Tiny dropped the plane down so it was five hundred feet off the haul road. A few miles from the entrance to the terminal a line of trucks sat idle. Juan guessed why, and in a moment the camera revealed the road had been blocked by felled trees. Because the ground just off the road was so soft the big tanker trucks couldn’t turn around. It would take giant earthmovers or a week of chain-sawing to remove the obstacle. If the Angolan government did send troops they would have to abandon any fighting vehicles well short of their target.

Having studied satellite pictures of the remote port, Cabrillo had anticipated this move because it was exactly what he would have done had he been in charge of the assault.

He watched as Tiny made the model plane gain altitude again as it neared the terminal. From a thousand feet everything looked normal at first. The two-hundred-acre facility sprawled along the coast, with a massive tank farm at its southernmost point and a separate compound for workers’ dormitories and recreational facilities to the north. Between them were miles of pipes in a hundred different sizes twisting and bending together in a maze only its designers could understand. There were warehouses as large as anything Cabrillo had ever seen, as well as a harbor for the tenders and workboats that took personnel to and from the offshore rigs. Shooting off from the facility was a mile-long causeway that led to the loading berths for the supertankers that took the crude to markets all over the globe. A thousand-foot tanker was tied to one, her tanks empty if Juan were to judge by the amount of red antifouling paint he could see above her waterline.

He spotted a large building constructed on an specially hardened pad near one of the terminal’s tallest vent towers. Juan knew from the research his people had done there were three General Electric jet engines inside the structure that provided electricity to the whole instillation. High-tension power lines ran from it to every corner of the port.

Three miles off the coast sat a string of dozens of oil rigs running northward like a man-made archipelago, each connected back to the port by undersea pipelines. Though not as large as rigs Juan had seen in the North Sea or the Gulf of Mexico, each was at least two hundred feet tall, their superstructures held above the waves on massive support piers.

It all appeared normal except when he started looking more carefully. Some of the flames he saw weren’t from natural gas being intentionally burned off. Several trucks had been set ablaze, and more than one building was wreathed in sooty smoke. The tiny stick figures lying randomly around the yard were the corpses of workers and members of the security force who’d been gunned down by Makambo’s soldiers. What Juan first took to be shadows around them were actually pools of blood.