After the Monsoon Read online

  Hands clean.

  The rubber boats had barely another two hundred meters to go. The pilot turned, leaving the pirate boat and the whole scene behind them, while the copilot announced: “Admiral Chabanenko, we are handing over pirate suspects to you.”

  “Affirmative,” answered the voice of doom. “Good hunting.”

  The pilot looked at his wristwatch. “Note that when we left them at zero seven fifty-three, all five were still alive.”

  The silence in the machine was palpable. The logistics officer must have been feeling some kind of internal moral struggle. They’d gone without a word for more than ten minutes when Slunga finally asked: “What will happen to . . . ?”

  “You don’t want to know,” replied the pilot.

  And then, silence again.

  They’d seen nothing. Hands clean.

  3

  Jenny never said it, could never stand to think it, but the MaryAnn II had been hijacked. Seven pirates on board, their two skiffs towed behind. They waved their guns around impatiently, everywhere, always a finger on the trigger. The first hour, they’d been full of victory and rage. Searching and looting, dragging Jenny along to open lockers, cabinets, and bulkheads. Mostly, they seemed to be looking for food, or racing to find valuables to stuff in their pockets. They’d wolf down a chocolate bar, clear out a bathroom cabinet, nab a little knife with nail scissors, and push on to the next cabin. The slightest misunderstanding was seen as defiance, and then the muzzle was up against Jenny’s face again. Worst was the crushing feeling of powerlessness, every time they grabbed or shouted at the children.

  In one of the skiffs lay a dead man—the one Carl-Adam had shot. Carl-Adam himself had been shot in the hand, and there was a long gash in his thigh. But all in all he’d been fortunate, given the number of shots they’d fired. His luck had only held out so far, however, and now it was over. He’d armed himself, killed one of their own, and now he was the pirates’ defeated enemy. They forced him into one end of the cockpit. He was guarded the whole time, by the unlucky bastard who got back at his prisoner for missing out on all the looting. Random bursts of kicking, rifle-butting, and yelling. Carl-Adam tried to defend himself, barely noticing his wounds, but soon the cockpit was covered in long streaks of blood where he’d braced himself, crawled, and slipped as he was being beaten. His corner looked like a pen where some animal was slowly being slaughtered.

  The whole time, the MaryAnn’s autopilot kept the boat on the same steady heading it was on before the pirate skiffs appeared.

  Jenny managed to keep the children with her while she was being dragged around the ship. Only one thing mattered as long as she had them with her: preventing them from seeing what was happening to their father out on deck. When the first numbing terror subsided, her head spun with one recurring thought: it’s all on me! The thought didn’t exactly make her stronger, but it did make her more wary.

  One face among the pirates, with his narrow almond-shaped eyes and henna-dyed beard, etched itself early in her consciousness. He ransacked the cabinets and ate like the others, but carried his rifle on his back, not in front, and the other pirates were careful never to get in his way. Seeing the way he observed his surroundings, Jenny always made sure to stand between him and Alexandra whenever he looked at her. Despite the looting, he kept the others from stealing the radio and the navigation equipment on the chart table.

  When the thieves had gotten what they wanted and given in to the drowsiness of victory, their leader went up on deck. His rust-red beard shone intensely in the sun. It took Jenny a while to realize that the man was kicking Carl-Adam like the others, but he wanted something specific. “Here!” he shouted, waiting a few seconds for the prisoner’s reaction, and then starting in again. “Here!” Then Jenny got a glimpse of the man’s handheld GPS and understood.

  It would take several days before the pirates grasped that Jenny was the skipper of the MaryAnn. But this time, when Redbeard kicked, she managed to go up on deck and get his attention. With a final kick to his side, bringing Carl-Adam down once again, the pirate leader turned around.

  “Here!” he repeated, reaching out his arm with the GPS right in front of her. The display showed a point on the Somali coast, just south of Harardhere.

  Jenny set the course with the autopilot. They veered to starboard, a gentle turn in the breeze. A new course to the west, toward a place everyone had been told to avoid. Redbeard watched her quietly during the entire maneuver, then checked the course on his own GPS. After that, she was allowed to take care of Carl-Adam.

