The Kill Room (38 page)

T
HE 110-FOOT GENERAL CARGO VESSEL
, chugging under diesel power, plowed through the Caribbean Sea, a massive stretch of turquoise water once home to pirates and noble men-of-war and now the highway of tourists and the playground of the One Percent.

The ship was under a Dominican flag and was thirty years old. A Detroit 16-149 powered her through the water at a respectable thirteen knots, via a single screw. Her draft was fifteen feet but she rode high today, thanks to her light cargo.

A tall mast, forward, dominated the superstructure and the bridge was spacious but cluttered, filled with secondhand navigation equipment bolted, glued or tied down. The wheel was an old-fashioned wooden ring with spokes.

Pirates…

At the helm was squat, fifty-two-year-old Enrico Cruz. This was his real name, though most people knew him by his pseudonym, Henry Cross, a New Yorker who ran several nonprofit organizations, the largest and most prominent of which was Classrooms for the Americas.

Cruz was alone on the deck today because the man who was to have accompanied him today had been murdered by the U.S. government in suite 1200 of the South Cove Inn in the Bahamas. A single shot to the chest had guaranteed that Roberto Moreno would not make this voyage with his friend.

Cruz and Moreno had known each other for decades, ever since Moreno’s best friend, Cruz’s brother, José, had been murdered too—yes, that was the right word—by a U.S. helicopter gunship in Panama during the invasion in 1989.

Since that time the two men had worked together to wage a war on the nation that had descended blithely into Panama, his country, and decided that, oh, sorry, the dictator we’ve been supporting all these years is a bad man after all.

In their campaign against the United States these men differed only in approach. Moreno was outspoken and publicly anti-American, while Cruz remained anonymous, which allowed him to set up the attacks and get the weapons and money where they would do the most good. But together Cruz and Moreno were the backbone of the unnamed movement.

They had engineered the deaths of close to three hundred U.S. citizens and foreigners who kowtowed to Western values: businessmen, professors, politicians, drug enforcement officials, diplomats and their families.

These attacks had been isolated and small, so authorities wouldn’t make any connections among them. But what was planned today was just the opposite: a massive strike against the political, social and corporate heart of America. Moreno had prepared for months—renouncing his citizenship, severing all ties to the United States, moving his money from the States to the Cayman Islands, buying a house in the wilderness of Venezuela—all in anticipation of what was about to happen.

And the weapon at the heart of the attack? The ship that now was plowing through the waves.

Cruz, as a native of Panama, had been steeped in the shipping trade for much of his early life; he knew how to drive vessels this size. Besides, nowadays one didn’t really need to be more than functional at the helm. A competent crew in the engine room, GPS and autopilot on the bridge were all you needed. That was about it. The computer was doing the donkey’s work of getting her to the destination. They were plodding north-by-northwest through the three-foot seas. The day was brilliantly blue, the wind persistent, the spray kaleidoscopic.

The vessel had no name, or did no longer, having been purchased through a series of real but obscure corporations, and was known only by her registration number. There had once been a file on her in a computer in the Dominican Republic, along with a corresponding entry into a registration book, regarding her vital statistics, but they had been, respectively, digitally erased and physically excised.

She was anonymous.

Cruz had thought about informally christening her before they set sail from Nassau—
Roberta
, after his friend, suitably feminized. But then decided it was better to refer to her simply as the ship. She was faded black and gray and streaked with rust. But to him, beautiful.

He now gazed at their destination, the black dot some kilometers away. The GPS tweaked the navigation system to compensate for the wind; new directions went automatically to the rudder. He felt the ship respond. He enjoyed the sensation of such a large creature obeying commands.

The door opened and a man joined him. He had black skin, a bullet-shaped head, shaved shiny, a lean body. Bobby Cheval wore jeans, a denim shirt with sleeves cut off so that it resembled a vest. He was barefoot. He glanced to the horizon. He said, “Too bad, don’t you think? He won’t see it happen. That is sad.”

Cheval had been Robert Moreno’s main contact in the Bahamas.

