Fracking Justice

FRACKING JUSTICE

MICHAEL J. FITZGERALD

Copyright © 2015 Michael J. Fitzgerald

All rights reserved.

Cover design by Amy E. Colburn,

Canandaigua, New York

http://www.amycolburn.com/

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, brands, media, and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any references to historical events, real people, or real locales are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is coincidental. The author acknowledges the trademarked status and trademark owners of various products referenced in this work of fiction, which have been used without permission. The publication/use of these trademarks is not authorized, associated with, or sponsored by the trademark owners.

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For Joseph and Yvonne

Acknowledgements

Writing a novel for me is solitary business.

I rarely discuss specific aspects of what I am writing with anyone.

But when my novel manuscript is completed, it takes a literary village to bring it into readers’ hands.

Fracking Justice was no exception.

This book – like its predecessor The Fracking War – would not have made it into print or e-book form if it wasn’t for the unwavering support and encouragement of my editor, best friend and wife, Sylvia Fox.

Through the drafts and redrafts, she kept me on track and moving forward, even as the sometimes-dark portions of this novel threatened to overcome me with angst. Her willingness to let me rant about the justice and injustice-related issues I researched in the course of this novel made it possible for me to write every day – but without my head exploding.

She also was amazingly patient in dealing with her husband-writer-husband, who like all writers sees their words as precious gems, not wanting to discard a single one.

Special thanks also goes to the five beta readers of this novel – Sylvia, Peter Mantius, Billy Pylypciw, Wrexie Bardaglio and Sjoukje Schipstra – each of whom contributed their time and energy reading the first drafts to help me polish the manuscript.

Each offered thoughtful suggestions for strengthening parts of the novel and encouraged me to get the book into readers’ hands as soon as possible.

Thanks also to professional book editor Darlene Bordwell, who was kind enough to lend her talents, too, giving the book a close read.

I would be remiss if I didn’t thank the Finger Lakes wineries for making the finest Reisling wines anywhere in the world, a wine that helped at the end of many a long day of writing.

And lastly, I would like to thank my four children, Jason, Anne, Dustin and Dylan and my many friends who encouraged me to take this sequel from idea to fruition.

I leave it to them and readers if there is real justice in Fracking Justice.

Watkins Glen, New York

February 2015

Preface

The idea for writing Fracking Justice rolled around in my head even as I was finishing the manuscript for its predecessor novel, The Fracking War.

In researching The Fracking War, I ran across many instances where it seemed that people objecting to the use of hydrofracking technology to extract natural gas and oil were being targeted by the oil and gas industry as enemies – way out of proportion to reasonable protests taking place.

Some strains of that over-the-top industry reaction to protests can be seen in chapters of The Fracking War, too.

But evidence that law enforcement agencies at all levels are increasingly siding with industry – well beyond simply protecting private property rights – helped prompt me to write this book.

The rapid, almost out-of-control spread of hydrofracking technology has encouraged an amazing culture of corporate greed. It has also spawned an attitude that anyone who challenges a company’s desire to drill, extract (or dump at will) should be quashed, not listened to.

The civil rights of protesters be damned, it seems, if they conflict with corporate goals.

In the months Fracking Justice was taking shape, a frightening militarization of police forces across the U.S. – some of it funded by the federal government, some of it by the gas and oil industry – became a public issue as police began dealing with legal, relatively benign protest activities in ways more common to military dictatorships than democracies.

In the Finger Lakes area of New York – where a regional anti-fracking, anti-gas storage movement has been building for years – it has become common for supporters of hydrofracking and the storing liquid propane gas (and natural gas) in unlined salt caverns to label protesters as eco-terrorists.

Fracking Justice was set in small towns in Pennsylvania and New York because, at the local level, the influences of industry, examples of corruption and displays of heroics play out closer to the surface than trying to delve into the byzantine corridors of our nation’s capital.

It’s at the local level where justice – or the lack of it – touches the most people in the most powerful of ways.

