Zodiac

7

MUCH OF NEW JERSEY'S COAST is protected from the ocean by a long skinny barrier beach that runs a mile or two offshore. In some places it joins to the mainland, in some it's wide and solid, and in other places (off Blue Kills, for example) it peters out into islands or sandbars.

"Kill" is Dutch for "creek." What we have here is short, fat river that spreads out into a network of distributaries and marshes when it reaches the sea. The kills are braided together along an estuary that's supposed to be a wildlife refuge.

The estuary was north of us. The town of Blue Kills and the little principality of Blue Kills Beach were built on higher and dryer ground on its south side. The whole area was semi protected from the Atlantic by a dribble of isles and sandbars. We were out on the toxic lagoon enclosed behind them.

I'd been studying my LANDSAT infrared photos so I knew where to find a shrub- and tree-covered island pretty close to our target, about a mile off Blue Kills Beach. We beached the Zodiac among the usual clutter left behind by teen beer-chugging expeditions. Tom checked his gear and climbed into the Darth Vader Suit.

Normally divers wear wet suits, which are thick and porous. Water gets through them, the body warms the water up, they insulate you. But you wouldn't be caught dead wearing something like that when you are screwing around with toxic waste. So the Darth Vader Suit was built around a drysuit, which is waterproof. I'd added a facemask made from diving goggles, old inner tubes, a patching kit, and something called Tennis Shoe Repair Goo. When you wrestled it down over your face, the scuba mouthpiece fit into the proper orifice and there was kind of a one-way valve over your nose so you could breathe out. When it was put on correctly, it would protect you from what you were swimming through, at least for a little while.

Tom didn't like drysuits but he wasn't arguing. Before he put it on, we protected the parts of his skin that would be uncomfortably close to leaks or seams in the Darth Vader Suit. There's a silicone sealant that's made for this kind of thing-Liquid Skin. Smear it on and you're semiprotected. The suit goes on over that. We equipped him with a measuring tape, a scuba notepad, and an underwater 8-mm video camera.

"Just one thing. What's coming out of this sucker?"

"Amazing things. They're making dyes and pigments back in there. So you have your solvents. You have your metals. And lots of weird, weird phthalates and hydrazines."

"Meaning what?"

"Don't drink it. And when you're done, take a nice swim out here, where the water's cleaner."

"This kind of shit always bugs me."

"Look at it this way. A lot of toxins are absorbed through the lungs. But you've got a clean air supply in those tanks. A lot more get in through your skin. But there's not enough solvents in that diffuser, I think, to melt the suit."

"That's what they told us about Agent Orange."

"Shit." There was no reason for me to be astonished. I just hadn't thought of it before. "You got sprayed with that stuff?"

"Swam through the shit."

"You were a SEAL?"

"Demolition. But the Viet Cong didn't have much of a navy so it was mostly blue-collar maintenance. You know, cleaning dead buffaloes out of intake pipes."

"Well, this stuff isn't like Agent Orange. No dioxin involved here."

"Okay. You've got your paranoia and I've got mine."

We were being paranoid. I'd already admitted it. After our midnight ride through Brighton he had a pretty good idea of how my mind worked.

"I don't care if they see me checking out their pipe on the surface, Tom. I don't even care if they recognize me. But if they see a diver, that's a giveaway. Then they know they're in trouble. So just bear with me."

So he climbed into the water and I towed him, submerged, to a place where the water turned black. Then I cut the motor. He thumped on the bottom of the Zode.

I gave him a minute to get clear, then restarted the motor and just idled back and forth for a few minutes. I already had pretty good maps, but this was a chance to embellish them, note down clumps of trees, docking facilities, hidden sandbars, and media-support areas. About half a mile south was a public pier belonging to a state park; then, moving north, there was a chainlink fence running down to the water, separating park land from the Swiss Bastards' right-of-way. A few hundred feet past that was another fence and then some private property, some old retired-fishermen's homes.

The Swiss Bastards' right-of-way was deceptively wooded. When the wind came up a little, the trees sighed and almost covered the rush-hour roar of the parkway. Just out of curiosity, I took the Zode closer to shore and scanned the trees with binoculars. One of the rent-a-cops loitering back there was giving himself away by his cigarette smoke. Or, knowing the habits of rent-a-cops, maybe it was oregano somebody had sold him as reefer.

I knew what direction the pipe ran, so I could follow it inland using my compass, trace its path under some swampy woods and crackerbox developments, out to the parkway, a couple of miles inland. Then a forest of pipes rose up behind the real forest. Whenever the wind blew the right way, I got a whiff of organic solvents and gaseous byproducts. The plant was just coming alive with the morning shift, the center of the traffic noise. Tomorrow I'd make a phone call and shut it all down.

