Ozone Depletion

Ryan Herbert
Ms. Devine
Due December 10, 1991

I decided to drive down to my office. It was only two blocks, but my car still had six hours of charge. I turned on the radio to listen to the news.

"Good morning, Chicagoland listeners. Today, August 1, 2011, is the day marking one year after all CFCs have been banned according to the Montreal Protocol. According to scientists, the ozone layer should have increased by five percent, but instead it has decreased two percent. Scientists are baffled at why the ozone is not recovering, even after they spent billions of dollars on a laser system on the peaks of the highest mountains that was supposed to break apart the CFC molecules to keep them from reacting with the O3 molecules. Unfortunately, the atoms drifted around and reformed, which didn't do much good. Ken Miller will interview Dr. Sherry Rowland."

I shut off the radio as I pulled into the CIA parking lot. As I was walking up to the door, I stared up into the sky. What could still be making the ozone get smaller, even though no one is supposed to be using CFCs and the scientists made the ones in the air unreactive? I didn't know, but hey, it wasn't my job to protect the ozone. I put my hand on the panel on the door and said my name. The door opened as I passed the fingerprint and voice test.

I went into my office and checked my electronic mail on my computer. Boy, you'd think that you wouldn't get any junk mail now that they don't have the postal service anymore. I deleted the junk mail files and started to read my office notes, when I was called down to Big Ben's office. The reason they call him big is partially because he's the head of the CIA and partially because he weighs 375 pounds. I started up the stairs to his office on the top floor. They must have thought that putting his office on the top floor would make him lose some weight, but all it did was give me sore legs. I usually had to go there three times a day from my ground floor office.

As I dragged myself into his room he was opening a box of twenty-four donuts. I saw that there were already two empty boxes on the floor. He offered me one, but I declined. After all, he was a growing boy and needed his energy.

"So," I asked, "What do you need, Ben?"

"Well," he mumbled through a donut, "I've got a job for you. You've heard that the ozone is continuing to decrease, right?"

"Yeah, I heard it on the news on the way here."

"Well, the Australian government is suspicious that a Japanese company that moved there is, well, using CFC-113 for cleaning electronic parts so they can undercut the competition."

"So why don't they just go in there and bust them?"

"Well, they have some goofy law that doesn't let them investigate unless they sell products in the country, and all the parts go back to Japan." He picked up his fourth donut. "Well, they want us to go in there and find out if this is what is keeping the ozone from recovering."

"Okay. I'll be in my office and you can download all the info I need into my computer." I started to leave. Only five "wells" - an all time low for Big Ben.

"Hey, wait a second. Since this is such a big case, well, we thought that you might need an assistant." He pushed a button on his desk and said, "Higgins, come to my office right now."

"Higgins?" I practically knelt down in his donuts. "Please don't make me go there with him!"

"Well, since he's new and you're experience so, well, we thought that you might show him how to..."

He was stopped short by the door slamming open. Higgins walked in and said, "You wanted me?" He was about five seven, 140 pounds with brown hair. He was one of those guys you don't want to admit that you know.

"Yes, well, I'm going to assign you to a case with Herbert." I let my head slowly fall onto my hands on the desk. "I thought that he might be able to show you some things about being a CIA agent."

I got up and sat in a chair. Higgins took a donut and started to eat it.

"Where are we going to go?"

"Well, I'd tell you, but I'm busy." Right. Not enough time in the day to eat all those donuts. He should have been a cop. "I'll download all the information to your computers."

I started to go out the door. Higgins followed me talking excitedly. What did I do that deserved this? I started down the many flights of stairs. I had years of experience running down the stairs, but Higgins was out of breath quickly. I went to my office and started to read the information. It seemed that the company called Chin Electronics was using CFC-113 for a solvent instead of HCFC-225ca, which is the popular substitute but it costs quite a bit more. It also said that when the CFCs get up into the stratosphere the UV rays cause them to release chlorine atoms. It showed these equations:

Cl + O₃ = ClO + O₂

ClO + O = Cl + O₂

I wished then that I had listened more to Mr. Schutte in Physical Science. But even though I didn't remember what the symbols were, I did realize that the O₃ was being changed into O₂ and O₂ doesn't block any UV-B rays.