“Maybe he will,” Cruz said. He didn’t believe this but he said it to reassure Cheval, who wore a horsehair cross around his neck. Cruz didn’t accept the afterlife and knew his dear friend Robert Moreno was as dead as the heart of the government that had killed him.

Cheval, who would lead the Local Empowerment Movement in the Bahamas once it was up and running, had been instrumental in putting together today’s plan.

“Any ships? Signs of surveillance?” Cruz asked.

“No, no. Nothing.”

Cruz was sure no one suspected what was going to happen. They had been so very careful. His only moment of concern had been earlier in the week when that sexy redheaded policewoman had shown up in the Chambers Street office of Classrooms for the Americas to ask about Roberto’s visit on May 1. He’d been surprised at first but Cruz had dealt with some truly despicable people—al-Qaeda operatives, for instance, and Shining Path rebels—and didn’t get rattled easily. He’d distracted Detective Sachs with the true story of the “white guy” who’d tailed Roberto, from NIOS undoubtedly. And distracted her further with some fiction about a mysterious private jet.

A red herring about a blue plane, he thought to himself now and smiled. Roberto would have liked that.

“Is the skiff ready?” Cruz asked Cheval.

“Yes, it is. How close will we get? Before we abandon, I mean.”

“Two kilometers will be fine.”

At that point the five crewmen would climb into a high-speed cigarette boat and head in the opposite direction. They’d follow the ship’s progress on the computer. They could steer remotely if the GPS and autopilot broke down; there was a webcam mounted on the bridge of the vessel and they’d be able to watch the ship approach its destination.

At which the men now gazed.

The
Miami Rover
was American Petroleum Drilling and Refining’s only oil rig in the area, located about thirty miles off the coast of Miami. (And named rather ironically; it didn’t rove anywhere anymore and its journey here had been straight from Texas, at the meandering rate of four knots.)

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.

Then he hurried back to the rocking deck. A glance over the bow. Yes, she was making right for the rig. He scanned the massive deck of the structure—easily a hundred feet above the surface. No workers were visible. This was typical. Nobody on oil rigs wasted time lounging on the fiercely hot iron superstructure, taking in the non-view. They were hard at work in the interior of the unit, mostly in the drill house, or asleep, waiting for the next shift.

Cruz hurried to the side of the vessel and climbed down the rope ladder and dropped into the speedboat with Cheval and the others of the crew.

The motor started.

But before they pulled away, Cruz opened his palm and kissed the pads of his fingers. He then touched it to a rusty patch of hull and whispered, “This is for you, Roberto.”

T
HE CLUSTER OF PASSENGERS ON
the cruise ship’s forward deck was being photographed by Jim from New Jersey, as opposed to Jim from Cleveland or Jim from London (all right, the Brit preferred “James” but since he was on holiday, he was happy to play along with the others).

The group had become friendly in the days since the ocean liner left Hamilton, in Bermuda, and had spent the first tipsy cocktail hour noting coincidences of career and number of children…and given names.

Four Jims, two Sallys.

Jim from California was below, neither the patch nor Dramamine working well, and so he would not be included in the picture.

Jim from New Jersey lined everyone up against what he said was a gunwale, though nobody knew exactly what that was—he didn’t either—but it seemed very nautical and fun to say.

“Nobody sing the
Titanic
song.”

There’d been a lot of that, especially as the bars remained open late into the night, but the truth was that very few people, men or women, could bring off the treacly song like Celine Dion.

“Is that Florida?” somebody asked. One of the Sallys, Jim from New Jersey believed.

He saw a dim line on the horizon but that was probably just a layer of clouds.

“Not yet, I don’t think.”

“But what’s that? It’s a building.”

“Oh, that’s the oil rig. The first one in this part of the Atlantic. Didn’t you see the news? A year ago or so. They found some oil between Nassau and Florida.”

“They? Who’s they? Everybody always says ‘they.’ Are you going to take the picture? My margarita’s melting.”

“U.S. Petroleum. American Petroleum Drilling. I don’t remember.”