  The shot had gone straight through his hand. She picked out bone chips, then washed the wound and bandaged it. At least one bone in there was shattered. The gash in his thigh was inches long and deep; she did what she could with a first-aid kit. She had a hard time getting a hold around Carl-Adam’s heavy thigh, and the wound started to bleed badly again, while her arms got shaky before she finally managed to squeeze so hard that it stopped. Her hands were shiny with her husband’s blood, so much of it on herself and her clothes that she could smell the iron. Carl-Adam was panting from exhaustion, and at times his gaze went blank. She started to take off his stained shirt but stopped when she saw all the big bruises forming and the lump rising on his back from the first blow with the rifle butt. How much more, for how long?

  “They’ll miss us” was the first thing he said, when she was nearly done. Carl-Adam was leaning back, and she put an arm around his head in an attempt to comfort him and get close. She thought he meant the kids, that he was already thinking of himself and her as dead.

  “I’m all right,” she said, and tried to smile. Not a second passed without her thinking about Alexandra and Sebastian, left alone in their cabin below deck.

  But Carl-Adam had seen a glimmer of hope, knowing that they’d turned west toward the Somali coast. “The link,” he explained, his voice a whisper. “Everyone will see.”

  On their blog, which they kept so friends and family could follow their trip, their location was automatically updated every ten nautical miles with a small red dot on a map. They probably wouldn’t be able to write another word, but their dotted trail now went counter to all their previous posts about where they were heading. “They’ll sound the alarm.” Even in his weakened state, this was Carl-Adam’s way of relating to what had happened, maintaining his distance, shunning the blood and vulnerability with his hope that someone would see the conflicting data. Jenny didn’t know what to think. He was busy finding a logical solution, while she was doing everything to keep them alive. Below deck, the children were still alone, with at least five pirates.

  “Of course,” she said, kissing Carl-Adam’s forehead. “Someone will get worried, and they’ll find us.”

  The days went by. A sixty-two-foot sailboat towing two skiffs close behind. Westward went the dotted trail on both the MaryAnn’s GPS and the family’s sailing blog. The corpse, left exposed in one of the skiffs, had begun to swell. There were only a few meters between the boats, and from the quarterdeck they could clearly see his face, the teeth shining white in an unnatural grin. Starting from the mangled shoulder, the flesh was turning a bad color and slowly cracking. Whenever they went up on deck, it was impossible not to look, and the weak wind blew the stench at them.

  Below deck, Jenny tried to restore order, unwilling to give in. She kept picking up, even though the floor was soon covered with trash again. Wads of paper and food packaging lay everywhere. She gave up on the toilets, which reeked ever more strongly of urine. But for her own sake and for the dignity of the children, she tried to keep their regular routines. She got up at the same time every morning, tried to cook at least one meal a day in an orderly way, kept busy, supervised Alexandra’s schoolwork. Her efforts were often blocked, as sometimes activities would be forbidden, or stuff would disappear, or someone would take away their food, but still—she’d try again. Jenny’s patience was all that kept the creeping resignation at bay, creating a sense of safety and keeping them from
giving up: they are there, and we are here. Before the pirates, on board she’d always worn shorts and gone barefoot, but now she covered her legs and wore shoes. And as a mother she was forced to choose: the children or Carl-Adam? So their shared cabin had become his infirmary, and she slept with Alexandra and Sebastian. She didn’t leave them alone for a moment, unless absolutely necessary. On board, she and the children moved as a pack. For an hour or so every evening, she tried to make sure all four were together, although her injured husband mostly slept.

  The second time the pirates went after Carl-Adam was when they wanted to go faster; the weak wind was making Redbeard impatient. They shook Carl-Adam and landed a couple of decent punches before Jenny understood and started up the engine. She didn’t try to explain that the tank would soon be empty. They ran out of diesel two days later, and then there was more shouting and a few kicks before they were powered only by the wind again. Carl-Adam recovered somewhat, but he had trouble putting weight on his injured leg, and his hand was an ominous red. He mostly just sipped water and lay on his bunk, and Jenny washed and dressed his wounds every day. They’d run out of bandages, so ripped sheets had to do. When she asked him to move his fingers, only his thumb twitched.

