– Dorn continues his tale.
THE SCENE: In a dimly-lit, nearly-abandoned Navy base, a skeleton crew is working to organize the base’s environmental records. Conspiracy theories are posited, secrets shared, triplicate forms collated and stapled.
(If you haven’t read part 1 of this story, you should start there.)
I was a fugitive from the NCIS (part 2)
One morning as the base shutdown was progressing, I welcomed into my office a couple of polite young beefy men in dark suits. They showed me their credentials: they were agents from the Naval Criminal Investigative Service (NCIS), and said they had some questions for me, and would like to look at some of my records. Our environmental office records (and indeed the whole base) got inspected regularly without advance notice by Navy, the state and the US EPA, but this was the first time I had entertained a criminal investigator in my office.
Back then I was 25 years younger and had a much much cleaner conscience than I do now, and it literally didn’t occur to me that I could have done anything to attract the interest of NCIS. So I said sure!, and answered their questions, and gave them access to all of the records we were working on.
They came back repeatedly after that over several weeks, sometimes asking new questions about how the environmental office worked or about some record they had found, sometimes carting away whole boxes of notebooks or other documents. When I asked what this was all about, all they said was that they were not at liberty to say.
The weeks stretched into months, and the NCIS agents’ continued visits started to get under my skin. Sometimes they would take away documents we were in the middle of archiving, or active records that I would need to produce if an environmental inspector visited. And although they assured me I would get everything back, I had not seen a single page returned. Plus they still wouldn’t tell me anything about what they were looking for, and I was starting to feel the pressure. It was obvious that I was a “person of interest”.
I started mentally reviewing all the environmental compliance training I had taken, and second-guessing my judgement calls about about what spills needed to be reported, or how to handle a pollutant or a hazardous material. Maybe I had done something after all, or failed to do something, and not realized it?
What if they demanded a vital record, but in my paperwork incompetence I mis-filed it somewhere and couldn’t find it? But surely if it was an accidental oversight, they wouldn’t send the criminal investigators in? What if I had inadvertently sent some Hazardous Waste to a shady disposal company, who dumped it at the side of the road?
It was a stressful time. At least I was doing a good job of avoiding that document organizer and her amorous advances. Or maybe she was avoiding me, seeing the handwriting on the wall that my time as a free man was ending!
Finally one day, the agents announced that they had done all of the investigating that they intended to do. They said they hadn’t developed any new leads, so they were just going to ask me about it. They showed me their smoking gun–a list of place names on a yellow legal pad in my handwriting.
They had gotten a complaint that this note showed that I was keeping a secret set of records of polluted sites on the base. The Navy is governed by hazardous waste cleanup laws like everyone else, and one aspect of those laws is full public disclosure, so having a secret list of sites would have been a serious criminal offense on my part! I would be in deep trouble, not just because I was the base’s “designated jailee”, but because the secret records had clearly been written by me personally!
STORY IS CONCLUDED! . . . here!