After the Monsoon Page 7
Six Swedes had been out on the firing range. They belonged to a MovCon unit. Their job was to keep a steady flow of equipment and supplies arriving from around the world, so that the war against the pirates could roll along without interruption: ammunition, fuel, bottled water, Band-Aids, DVDs, and sunscreen. Mostly, they handled air transports to and from Djibouti, the loading and unloading, sorting and checking off. They were led by Lieutenant Per-Erik Slunga, who now lay with rigor mortis and a hole through his head.
For help, MovCon relied on a handful of local Djiboutian staffers. They were the ones who’d been at the shooting range. No—of course no one else had any inkling that the group had planned an outing to a shooting range, far beyond where they could be seen or heard. The escapade had apparently been Per-Erik’s own idea, an attempt to do some bonding and team building. Socializing over a thousand 5.56 cartridges. There wasn’t a rule book on the planet covering that kind of insanity.
It was all the lieutenant’s idea, the dead man’s idea, his five subordinates said afterward. Good, that was something concrete to hold on to, Grip thought. Forty-eight hours since it happened, forty-seven hours for them to talk among themselves.
Mickels had prepared personnel files for Grip. Six folders, each showing the solemn face of a person in uniform, inside a plastic cover.
“What’s the group doing now?” Grip asked.
“Same job, same place, only now with their sergeant as boss. The planes keep coming and going, you know. They still need to be loaded and unloaded for the war against the pirates. Nothing stops.”
Grip looked at the sketch on the flip chart showing who stood where when the shot hit: a circle for a Swede, a black dot for a Djiboutian. Some were shown up by the targets on the embankment, others thirty meters in back. A dotted line was drawn from two circles that stood close together on the shooting range, a black one and a white one, leading to Per-Erik Slunga’s position.
“Everyone in the group agrees, that’s where the shot came from.”
“Uh-huh,” said Grip.
As if to underscore his fairness, Mickels said, “I’ve spoken to each one individually, and also in groups.”
“The Swedes?”
“Yes, exactly.”
“And the locals? The Djiboutians?”
“Difficult, only once through an interpreter.”
Grip nodded, then asked, “So whose finger was on the trigger?”
Mickels pointed to the black circle where the line began. “It was Abdoul Ghermat’s.”
“And he was standing next to?”
“Milan Radovanović, who witnessed it.”
“What does Abdoul say himself?”
“He denies it.”
“And the other locals?”
“You have to understand . . . I don’t have a police force here, it’s only me. I heard them only once in a group, right after it happened, with the interpreter. Couldn’t get a coherent story out of them, it was all just a mess.”
“Were they high?”
Mickels hesitated. “Everyone, except maybe Mr. Nazir, the foreman, was high on khat. They were high when it happened, high every day before and every day after. But I didn’t mention the khat in my report.” Grip just looked quietly at him, waiting for what would come next. “The captain wanted it that way.” Grip kept silent. “We don’t talk about the local workers being high on the job. It’s impossible to apply Swedish rules. They are, after all, employed by us.”
“So the captain has already read and approved your report?”
“He wanted it that way.”
“You mean, so everything would be neatly sewn up before I arrived?”
Mickels didn’t answer but was clearly embarrassed.
“Per-Erik Slunga’s body has barely cooled down,” Grip went on, and then he added, “Did the captain change much in your report?”
“He cut a few small things.” The ruddy military police officer’s cheeks flamed with indignation.
Grip kept pushing. “Like the khat?”
“Yes, like the khat.”
“Anything else?”
Mickels’s gaze said that was as far as he’d go. “The report 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 added. He was the third person wearing a Swedish uniform who’d said that to Grip in the past few hours, only now, he didn’t buy it. The captain nodded quickly; he was the meaty type who gave the impression of being very busy. Always making people feel he’d rather be doing something else. The first officer was dark and more chiseled, with a penetrating gaze.
“Right, you’re the one from the police,” he said.
“Security police,” Grip corrected him. That little addition was rarely a disadvantage, when it came to balance of power.
“Yes, this is tragic,” continued the first officer. “We’re still . . . shaken.” He seemed to mean it.
The captain drummed impatiently on the leather sofa. “Tragic, but completely out of bounds.”
The first officer followed his lead. “We didn’t know anything beforehand about the excursion to the shooting range.” The captain’s career had to be protected, no blotches on his record. “You’ve got everything there, in our report about the incident.” The first officer nodded toward a printout on the coffee table, which was otherwise bare.
“Thanks, I already received a copy from Mickels.”