I decided to go up and talk to Bill, my info man. He should be able to give me some information.

I went up the ten stories to Bill's office. I knocked on the door. There was no answer. I knocked harder and yelled his name, but on the other side of the door there was silence. I tried the doorknob but it was locked. He should have been in his office at this time of day. I decided to kick in the wood door. I took a step back and went to kick the door, but all I did was hurt my foot. I had forgotten that it was steel under it.

There was steel under the door, but not under the plasterboard wall. I had a hole big enough for me to fit through in the little while and climbed through. The room seemed empty. I went over to Bill's desk to use his phone, when I saw Bill crumpled up underneath his desk. I laid him out on the floor - three bullet holes in his head. That was the third info man I had lost that month. I started to straighten up as I heard someone behind me. I spun around and gave him a crescent kick to his head. He reeled back about ten feet and then came running at me again. I dodged and twisted his arm as he ran by, flipping him over the desk. I jumped over the desk and hit him in the Adam's apple. He fell backwards and I pushed him toward the window. It shattered and I watched him fall down ten stories right onto a new 2011 Mercedes-Benz. Oh well. The guy should have bought an American car anyway.

I turned to leave when I saw two guys with guns standing by the hole. I backed up to the wall with my hands up. They walked up to me and one of them stuck his gun right in my gut.

"You're coming with us," he said.

Well, I had other ideas. I shook one of my hands and as he glanced at it, I kneed him in the groin. He staggered back a step and fired. He hit me right in the center of my chest. But I just flexed my muscles and the bullet bounced off. The bulletproof vest helped a little too. Anyway, I was mad because he ruined my best suit. I did a spinning kick to his temple, and he dropped to the ground and cracked his head on the floor. I dove behind the desk as I crawled around opposite to him. I waited until his back was to the window then I stood up. He took a step back, but I grabbed his head and smashed it onto the desk. I pushed him backwards, and he went out the window to visit his buddy.

I unlocked the door and left the office. As I left the building, I told the secretary to call the police. I figured that they might want to know about this.

The guy with the Mercedes-Benz was examining the damage of having two people from ten stories up fall on it. It was pretty much totaled. I climbed into my Cadillac and started to the airport, where my private jet was waiting for me.

I called up Higgins from my car Visiphone.

"Hello?"

"Uh, yeah, Higgins? This is Herbert."

"Where are you? I've been waiting here for half an hour. Ben's going to be mad."

"I, uh, ran into a little trouble. Just hold on for a while."

It was about fifty miles away so I got on the interstate. I was doing about a hundred and seventy km/h when a cop pulled out behind me. I didn't have time to stop, so I switched on the reserve batteries and was doing about two fifty when a main battery shorted and no power could get through to the engine. I pulled over to the edge of the road and when the cop came up I arrested him for harassing a CIA agent on duty, then stole his car. I radioed headquarters for someone to pick my car up and get the cops. I finally got to the airport a half hour after I expected, and then I got into one of those new SSTs that ran on hydrogen fuel. Higgins started to make a fuss about me being so late and stealing a police car, but luckily I had brought some duct tape and the rest of the trip was pretty peaceful.

I talked to headquarters by satellite and they had gotten everything straightened out. I told them about Bill, and they told me that the guys worked for Chin Electronics and that Bill had gotten a little too much information. They had everything figured out about Chin Electronics: blueprints, how many CFCs that they were using, leaders, and all that kind of stuff. They only needed to know one thing: where it was. They knew that it was somewhere in the outback, but not exactly where. I told them that I was no Crocodile Dundee, and they told me that they could ring up Hollywood and I could be on the unemployment line. So I got out my big knife and Snowy River hat and told them all I needed was a few aborigines. They told me to find them myself and hung up.

