Zodiac

6

WE INVADED the territory of the Swiss Bastards shortly before dawn. At sea we had three Zodiacs, two frogmen, a guy in a moon suit, and our mother ship, the Blowfish. We had a few people on land, working out of the Omni and a couple of rented vehicles. Our numbers were swelled by members of the news media, mostly from Blue Kills and environs but with two crews from New York City.

At about three in the morning, Debbie had to shake a tail put on us by the Swiss Bastards' private detectives. There was nothing subtle about the tail, they were just trying to intimidate. Tanya, our other Boston participant, was driving the car and Debbie was lying down in the back seat. Tanya led the tail onto a twisting road that wasn't sympathetic to the Lincoln Town Car following them. She thrashed the Omni for five minutes or so, putting half a mile between herself and the private dicks, then threw a 180 in the middle of the road-a skill she'd learned on snowy Maine roads last February while we were driving up to Montreal to get some French fries. Debbie jumped out and crouched in the ditch. Tanya took off and soon passed the Lincoln going the other way. The private dicks in the Lincoln were forced to make an eleven-point turn across the road, then peeled out trying to catch up with her.

Debbie walked a couple hundred yards and located the all-terrain bicycle we'd stashed there previously. It was loaded with half a dozen Kryptonite bicycle locks, the big U-shaped, impervious things. She rode a couple of miles, partly on the road and partly cross-country, until she came to a heavy gate across a private access road. On the other side of the gate was a toxic waste dump owned by the Swiss Bastards, a soggy piece of ground that ran downhill into an estuary that in turn ran two miles out to the Atlantic. The entire dump was surrounded by two layers of chainlink fence, and this gate was a big, heavy, metal sucker, locked by means of a chain and padlock. Debbie locked two of the Kryptonites in the middle, augmenting the Swiss Bastards' chain system, then put two on each hinge, locking the gates to the gateposts. In the unlikely event that an emergency took place on the dump site, she stuck around with the keys so that she could open the gates for ambulances or fire trucks. We aren't careless fanatics and we don't like to look as though we are.

I was on the Blowfish, explaining this gig to the crew. Jim, the skipper, and hence their boss, was hanging around in the background.

Jim does this for a living. He lives on the boat and sails back and forth between Texas and Duluth; along the Gulf Coast, around Florida, up the Atlantic Coast, down the St. Lawrence Seaway into the Great Lakes, and west from there. Then back. Wherever he goes, hell breaks loose. When GEE wants an especially large amount of hell to break loose, they'll bring in professional irritants, like me.

Jim and his crew of a dozen or so specialize in loud, sloppy publicity seeking. They anchor in prominent places and hang banners from the masts. They dump fluorescent green dye into industrial outfalls so that news choppers can hover overhead and get spectacular footage of how pollution spreads. They blockade nuclear submarines. They do a lot of that antinuclear stuff. Their goal is to be loud and visible.

Myself, I like the stiletto-in-the-night approach. That's partly because I'm younger, a post-Sixties type, and partly because my thing is toxics, not nukes or mammals. There's no direct action you can take to stop nuclear proliferation, and direct action to save mammals is just too fucking nasty. I don't want to get beat up over a baby seal. But there are all kinds of direct, simple ways to go after toxic criminals. You just plug the pipes. Doing that requires coordinated actions, what the media like to describe as "military precision."

This crew doesn't like anything military. In the Sixties, they would have been stuffing flowers into gun barrels while I was designing bombs in a basement somewhere. None of them has any technical background, not because they're dumb but because they hate rigid, discipline thinking. On the other hand, they had sailed this crate tens of thousands of miles in all kinds of weather. They'd survived a dismasting off Tierra del Fuego, blocked explosive harpoons with their Zodiacs, lived for months at a time in Antarctica, established a beachhead on the Siberian coast. They could do anything, and they would if I told them to; but I'd rather they enjoyed the gig.

"These people here are environmental virgins," I said. We were sitting around on deck, eating tofu-and-nopales omelets. It was a warm, calm, Jersey summer night and the sky was starting to lose its darkness and take on a navy-blue glow. "They think toxic waste happens in other places. They're shocked about Bhopal and Times Beach, but it's just beginning to dawn on them that they might have a problem here. The Swiss Bastards are sitting fat and happy on that ignorance. We're going to come in and splatter them all over the map."

Crew members exchanged somber glances and shook their heads. These people were seriously into their nonviolence and refused to take pleasure in my use of the word "splatter."

"Okay, I'm sorry. That's going a little far. The point is that this is a company town. Everybody works at that chemical factory. They like having jobs. It's not like Buffalo where everyone hates the chemical companies to begin with. We have to establish credibility here."

"Well, I forgot to bring my three-piece suit, man," said one of the antisplatter faction.

"That's okay. I brought mine." I do, in fact, have a nice three-piece suit that I always wear in combination with a dead-fish tie and a pair of green sneakers splattered with toxic wastes. It's always a big hit, especially at GEE fundraisers and in those explosively tense corporate boardrooms. "They're expecting, basically, people who look like you." I pointed to the hairiest of the Blowfish crew. "And they're expecting us to act like flakes and whine a lot. So we have to act before we whine. We can't give them an excuse to pass us off as duck squeezers."

There was a certain amount of passive-aggressive glaring directed my way; I was asking these people to reverse their normal approach. But I was directing this gig and they'd do what I asked.

"As usual, if you don't like the plan, you can just hang out, or go into town or whatever. But I'll need as many enthusiasts as I can get for this one."