  It wasn’t long before Alexandra made an innocent mistake. One afternoon, on her own initiative, she sat down at the computer on the chart table, to send an essay in for school. Despite all the chaos on board, she still wanted to do well in her last semester of junior high. Jenny couldn’t stop her, and Redbeard saw and understood what a satellite link could lead to. He yelled, Alexandra glared, a loud slap was heard, and she cursed in defiance before Jenny stepped between them, and then he furiously snatched all the cables out of the computer. The link was broken; there was no more dotted trail. Later that evening, when she and the children were below with Carl-Adam, he asked about the commotion. Alexandra shrugged, and Jenny said Redbeard had gotten upset when she’d opened some cans. She held his hand in bed, and in his eyes, saw that he didn’t completely believe her.

  “Someone will notice?” he said.

  “Of course,” she replied. “Someone will miss us.”

  Her lie in front of the children, her own sense of hopelessness while needing to keep up an appearance of strength. It was the loneliest moment she had ever known on the boat.

  Redbeard was called Darwiish by the other pirates, and after the incident at the chart table, Alexandra kept a close eye on him. She’d slip past Jenny and say: “We have to watch out, Redbeard is drunk.” The liquor bottles on board had disappeared from the cabinet on day one. No one saw when he drank, but after nightfall, they sometimes saw his awkward movements and moist lips. From time to time, he’d fire shots into the night, but mostly he kept to the cockpit at the stern, or the middle of the cabin below deck, sitting up straight and thin, and watching everything and everyone through narrow eyes.

  The slowness, the heat, and the weak wind that kept them at a crawl took their toll. Fights broke out among the pirates, and there were new outbreaks of looting to relieve the boredom. When Darwiish roared at or hit one of his own, it was impossible to say if he was settling a dispute or simply acting on impulse. Once, he forced one of the younger pirates, not much more than a boy, to sit at the bow for the whole afternoon without shelter from the sun. Only when he fainted did someone go up on the deck and pull him away.

  Finally, the situation with the bloated corpse became unbearable. Three pirates stepped into the skiff with handkerchiefs tied over their noses and mouths, and they rolled the body over the side. They’d wrapped a chain they’d found on board around his feet as a sinker, but the dead man was so bloated with gas that he floated anyway, with one arm strangely sticking up above the surface. He looked like someone in distress who’d been frozen in his plea for help, as he slowly drifted away, disappearing into the mist.

  Only once was Darwiish caught in a moment of indecision. When a military helicopter crossed the horizon, the pirates came to a standstill on deck, all eyes focused on the same point in the sky. A burst of static on the radio. Darwiish looked at the speaker as if it were a weapon aiming at him. Suddenly there was a chance. The emergency flares, Jenny thought. They were right there in a box next to the cockpit, still intact, she knew it for a fact. She could do it. She had time; they were two steps away. Just tear off the tape and pull. Poof—a red light rising into the sky. What a sight, what defiance. It would have cost them, maybe a life. But still.

  Then she thought of the children, especially Sebastian. She hesitated. The sound of the helicopter died away.

  She should have fired that flare. It was the first thing she thought of two days later when she saw land before the bow of the MaryAnn.

  4

  Annoyingly, he felt himself breathing hard, although he hadn’t moved a muscle. His adrenaline hadn’t yet kicked in, not like for the others. But he could feel the fatigue behind his eyes. As usual, he hadn’t slept.

  Ernst Grip stood outside an apartment door in the Stockholm district of Husby, eyeing the second hand on his watch. In front of him stood a handful of SWAT guys, way overequipped as usual. They’d even brought a battering ram, though they called it something else. At the briefing beforehand, someone had suggested they could just pick the lock—but no, they wanted shock and awe. They’d use “the big master key,” as they called it. No one even laughed when it was said, just a few quick and knowing nods, then the matter was settled. Shock and awe.

