Drone

“Of course.”

Hernan was intrigued. “Your services in exchange for what?”

Ali explained. The terms were acceptable. More than acceptable. Hernan agreed. They worked out a plan.

No need to leave Mexico after all.

Hernan smiled.

Poured himself another whiskey. Time to call in favors from his friends in Caracas and Havana. Start the plan rolling ahora.

He drained his glass.

Fuck the mice.

* * *

Two days later, one of the big media conglomerates began running a Victor Bravo memorial piece, extolling his virtues as an advocate for the poor, his charitable work among the campesinos, and the vast array of clinics, orphanages, and education centers he’d built around the country over the last two decades. The show featured glowing interviews with grateful farmers, Indians, admiring telenovela stars, and several staged “man-on-the-street” encounters, and all of it was scored with popular folk music that had been written about him over the years. The media conglomerate—a big supporter of the Barraza campaign during the last election—had already put it together even before the death of Victor Bravo. With orders from Hernan, they released it to any television station or cable satellite programmer that wanted to run it free of charge.

The hugely popular show was picked up immediately by the Spanish-language networks in the United States. Local news shows then ran their own follow-up programming, tying together all of the recent events, including the terrible border-crossing situation affecting so many Hispanics in both countries. Like their English- language counterparts, Telemundo, Univision, and the other majors had distinct political agendas that favored a particular point of view slanting against the Myers administration, which was increasingly vilified on these networks because of the new border regulations. What most Anglos didn’t realize was that Spanish-language news shows were the number one rated shows of any language in Los Angeles, Dallas, Phoenix, and Houston. The Victor Bravo mythology—and his death, which was now being characterized as a martyrdom—was spreading like wildfire on both sides of the border.

Bay of Campeche, Mexico

One hundred and seven miles offshore from Veracruz, a PEMEX oil rig, the Aztec Dream, was topping off a giant oil tanker with crude pumped directly from the gulf floor. Bill Gordon was the offshore operations engineer (OOE), which made him the senior technical authority on the PEMEX rig. The middle-aged Texan in the burnt orange UT Longhorns ball cap had worked on offshore oil rigs all over the world, including the Persian Gulf, before joining PEMEX.

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.

Publicly, of course, those same oil-producing nations—Venezuela the most vociferous among them—decried the attacks on the PEMEX facility as an attack not just on an oil facility, but on the entire global marketplace, driven as it was by the free flow of petroleum. The Venezuelans claimed that America was just another “fading superpower” that was simply lashing out in a vain, unbridled attempt to crush the emerging Mexican economy. Socialist, Marxist, and racialist explanations were soon forthcoming from the usual sources both inside and outside of the United States.

But it was the UN secretary-general who surprised everybody when he introduced a resolution approving the most recent findings of the self-appointed Global Commission on Drug Policy (GCDP), whose members included the former presidents of Mexico, Colombia, and Chile, along with luminaries from the entertainment and financial