"I'm into it," said a voice from the galley. It was Arty, short for Artemis, author of the omelets, the best Zodiac jockey in the organization. Naturally she was into it; it was a Zodiac-heavy operation, it was exciting, it was commando-like. Artemis was even younger than me, and military precision didn't come with all the emotional baggage for her that it did for the middle-aged Blowfish crew.

At 4:00 A.M., Artemis powered up her favorite Zode and prominently roared off, heading for some dim lights about half a mile away. The lights belonged to a twenty-foot coast guard boat that was assigned to keep an eye on us. It happens that boats of that size don't have cooking facilities, so Artemis had whipped up a couple of extra omelets, put them in a cooler to keep them warm and was headed out to give these guys breakfast. She took off flashing, glowing and smoking like a UFO, and within a couple of minutes we could hear her greeting the coast guards with an enthusiasm that was obscene at that time of the morning. They greeted her right back. They knew one another from previous Blowfish missions, and she liked to flirt with them over the radio. To them she was a legend, like a mermaid.

That was when Tom and I took off in one of the other Zodes. This one had a small, well-muffled engine, and we'd stripped off all the orange tape and anything else that was easy to see in the dark.

The Blowfish was three miles off the coast and maybe five miles south of the toxic site that had just been locked up by Debbie and Tanya. Jim waited fifteen minutes, so the coast guards could eat and we could slip away, then cranked up the Blowfish's huge Danish one-cylinder diesel: whoom whoom whoom whoom. We could easily hear it from the Zode and if anyone ashore was listening, they could probably hear it too. Normally, for environmental reasons, Jim used the sails, but this was right before dawn and there wasn't any wind. Besides, we were aiming for military precision here.

Around 6:00 we heard them break radio silence with a lot of fake traffic between Blowfish and GEE-1 and GEE-2 and Tainted Meat, which was my current code name, and loose talk about banners and smoke bombs. We knew that the rent-a-dicks were monitoring that frequency. Meanwhile, Tanya was in Blue Kills, trailing a parade of Lincoln Town Cars, rousting the media crews from their motel rooms, handing out xeroxed maps and press releases.

The import of the press releases was that we were mightily pissed off about the toxic marsh north of town. You know, the one that two Zodiacs were converging on at this very moment. I was imagining it: Artemis undoubtedly in the lead, spiky hair slicing the wind, thrashing the morning surf at about forty miles an hour, as some lesser Zode pilot desperately tried to keep up with her. She'd been through a special GEE course in Europe where she'd learned how to harass two-hundred-foot, waste-dumping vessels, dipping in and out of their bow wave without getting sucked under. She knew how to massage a big roller with her Mercury, how to slide up and down the troughs without going airborne.

We were listening too, but we already knew what was going on. The whole flotilla was headed for the estuary. There was nothing the coast guard could do except watch, because there's nothing illegal about riding a boat up a river. By now, the Swiss Bastards would have dispatched all available rent-a-cops and rent-a-dicks to the scene, ordering them to drive into that toxic waste dump and stand shoulder-to-shoulder along the shoreline to prevent the GEE invasion forces from establishing a beachhead.

When they arrived, pushing through the horde of media, they would find the gate impregnably locked. They would find, as they always did, that no boltcutter in the world had jaws that opened wide enough to cut through a Kryptonite lock. They would then find that their hacksaws were dulled useless by the tempered steel. If they were exceedingly bright, they would get a blowtorch and heat the metal enough to destroy its temper; then they could hacksaw it, and, after a few hours, get inside their own dump. Meanwhile, the cameras would be rolling, as would the GEE demonstration, unmolested, on the other side of the transparent fences. Unless, in full view of the NYC minicams, they wanted to send rent-a-cops clambering over their own fences, or chop them up with boltcutters.

Tanya and Debbie had parked the Omni right in front and were propagandizing with a bullhorn. Listening to the radio, I could occasionally make out a word or two of what they were saying. Basically they were encouraging everyone to stay cool-always a major part of our gigs, especially when state troopers were present.

Riding in one of the Zodiacs was a man dressed up in a moonsuit, one of those dioxinproof numbers with the goggles and the facemasks. Nothing looks scarier on camera. This Zodiac was about three inches from the shore-no trespassing had yet been committed. He had some primitive sampling equipment mounted on long poles, so that he could reach into the dump and poke around pseudoscientifically.

In the other Zodiac was a guy in scuba gear, who, as soon as they arrived, jumped into the water and disappeared. Every few minutes he would resurface and hand a bottle full of ugly brown water to Artemis. She would take it, wearing gloves of course, and hand him an empty. Then he would disappear again.

They hated it when we did this. It just drove them wild. From previous run-ins with me, they knew the organization now had some chemical expertise, that we knew what we were talking about. Neither the guy in the moon suit nor the diver ever showed his face, so they didn't know which one was Sangamon Taylor. This sampling wasn't just for show, or so they thought. All of this shit was going to be analyzed, and embarrassing facts were going to be, shall we say, splattered across the newspapers.

That had started the day before, with an article in the sports section by well-respected journalist/sportsman, Red Grooten, who detailed, with surprising sophistication, the effects of this swamp's toxins on sports fishing. Next to it had been a shocking picture of a dead flounder. GEE authorities were quoted as speculating that this entire estuary might have to be closed to fishing.

In half an hour, the Blowfish would pull into view, and earnest GEE employees would begin examining the river-banks downstream for signs of toxicity. If they were lucky they'd find a two-headed duck. Even if they found nothing, the fact that they went looking would be reported.

Tom and I were converging, slowly and quietly, on the real objective.