The big lie of American capitalism is that corporations work in their own best interests. In fact they're constantly doing things that will eventually bring them to their knees. Most of these blunders involve toxic chemicals that any competent chemist should know to be dangerous. They pump these things into the environment and don't even try to protect themselves. The evidence is right there in public, almost as if they'd printed up signed confessions and sprinkled them out of airplanes. Sooner or later, someone shows up in a Zodiac and points to that evidence, and the result is devastation far worse than what a terrorist, a Boone, could manage with bombs and guns. All the old men within twenty miles who have come down with tumors become implacable enemies. All the women married to them, all the mothers of damaged children, and even those of undamaged ones. The politicians and the news media trample each other in their haste to pour hellfire down on that corporation. The transformation can happen overnight and it's easy to bring about. You just have to show up and point your finger.

No chemical crime is perfect. Chemical reactions have inputs and outputs and there's no way to make those outputs disappear. You can try to eliminate them with another chemical reaction, but that's going to have outputs also. You can try to hide them, but they have this way of escaping. The only rational choice is not to be a chemical crook in the first place. Become a chemical crook and you're betting your future on the hope that there aren't any chemical detectives gunning for you. That assumption isn't true anymore.

I don't mean the EPA, the chemical Keystone Kops. Offices full of mediocre chemists, led by the lowest bottom-feeders of them all: political appointees. Expecting them to do anything controversial is like expecting a hay fever sufferer to harvest a field of ragweed. For God's sake, they wouldn't even admit that chlordane was dangerous. And if they don't have the balls to take preventive measures, punitive action doesn't even enter their minds. The laws are broken so universally that they don't know what to do. They don't even look for violators.

I do look. Last year I went on an afternoon's canoe trip in central Jersey, taking some sample tubes with me. I went home, ran the stuff through my chromatograph, and the result was over a million dollars in fines levied against several offenders. The supply-side economists made it this way: created a system of laissez-faire justice, with plenty of niches for aggressive young entrepreneurs, like me.

A rubber-coated hand broke the water ahead of me and I cut the motor. Tom's head emerged next to the Zodiac and he peeled back the Darth Vader mask to talk. His mouth was wide open and grimacing; he was surprised. "That is one big motherfucker."

"How long?"

"It's so long I can't swim to the end of it. I'll need a lift."

"And there's black shit coming out of it?"

"Right." Tom placed the little video camera on the floor of the Zode. I picked it up, rewound the tape, put the camera to my face and started to replay the tape through the little screen in the viewfinder. "Some shots of the diffusers," Tom explained. "Each one is three and a quarter inches in diameter. The crossbar is three-eighths inch."

"Nice job."

"Wasn't doing much when I showed up, then it started really barfing that stuff out."

"Morning shift. You missed the rush hour when you were down there. Let's see."

Through the viewfinder I was looking at the smooth, unnatural curve of a large pipe on the seafloor. It was covered with rust, and the rust with hairy green crap. The camera zoomed in on a black hole in the side of the pipe; understandably, nothing was growing near that. Cutting across the center of the hole was a crossbar.

"This remind you of anything?"

"What do you mean?" he said.

"Looks like the Greek letter theta. You know? The ecology symbol." I held up a press release bearing GEE's logo and he laughed.

"I guess this means to hell with the secrecy fetish," I said. "Hang on and I'll take you out farther."

We worked our way offshore about a hundred yards at a time, then, and when we got bored and started thinking about lunch, a quarter mile at a time. The slope of the bottom was gentle and the water never got deeper than about fifty feet. I'd motor him out, following the pipe with my compass, and he'd drop off and swim down to see if it was still there. When Tom finally found the end of it, we were pretty close to our starting place on the little shrub-covered island. The fucking thing was a mile long.

I hadn't worked with him before, but Tom was good. When you dive for a living I guess it pays to be precise. I knew some other GEE divers who would have said. "Whoa, man, it's a big fucking pipe, it's, like, about this wide." Tom was a fanatic, though, and came up with pages of measurements and diagrams.

We hung out on the island for an hour, savored a couple of beers, and talked it over.

"The holes are all the same size," he said. "Spaced a little over fifty feet apart. That tape measure is just an eighteen-footer, so I had to be kind of crude."

"All on the same side of the pipe?"

"Alternating sides."

"So if the thing is about a mile long ... that works out to something like a hundred three-inch holes we have to plug up."

"It's a big job, man. Why did they build it that way, anyhow? Why not have your basic huge pipe, just barfing the stuff out?"

"They used to think this was the answer. Diffusion. There's a strong current up the shore here."

"I noticed."

"The same current that created this island we're on, and all the barrier beaches. They figured if they could spread their pollution out across a mile of that current, it would more or less disappear. Besides, a big barfing pipe is mediapathic."

"And you're sure it's illegal?"

"In about six different ways. That's why I want to close it down."

"Think you can bluff them?"

"What do you mean?"

"Call them up, say, 'This is GEE, we're going to shut off your diffuser, better close down the plant.' "

"Anywhere else I could, but they wouldn't go for it here. They know how hard this thing would be to plug up. Besides, I want more than a bluff. I want to stop pollution."

He grinned. So did I. It was a catch phrase we repeated when frustrated by a hopeless task: "I want to stop pollution, man!"

"So what do we do? Postpone it?"

"Naah." I started to rewind the tape for the third time. "Necessity is the mother."