Two seconds to go. Grip pressed the button on the little voice recorder in the pocket of his bulletproof vest.
The battering ram was swung back, on the second, like a freight train picking up speed toward a pile of boards . . . “Now, you fuckers!”
The entire door collapsed in a shower of splinters. And then they went at it.
Two dark men were in the first room—at the briefing, someone had said Somalis—and a third ran back through the apartment as the wave of police and weapons swept in. When one of the overtaken men raised his arm, probably just for protection, the blow that followed knocked him flat on his back. The officers yelled, nonstop, and one drove his knee into the back of the other man who was already down on his stomach. Grip looked for weapons or suspicious devices with electrical wires. As he moved past, he noticed a table with a few stacks of foreign bills. He hadn’t lost speed, hadn’t stopped for a second. He and two of the SWAT officers rushed ahead to find the third man. A bedroom door slammed shut in front of them, but it was ripped right off its hinges by two flying shoulders. The Somali, if that’s what he was, had been pushing from behind and was thrown back into the room. The two SWAT guys dressed in black were on him in an instant. Grip saw a trail of blood spatter on the carpet. It was impossible to determine if the man on the floor was just whimpering in pain or still resisting.
“I got this,” Grip said, moving in quickly between them. He’d already holstered his pistol; the other two struggled to hold the man while they fumbled with their equipment. Grip approached, taking control. He was bigger than the two police officers, despite wearing only body armor, while they were dressed for two weeks of rioting.
“You check the bathroom.”
No one would be in there, he was certain of it. He trusted his instincts. He thought it was enough now, with all the punches, knees, and shouting. There were only three, and their hands were under control. No one would be able to press a detonator. The SWAT men left to check. The man beneath Grip had a bad nosebleed, dark blood running over dark skin, and stared at him wide-eyed and confused. Grip hadn’t even brought along handcuffs, but that wouldn’t be a problem. He pulled the skinny young man to his feet with a single move, the man’s arms hanging like fragile pendulums.
The two SWAT officers came out of the bathroom, the first giving a quick shake of his head, and then they hurried out with heavy steps. There was another bedroom somewhere. Grip heard loud voices and commotion behind him—they were ransacking every inch of the place. Just a few more seconds, before the others would also realize that they’d gotten all of the men. Then it all would wind down. Grip held the African with one hand wrapped in the front of his loose shirt. Blood was dripping on his fist—at least he’d brought gloves. With his other hand, Grip reached for a hand towel slung over a chair and gave it to the young man for his nosebleed. He took the towel but left it dangling from his hand.
Grip was alone in the room at the back of the apartment. Still all that noise and struggle behind him. What the hell were they doing? Everything in the operation had gone as it should, and now they were done. A feeling of vulnerability came over him. He looked around, both ways, but no one else was there. The man in his hold gasped and trembled. A creeping sense of unease. Something was going on. Grip scanned the face of the man standing in front of him but got back only a blank stare. No, the world could not be read so easily. Matchstick arms and frightened eyes revealed nothing about the people they were facing: petty criminals or hardened terrorists. But wasn’t it enough now? What the hell were they doing? Just a few more seconds, then it would all wind down.
5
The HMS Sveaborg had docked a few hours before in Djibouti, home base during her mission in Africa. The sun had passed its peak, but still no one moved, not if they could help it. The ship’s dock guards suffered in their desert hats, kept to short shifts, and drank huge quantities of water. When sailors hauled garbage bags from a cargo door and threw them into an empty dumpster, it instantly began to stink in the heat.
A white Toyota Land Cruiser drove onto the loading dock, which was the size of two football fields, with huge cranes on rails guarding either end. The car, with Swedish military plates, pulled right up to the dock guards’ table. A lone sergeant stepped out, wearing the same desert uniform as the watch officer on the dock, but a more pleasant expression. As if he’d sat in an air-conditioned office all day and knew that within half a minute, he’d be inside again. Or possibly because, even though he was Swedish, he’d spent much of his adult life in this climate and knew how much everyone else suffered.
“Hi,” he said, nodding to the watch officer, who raised his head just enough to see under the brim. The sergeant walked around the car and opened the tailgate. “Jönsson, make sure you come ashore for real this time. There’s plenty to do here in town. Whatever you want.” He took out two metal suitcases covered with baggage tags, slung a small cooler bag across his back, and slammed the door. “Damn it, all you have to do is ask, while you’re out on the boat, you’ve always got MovCon here. We know all the places.” He stopped in front of the desk, slightly raising up both bags. “Just some spare parts, arrived by plane this morning while you were out at sea.”
The watch officer nodded and the sergeant went up the gangway.
The helicopter stood on the flight deck, as pampered and fragile as a patient in intensive care. A tarp draped over the rotor blades gave some shade to the men working below, naked from the waist up. The fuselage panels were stripped off, exposing the engine and the gearbox, while a few pairs of arms reached inside.
The sergeant nodded as he came up to the last ladder on deck, but he said nothing until he was under the shade of the tarp. “Where is . . . ?”
