Ground Truth

by Rob Sangster

  Gano poked his dark glasses half an inch down the bridge of his nose to look over them with black-ink eyes. “Heavy shit, Sigmund.” The glasses went back into place. “Good thing you have a lot of experience at this sort of thing.”

  “Yeah, from Boy Scouts.”

  Gano banked the Cessna into a slow turn. “Unfortunately, we’re not going to pin the tail on the donkeys today. I haven’t taught this thing to fly on fresh air yet.”

  Jack caught the glint of sunlight off a windshield below and grabbed Gano’s arm. “There they are about a mile up the road.” The closely bunched trucks looked ominous, even from 1,200 feet above.

  “Targets acquired, lieutenant.” Gano grinned but continued north, not changing course. “If they see us they won’t be suspicious unless we do something dim-witted that makes them pay attention. We’ll let them get out of sight for a while. That’s Mescalero right ahead of them. If they don’t stop there, they must be going to Ruidoso Downs to bet on the ponies.”

  But a few miles past Mescalero, the trucks turned off on a well-maintained road that wasn’t on the map. After another mile, they stopped at a wide gate made of a lattice of heavy steel bars. A razor wire fence three times the height of a man stretched miles from the gate in both directions. A long-barreled weapon mounted on the roof of the gatehouse immediately trained on the lead truck. No one dismounted from the trucks. Looking back over his shoulder, Jack saw the gate swing inward and the trucks move up the road like six ducks in formation.

  Gano whistled. “Wow! That’s a 120mm cannon, like the one on an Abrams battle tank; thermal imaging gun sight and a laser rangefinder. It’s probably remote controlled by some geek in an air-conditioned office. I don’t like that one damn bit. I’m going to lose some altitude before we get turned into a puff of smoke.” He didn’t pull out of the dive until the Cessna was a hundred feet off the ground. “Harder to target us down here.”

  The cannon was out of sight behind them, but Jack sensed its black snout tracking the plane. If it fired, they’d never know what hit them.

  “With firepower like that at the gate,” Gano said, “they’ve damn sure got more inside. This is getting interesting.” He stroked the Benelli semiautomatic rifle, then reached back and brought the Mossberg shotgun forward.

  Jack frowned and said sharply, “You’re not going to need those. We’re not going to kill anybody.”

  “That’s the captain’s call, swabbie. Aboard this ship, that’s me. I’m going to circle out of sight for a minute to give them time to get where they’re going, and then make a high speed pass right on the deck.” He reached under his seat, pulled out a mini camcorder, and handed it to Jack. “Be ready. A fast moving plane is a bad platform, but that has a 35X optical zoom with an image stabilizer. We’re only going to make one pass.” He pulled the Cessna into a steep climb. Puffy white clouds filled the windscreen.

  Minutes later, dropping out of the sun, Gano started his dive. “Look at that baby down there, one hell of a private airstrip. And that road must lead to—yep, there’s home plate.”

  The plane banked slightly, giving Jack a clear view of warehouses, 18-wheelers, several low buildings that could be offices, and rows of apartments. Whatever was going on, it was big.

  Gano brought them so low they lost sight of the compound behind a ridge. “When we pop up over that ridge we’ll be maxed out at 175 so get with the ‘lights, camera, action.’ We ain’t comin’ back.” He whipped the Cessna up a few feet and over the ridge line. “Yahoo!”

  The landscape shot past, a blur of cacti and rock. Jack got a clear look through the camcorder’s viewfinder.

  “Oh my God!” they said in unison.

  Chapter 37

  July 8

  4:30 p.m.

  “WHY DID THAT air traffic controller call you ‘Crash’?” Jack asked as they taxied across the Tarmac and away from the dust-caked glass domes of El Paso International Airport.

  “She’s a smart ass, that’s why,” Gano answered. “Forget it. See that gizmo by your right hand? Pull it off the Velcro strip, point it at the sign on that hangar ahead and click the button.”

