The Kill Room

resembled a vest. He was barefoot. He glanced to the horizon. He said, “Too bad, don’t you think? He won’t see it happen. That is sad.”
    Cheval had been Robert Moreno’s main contact in the Bahamas.
    “Maybe he will,” Cruz said. He didn’t believe this but he said it to reassure Cheval, who wore a horsehair cross around his neck. Cruz didn’t accept the afterlife and knew his dear friend Robert Moreno was as dead as the heart of the government that had killed him.
    Cheval, who would lead the Local Empowerment Movement in the Bahamas once it was up and running, had been instrumental in putting together today’s plan.
    “Any ships? Signs of surveillance?” Cruz asked.
    “No, no. Nothing.”
    Cruz was sure no one suspected what was going to happen. They had been so very careful. His only moment of concern had been earlier in the week when that sexy redheaded policewoman had shown up in the Chambers Street office of Classrooms for the Americas to ask about Roberto’s visit on May 1. He’d been surprised at first but Cruz had dealt with some truly despicable people—al-Qaeda operatives, for instance, and Shining Path rebels—and didn’t get rattled easily. He’d distracted Detective Sachs with the true story of the “white guy” who’d tailed Roberto, from NIOS undoubtedly. And distracted her further with some fiction about a mysterious private jet.
    A red herring about a blue plane, he thought to himself now and smiled. Roberto would have liked that.
    “Is the skiff ready?” Cruz asked Cheval.
    “Yes, it is. How close will we get? Before we abandon, I mean.”
    “Two kilometers will be fine.”
    At that point the five crewmen would climb into a high-speed cigarette boat and head in the opposite direction. They’d follow the ship’s progress on the computer. They could steer remotely if the GPS and autopilot broke down; there was a webcam mounted on the bridge of the vessel and they’d be able to watch the ship approach its destination.
    At which the men now gazed.
    The Miami Rover was American Petroleum Drilling and Refining’s only oil rig in the area, located about thirty miles off the coast of Miami. (And named rather ironically; it didn’t rove anywhere anymore and its journey here had been straight from Texas, at the meandering rate of four knots.)
    Months ago Moreno and Cruz had decided that the oil company would be the target for their biggest “message” to date; American Petroleum had stolen huge tracts of land in South America and displaced thousands of people, offering them a pathetic settlement in return for their signatures on deeds of transfer that most of them couldn’t read. Moreno had organized a series of protests in the United States and elsewhere over the past month or so. The protests had served two purposes. First, they’d brought to light the crimes of AmPet. But, second, they lent credence to the proposition that Moreno was all talk. Once the authorities saw that mere protesting was what he had in mind they largely lost interest in him.
    And so nobody followed up on leads that might have exposed what was going to happen today: ramming the ship into the Miami Rover . Once it hit, the fifty-five-gallon drums containing a poignant mixture of diesel fuel, fertilizer and nitromethane would detonate, destroying the rig.
    But that in itself, while a blow for the cause, wasn’t enough, Moreno and Cruz had decided. Killing sixty or so workers, ruining the biggest oil rig in the Southeast? That was like that pathetic fellow who suicide-crashed his private plane into the building housing the IRS in Austin, Texas. He killed a few people. Caused some damage, snarled traffic.
    And soon, back to business as usual in the Lone Star State’s capital.
    What would happen today was considerably worse.
    After the initial explosion destroyed the rig, the ship would sink fast. In the stern was a second bomb that would descend to the seafloor near the wellhead. A depth-gauge detonator would set off another explosion, which would destroy both the well’s ram and annular blowout preventers. Without any BOPs to stop the flow, oil would gush into the ocean at the rate of 120,000 barrels a day, more than twice what escaped in the Deepwater Horizon disaster in the Gulf.
    The surface currents and wind would speed the oil slick on its mission to destroy much of the eastern coast of Florida and Georgia. And might even spread to the Carolinas. Ports would close, shipping and tourism would