Much of the inspiration for writing this book came from the non-fiction book by Will Potter, Green Is The New Red, which is as terrifying and compelling a story as any fictional account of the attacks on environmentalists that I could have ever imagined or written.

Inspiration also came from filmmaker Josh Fox’s Gasland II, a movie that dramatically shows how the oil and gas companies promoting hydrofracking technology have twisted legal and regulatory systems into a tangle of knots.

I hope Fracking Justice can help cut those knots away and let people get a glimpse into an energy industry whose focus does not include the safety of our communities or our environment.

Ulysses Returns

Chapter 1

ROCKWELL VALLEY, Pennsylvania – Tyrone Arthur Garber sat in his Central Pennsylvania Railroad pickup truck eyeballing the single-track, 400-foot steel and wood train trestle that spanned Rockwell Valley State Park gorge, 200 feet above Rockwell Valley Creek.

He cursed that he had forgotten to swallow two of his wife’s anti-anxiety pills before he left the house.

The  work order was straightforward: State Park trestle inspection. Check top and bottom of entire structure. Two hikers on the state park creek trail reported something below the tracks mid-span.

Just another day on the railroad for Tyrone – known as Tag to friends and railroad employees. Except during the last six months, 45-year-old Tag had developed a case of acrophobia – fear of heights – that this morning had him in a literal panic.

He had been waking up with night sweats after having bad dreams about falling from buildings, waterfalls, trees, and into wells. Then just two nights before, he dreamed of taking a header off a railroad trestle.

Just like the trestle he was looking at.

Tag opened the truck door, a blast of freezing January wind hitting him hard. He could feel his hands sweating inside his heavy wool gloves. He left the company truck running to keep the cab warm.

He saw that the trestle was mostly clear but had some snow pushed up in a few spots. The 9:05 freight wasn’t due for another hour, plenty of time for him to carefully pick his way out across the bridge, inspect it, and get back to the warm truck.

Tag had parked as close as he could below the bridge, using his field glasses to get a peek at whatever the hikers had seen. But he couldn’t make out what it was other than it was the size of shoebox. He thought maybe it was a dead animal of some kind.

As he gingerly stepped in the center of the first railroad tie, he wished for the second time that morning he had his wife’s anxiety pills.

When he inspected a trestle over a state highway a month before – a bridge barely 50 feet off the ground – the pills took enough of the edge off that he didn’t have any problem.

Tag stopped to put on his sunglasses, fumbling with his gloves. Then he slowly started making  progress across the span, the roaring creek clearly visible between the railroad ties. He didn’t feel any vertigo in the middle of the tracks as long as he kept looking straight ahead. But he needed to get to the edge with a mirror on an extendable pole to check whatever was lodged underneath the bridge.

His cell phone suddenly started to ring, startling him so much he slipped down onto all fours. He froze in that position, quietly cursing until the phone went to voicemail.

Tag  saw he was about mid-span on the bridge, perhaps even right above the object beneath the trestle. He stayed kneeling and slid the mirror down through the space between the railroad ties, twisting it slowly to get a look.

The cold fogged the mirror just enough that it took him a moment to realize he was seeing a half-dozen slender red tubes just ahead of where he was kneeling.

Holy shit, he thought. Dynamite?

Tag forgot all about his acrophobia as he crabbed his way sideways on his knees to his right, right up to the edge of the trestle where he could slide the mirror over and get a better look.

Still on his knees, he focused on the reflection in the mirror and tried not to let his eyes wander down to the rocks and swirling water.

He thought he could see a small curling wire sticking out. A fuse? he thought.

He reached into his jacket pocket for his phone, fumbling with his stuck glove. He leaned back slightly to shake the glove loose, moving his right leg a fraction of an inch too close to the edge of the icy trestle, feeling a sudden rush of cooler air on his knee.

He pancaked his body on the edge of the trestle a moment too late as he felt his right leg go over the edge.