  After several seconds, the hangar bay doors of Aerolitoral Airlines slid open. Gano steered the Cessna inside and shut it down. With another click, Jack closed the big doors behind them.

  When he jumped to the asphalt he saw a person, a backlighted silhouette, entering the hangar through a small entrance to the left of the hangar bay door. As the figure got closer, he saw it was Debra carrying her laptop case.

  “If you’re finished playing air commando,” she called, “I have a lot to tell you.”

  When he’d called her from the plane to let her know where to meet them, her tone had an edge, letting him know she thought he should have stayed in El Paso. Instead of giving her a hug, he waved to Gano to join them.

  “Gano LeMoyne, this is Debra Vanderberg.”

  “Howdy, ma’am.” He made a half-bow.

  Debra gave him a quick handshake with no comment. Apparently she wasn’t buying his backcountry Cajun pitch.

  Gano walked to a wall cabinet and came back with a bottle of Cuban rum.

  “You’re certainly at home here,” Jack said.

  “When Aerolitoral isn’t using this hangar, they let me park here. I use it when I have, hmm, sensitive cargo, whether it’s animal, vegetable, or mineral.” He poured three fingers of rum into a cup and drank half of it.

  They settled into chairs around a worktable in the corner, and Jack described for Debra the buildings, weapons, and black trucks they’d seen on their flyover. “But there were no signs, so we couldn’t tell who owns the place. That’s why I called you with the GPS coordinates. Any luck?”

  “I pulled up a state map and plotted the coordinates. Then I called the emergency number of the Public Service Company of New Mexico and said I’d been hiking and smelled gas. When I gave the operator the location, she said, ‘Oh jeez, you’re on D-TECH land. You better get out of there fast. How did you get through the electrified fence?’ I said I hadn’t seen a fence, so we agreed I must be confused about the location. Anyway, the owner of that site is named D-TECH.

  “I looked on the New Mexico Secretary of State’s web site and found out D-TECH wasn’t incorporated in New Mexico. Next, I called the chief of police in Mescalero. He claimed he’d never set foot on the site and knew nothing about D-TECH.”

  Raising his cup, Gano said, “I’ve got a scrap of info to kick in. There’s this joint in Las Cruces, the Aces Inn, where they play a little poker. Hotshot quarter horse owners come slummin’ from Ruidoso Downs, so I drop in when I feel democratic, you know, like redistributing their wealth.” He took a swig of rum. “One night a fella sounded off about some big operation not far out of town. He was pissed because it hires no locals and spends no money in the county. He said it was like a spaceship. Everything they need is beamed in, and workers never leave the place. And if you believe him, that fence around the property has fried more cattle than ever got rustled in these parts. He never mentioned the name, but he had to be talkin’ about this D-TECH.”

  Jack handed the memory card from the camcorder to Debra. “Run it at one-quarter speed, and let’s take a better look at what we saw.”

  On the laptop screen, five of the giant trucks were lined up next to each other near a warehouse. The sixth truck was parked directly in front of the cargo door of the same warehouse.

  “Now go to super slow motion and zoom in,” Jack said.

  Watching frame by frame, he saw outsized forklifts removing pallets carrying green barrels from inside the warehouses and placing them into the big truck.

  “Stop there, Debra. See the markings on that first barrel? If those are three yellow prongs inside a black circle, that’s a radiation warning.”

  “And look at this one.” Gano touch
ed the screen. “It looks a lot like the symbol for an atom. That must have something to do with radiation.”

  “My God,” Debra said, “that could mean there’s radioactive material in those barrels.”

  “That ups the stakes,” Jack said, “but from the way they’re handling them, it’s probably low level nuclear waste. Debra, will you make a print of the frames that show the cargo?”

  She nodded.

  In the next frames, he picked out another detail. Two long hatches on top of the truck with the crane were open. The cargo compartment was empty. Why would it come north without a load?

  “Look guys,” Debra broke in, “we don’t know much about what’s going on at D-TECH, but we know for sure that Palmer Industries is . . .” She stopped.

