The ship was under a Dominican flag and was thirty years old. A Detroit 16-149 powered her through the water at a respectable thirteen knots, via a single screw. Her draft was fifteen feet but she rode high today, thanks to her light cargo.
A tall mast, forward, dominated the superstructure and the bridge was spacious but cluttered, filled with secondhand navigation equipment bolted, glued or tied down. The wheel was an old-fashioned wooden ring with spokes.
Pirates…
At the helm was squat, fifty-two-year-old Enrico Cruz. This was his real name, though most people knew him by his pseudonym, Henry Cross, a New Yorker who ran several nonprofit organizations, the largest and most prominent of which was Classrooms for the Americas.
Cruz was alone on the deck today because the man who was to have accompanied him today had been murdered by the U.S. government in suite 1200 of the South Cove Inn in the Bahamas. A single shot to the chest had guaranteed that Roberto Moreno would not make this voyage with his friend.
Cruz and Moreno had known each other for decades, ever since Moreno’s best friend, Cruz’s brother, José, had been murdered too — yes, that was the right word — by a U.S. helicopter gunship in Panama during the invasion in 1989.
Since that time the two men had worked together to wage a war on the nation that had descended blithely into Panama, his country, and decided that, oh, sorry, the dictator we’ve been supporting all these years is a bad man after all.
In their campaign against the United States these men differed only in approach. Moreno was outspoken and publicly anti-American, while Cruz remained anonymous, which allowed him to set up the attacks and get the weapons and money where they would do the most good. But together Cruz and Moreno were the backbone of the unnamed movement.
They had engineered the deaths of close to three hundred U.S. citizens and foreigners who kowtowed to Western values: businessmen, professors, politicians, drug enforcement officials, diplomats and their families.
These attacks had been isolated and small, so authorities wouldn’t make any connections among them. But what was planned today was just the opposite: a massive strike against the political, social and corporate heart of America. Moreno had prepared for months — renouncing his citizenship, severing all ties to the United States, moving his money from the States to the Cayman Islands, buying a house in the wilderness of Venezuela — all in anticipation of what was about to happen.
And the weapon at the heart of the attack? The ship that now was plowing through the waves.
Cruz, as a native of Panama, had been steeped in the shipping trade for much of his early life; he knew how to drive vessels this size. Besides, nowadays one didn’t really need to be more than functional at the helm. A competent crew in the engine room, GPS and autopilot on the bridge were all you needed. That was about it. The computer was doing the donkey’s work of getting her to the destination. They were plodding north-by-northwest through the three-foot seas. The day was brilliantly blue, the wind persistent, the spray kaleidoscopic.
The vessel had no name, or did no longer, having been purchased through a series of real but obscure corporations, and was known only by her registration number. There had once been a file on her in a computer in the Dominican Republic, along with a corresponding entry into a registration book, regarding her vital statistics, but they had been, respectively, digitally erased and physically excised.
She was anonymous.
Cruz had thought about informally christening her before they set sail from Nassau—Roberta, after his friend, suitably feminized. But then decided it was better to refer to her simply as the ship. She was faded black and gray and streaked with rust. But to him, beautiful.
He now gazed at their destination, the black dot some kilometers away. The GPS tweaked the navigation system to compensate for the wind; new directions went automatically to the rudder. He felt the ship respond. He enjoyed the sensation of such a large creature obeying commands.
The door opened and a man joined him. He had black skin, a bullet-shaped head, shaved shiny, a lean body. Bobby Cheval wore jeans, a denim shirt with sleeves cut off so that it 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.