Janson tapped the pilot’s shoulder.

The Frenchman aimed straight at the helipad that was cantilevered out from the bridge and over the bow of the ship. The landing zone was mere yards from Vulcan Queen’s DP control center, her most vulnerable asset.

The young voice on the radio was suddenly panicky: “Negative! Negative! You can’t land without clearance.”

“I got a whole crew of worms,” Janson protested. “What do I do with these guys?”

He ripped off the headset and pulled on his rope gloves.

Coughing violently, the Frenchman put the machine in a hover fifty feet above the helipad. Janson dropped the fast rope and plunged down the braided line. Four seconds after his boots hit the helipad, he was racing down a flight of steel steps. He hit the landing and swung the corner to the second flight. Two uniformed security officers racing up the flight saw him coming.

They raised short-barrel shotguns to sweep the steps with buckshot.

Janson fired first. The muffled reports of the sound-suppressed MP5 were drowned out by the rotor thud and turbine whine of the helicopter racketing back up into the dark night sky.

He vaulted over the fallen guards and burst through the side door of the bridge.

The quiet, dark room was lit by computer screens and nav instruments.

Janson found only two men, neither a security officer, and knew that he had bet right. Private jets, fleets of helicopters, and giant ships made corporation men feel safe, even when they weren’t.

The DP unit operator and the officer of the watch Janson had snowed on the radio gaped at his weapons and the balaclava that masked his face. The DP operator stayed at his keyboard and monitors. The frightened third mate, who looked twenty years old, fled to the opposite bridge wing door.

Janson got there first with his MP5 leveled at his chest.

“Easy, son. No one’ll get hurt.” He herded the third mate next to the DP operator, who was hunched over his instruments. “Do your job,” Janson told the DP man. “Move only to maintain your ship’s position. Do not let her drift. Understood?”

“Yes, sir.”

To the third mate Janson said, “Call Captain Titus. When he answers, give me the handset.”

The mate did as he was told and passed Janson the phone with a trembling hand. Janson spoke. “Captain Titus, come up to the bridge to greet the president of Isle de Foree.”

“Who the hell is this?”

“We have secured the bridge of your ship, Captain Titus,” said Janson, the “we” intended to keep them guessing about the size of his force. “Tell no one. Do not permit your security people to come with you. The first armed man we see, we start shooting DP computers.”

“Are you out of your mind? The ship—”

“Your ship will immediately fall off-station. She will drift out of control. She will tear up the six miles of riser pipe and drill string that American Synergy Corporation has driven to the seabed at a cost of a hundred million dollars. Come now. Alone. Use the stairs, not the elevator. Now!”

Janson backed against a bulkhead where he could cover the elevator and the stairs and the doors to the bridge wings. “Open the door for the captain,” he ordered.

The third mate did. Janson heard pounding footsteps. Only one man storming up the companionway. The captain burst into the bridge. He was a bull-necked, close-cropped bad-tempered-looking man in khaki, and if he feared a heavily armed, masked commando it did not show.

“Who in hell are you? What are you doing on my ship?”

“We’ve taken your ship,” Janson repeated. “There will be no killing and no damage if you do exactly what you’re told. If you don’t, I’ll take out the DP.” Janson gestured at the third mate. “Radio the helicopter; clear him to land.”

The mate looked at the captain.

“Do it!” shouted the captain.

The S-76 thundered down from the sky, the noise only slightly muffled by the pad over the bridge. After an agonizingly long wait, Ferdinand Poe appeared at the bridge wing door, leaning heavily on the Angolan co-pilot. The co-pilot helped him in, handed Poe the machine gun he had carried for him, and fled.

“Are you all right, sir?” Janson asked him.

Poe caught his breath and said, “Perfectly.”

Janson said, “Captain Titus, this is your host, Acting President of Isle de Foree Ferdinand Poe.”

Titus roared, “Who the hell do you think you are, boarding my ship on the high seas? Goddamned pirates.”

Ferdinand Poe bristled. “We are not on the high seas, Captain.”

“What?”

“We are on the sovereign territory of Isle de Foree. And you are my country’s guest.”

“Maritime law—”

“Maritime law permits you to sail through our territorial waters. But as long as your drill strings and risers attach you to our seabed, you are on Isle de Foree’s property.”

“Detaching them,” Paul Janson noted, “is a simple matter of me shooting up those computers.” He pointed his MP5 at the DP controller.

“I get the picture, goddammit. What do you want?”

“What ASC brass are aboard?”

“All of ’em. Half of goddamned Texas.”

“What sort of security do they have?”

Captain Titus hesitated.

Janson said coldly, “This no place for a shoot-out. You have two hundred hands working aboard your ship, Captain—sailors, technicians, tool pushers, drillers, roughnecks, stewards, and cooks. Answer me very carefully.”

“I have a four-man ASC security detail.”

“How many more did Mr. Case bring with him?”

The captain’s shoulders sagged. “Ten.”

“What sort?”

“Militia.”

Janson and Poe exchanged a quick glance.

Captain Titus straightened up again. He looked Janson in the eye and spoke like an officer accustomed to leavening authority with common sense. “Mister, they’ve got you outmanned and outgunned. Why don’t you save a lot of innocent people a lot of sorrow and put down your weapons?”

FORTY-TWO

Three decks below the Vulcan Queen’s bridge, fifteen men and three women who had flown most of the night and day from Houston ate at a long table in the drill ship’s conference room. The table was laid in white linen and heavy silver. Quietly efficient black stewards served.

Doug Case hid an amused smile at the diners’ pasty faces and stringy hair. ASC company lore held that no one in the oil business worked harder than ASC’s so-called officer corps. No matter how long they’d traveled, no matter how far they’d come, ASC executives hit the ground running, rolled up their sleeves, and went straight to work. All the while pretending they didn’t wish they were showering off the sixteen-hour plane ride and falling facedown on their mattresses.

Tonight, work was a full-press media massage to sell the special partnership between benevolent American Synergy Corporation and the grateful, stable island nation of Isle de Foree. Straight to work meant hosting egghead reporters from NPR, PBS, the BBC, and the New York Times, at a sustainable dinner of Isle de Foreen reef fish caught by artisanal fishermen. Rolling up sleeves involved sharing exclusive news of a major commercial ultradeepwater oil discovery. How major? The mother of all reserves. “Oh, and by the way, our old friend President for Life Iboga has come home to stabilize his nation.”

The fabled, ancient, and rarely seen “Buddha,” CEO Bruce Danforth himself, led the charm attack, demonstrating that he respected the media by being bluntly unapologetic. Despite Doug Case’s vaunted title President of Global Security, this was the first time he had been in the same room with the reclusive CEO, and he was deeply impressed. The Buddha was pushing ninety, but he was a damned sharp ninety.

“Coal,” Buddha addressed the dinner table in a roundabout answer to an NPR query, “will be the primary source of energy in the world for another hundred years. Oil will be the secondary source. Natural gas the third. Whether we like it or not, the methods of energy conversion established by James Watt’s steam engine and Charles Parsons’s steam turbine are still with us. Heat is power. Improved, refined, enhanced—heat is stillpower. And we will create eighty-five percent of that heat—that power—by burning fossil fuel.”