On his main flat panel display a reticle appeared where the barrel was currently aiming, the curved gray side of the support leg. He tracked back the camera’s zoom and found the fourth outboard speeding off for the next oil rig. A tiny movement of a joystick centered the sight on the fleeing craft and a second’s long touch of the trigger blew it to oblivion.

He reset the weapon to automatic and the multibarrel gun pivoted back to the platform for the last boat. A sliver of the outboard’s stern appeared from around the column, a target that was less than a square foot. Even at five hundred yards from an unstable ship it was more than enough. The Gatling shrieked again. The outboard’s motor exploded, blowing the boat out of the water, sending its eight occupants flying in every direction. Some were launched into the sea, others were slammed into the column, and two of them seemed to have simply vanished in the blast.

“Platform three secure,” Mark said, exhaling a long breath.

“Helm, get us to the last rig under attack,” Max grunted, knowing the two submersible teams wouldn’t have it so easy.

CABRILLO was thinking the exact same thing as he crouched on an exposed stairwell hanging over the side of the platform. Below him the oil slick pulsed like a living thing even as it killed the surrounding ocean. It had stretched in an inky bloom as far as he could see and had probably already reached the concrete breakwater running along the front of the Petromax terminal. With a freshening wind out of the south the smell wasn’t as bad as it had been down below, but the petrochemical taint still hung in the air.

Unlike the mammoth oil rigs of the North Sea or the Gulf of Mexico that could house hundreds of workers for months at a time and stood taller than many skyscrapers, this platform was no more than four hundred feet square, dominated by the spidery drill tower and a brightly painted mobile crane used to raise and lower supplies from tenders.

There were several metal-sided buildings clinging to the deck and cantilevered over the edges of the structure. One would be a control center; the others housed machinery to regulate the flow of crude from the well head on the sea floor. The deck was also crisscrossed with a maze of pipes and littered with equipment — broken auger bits, lengths of drill string, and a couple of small cargo containers for storage. Though only a few years old, the platform was streaked with grime and showed signs of neglect. He thought it was a good sign that he didn’t see any bodies of dead workers.