“I’m here.” An older technician looked out from behind a door into the cockpit. “And both of them made it.” He smiled and took the bags, moving much more cautiously than the courier handing them over.
When the sergeant pulled out the cooler bag, the technician said: “Thanks, but don’t get me mixed up in that. Take it to the guys over there.” He nodded toward a few others who were working on the machine.
Two of them met him by the tail rotor.
“Six cold ones,” said the sergeant, smiling wide like someone with an answer to everything, “and you can knock them back as soon as she’s fixed and ready to go. And a whole bottle of Talisker. It was Talisker that you wanted, right?”
“Yeah,” replied one of the technicians. He looked at the cooler bag, his body shining with sweat. “Salminen’s totally sick of this ship. He can’t stand being on board anymore, and he needs cheering up.”
“Beer’s on me, but for the whiskey, it’ll be nine hundred.”
“Nine hundred!” said the other one under his breath, clearly annoyed.
“Hello? This is Djibouti.” Very discreetly, he took a look around the deck beyond the helicopter. If the wrong officer saw them, he’d be in trouble.
He got a shrug in reply from the pissed-off technician. The other said: “We’ll drink it on shore, promise.”
“Doesn’t bother me, either way,” said the sergeant.
“The cash?”
“We can settle up another time. Or else, you can take me on a helo joyride. My boss just got one.”
The technicians laughed for a moment. Everyone knew it would never happen.
The sergeant drove back out in his white Toyota. It took a while to get out of the port, a landscape of containers and miscellaneous cargo waiting to be sent somewhere else. There were long rows of little Chinese trucks, hundreds of them, of a type never seen inside Djibouti, and huge stockpiles of pipes. By this time of day, the few longshoremen around lay sleeping in the shade next to their water bottles.
At the gate, a uniformed guard was stationed at the entrance and exit, and anyone leaving had to show proper identification. The sergeant pressed his ID card against the side window without turning his head. In the photo, he was clean-shaven and had an intensity in his eyes that
seemed to question what the photographer would actually do with his picture. The guard had to settle for seeing him in profile—with cap, sunglasses, and beard. Neither man bothered to care, and without a moment’s hesitation, he was waved through.
The road out, one of the few that was paved, led through the city’s low-rise downtown. Despite the miserable state of the roads, there were many roundabouts, a legacy of the French, the last outsiders to hold official power. The sergeant drove through one with a few tired dolphins made of concrete in the center and passed by a small amusement park that never seemed to be open. The neighborhood was a mixture of filthy vacant lots, small workshops, and walled houses. Everywhere, wild dogs limped and stared. He turned down a busier street, with shop advertisements painted on the facades, and a big poster mounted on a pole, with the president’s broad smile and a message of progress. Here people were out, and along both sides of the street stood small stalls, every ten meters, with burlap roofs shielding them from the sun. The same damp burlap covered the goods on all the tables. The vendors were women, and all they sold was khat. The leaves had to be kept fresh to stay potent. It was long after one o’clock, when the women were allowed to set up their stalls, and nearby shopkeepers waiting for customers had been standing for a while, chewing in their doorways. An entire nation was getting its daily buzz.
The sergeant picked up speed where the buildings thinned out and the asphalt turned to gravel. He passed a few warning signs that marked a military training area, drove a few kilometers without seeing a soul, and then stopped at a gravel yard.
Even here, they were expecting him. “Damn it, Hansson, we’ve been waiting for almost half an hour,” said Slunga, his lieutenant, when he got out of the car.
“Had to make deliveries to the helicopter,” he said effortlessly.
“And that was all you left on the Sveaborg?”
“What else?”
Slunga looked incredulously at Hansson. Behind the lieutenant sat two white Land Cruisers and a small bus. There were half a dozen Swedes wearing his same desert uniform, and an equal number of civilian Djiboutians. Beyond the gravel yard were a few low shrubs, otherwise only stone and dust. The others had gotten out, some just standing there, others joking around, some of the soldiers pointing and showing their equipment to the Djiboutians.
“Yes, but what now?” said the sergeant, swinging his AK-5 onto his shoulder.
Mr. Nazir, the Djiboutian foreman, looked concerned. He spoke to Slunga in English but looked at Hansson. “I really do not think we should. Maybe tomorrow.”
Slunga hesitated. “Let’s do this the way we said,” said Hansson, and he started walking. And the whole group set off in a muddle of English, Swedish, and Somali. Several of the younger Djiboutians talked loudly and spat khat juice around themselves, already much too interested in the weapons they got to carry.
“Are we really?” asked one of the soldiers in disbelief, keeping a tight hold on his own gun. “But we’d set conditions, and Nazir promised that . . .”
Slunga heard him and turned to the foreman: “Mr. Nazir, you promised us. Why?”
The man made a slow gesture with his hands, a prayer for understanding in the face of defeat. Apparently, he’d promised that none of the men would arrive high, and at least he wasn’t chewing himself, but most of the others unabashedly kept a ball in one cheek, and their teeth shone green with the juice. “Please,” he said, “tomorrow instead, but before lunch, like we agreed.” It was not only the Djiboutians who had failed to keep their word. Slunga said nothing but hurried to get away from the foreman.
