After the Monsoon: An unputdownable thriller that will get your pulse racing!. Robert Karjel

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СКАЧАТЬ is accurate as written.”

      “Certainly,” Grip said curtly. And he made a sad mental note: he’d already lost his chance at an unfiltered first impression. Mickels had been too talkative from the start. Grip swore at himself, blaming the heat and thirst; he’d stepped off the plane and wasn’t on his game. And Mickels had quickly drawn a convincing mental image: Swedish soldiers, Djiboutians, a shooting range, weapons, khat, and a deadly dotted line on a flip chart. It would be hard to erase that picture and see something different. An almost endless desert, a few men, and a shot. It was so beautiful in its simplicity that it almost seemed staged. What had been going on, and what had taken place beyond the frame? He was being strung along, and even worse, the report was already finished.

      Grip didn’t distrust Mickels but realized that he was, after all, being loyal to his boss. There’d be no free lunch for Grip—he was dealing with someone who only allowed himself to see a narrow slice of reality. Grip would have to get past that.

      “And this Abdoul …?” Grip continued.

      “Abdoul Ghermat, what about him?”

      “Where is he now?”

      “The Djiboutians took him. The police, that is. He’s being held at the main station here in town.”

      “Arrested?”

      “Something like that.”

      “Suspected of murder?”

      “Not by me.”

      Grip was annoyed. “Come on, this isn’t exactly a trivial incident. Why?”

      “The Djiboutian authorities want to stay on our good side. Once we’d reached a clear conclusion, the captain of the ship called up the local police chief. He was informed about the incident and who took part. And then I assume the local chief wanted to look decisive, and he arrested Ghermat.”

      “Once you’d reached a clear conclusion, you said. So what actually happened?”

      Mickels looked blankly at Grip. “It’s obvious.”

      “Is it?”

      “A stray bullet. Fucking arrogant Swedish soldiers and Negroes high on khat. That bastard fumbled, he’d probably never held a weapon before. And so the shot went off.”

      “The cocky lieutenant’s own idea?”

      “Yes, to his eternal regret. And here we sit in this shit. But one more thing …” Mickels was fired up, and he kept pointing his finger at Grip as he searched for the words. “We haven’t pressed formal charges against Ghermat. An accidental discharge, under the circumstances,” he said, shrugging. “Why the Djiboutians are detaining him is their call.”

      “Accidental discharge, you said?”

      “Yeah, if you ask me. But now that you’re here, you can decide the rest. You have the personnel files, and at the bottom you’ll find my report: who said what, where they stood, all that. I collected the weapons that were there too. They’re here with me, in a locker.”

      For Mickels, it really was cut-and-dried. The incident had taken place two days ago, and he’d already drawn his conclusions.

      “Might as well take a look at the weapons too,” Grip said, trying to look methodical. They went into a room next door. Mickels entered the code into a large cabinet and swung open the heavy door.

      There they were, lined up in a rack: six identical assault rifles.

      “It was this one,” Mickels said, pointing.

      To Grip, that didn’t mean a damn thing. Only that he was being fed too many simple truths.

       11

      “See you later.”

      “Sure,” Grip replied, opening the door to Mickels’s jeep at the gangway of the HMS Sveaborg.

      The dock was nearly a kilometer long, but the Sveaborg was the only ship there. Huge container cranes loomed, unmoving and seemingly abandoned, on either side of her. Whether their red-brown color was rust or the original paint was difficult to say. In the late afternoon, the sun shifted from white to yellow, and the only human in sight was the watch officer.

      An hour before, when they’d left the French base in Mickels’s car, Grip had said on a whim, “Can’t we go to the shooting range first?”

      It turned out that all Mickels had to do was make a call from his cell, since the shooting range was officially part of the US base. Fifteen minutes later, Grip stepped onto the dusty gravel. Just as he’d expected, the place was completely surrounded by desert, with the city barely visible as a gray zone to the southeast, and, in the other direction, the silhouettes of distant mountains in the haze. The place felt alien, a no-man’s-land. After a few steps, the black of his shoes disappeared under the fine dust. He kicked an empty shell. There were hundreds near where he stood. How many bullets were buried in that embankment—and which one was the one?

      In front of the mound, he saw the big rusty stain in the sand, shapeless and darkly ominous. When Grip pressed the toe of his shoe into the middle of it, the bloody sand cracked like crusty snow. Tens of thousands of bullets and shell casings, six identical assault rifles in a locker. Here was a job to keep the forensics technicians busy for a decade. A troubling thought. This shooting range in the desert, this blank space that gave up nothing. Only silence. If he were looking for the right questions to ask, he wouldn’t find them here. Grip did a dutiful lap, but then flattened the stain with his shoe and nodded to Mickels that they could get back in the car.

      The empty dock looked as battered and unchanging as the desert. And just as with the bloodstain, Grip saw the Sveaborg as an island of uncertainty. Not an intruder exactly, but out of place.

      “You’ll find the duty officer on the third deck,” said the watch officer, once Grip had presented his ID. He walked up the gangway and into the shade below the helicopter deck.

      “Welcome aboard!” said a man in a navy T-shirt and shorts. He wasn’t wearing the khakis of the watch officer on the dock: everything past the gangway was Africa and desert, but everything on board was pure Sweden. The man led the way. It cooled off as soon as they reached the ship’s interior, passing the whirling fans and the clatter of activity in that endless maze of gray corridors and steep ladders. Even if Grip wouldn’t admit it, the layout was confusing. He could never have found his way back out if he’d had to. They moved inward and upward. Gradually the detailing became more polished and a little quieter, and then they came to a door made of varnished wood. The man knocked, and when a voice replied within, he said only, “Please,” and disappeared.

      The door opened. Grip left the noisy jumble behind and saw in front of him: power expressed in mahogany and fine rugs. Also, it was two against one. The captain’s cabin resembled the boardroom of a shipping company, down to the pair of ship portraits on the walls. The captain himself sat in a corner sofa, with his arms confidently outstretched. The first officer stood to the side, and slightly in front. A well-rehearsed chamber play, Grip thought, taking a few more steps forward.

      “Welcome aboard,” the first officer СКАЧАТЬ