dead body than the polluted water. Patiently, she answered Janet’s questions, becoming more wary and vague as she went.
“What about the test sites? They were clearly tampered with,” she said, checking her phone again, hoping for some confirmation from Jen about the test results.
“That’s more the National Science Foundation’s deal. They run the test sites,” Janet said.
“I’ve done enough homework on the sugar industry and the travesties they’ve committed to both our health and the environment to know there’s a ton of blame shifting going on. I thought maybe you could help me make a difference. Let the doctors straighten out the medical stuff, and I don’t really care about the real estate, but the environment—”
Janet interrupted, “What is it that you want me to do?”
Mel wrung her hands in her lap, frustrated about how this was going. She had made a mistake trusting a friendship and coming in without a plan or expectations—she knew better, and had to watch how emotionally involved she was getting. She tried a different angle. “I have some property, from my dad, down there. If those fish kills reach the middle Keys, it’ll be worthless.”
“Honey, I feel your pain. There’s some paperwork I can get you to fill out, it usually takes a while, but I can push it through. Let me see what I can do for you,” Janet said, rising from her seat.
Mel was shocked she was being dismissed like this. Not only did she expect their friendship, dating back to their days at Virginia Law School, to carry weight, but Janet had a position of authority here and the means to help her. “Well, if that’s all you can do.” She got up and waited for the other woman to come around the desk. They embraced again, but this time Mel could tell it was not heartfelt.
“I can find my way out. You look busy,” Mel said, opening the door. She wanted out of there fast.
Stopping in the bathroom off the lobby on the way out of the building, she washed her face and looked in the mirror. What looked back was not the impression she wanted to give. It was the look of worn-out desperation. She wondered if she should have stopped at a store and bought business clothes and some makeup before her meeting and decided that wasn’t it. She had been routinely dismissed by an old friend and bureaucrat. It was hard to believe some of the claims about Big Sugar, but she was starting to get a taste of just how powerful they were. It looked like Mac was right, and the only way to fix it was to do an end run around the government.
She got back in the car, checked the rearview mirror and backed out of the space. A dark blue four-door sedan, barely identifiable from the other million just like it, pulled out from behind the building. It stopped and waited. She thought the driver wanted her parking space, but instead the car followed her out of the lot. She didn’t think anything of it as the driver turned in the same direction as she did onto the road and quickly dropped several cars back.
As she drove, she replayed the meeting in her head, looking for clues or reasons why Janet had been patronizing, allowing her to leave with only a vague offer of help. She had even steered her away from a written complaint. The other car was quickly forgotten as her brain shifted into overdrive, trying to solve the puzzle.
19
Mac tried to ignore Pamela’s attitude. Her impatience was gnawing at him, and in the tight confines of the boat there was no escaping it. He was anxious as well, but knew the only way to figure out what was going on and to rescue Trufante was to follow the string of test sites. The stop to check the next site would only take a few minutes. Using the GPS on her phone, he located the station and pulled toward the bank of the canal. The Everglades Conservatory’s web page had pictures of each testing station, and he scanned the area looking for the short boardwalk allowing access to the sawgrass marsh. The site was labeled inactive, and he soon saw why when the dilapidated structure appeared on his left. He turned to the shore and nudged the bow until it lodged in the soft berm.
“Can you hold her here? I’ll be right back,” he said to Pamela, leaving the engine in forward.
She nodded and took the wheel. Moving to the bow, he jumped onto the six-foot slope, hoping it would hold him. His feet slipped, but he regained his balance and was able to crawl to the top. From there he could see what the berm had hidden. Stretched out to the horizon and beyond was an endless prairie of sawgrass. Cutting through a section was a short boardwalk. Taking a tentative step onto the first board, he felt something crack under his feet and retreated. Since the walkway was short, he figured whatever samples he could get at the end he could also get here and reached down, pulling a handful of cattails and grass from the marl.