The captain stopped himself, just as he was sliding the report over.
Mickels would catch hell for that, Grip thought, for upstaging his boss with an outsider.
“By the way, where are you holding Slunga’s remains?”
The captain looked vacantly at Grip, who’d directed the question his way.
“Where’s the body?” Still that same look, and Grip realized that he didn’t know. The captain only waited, hoping to be rescued.
“We’re keeping it on board,” said the first officer. “In the cold room. We have a couple of mortuary compartments, just in case.”
“How convenient. Autopsy?”
“We’re a combat unit, not a forensics clinic. He’s down there, in the same condition as when he came in.”
“Excellent, then at least there’s one thing that’s been left untouched.”
“Excuse me, what are you driving at?”
“Just that everything seems to keep rolling along, even though a person has just been shot to death.”
“Yes, it probably looks that way,” replied the first officer, “but that’s because we have other problems to deal with. It’s real here. Every extra hour in port is an hour lost at sea. Out there, ships are getting hijacked and people are being shot all the time.”
“And a dead Swede . . .”
“An accident at a shooting range in Djibouti is tragic, but the world doesn’t stop for it. So what do you want us to do differently?”
Well, what the hell did he want? They couldn’t have isolated all the Swedes in the MovCon unit, he realized that. Was it the report that annoyed him, slapped together and approved so quickly? No, it wasn’t that either. Or not that alone, but the way it all added up: the atmosphere of arrogance. Expecting that he’d made the journey simply to sign off on their version. He had no other theory than the one they were feeding him, but it all seemed so simple, the slightest question met by a perfectly reasonable answer. What did he want? He didn’t want to feel stupid, but he did now, because he had nothing else to go on.
Before Grip answered, the captain, who seemed uncomfortable with the tone, cut in. “Everyone under my command has received an explicit order from me to cooperate with your police investigation. Your inquiry, that is.”
“And you think you need to give an order,” Grip said, “for that to happen, I mean?” Now he was being rude, and he knew it.
Silence.
“When do you head back out to sea?” Grip asked instead.
“Two days from now.” It was the first officer, stepping in once again. He held Grip in his gaze. “MovCon will be busy transporting matériel to the ship until then, but of course you can question anyone, anytime. I think Mickels has given you background on who they are and how they work.”
“He has.”
“And what about the Djiboutians?”
“Only that the local police have arrested the man accused of firing the shot.”
“What goes on there is completely beyond our control,” said the captain.
“And where can I find the rest of the Africans?” Grip asked.
“I spoke with Sergeant Hansson, who took over the unit after Slunga,” said the first officer. “Apparently, most of the locals quit after this incident, and I’m afraid they’ll be difficult to track down.”
“It is what it is. But the Swedes are all back at work?”
“Of course.”
“Well then, I’ll want to question them tomorrow, the whole gang at once.”
“Question them? You mean you already have suspicions?”
“Journalists interview, and police question, that’s all.”
The first officer shrugged.
“We . . .” The captain sounded conciliatory. “We’re thinking of holding a small dinner tomorrow, here on board, and we’d like you to come. At seven, that was the idea.”
“Think jacket.”
Grip didn’t understand.
“For dinner tomorrow. If that works.”
Grip, who hadn’t changed since he landed, stood there without a tie, looking rumpled. What was this about, he wondered, some sort of game, giving him a dress code?
“Jacket, of course,” Grip replied with a nod. “And my questioning?”
“I’ll take it up with Mickels,” replied the first officer.
Then there was silence again.
“For me, there’s just one detail left before I call it a day,” Grip said. “Where am I staying?”
“Hm,” said the first officer, taking a moment to remember. “The Sheraton was completely booked, so it must be the Kempinski. A night there costs a bloody fortune, but that’s what’s available, from what I understand.”
“The Kempinski?”
“The best Djibouti has to offer.”
Grip had done his homework. The Kempinski. Not just the best in Djibouti, but possibly the best anywhere in Africa. Did they want to smoke him out, get him to stay as short a time as possible, fearing what some police chief would say about his travel expenses?
“That will be perfect.” The navy men were apparently accustomed to a different kind of boss.
“Until seven o’clock, tomorrow, then,” said the captain. Time to go.
“The quartermaster will drive you to your hotel,” said the first officer, glancing at the clock. “He’s out running an errand in town. It shouldn’t be long. You can wait for him in the officers’ mess.”
Grip hadn’t taken more than one step toward the door before the first officer noticed his hesitation. He had no idea how to get out. The maze had won.