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.

And soon, back to business as usual in the Lone Star State’s capital.

What would happen today was considerably worse.

After the initial explosion destroyed the rig, the ship would sink fast. In the stern was a second bomb that would descend to the seafloor near the wellhead. A depth-gauge detonator would set off another explosion, which would destroy both the well’s ram and annular blowout preventers. Without any BOPs to stop the flow, oil would gush into the ocean at the rate of 120,000 barrels a day, more than twice what escaped in the Deepwater Horizon disaster in the Gulf.

The surface currents and wind would speed the oil slick on its mission to destroy much of the eastern coast of Florida and Georgia. And might even spread to the Carolinas. Ports would close, shipping and tourism would stop indefinitely, millions of people would take a huge economic hit.

Roberto had said, “Americans want oil for their cars and their air-conditioning and their capitalist companies. Well, I’ll give it to them. They can drown in all the oil we’ll deliver!”

Forty minutes later the ship was three kilometers away from the Miami Rover.

Enrico Cruz checked the GPS one last time and he and Cheval left the bridge. Cruz said, “Everybody in the speedboat.”

Cruz hurried to the gamy forward hold, in which slimy water sloshed, and checked the main bomb. Everything fine. He armed it. He did the same with the second, the device that would destroy the blowout preventer.