Then I called the Australian government. They were happy that I was coming and were a lot more helpful than headquarters was. They told me the approximate location and offered me supplies. They also told me that it was twenty kilometers from where any normal car could reach, and offered me a truck that could get me there. I accepted, and soon I was in the airport ready to get started. I let Higgins go, and we went to a nearby general store to get some information.

"G'day, mate. What can I do for you?" The store clerk had a thick Australian accent and looked a little like Paul Hogan.

"Well, you look like the outdoorsy type. I need to know where a certain company is."

"Hmmm. Why would you be needin' to do that?"

"Well, I was thinking about investing a bit of money into it and I want to look it over first."

Higgins started to stammer, "Hey, I thought that we were supposed to..." but I elbowed him in the ribcage and he was out of breath for a few minutes.

"It's called Chin Electronics. I heard it was out here somewhere."

"Oh, that would be that new company out by Alice Springs. You'd just go out that way a little bit and then you turn south on the dirt road after you go past the river. You can't get to it unless you want to walk for twenty kilometers." He laughed. "I've heard that the government is suspicious about it, so I wouldn't invest too much money."

I replied that I would be careful, and headed back to the airport. I informed Higgins that he would stay behind and wait for me to radio him, and took off in the truck.

The truck was a dual battery four-wheel drive monster truck capable of traveling one hundred fifty km/h on mud - my kind of truck. I was whipping down the road when I saw a semi ahead of me that said Chin Electronics on the back. I shut off my lights and pulled up behind it. I rolled down my window and pulled out my gun. I shot out one of the back tires and then pulled off the road and sped over a hill. I put all of the equipment and the knife in my bag and put on my black ninja suit. My gun was too big to carry around. I ran off toward the semi. They had just finished putting on the spare so I had time to slip into the trailer while they were getting back in the cab. I examined the boxes around me. There were cases and cases of CFCs and other ozone depleting chemicals that they had gotten off of the black market for about a third of the price of the substitutes. I sat and thought about how these CFCs rose into the atmosphere until they got into the stratosphere where UV radiation broke the atoms apart and they combined with ozone materials, causing more radiation to get through the hole now over parts of Australia, causing thousands of people a year to get skin cancer.

Then all of a sudden my thoughts were interrupted by the semi coming to a quick stop. Suddenly, I remembered that the clerk said that you couldn't get to it unless you walked. How were they going to get all these crates there? Then I heard the familiar chopping of helicopters. We must be at some sort of warehouse where they shipped the CFCs to the main factory building. Quickly, I dumped the contents of a crate out the back of the truck as it was moving slowly up a ramp. Then I squeezed into the crate and put the lid back on. Hopefully I could get there in a crate undetected.

A couple of guys opened up the back of the semi. They started to load up the crates on the helicopter. Soon they got to me.

"Boy, this one's heavy," they muttered.

"Wait a second," a guy from the helicopter yelled. "We've got all that we can have on the helicopter already."

They dropped the crate on the ground and hopped up onto the helicopter. The helicopter left and I climbed out of the crate. There was a guy with a gun pointed at me. I stood up, slowly raising my hands in the air.

"I heard you groan when they dropped the crate. I figured I'd wait around to welcome you." He was a medium sized man with a large sized gun. "Bring your hands slowly together in front of you and keep them there."