  Jack knew what she was thinking. She didn’t know how far he had brought Gano into the circle and didn’t want to spill anything. Gano picked up on that too.

  “Let’s stop the pussyfooting,” Gano said. “You don’t trust me. Maybe you think I’m just some gun-totin’ pothead. Even if you’re right, I’m also a little brighter than your average prairie dog. So here’s the deal. I’m in this game of cops-and-robbers all the way, or I’m out. Jack came to find me, not the other way round, and it seems like he’s going to need me. Hell, the money’s right, and this is shaping up as a lot more interesting than my usual dump-and-run gigs, so I wouldn’t mind playing the hand.”

  “You’re in, Gano,” Jack said, “as long as you accept my ground rules. First, keep all this absolutely secret. Second, don’t kill anyone.”

  “My lips are sealed.”

  “And the other?”

  Gano took off his shades and looked at him steadily. “Let’s play the hand.”

  Debra glanced at Jack, eyebrows raised.

  He nodded “Yes.” It would be up to him to keep Gano in check.

  “As I was about to say,” Debra said, “since your home movie doesn’t prove anything about those trucks, Palmer will be your highest priority after you hear what I learned from Professor Rincon. The first shock came when I walked into his office. The man looks like a praying mantis in a white lab coat and white Nikes. His eyes are round and flick around the room, like they’re operating independently.

  “He knew I was in a hurry to get the information he had, so he jumped right in. And that was the second shock.” She consulted her notes. “He said the toxicity is ‘off the top of the scale.’ Here’s what he found in the samples—trichloroethylene, carbon tetrachloride, chloroform, benzene, toluene, xylene, and dioxin, plus crude oil, lead, mercury, and medical waste.”

  “Holy prickly pear,” Gano said.

  Debra’s grimace dismissed his attempt at humor. “There’s more. He found compounds that probably came from outdated chemical weapons—traces of blister agents such as mustard gas, phosgene, which is a choking agent, and even AC and CK that prevent blood from carrying oxygen. After he told me that, he went off on a rant about how Congress let utilities, mining companies, oil drillers, airports, and incinerators release seven billion pounds of toxic waste directly into the air, water and land last year alone. He called the samples ‘murderous’ and said whoever put that stuff together should be shot. By the way, every time he made a big point, he cracked his knuckles like a string of firecrackers. After a while, that really got under my skin. Anyway, I asked him whether counteragents could be mixed with this stuff to make it less toxic. He said it’s too complex. And there’s also no antidote.”

  “What if it were diluted?” Gano asked.

  She flipped through her notes again. “He said if you took a few milliliters and mixed it into Lake Powell, no problem. But as you increase the amount and decrease the volume of the solution into which it’s mixed, it would be fatal.”

  “Did he ask where the sample came from?” Jack asked.

  “He never stopped trying to pry information out of me, but I gave him nothing.”

  “At least he did everything we need,” Jack said.

  “I’m afraid he might do more than that. After he recited all that stuff he got a weird look in his eyes and announced he was going to call the police to tell them about the samples.”

  “I was worried about that,” Jack said with a sigh. “He doesn’t know whether we’re the good guys or not.”

  “Since he doesn’t know about Palmer Industries, he tied the toxic samples to you and me. I pointed out that the samples could have come from anywhere, even a UTEP chem lab. I also said that a terrorist wasn’t likely to come to UTEP to have samples tested. Then I shifted into ‘I’m a shit-kicking lawyer’ mode and warned him that slandering people would have serious consequences for him.”

  “Did he back off?”

  “He started popping knuckles again and said he’d hold off because George McDonald had vouched for you. But if he hasn’t heard from us within four days, he’ll take everything to the authorities.”

  “You handled that well,” Jack said with a quick smile.