“I hate those things,” Sally from Chicago muttered. “Did you see the birds in the Gulf? All covered with oil. It was terrible. I cried.”

“And we couldn’t get good shrimp for months.”

The photog marshaled his subjects into line against the gunwale and tapped down on the Canon shutter.

Click, click, click, click, click…

Enough to make sure that there’d be no blinks.

The proof of vacation burned into a silicon chip, the tourists turned to gaze at the sea and conversation meandered to dinner and shopping in Miami and the Fontainebleau hotel and was Versace’s mansion still open to the public?

“I heard he had an eight-person shower,” said Jim from London.

Claire disputed that.

“Holy shit,” Jim from New Jersey gasped.

“Honey!” chided his wife.

But the camera was up once more and by the time the sound of the explosion reached them, everyone had turned and was focused on the massive mushroom cloud rising perhaps a thousand feet in the air.

“Oh, Jesus. It’s the oil rig!”

“No, no!”

“Oh, my God. Somebody call somebody.”

Click, click, click, click…

W
HAT’S THE DAMAGE ASSESSMENT?”

Shreve Metzger, in blue jeans and a long-sleeved white shirt that was partly untucked amidships, was leaning over a computer monitor, staring, staring at the smoke and haze hovering over the Caribbean Sea, a thousand miles away.

“Gone completely,” said a NIOS communications specialist at a control panel beside him, a young woman with hair pulled back in a bun that looked painfully tight. The comspec’s voice was unemotional.

The scene on the monitor revealed clearly that, no, there was nothing left, other than an oil slick, some debris.

And smoke. A lot of smoke.

Gone completely…

Lincoln Rhyme and Amelia Sachs, along with Metzger and the comspec, were in the outer office of NIOS’s Ground Control Station trailer, on Rector Street in lower Manhattan. In the parking lot.

Rhyme squinted at the bits of wood and plastic and rocking sheen of oil, which had until thirty seconds ago been the 110-foot Dominican cargo ship that Robert Moreno’s friend, Henry Cross, aka Enrico Cruz, had guided toward the
Miami Rover
, the American Petroleum Drilling and Refining oil rig off the coast of Florida.

The comspec touched her earphones. “Reports of a second detonation, underwater, Director. About eight or nine hundred feet depth.”

A moment later, they could see on the high-resolution monitor a slight bubbling up of the water on the surface. That was all. Rhyme supposed that however large the second bomb had been, intended to destroy the rig’s wellhead, he guessed, so much water had quite a mitigating effect.

Rhyme looked through the glass wall dividing the trailer in half: the Kill Room of the GCS. He noted in the dim light the man who had just caused the devastation—and saved the lives of the people on board the rig, as well as much of the east coast of Florida.

Oblivious to those observing him, Barry Shales was at the drone operations station. To Rhyme it seemed like a freestanding airplane cockpit. Shales was sitting forward, apparently quite relaxed, in a comfortable tan leather chair, facing five flat-screen monitors.

The NIOS officer’s hands gripped joysticks, though he would occasionally twist or tap one of the other hundred or so knobs, dials, switches and computer keys.

Rhyme noted that somebody had affixed a seat belt to the chair. It dangled to the floor unlatched. A joke, surely.

Shales was alone in the dim room, which was soundproofed, it seemed, presumably so that he wouldn’t be distracted by noises from associates—or visitors like Rhyme and Sachs today. Delivering deadly messages from on high undoubtedly required supreme concentration.

The comspec, who also had a live link to the American Petroleum security people on board the oil rig, tapped buttons herself, asked some questions and announced to Metzger, Rhyme and Sachs, “Confirm no damage to
Miami Rover
or blowout preventer. No injuries, except a few earaches.”

Not unexpected when a massive fertilizer bomb detonates a half mile from you.

As he’d been reviewing the evidence a half hour ago, Rhyme had suddenly realized that some things didn’t add up. He’d made a half dozen calls and deduced that an attack might be imminent. He’d contacted Metzger. Feverish debate in Washington and at NIOS ensued. Scrambling air force fighters required too much authorization from the Pentagon on up; hours would be wasted getting the approval.

