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or the pitch and roll of nearby boats. The lead boat, way ahead of them, seemed to be slowing down. Jack figured it was just wishful thinking on his part, but then Rick cut their speed as well.
    “Are we getting close?” asked Jack.
    “Only so far we can go before we hit Cuban waters,” said Rick. He reduced his speed further, down to just a few knots. “Looks like everyone is stopped right at the boundary.”
    Jack rose from the bench seat and took a better look. The flying bridge was twenty feet above sea level, which extended visibility with the naked eye. Jack hadn’t committed every boat in their group to memory, but it was plain to see that they had joined up with many more boats than the twenty-nine he’d counted out of Key West. One in particular stood out as much bigger than the rest.
    “What’s that ship at two o’clock?” asked Jack.
    Rick aimed his binoculars in that direction. “That’s CCA.”
    “What’s CCA?”
    “Clean Caribbean and Americas. It’s an emergency-response cooperative out of Fort Lauderdale. I’ve watched their practice drills around Key West. As far as I know, they’re the only guys in the country who are licensed by the U.S. government to help clean up a spill in Cuban waters.”
    “I was under the impression that no U.S. company could help,” said Jack. “That’s what all the news reports have said.”
    Rick kept the binoculars trained on the ship. “It’s hard to know who’s right. When they were doing practice drills in Key West, the guy from CCA said he had the only license for actual on-site cleanup. A handful of other companies are licensed to lend training and know-how to Cuba. But this is all new ground. I don’t think anyone really knows what they can and can’t do in an actual catastrophe.”
    “They can’t be much help sitting around here like the rest of us,” said Jack. “We still must be a long way from the actual blowout.”
    “A good five miles, I’d say. Let me get CCA on the radio. A guy named Bobby Timms is in charge of operations. He brought his whole crew by my bar after the training exercise, and I took good care of them. If he’s aboard, he’ll tell me what’s up.”
    Rick put the engines in neutral, bringing the boat to a dead stop in the water. He tried the radio—“CCA, this is Rick’s Café, do you copy?”—and after several attempts, a response came.
    “This is CCA. Bobby here. Go ahead, Rick’s Café. Over.”
    “That’s my buddy,” Rick told Jack and Theo, and then he keyed up the mic. “Bobby, it’s Rick. Why is the cavalry on the sidelines like the rest of us rubberneckers? Over.”
    “Can’t go in. License problem. Over.”
    “Why the problem? Over.”
    “OFAC tells us we can enter Cuban waters only if the drilling is being done by foreign oil companies that are members of CCA.”
    Rick went off-mic again. “OFAC is the Office of Foreign Assets Control.”
    “I know,” said Jack, “I dealt with them when I went to Guantánamo. But I want to understand exactly what he’s saying. Scarborough 8 was a consortium of companies from China, Russia, and Venezuela. Is that the problem?”
    “Let me ask,” said Rick. He keyed up the mic: “Lemme guess, Bobby: CCA has no member companies from China, Russia, or Venezuela. Over.”
    “Affirmative. Over.”
    Jack could hardly believe what he was hearing. “Member, schmember,” he told Rick. “Tell him to go in, clean up that mess, and ask for forgiveness later.”
    Rick repeated the gist of Jack’s message, without attribution.
    “No can do,” said CCA. “Have you seen what’s out there? Over.”
    “Oil?”
    “Besides oil. North latitude 23.374496 degrees, west longitude 82.492283 degrees. Check it out. Gotta go now. Over and out.”
    Rick found the coordinates on the map, then aimed his binoculars accordingly. “Can’t see that far from this level. Let’s go up.”
    Jack and Theo followed him up the side ladder to the fiberglass crow’s nest atop the