Drone

Bill was finishing up a cigarette in the designated smoking area way up high near the rig office, right next to one of the emergency lifeboats, enjoying a million-dollar ocean view. He flicked the butt off the rail and watched it drift down the two hundred feet or so toward the churning gulf waters below, but he lost sight of it before it hit the waves.

A glint of silver caught his eye and he glanced up. Bill had seen plenty of drones when he worked in the Persian Gulf and easily recognized the one circling overhead. Flying low.

He supported Myers’s most-wanted-list policy wholeheartedly, but kept that opinion to himself, since his Mexican counterparts on the rig were mostly against it. When he saw the Reaper, his heart skipped a beat. He was damn proud to be an American, and that little piece of technology roaring around in front of that four-cylinder turbocharged engine up there was yet another proof of American technological dominance.

What he couldn’t quite understand was why it was flying around his rig. He scanned the water around him, searching for a renegade Zodiac or maybe some frogmen who might be trying to sabotage the vulnerable platform, but he didn’t see anything.

He wondered if the Reaper was on some kind of routine patrol. Whoever was flying it must have been new on the job, though, because the wings kept wobbling and the plane yawed back and forth, as if it were fighting a stiff crosswind. He guessed it was a training mission for a young pilot stuck in a trailer in Nevada somewhere.

The Reaper circled lower and closer until Bill could see the big American flag on the fuselage and the two antitank missiles slung under its wings. It was close enough that he pulled out his smartphone and zoomed in on the drone with the built-in video camera.

WHOOSH! A missile roared off of its rack in a jet of flame and smoke.

“Shit!”

Bill nearly dropped his phone. He watched the missile track until it slammed into the side of the big oil tanker, just above the water line. The thin steel skin of the tanker erupted under the force of a warhead designed to penetrate heavy tank armor. Flaming oil gushed out into the gulf, forming a fiery slick near the ship and the pumping boom that connected it to the rig.

Bill raced for the door of his office to call it in when he heard another WHOOSH! overhead. It sounded so different from the first one, he instinctively knew it hadn’t been fired at the tanker.

A massive explosion rocked the oil rig. The missile had smashed into the wellhead assembly, the worst possible location. High-pressure oil and gases from deep within the earth’s crust now burst free and caught fire, creating a seventy-foot-tall blowtorch of white-hot flame. Fire quickly spread onto the main deck, fueled by the fine mist of oil clouding the air. New explosions rocked the steel decking under Bill’s feet as gas welding canisters and storage tanks exploded like a chain of firecrackers, throwing shards of jagged steel whistling through the air.

Within moments, the lower decks were enveloped in a cauldron of fire. Men roasting alive screamed as they threw themselves over the rails toward the ocean below. Fire crews grabbed hoses and fire extinguishers, and charged toward the advancing flames, but it was too late. The rig’s installation manager sounded the alarm. Sirens wailed. The few surviving crew members who weren’t trapped or already dead raced for the bright orange lifeboats hanging in their stanchions, Bill among them, but the sea itself was on fire. Chances were that they would be boiled alive inside the boats like lobsters in a pot.

The Aztec Dream had become a nightmare of the damned.

One hundred and twenty-five miles away, the Iranian drone technician maneuvered the Reaper back toward a hidden Bravo landing strip, his mission with the hijacked American Reaper a complete success.

46

New York City, New York

Oil prices skyrocketed once again and stock markets roiled around the world on the news of the American drone attack on the Mexican offshore oil rig.

Despite her administration’s protests to the contrary, the world firmly believed that Myers had taken out the oil rig in retaliation for the attack on the Houston tank farm weeks before.

Privately, the oil-producing nations thoroughly enjoyed the price spike. Countries like Saudi Arabia had crested their peak oil reserves in recent years; sooner rather than later the tap would run dry. Any boost in revenues, for whatever reason, was seen as a huge benefit.