Citizen Hughes - Michael Drosnin [187]
At first, the surreptitious legal maneuver triumphed. Just as the army finished off-loading the gas from its trains to the waiting ship, a federal judge issued a temporary injunction, ordering the gas-laden old freighter not to set sail with its deadly cargo. The victory, however, was short-lived. After further hearings the next day, the judge lifted her injunction despite “serious misgivings” about the dump site. It was not its proximity to the Bahamas that troubled the judge, but her fears that sinking the nerve gas three miles deep would subject it to water pressure so great that all of the concrete coffins would get crushed at once, releasing all of the lethal poison simultaneously. Freeing the military to dump the gas, she suggested that it be done in shallower water.
Up in his penthouse, a distraught Hughes received the news with alarm. It was not the legal setback that most upset him but the change in depth.
“What has me worried the most now is all this talk about selecting a location where the water will be shallower,” he wrote in an urgent scrawl.
“I think this is dynamite, because the search for such a site could easily lead to a location even less desirable than the one presently selected,” he added, envisioning a dump practically on the beach of his intended island refuge.
“I have no concern about the depth of the water. In fact, I think the deeper the better.”
On Saturday night, the unstoppable Lola Lea, still posing as an attorney for the Environmental Defense Fund, reached Chief Justice Warren Burger at his home and managed to persuade the Nixon appointee to once more block the dumping. It was only a temporary reprieve. At high noon Sunday the military won the final showdown in the court of appeals, and the gas-laden ship immediately left port on its two-day voyage to the Bahamas.
With the collapse of his clandestine court battle, Hughes turned frantically back to Maheu and Nixon. There was no more talk of calypso-boy cartoons. The billionaire had been reduced to another desperate eleventh-hour plea. Only the president could save him now.
Maheu confidently stepped back in, dropping code names, presenting himself to the penthouse as the only operative with the real connections.
“Our ‘friend from Florida’ has just returned after spending the entire weekend with the ‘top man,’ ” he wrote, after making contact with Rebozo, just back from Camp David.
“In spite of our participation in the injunction, which they very quickly identified, they are thoroughly convinced that Danner and me were not involved in that particular operation,” added Maheu, unable to resist an I-told-you-so slur on the failed Gay-Davis initiative.
“There was much time spent considering alternate sites, but additional scientific inputs bolstered the conviction that the proper site had been chosen. Our friend stated that the ‘top man’ presumably did not reiterate his request that you have faith and confidence in him, since that message had been delivered previously.
“Again, however, they are prepared to give you a full scientific briefing, either in person or on the telephone, which they are convinced would satisfy all your apprehensions,” he concluded, for all his big connections able to offer only blind faith and another briefing. “Our friend stated again that the ‘top man’ had categorically refused to listen to any suggestion about disposition here in Nevada, thinking very seriously that he was cooperating with us to the fullest.”
Hughes didn’t want a briefing, and he didn’t want to hear another word about Nixon’s good intentions. He wanted the nerve gas shipped to the North Pole. And now, on Tuesday morning, as it instead neared the Bahamas, the billionaire