With a beam of a hundred and twenty feet and the length of three football fields, the Gulf of Sidra was a huge ship, though small in comparison to the 350,000-ton tanker that had been berthed at the Petromax terminal. Her outdated design left her seven holds capable of carrying only 104,000 tons of crude.

Though she had become a fixture lying at anchor outside the Mauritanian port of Nouakchott, a hazy silhouette against the western horizon that had been there for weeks, her departure went largely ignored. She’d steamed from the city as soon as Daniel Singer had arrived from Angola and had put more than two hundred miles between herself and the coast.

She was chasing a tropical depression moving across the Atlantic that had the potential to build into a hurricane. It was the storm Singer had been waiting for, the perfect conditions to test what the world’s brightest meteorological minds and the most sophisticated computer models said would happen.

With the temperature in his cabin hovering above a hundred degrees, Singer had taken to spending as much time as he could on the wing bridge, where at least the ship’s seventeen-knot speed created a breeze.

He’d just gotten word over the BBC wireless service that Samuel Makambo’s attack had been foiled by Angolan troops. Nearly a hundred guerillas had been killed in the swift counterattack and four hundred captured. Singer wondered briefly if Colonel Abala, the only rebel who could identify him, was among the living or the dead and decided it didn’t matter. If he was linked to the assault the publicity of a court appearance would only spread the word. He’d hire the flashiest lawyers he could find and get his case shifted to the World Court in The Hague. There he would use the opportunity to put humanity’s treatment of the earth on trial.

What truly bothered him about the failed attack was that estimates put the amount of oil spilled at about twelve thousand tons. Though an environmental catastrophe, it was far short of the million tons he’d been planning on. There would be no cloud of benzene arsonic acid lacing the storm and spreading its poison across the southeastern United States. It would be a punishing storm, the worst hurricane to hit America in recorded history, but without the noxious contamination he feared it wouldn’t touch off the panic he’d expected.

He knew he would have to contact the media and explain once the storm was over — or better yet, when it was about to make landfall — how a chance battle in a remote part of the world had prevented a catastrophe. It would be one more example of how interconnected the earth was, how we were leaving our future to the vagaries of chance.