Читать книгу After the Monsoon: An unputdownable thriller that will get your pulse racing! - Robert Karjel - Страница 15

Djibouti. Little more than a stretch of stony desert and oppressive heat. A colonial leftover, a shard of a country, and a city by the same name. A backwater with only one thing to offer the world: its location. At the crossroads of ship traffic to and from the Suez Canal, the pirate-infested Gulf of Aden, the turmoil of the Arab world, the tentacles of Al-Qaeda and ISIS, the civil wars of Sudan and Ethiopia to the west, and the total anarchy of Somali in the east—there lay Djibouti. An oasis of apparent order, for anyone willing to pay. South of the international airport, the Americans had thousands of troops stationed, in their ever-expanding and only permanent base on the African continent. North of the airport, the French kept their installations, while also housing half a brigade of Foreign Legion soldiers in another part of the city. A flurry of other uniforms came and went.

Grip stepped out of the air-conditioned Air France plane straight into an oven. Africa. It had been a while. The air actually shimmered in the heat. Already, as he turned toward passport control and customs, the sweat was dripping down his back. Grip carried a stack of papers he’d been handed before he left and hadn’t really examined, but after a few stern glances, his passport got stamped with a visa. None of the officials asked questions, not to a single person in the line. Everyone who came to Djibouti obviously had a job to do. The posters advertising desert ruins and camel caravans were merely for show. Grip didn’t see anyone among the passengers who looked like a tourist. You arrived in Djibouti either as crew cut military, or with a briefcase and laptop for business.

A dozen aggressive taxi drivers swarmed in the arrival hall, but they stopped when they saw that Grip had someone waiting. His eyes met the gaze of a tall, ruddy man with a cautious smile. Grip had no idea who’d be meeting him, but he’d spotted the small blue-and-yellow flag on the desert uniform.

“Hej?” the man said in Swedish, more a question than greeting.

“Yes, I’m the one,” Grip replied, and kept walking.

The man, who introduced himself as Captain Tommy Mickels, wore the black armband of the military police on one bicep, marked with a big MP. “I have the car right out here,” he said, pointing through the glass doors.

They loaded Grip’s bags into the white jeep and got in. Once the engine was running, it took a few more minutes for the air conditioner to cool things down. Grip sensed Mickels’s hesitation.

“So, where will it be?” Grip asked.

“The commander is expecting you.”

“The commander?”

“The captain of the Sveaborg. He’s the top brass, in charge of all the Swedes on this mission.”

“And he knows I’m here?”

Mickels smiled without looking at him. “Everyone knows you’re here.”

People within the ranks always worried whenever an outsider stepped in. Grip hadn’t expected anything different, but he was in no rush to make a courtesy call. Shaking hands with a nervous boss, that kind of nonsense could wait. First, he wanted to know what had actually happened, and wasn’t that why the MP was hesitating? The car still hadn’t moved a meter.

“The captain will be around, I’m sure, so why don’t you start by …”

“… bringing you up to speed …” Mickels nodded. They pulled out.

Turning off, they headed to Mickels’s office, not more than ten minutes away. As they drove, he explained that when the Sveaborg was out at sea, the Swedes who did shore jobs stayed inside the French base.

The entrance was tightly guarded: speed bumps, barbed wire, lots of weapons.

“Al-Shabaab and Al-Qaeda,” Mickels said, not needing to explain more.

Behind the walls and fences, they drove slowly along the base’s neat grid of streets. A whole self-contained community: office buildings, little dusty parks, bunkhouses, a bar with plastic chairs and umbrellas, and rows of hangars.

“Here.” White, windowless containers with sprawling antennas formed a little lunar base on the gravel, their air conditioners clattering in the heat. On a pole hung a limp Swedish flag.

They stepped into the cool of a small meeting room. Mickels closed the door to the hallway, shutting out the sound of office work.

“Water?” he asked, opening a refrigerator. Along the walls stood plastic crates of bottled water, stacked as tall as a man. Grip caught the bottle that was thrown to him. Mickels pointed to a chair, and Grip sat down. He tried to quench his thirst while he listened.

The MP was well prepared, starting right in with a PowerPoint and sketches on a big flip chart. It had been just forty-eight hours since the shot was fired. And with cool sincerity, Mickels concluded that the situation was totally fucked up. Grip soon realized that Mickels probably wasn’t the ship captain’s favorite. He was a little too thorough and outspoken to be liked by a manager. Grip let the information wash over him, not bothering to take notes. The way everything flickers at the moment of takeoff.

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.