Tag valiantly hung on for about 10 seconds, half on the bridge, half off, his head below the span, one hand clawing at the tracks. He stayed that way just long enough to read the word "Wolverines!" written across several of the tubes.

When his grip gave way, Tyrone Arthur Garber screamed once as he plunged off the railroad trestle. Then he passed out, dropping silently the rest of the way down.

A Rockwell Valley State Park ranger found Tag’s shattered body at the bottom of the gorge later that morning after the engineer of the 9:05 freight train alerted the main Central Pennsylvania Railroad office that there was a company track inspection truck with its engine running at the top of the Rockwell Valley State Park gorge, but no one was around.

Chapter 2

Rockwell Valley Police Chief Melvin Bobo Caprino poked his No. 2 lead pencil at the package of red cylinders on his desk, a six-inch piece of fuse-like material sticking out of the middle.

He rolled it over, looking at the lettering that said Wolverines! then back over to the other side, where the outside tubes were clearly marked as standard issue roadside safety flares.

Some stunt, huh chief?

Caprino looked up to see his second-in-command, Lieutenant Del Dewitt, leaning in the doorway, his ever-present coffee mug in front of him. Dewitt’s nickname among the other members of the force was Dim Wit, a clever label – but inaccurate.

Dewitt was the only one on Caprino’s police force who had gone to college, coming home with a degree in forensic science.

What do you make of this, other than the obvious? Caprino asked. It’s a stunt for sure. But it killed Tag, even if it was an accident.

Dewitt came into the office and picked up the road flares with his free hand. We’ve already checked this for any prints. Don’t worry, he said. Whoever did it did a nice job to make it look like explosives to someone who didn’t know about them.

For the first few hours after Tag’s body was discovered, the Rockwell Valley Police Department treated it as a simple slip-and-fall accident. Tragic, but such accidents were not unknown in a town that had seen a spike in industrial mishaps in recent years, most linked to the natural gas well drilling in the area, part of the boom of a gas extraction technology known as hydrofracking.

Then Dewitt found Tag’s clipboard stuck between two rocks 100 feet away. It had a notation about a suspicious item lodged underneath the train trestle, which the park ranger confirmed had been reported by the park office to the railroad.

Thank God we’ve kept the media away from this, Caprino said. They’d be having a field day.

Because of the foul weather, only a financially starved local alternative monthly newspaper showed up to the scene, no doubt alerted by listening to the police scanner. The Rockwell Valley PD used cell phones to avoid being tracked in their patrols. But the local ambulance service and the park rangers chatted like magpies on their radios.

The editor-reporter-owner of the Rockwell Valley Tribune shot a few pictures of Tag’s body covered by a sheet and had left by the time Lt. Dewitt had dispatched a couple of officers with ropes to climb under the trestle and see what Tag had been searching for.

Good thing it wasn’t really an explosive, Dewitt said. They just yanked it out from under the bridge. A real terrorist would probably paint the explosives to look like road flares to throw us all off.

Dewitt put the package down carefully on the desk, then laughed.

"Gotcha chief… These are road flares. And the numbers under the tape says they are long expired. No worries. It was a prank. Pretty good one, too. Sorry about Tag, though."

Caprino watched Dewitt head back out of his office, no doubt to the coffee pot in the squad room. He must have a bladder the size of an elephant, Caprino thought.

Caprino was worried – but not about the road flares.

He had just gotten two phone calls in quick succession before Dewitt meandered in.

The first call was from Rockwell Valley’s newly elected mayor, a 39-year-old transplant from Missouri who had moved to Rockwell Valley six years before, right at the start of the natural gas-hydrofracking boom that had brought a modest amount of financial prosperity to the town and a boatload of environmental and social headaches along with it.

Mayor Will Pennisen was also the local manager with Grand Energy Services of Flathead, Missouri, working on the installation of infrastructure to get ready for salt cavern propane and natural gas storage in some abandoned salt mines at the north end of Rockwell Valley Lake.