  Two men, one on either side, took hold of the bars. Arms out, they clenched their gloved hands into fists, like overtrained athletes winding up to throw something extremely heavy as far as possible. In Grip’s row, lined up behind the strike force, stood the two others from Säpo, the security police. They were the ones in charge, the ones who’d received the order, who wielded the power. The atmosphere was both serious and amped up, as if they were facing something decisive, something at once important and extremely dangerous. And Grip didn’t like it. From where he stood, there were too many murky agendas. Of course, there was fear, but also a kind of unchecked enthusiasm before they’d even begun. What was it they were actually about to do? He looked at his second hand—fifty-five. Just seconds to go.

  Ernst Grip had only a vague idea about the men standing around him. Within Säpo, he worked in the bodyguard detachment. Official visit to Dubai one day; the next, standing by the queen as she cut a blue-and-yellow ribbon for a hospital in Skövde. Working for the royals had no cred among the bodyguards, who saw it as a place for newbies needing to prove themselves or old guys who’d lost their touch. The ones who were for real got to accompany the foreign minister to some refugee camp on the Syrian border, despite all threat analyses flashing red. There were a few among Grip’s colleagues who thought he’d been shunted aside, but those who’d been there longer and had heard the rumors guessed at the real reason behind Grip’s job. He had a reputation for being good with his fists, among those who’d seen him. Maybe that was why he’d gotten called in so fast for this apartment raid. At least, that was what he hoped. Nothing more than that.

  Now it was late Sunday afternoon, and already Grip had taken the royal couple to a fund-raiser at Stockholm Concert Hall. He’d driven them back to Drottningholm Palace, then returned to Säpo headquarters in Solna to drop off his equipment, planning to head home.

  Everything at headquarters was dead, except in a room full of people where the phones and printers were going crazy. Grip hadn’t paid attention, only walked by. But then while he sat alone in the echoing locker room, a face that had nothing to do with bodyguards looked in: “Come on, we need you too.” So Grip had stood up.

  The operations room was in chaos, with more information coming in than the staff could handle. The people around Grip were barely familiar to him, by either face or name. The instructions were unclear. “You know, on a Sunday you can’t fucking reach anyone, and we need at least one more to tag along.”

  They passed him some papers with signatures. “The boss has given you c
learance.” There were dozens of bosses in the building, but Grip didn’t ask questions. He saw it as a simple matter: they were shorthanded and needed extra muscle. Besides, a Sunday afternoon alone in his apartment wasn’t something he looked forward to. “Can’t just rely on SWAT for this.” Someone winked at him. A forced entry apparently, but then what? People were so stressed that they were dropping things. Someone spoke nonstop in English on an encrypted phone, mostly obedient strings of: “Yes, yes,” and “Please say again.” Body armor and firearms began to appear on a large table. An apartment blueprint was taped to one wall.

  And then SWAT sauntered in.

  Already dressed for action, they sat down, while the security police officers quickly took their equipment from the table and improvised a briefing. Stress and loose ends, sure, that’s what they had to deal with at times, Grip had seen it before. But it was during the briefing that Grip felt his first wave of uneasiness. The thing with the lock, for one. Not so much the battering ram itself, as the sense that they were going in full force. A piece of the larger world would play itself out in an immigrant neighborhood of Stockholm on a Sunday. They were facing a suspected terrorist cell linked to ISIS, and they had to strike now.

  Obviously, they were acting on foreign intelligence, though no one said that out loud. The jargon always sounded a certain way, whenever Washington and Paris were involved. There was talk of weapons caches and suicide bombers. Sweden had long been dismissed as a backwater that didn’t take matters seriously enough. A safe haven for the naive. No one could remember the name of the guy who blew himself up a few years before near Queen Street, and there’d been some change in attitudes afterward, but still. They’d never gotten wind of something big, always been relegated to the B team. Then suddenly, this active cell. Apparently, there were people in that apartment right now. Hands in jam jars: money, weapons, bombs. It was like a perfect hand in poker. You could take the whole pot. “Now, you little fuckers!” There was no limit to ambition, and that was precisely what gave Grip the sense that something was wrong.