  “Thanks, and I have more. I now have a good idea how Montana has been getting away with this. Here’s how the EPA tracking system works. Suppose Alpha Petroleum in Texas ships ten tons of hazardous waste to Palmer Industries for treatment, but it reports to the EPA that it shipped five tons. Then Palmer Industries reports to the EPA that it received five tons. Problem is, it’s all paperwork with no on-site inspections. So Palmer is free to dispose of the difference any way it wants, say by dumping it down a well. EPA people know that the producer of waste and the disposal site can easily collude, but they say, ‘Well, it’s the best we can do.’” She paused and looked up. “Are they that stupid? No, they don’t like to approve dumping in U.S. landfills, so they’re fine with it going to Mexico. Even if EPA catches someone in violation, a big fine might be $15,000. So nobody cares.”

  The way Debra laid it out made the scam obvious. By keeping it off the books, tons of hazardous waste flooding into Mexico didn’t have to be properly treated. Instead, it could be dumped illegally. The greedy bastards who produced the stuff saved big bucks. Lazy bureaucrats weren’t the watchdogs they were paid to be, and the Palmer brothers and Montana were the biggest rats of all.

  “What else did McDonald say about the aquifer?” he asked her.

  “I gave Professor McDonald the rough dimensions of the tanks on the ridge. Assuming they’re full, he calculated the volume of toxic waste. Then he gave me what he called a SWAG—scientific wild ass guess—on the volume of water in the Hueco bolsón . He’d used those figures to build some quick mathematical models that considered various flow rates, viscosities and other variables. His calculations showed that the water in the upper levels of the aquifer would become fatal to humans and livestock and unusable for farming for miles downstream, maybe for more than a century. It would be a disaster.”

  “How soon would it be deadly?”

  “He said he’d need more details before he could answer that.”

  They sat in silence. Debra’s face was pale. Gano’s hand had stopped with his glass halfway to his mouth. “Holy shit.”

  “That’s an understatement,” Debra said. “Jack, there’s something else eating at me. When I got mad at you back in law school, I didn’t say anything.” She took a deep breath. “I won’t make that mistake again, so I have to say that you were irresponsible wasting all day yesterday tracking those damned trucks across northern Mexico, then most of today on a wild goose chase over New Mexico making spy movies.” She jerked her thumb in Gano’s direction. “You’re flying around with Doc Holliday when you should be stopping that weasel Montana before he pulls the lever. What the hell were you thinking?” She scowled, crossed her arms over her chest and leaned back.

  His face felt hot, so he took a breath before answering. “I had a damn good reason to be worried about those trucks. I was afraid they were smuggling biological or che
mical weapons out of Mexico into the U.S. But that video shows the forklifts coming out of the warehouse and loading an empty black truck for a trip south. That made me remember how those trucks sounded when I followed them south from Palmer Industries to the cave. It was a low rumble. That means they were fully loaded.”

  “Not that I have any personal experience,” Gano interjected, “but that’s a real switcheroo on the usual south-to-north smuggling routine. Those are huge trucks. This could be a big deal.”

  “It’s a big enough deal for Guzman to commit murder to keep the trips from being revealed.” He looked at Debra. “Nuclear waste is being loaded at D-TECH and transported to that cave. And Palmer Industries is involved.”

  “If the Mexican government finds out someone in the U.S. is using Mexico as a dump,” Gano said, “that will go over like a turd in a piñata. Might make ’em mad enough to sell their oil to China instead of to the good old U.S. of A. They’re already pissed that the U.S. security obsession has brought border traffic to a standstill. Then there’s that wall they’re building along the border.” He stopped for a swallow of rum.

  Jack turned away from the conversation to mull over what he knew. Fact: the toxic waste at Palmer was deadly enough to poison the aquifer. Fact: Montana had the mechanism and motivation to do that. Fact: a high volume of nuclear waste was being smuggled into a remote cave in Mexico.

  “Okay,” he said, “I know who to call to find out about D-TECH. We rowed crew together in college.” He pulled out his cell phone and entered a number.

  “Hello. I’m calling for Senator Toby Baxter.”

  “Sorry sir. Senator Baxter is—”

  “Please tell him Jack Strider is calling. Say we’re in the final hundred meters, and I need his help. He’ll understand.”