I did what he told me and he started to wrap the ropes around my wrists. I pulled my hands apart a little so I could get out when I wanted to, but he pulled them together tight with the ropes. He pushed me up against a wall and stood about a foot away from me. He started to say something, but I didn't want to hear it so I clenched my roped hands into a fist and brought them up sharply into his abdomen. He shot into my chest, but my bulletproof vest was still working. I kicked the gun from his hand, but my hands were tied so I couldn't keep my balance and fell over. He pulled out a knife was on top of me in seconds, but luckily my bulletproof chest automatically changed into a knife-proof chest. As he was wondering why he couldn't get his knife in, I brought my hands up and started to pull them along the blade. He pulled the knife away, but it was too late. The knife was sharp enough to cut through the rope and my arm. My arm bled a little, but my hands were free. The guy started to stand up, but I grabbed his head and bashed it on my knee a couple times before he broke free. We stood up, and he swung at me. I ducked and charged into his chest. He fell back into a pile of crates. I ran into the warehouse as he got up and his behind a vertical wall of crates standing about seven feet high. He walked into the building and looked around, and, not seeing me, started to walk on the other side of the wall. I could hear the sound of his heavy boots hitting the cement floor, but my dual-suspension steel-belted spring-loaded Nikes were noiseless because of their soft rubber non-marking outer sole. When we were walking about even I started to push over the wall, but the stuff in the crates was too heavy to push over. I decided to keep on walking with him, but pretty soon I ran out of wall. He saw me and ran toward me. Deftly, I stepped aside and he ran headlong into the wall. He put a pretty good dent in it, too. He charged again but this time he ran into the wall of crates. The wall collapsed and a crate fell right on his head, smashing it open like a melon. He was hardly worth the effort.

I cleaned up the mess and put him in a crate so that the guys in the helicopter wouldn't find him. I cleaned and dressed my cut, and then I went to sleep in the bushes next to the warehouse so I could hear the helicopter when it came back. I slept until about ten o'clock the next morning when the noise of choppers woke me.

I sat behind the bushes, tense, waiting for my chance to get in the crate. It never came. As I watched in dismay, the helicopter rose above me. Then I got an idea. I ran up underneath the helicopter and jumped up to reach the landing bar. I just barely reached it in time. I pulled myself up and swung my feet up to rest on the other bar. I expected a short trip. I was wrong. The trip took about half an hour. We were getting close and I realized that I had no chance of getting there without being seen if I kept on holding on to the bars. We were flying low over a forest and luckily a tall tree was going by underneath me. I could let go of the bar and grabbed the tree, but unluckily the branches at the top couldn't hold my weight and they broke off. I fell about fifteen feet and landed with a thud on some soft earth. I was a little jarred, but basically not hurt. I got up and shook the dirt off of me and started to walk toward the factory. I was sure glad that I didn't have Higgins tagging along with me. He probably would have fallen off of the helicopter.

I circled around the factory a couple time, watching to see what kind of security they had. It didn't seem to be much on the outside. One guard stood at each door. I went around to an isolated side of the building where there was only one chubby guard standing at the door. I backed up about ten feet into the forest. The ground was soft so I took out my knife and used it as a trowel. After I got down a foot I could use my hands to dig because the soil was soft and wet. When I got down about six feet, I broke down a fairly small sapling about six feet tall and sharpened it to a point. I hid the dirt under some leaves and covered the hole with sticks and leaves, making a Bermuda tiger trap. Maybe I should call it an Australian guard trap. Anyway, I polished my knife and went up behind a tree close to the factory. I flashed the sun in the guard's face with my knife and pretty soon he noticed and started to walk towards me. I retreated back into the forest behind my trap and found a patch of light coming through the trees and kept signaling. He couldn't see me because of my black clothes, and walked right into the trap, the poor idiot. As he fell into the hole he yelled, "What?!" and the sharp stick killed him instantly. He didn't even scream. I pulled him out and yanked the stick embedded deep in his abdomen. I put his clothes on me. The only problem was that there was a hole in his pants where the stick had penetrated, but it was easily hidden and the blood was easily washed out. I stuffed him back into the hole and filled it up with dirt.

I decided to radio Higgins and tell him what was going on. "Higgins, are you there? Higgins, are you there!"

"Yeah, hey! Why didn't you use your password?"

"Just shut up and listen. I'm at the factory. I'm just about to go in. First I'm going to shut down the electricity and then I'll arrest the guys in charge. Have the Aussies get some helicopters and cops and get over here."

"How are you going to..."

"Xar 1, signing out."

I turned off the short-wave radio. At least he should be happy that I used my password.