He was also lobbying hard for a pipeline from the natural gas wells to the west to the proposed gas storage site and another pipeline to the east to send gas to the coast for export.

Bobo, I heard about the package under the bridge, Pennisen had said on the phone. This is terrorism pure and simple. No other way to look at it. I want you to have your officers investigate this as eco-terrorism. We don’t need any more of that Wolverine bullshit here. I bet that old crone Alice McCallis had something to do with this, too.

Caprino knew that Pennisen’s call had probably been prompted by Pennisen receiving a phone call from GES headquarters – maybe even right from the desk of GES president and CEO Luther Burnside himself. From what Caprino was hearing and reading, Burnside was living up to his in-house, company nickname of Luca Brasi, the name of a ruthless strongman-hit man in a 1969 novel about the Mafia.

GES and other gas companies had started ramping up a coordinated counter-offensive against protesters in the last year, filing lawsuits, calling anyone with an anti-hydrofracking sign an eco-terrorist and launching a campaign of dirty tricks against environmental groups.

GES had also quietly donated enough money to Rockwell Valley police so that Caprino’s 14-officer department was equipped with amazing new weaponry, body armor, full riot gear and a closet full of sophisticated surveillance equipment, including a small helicopter drone.

The drone was under lock and key after Caprino caught an officer using it to spy on a woman sunbathing in her backyard.

That equipment came in addition to the crates of U.S. Department of Defense surplus gear that had been given to the department.

The DOD had offered an armored assault vehicle, but Caprino turned it down, thinking it was overkill.

Caprino had a hard time imagining that Alice McCallis – a nearly 80-year-old retired chemistry and biology teacher from Rockwell Valley High School – would have scaled the trestle to put the highway flares up there.

And as a big a pain in the ass as she could be, McCallis was unlikely to take part in any kind of covert actions, he thought.  Alice McCallis came at people straight on.

The year before she had been arrested at a natural gas well protest when she refused to move to let GES trucks pass through. She even served a week in jail when she refused to pay a fine.

Still, Caprino knew that unless he sent his officers scrambling in that direction chasing the specter of terrorists, Pennisen would be telling the town council that Caprino was soft and not up to the job of being police chief. Or maybe even being a cop on the force at all.

And a couple of the double-digit-I.Q. bumpkins on the town council would probably go along with pushing Caprino out the door so fast he would barely have time to grab his personal gear.

I just have to hang on for two more years for early retirement, Caprino thought, looking at his desk calendar underneath the still-bound road flares. Hell, not even two years. Just 22 months.

Caprino was used to rolling with the political punches after nearly 30 years with the Rockwell Valley Police Department. His nickname Bobo had come from when he was a young teenager and got into fights with older boys. They would knock him down, only to see him spring back up, like the popular sand-filled punching bag toy called Bobo the Clown.

He was mentally recovering from the mayor’s phone call when the second call rocked him back.

The phone call was from a cop friend in Horseheads, New York, just across the Pennsylvania-New York border.

The friend said he had read in that morning’s Horseheads Clarion newspaper that Jack Stafford, the newspaper’s investigative columnist and publisher on a leave of absence for the last two years, was coming back to take over the publication’s helm.

Stafford had published scathing columns before he left, claiming that Rockwell Valley’s public officials were nothing but company shills for Grand Energy Services, doing the corporation’s bidding to the detriment of everyone except for themselves, GES shareholders and gas company executives.

After he hung up, Caprino reached into his desk drawer to get a slug of milky medicine for his increasingly upset stomach, getting more upset as the day went along.

But the growing uncomfortable gas bubble in Melvin Bobo Caprino’s stomach was also there because sitting in a holding cell in the back of the Rockwell Valley Police Station was Eli Gupta, the current editor of the twice-a-week Horseheads Clarion, who had been remanded into police custody just a few hours before by a local judge. Gupta and the court bailiff got into some kind of courtroom altercation over a camera Gupta had brought into the courtroom.

