Prevent memory leak from repeated $.ajax( { dataType : 'script' } )

Question

I'm writing a little locally-run web app that expects to have intermittent network access. With this in mind I'm checking to see if our external dependency (Google Maps) fails to load, and try again 10 seconds later. A brief outline:

// Assume the worst
var mapsSuccess = false;

// Only gets invoked by maps success
function initialize(){
  // Set the flag to prevent continuous recursion of the previous function
  mapsSucess = true;

  /* application init */
}

// Invoke immediately
( function mapsCall(){
  // Maybe we don't need this...
  if( mapsSuccess === true ){
    return;
  }

  $.ajax( {
    cache    : true,
    dataType : 'script',
    // `callback` param specifies function to call on successful execution
    url      : googleMapsUri + '&callback=initialize'
  } );

  // Run this function again in 10 seconds to see if we succeeded
  setTimeout( mapsCall, 10000 )
}() );

The problem is in the worst case scenario, whereby we don't succeed in loading maps for hours. There is fallback offline content, but currently a memory leak eventually causes the browser to crash. Examining the timeline in Chrome dev tools, the source is obvious:

Each time mapsCall is re-invoked, new DOM nodes and new event listeners are invoked. I'd like to delete these and remove whatever event listeners are being bound (ironically, my code doesn't set any event listeners), so I set this in the mapsCall body:

$( 'script[async][src*="callback=initialize"]' ).off().remove();

This effectively removes the redundant script elements, but doesn't really dent the memory leak on account of the event listener count. I've tried sniffing for where these mysterious event listeners are bound using $._data( element, 'events' ), but they're not on the scripts themselves, the document, the window or the root elements (html, body) so I'm at a loss.