Metzger, of course, had a solution. He’d appealed to Barry Shales, who was en route to headquarters anyway to collect his personal belongings—Metzger explained that the pilot had decided to leave NIOS.

Given the horrific consequences if the pending attack was successful and the approaching deadline—a matter of minutes—the former air force officer had reluctantly agreed to help. He’d flown the drone from Homestead to a spot just over the cargo ship and hovered. The ship was apparently abandoned; they’d seen the crew get into a speedboat and flee. When the radio hails, ordering the cargo ship to come about, were ignored, Shales had launched a Hellfire, which struck the forward hold, where Rhyme speculated the fertilizer bomb had been placed.

Bull’s-eye.

Shales was now turning the drone in a different direction and began following the small boat that contained the crew, who had abandoned the vessel twenty minutes earlier. Into view on the monitor came the black, long-nosed speedboat, crashing over the waves away from the rig and the explosion.

Rhyme heard Barry Shales’s voice over a ceiling-mounted speaker. “UAV Four Eight One to Florida Center. I’ve got secondary target in range and acquiring lock. Distance from target eighteen hundred yards.”

“Copy, Four Eight One. Close DFT to one thousand yards.”

“Roger, Florida Center. Four Eight One.”

On the monitor, Rhyme could see Henry Cross and the sailors who’d abandoned the vessel and were speeding away to safety. You couldn’t quite catch the facial expressions but their body language suggested confusion and concern. They wouldn’t have heard the drone or seen the missile, most likely, and would think that some malfunction in the bomb had caused it to detonate prematurely. Perhaps they were thinking, Lord, that could’ve happened while we were on board.

“Four Eight One to Florida Center. I’m DFT one thousand. Locked on secondary vessel. At their speed they’ll be under cover of Harrogate Cay in ten minutes. Please advise.”

“Roger. We’re hailing now on general frequencies. No response yet.”

Shales replied evenly, “Copy. Four Eight One.”

Rhyme now glanced at Sachs, whose face revealed the concern he himself felt. Were they about to witness the summary execution of six people?

They’d been caught in an act of terrorism. But that risk had been neutralized. Besides, Rhyme now thought, were they all terrorists? What if one or two were innocent sailors that had no idea what the cargo and mission were?

Suddenly the conflict between Shreve Metzger and Nance Laurel came into stark, wrenching focus.

“Four Eight One, this is Florida Center. No response to the hail. Payload launch is authorized.”

Rhyme could see Barry Shales stiffen.

He sat absolutely still for a moment and reached forward, flipped up the cover of a button on a panel in front of him.

Shreve Metzger said into a stalk mike on the desk in front of him, “Barry. Fire the rifle across their bow.”

Over the speaker Shales said, “UAV Four Eight One to Florida Center. Negative on payload launch. Switching to LRR mode.”

“Copy, Four Eight One.”

In the Kill Room, Barry Shales juggled a joystick and squinted at the video image of the speeding ship. He touched a black panel in front of him. A brief delay and, in eerie silence, three sequential plumes of water shot into the air a few feet in front of the speeding boat.

The slim vessel kept going, though everyone on board was looking around. Several of the sailors seemed very young, no more than teenagers.

“Florida Center to Four Eight One. We copy no change in target velocity. Payload launch is still authorized.”

“Copy. Four Eight One.”

Nothing happened for a moment. But then, with a lurch, the speedboat slowed and stopped in the water. Two of the sailors were pointing to the sky, nowhere near the camera, though. They couldn’t see the drone but they all now understood where their enemy was.

Almost in unison they raised their hands.

What followed was comical. The water was choppy and the boat small. They were trying to maintain balance but afraid if they lowered their arms, death from on high would find them. Two fell over and scrabbled quickly to their feet, shooting their hands into the air. They seemed like drunks trying to dance.

“Florida Center to UAV Four Eight One. Copy surrender. Navy advises
Cyclone
-class patrol ship, the
Firebrand
, one mile away, making thirty knots. Keep secondary target dead in the water until it arrives.”

“Copy. Four Eight One.”