Stafford will have a field day with all of us over this, Caprino thought.

He took a slug of the medicine and was about to toss the road flare package back into the evidence sack on his desk. Then he noticed the road flare in the center of the package seemed to be of a slightly smaller diameter. It looked like it had a few beads of condensation on the outside of it as if it might be sweating.

DEWITT, DEWITT! – GET-IN-HERE-NOW, Caprino screamed.

NOW!

Chapter 3

The inter-island prop plane with 28 passengers aboard swung over tiny Lata Island, dipping its right wing so passengers could get a good view of the land, its protective, encircling coral reef and a smattering of small resort buildings.

Jack Stafford had arranged with the pilots to make the diversion from the normal flight path nearly two months before when he had expected to be leaving the Vava’u Island group of the Kingdom of Tonga to fly back to the United States.

Today he sat on the opposite side of the plane, alone, unable to look at the island he had called home for nearly two years with his wife Devon, his three-year-old-son Noah and a Tongan friend named Gideon, who had saved Noah’s life.

Noah sat in the window seat watching his home below. His aunt Cassandra held him around the waist, whispering in his ear as the plane made a quick circle of the small island before heading south to the Tongan island of Tongatapu, where they would connect with flights to Fiji and then the U.S.

Cassandra – who liked to be called Cass – had flown in a week after the boating accident that killed her older sister, Jack’s wife Devon, thinking she would stay just long enough to help Jack get things under control.

She had only met Jack once before, at  Devon and Jack’s wedding in the offices of the Horseheads Clarion a few months before Noah was born.

Looking out the window of the plane with Noah, she remembered the happy scene with what seemed like hundreds of people crammed into the small newspaper offices. She also remembered the twinge of envy at her sister’s glowing happiness.

Cass’s own love life had been a series of disappointments, brought on in part by her vocation of acting, writing and directing stage plays. The men she dated were all from the theatrical world. A shallow pool of raging narcissists, she had thought at the wedding. She had met a friend of Jack and Devon’s named Oscar, a winery owner and big bear of a guy who was so gracious and so polite and so courteous, she couldn’t believe he had never been married. But then neither had she. And now she was staring  down 40.

Jack. Jack! Cass called across the aisle. You sure you don’t want to look at this side, even for a moment?

A dark look passed over Jack’s eyes. She returned the look with a reprimanding scowl, then softly smiled.

I’d rather sit here, Cass. Really, Jack said. I’m okay. Really. Okay.

Cass kept looking at him until he looked back out his window at the vast Pacific Ocean.

Okay my ass. This is killing you, she thought.

When she had arrived on the nearby Tongan island of Neiafu after the accident, local residents warned her that Jack was wild with grief. He had holed up on Lata Island with Gideon, Noah and several members of Gideon’s extended Tongan family. Devon had been buried there, counter to local custom, and had caused a stir among the various church leaders.

The woman who ran a Neiafu restaurant called Café Pa’alangi told Cassie she heard that Jack hadn’t drawn a sober breath since the funeral. The whole community was mourning Devon, too.

Cass hugged Noah as he turned away from the window, ready to find something else to look at. He often seemed confused when he looked at Cass. He knew she wasn’t his mother, but the resemblance to Devon was remarkable. Cass was thinner than Devon had been and had more reddish hair. But when she smiled she had the same dimples in exactly the same spots on her cheeks. Cass’s mother had described them to her three daughters  as Walsh family beauty spots.

Cass’s eldest sister, Anne, couldn’t join them in Tonga but was waiting for them on Vashon Island near Seattle at the estate she, Cass and their late sister had inherited from their parents years before.

Cass pulled out a coloring book for Noah, who grabbed some crayons from the seat back and who was quickly engrossed with the sea creature images in front of him. She unbuckled her seat belt and slid across the aisle to sit next to Jack.

Remember what we talked about? About breathing? About thinking about Noah? Cass asked.