TEN miles north of where Tiny Gunderson sat in his plane at the Cabinda airport with a hundred eager soldiers, Daniel Singer was talking with General Samuel Makambo of the Congolese Army of Revolution. Dawn was two hours away and the jungle was finally quieting as the nocturnal insects and animals bedded down for the day. Though, with the glare of so many oil rigs burning off natural gas both offshore and along the coastline, it was a wonder how the creatures maintained their circadian rhythms. Around them in the lean-to were the most senior soldiers Makambo was willing to sacrifice for this mission. Leading the four-hundred-man expeditionary force was Colonel Raif Abala. He was here for two reasons: punishment for the debacle on the Congo River when he let the arms merchants get away with the diamonds, and because Makambo suspected the colonel was skimming stones from their blood diamond trade. He wouldn’t be too put out if Abala didn’t return.

The rebels had been hiding in plain sight near the squatters’ camps that had sprung up around the facility belonging to the oil giant Petromax. They wore regular, albeit ragged, clothing and acted as though they were here seeking employment. Their weapons and outboard boats had been easily concealed in the mangroves, with guards posted nearby to dissuade fishermen or people looking for bush meat to stray too close.

“Colonel,” Makambo said, “you know your duty.”

With his sheer size, Samuel Makambo was a commanding presence. And while what had once been battle-hardened muscle was slowly jelling into fat, he still possessed incredible strength. He favored mirrored sunglasses like his mentor, Idi Amin, and carried a swagger stick called a sjambok made of plaited hippo hide. The pistols in his twin holsters were custom-made by Beretta; their gold inlays alone were worth a small fortune.

“Yes, sir,” Abala replied at once. “A hundred men will use the boats to launch attacks on the offshore loading terminal and the rigs themselves while the bulk of my force will concentrate on securing the compound.”

“It’s essential that you take control of the generating station as well as the pump control rooms,” Dan Singer, the architect of the attack, said. “And they must not be damaged.”

“The attack on those two parts of the terminal will be carried out by my best men. They will take them as soon as we break through the perimeter fences.”

“And your men are clear on how to work the controls?” Singer demanded.

“Many of them were employed at this very facility until our government forbade members of our tribe from working in Congo’s oil industry,” Abala said. “As soon as the tanker that’s currently loading has been decoupled from the terminal they know to turn the pumps on full force and dump the oil into the sea.”

“And on the rigs?”

“They will destroy the undersea pipes that send crude to the storage tanks onshore.”