I cautiously went to my post. I looked around but I didn't see anybody. Now I could either go in, or I could wait for somebody to relieve me from guard duty. I had already sent for the cops to come, so I tried the door. It was locked. The architect must not have been very intelligent, though, because the hinges were on the outside. I took out my knife and took them off. The door fell on the ground, so I went inside.

It was a dark room. I looked around at the stuff on the tables - just a bunch of tools. What was more interesting was on the wall - two 25,000-volt circuit breakers were on the wall. I opened up one of them and saw a whole bunch of switches so I took some jumper cables and electrician's gloves from off of the table. I put on the electrician's and opened up the boxes to hook up one end of one of the cables to the inside of the first one. I hooked up another wire to the second box. I flipped a table on its side and hid behind it as I connected the two jumper cables. There was an explosion and the table was blown back into my face. The hum of machines operating was gone. The only sound I could hear was the sound of the circuit board sparking occasionally.

Suddenly the door opened and two burly men rushed in. They started to corner me by the circuit breakers. I picked up the hot wires and as they reached and as they reached to grab me I attached the alligator clips to their hands. They were grounded with the floor and they shook around for a few seconds and then fell. I couldn't blame them. I would fall on the floor, too, if I had 25,000 volts coursing through my body, but I was smart enough to wear the proper gloves for the occasion. I bet that they wish they had, too. A lesson for all you kids out there.

Finding the manager's office wasn't that hard. It was right on the main hallway with a sign that said MANAGER in big letters. I just walked in and mumbled the usual.

"You are under arrest by the CIA under authorization of the Australian government. You have the right to remain silent. Anything you say can and will be used against you."

Then I looked at the manager. To my great surprise, and probably his too, it was Mr. Schutte, my high school physical science teacher!

He said, "Well, Bryan, I mean Ryan, you found me out. I guess you'll just have to turn me in to the police." I couldn't believe it! It was just too easy! "Well, Mr. Schutte, I guess this will pay you back for making us take all those hard tests and then, after all those hours of hard work, you still gave me a B!"

"Yes, I guess it will." Then he pulled out an enormous gun from his desk and hit me at point black range. The force from the hit blew me up against the wall, and I slid to the ground. He got up and aimed the gun right at my head.

"Good-bye, Bryan. It was nice knowing you."

He started to tighten the trigger on the gun when the door flew opened and knocked him over on top of me.

"Stop! Police!"

Mr. Schutte turned to fire at the policemen but I knocked his gun away from him. He put up his hands, and I clamped on the handcuffs.

"It was unnecessary for you to do that, officers. I had the situation totally under control." I got up and led Mr. Schutte out of the room.

"I'm sorry, mate, but the way your little friend talked it sounded like you were in a bit of trouble."

"Oh, don't mind him. He always talks like that. I hope he didn't bother you too much."

"No, not too much. Lucky we had some duct tape, though."

I laughed. He loaded all the employees into the helicopters and we got into a separate one. Higgins was tied up in the back. He was used to it, so I just let him sit there. We all had a pleasant trip back. The ozone and I could just sit back and relax, and the ozone would probably get a longer vacation than I could.

"And for violation of the Montreal Protocol, I sentence all of the employees of Chin Electronics to twenty years in prison. The manager of the company will receive a life imprisonment. The owners, who the Japanese government was so kind to turn over to us, are sentenced to death by having UV rays fired at them for all the deaths from skin cancer they caused. At least they weren't putting toxic waste in gumballs. Case closed." The judge slammed his hammer down on the table.

Well that didn't seem like cruel and unusual punishment to me - death by tanning, I thought as I gathered my papers up from the Australian courtroom. All of those people who died of skin cancer just so that Chin Electronics could get an edge on the competition. I wonder why they didn't stop using CFCs a long time ago.

Really, Mr. Schutte looked nice in stripes. He spent the rest of his days in that prison. Actually, I felt sorry for him. Probably all the hundreds of years that he spent teaching at RTHS drove him to crime. I really don't know. All I can say is that he got what he deserved.

See other papers and read the plagiarism notice.