“Damn them,” muttered one of the soldiers. One Djiboutian posed with an assault rifle, while another took pictures with his cell phone. “Great, great,” shouted one of the Swedes to them. “You see what fucking nonsense this is,” said another to a third, under his breath, in Swedish. The camaraderie was playacting that existed only in English.
One of the Swedes stopped walking.
“Come on, what the hell’s wrong?” someone asked.
“No fucking cell phones. I will not be in the fucking picture if we’re doing stuff like this. Tell them!”
One of the Africans lay on his back in the dust with sunglasses on his forehead, pretending to surrender, while another straddled him holding a gun without its magazine and saying “ta-ta-ta” while making his whole body jerk. Mr. Nazir tried to stop them and was clearly humiliated by their refusal to obey. Walking at the head of the whole entourage was a man humping his surroundings with an AK-5 held against his crotch like a huge cock, while his friend shouted encouragement from behind and took pictures.
A corporal tried to restore order, but finally Hansson had to yell at the top of his lungs to get through to them, so that at least the cell phones disappeared.
Soon they arrived at the actual shooting range. Hidden behind a hill, it was desolate and flat, with only a few dirt berms built up at the end.
“We’ll be in deep shit for this.”
“It’s okay. Not a single fucking person around.”
“Damn hot, no?” asked a soldier in English, trying to take the edge off what had been set in motion.
The Swede got a shrug for an answer and a questioning look from khat-shiny eyes. “Bullets, you have the bullets?”
6
With Ernst Grip still clutching his shirt, the young man began to return to his senses. He said nothing, had barely come around, but at least he’d wiped his nose, and he stared down at all the blood on the towel. Then he cleared his throat low, as if to regain his dignity, and looked up at Grip. It was as if he’d said he was ready to proceed, to wait patiently, to do whatever was expected of him. Beneath the arch of his eyebrows, his eyes revealed an underlying sadness.
“Secure!” someone shouted from farther back in the apartment, and just as Grip was about to pull the youth out toward the living room, the other two security police officers came rushing into the bedroom. They were dragging the suspected terrorists along with them, both with their hands cuffed behind their back. One looked scared and stumbled along, while the other looked tall and defiant with every step.
He glared at Grip and the one who was dragging him. Impressive, thought Grip for a second, that the man could resist such a show of force. But that didn’t explain the look in his eyes. At the same time, the young man he was holding grew anxious, lurched and mumbled something, as if the other’s expression was a call to arms. Grip shook him and he grew still.
Grip wondered what they were planning to do to the two men in the bedroom. “What’d you find out there?” he asked.
“We need to get more,” said one of the security police officers, without looking at him. All the SWAT guys were somewhere else. At first, Grip didn’t realize what was happening. Something unspoken had been agreed on, and the three detained men understood more than he did himself. He had a deep sense of foreboding when one of them whimpered. Out of reflex, he tightened his hold on the young man’s shirtfront. When one of his coworkers yanked open the bathroom door, the terrified prisoner threw himself down on the bed, trying to stay away from the open door. He lay on his back and kicked, before he was captured again. He pleaded. They were going to get him in there, some kind of shit was about to go down, but the Säpo guy who held him couldn’t drag him by himself, so the other officer had to let go of the defiant one and grab the man’s legs. And in that instant, the man wound up and threw a powerful kick.
Ernst Grip saw in a split second what was happening, the step back and the kick that would have hit his coworker from the side. But its force, just as it was about to land, rebounded right back as it met Grip’s own kick. Not a clean hit, but the impact went straight to the gut. Sensing something, the police officer turned around. Behind him, the man lay curled on the floor, groaning, his arms cramping from the handcuffs when he tried to pull them to his stomach.
“Never mind,” said Grip. “What are you . . . ?”
“Just hold down those two.”
The ma
n who’d tried a futile escape over the bed was pulled into the bathroom by the security police officers. The last thing Grip saw before the door slammed shut was that they’d turned on the bathtub taps. Soon, from the other side, came terrified screams.
Now Grip was alone with one man who was bleeding, and the other, who was doubled over in a bedroom. Trapped. They knew that Grip would be loyal. None of the SWAT team was in sight; they must have been told to stay out and look for evidence. That way there were no witnesses, at least, no one who wasn’t 100 percent loyal. That was that. All this unspent energy, when the final confrontation never happened. They probably hadn’t found anything useful out there, maybe some cash and a few unused cell phones. But then again, they had these men, three terrorists traced to ISIS, that’s the thing. Tips, notifications, hundreds of cell numbers, intercepted calls, transactions traced and lost—the Americans, or the French, or whoever they were, they knew. They’d pointed their finger, and now the Swedes would seize their chance. They had to. They couldn’t leave empty-handed, not again.
And Ernst Grip, that bodyguard who kept to himself, the one no one cared about, but who was a hell of a fighter, would keep watch outside. He was the type who couldn’t afford to say anything if you needed to turn up the heat. Two security police coworkers with far more influence than he in the corridors of power, and totally single-minded, had seen their chance. Grip had anticipated only the kick, not the other thing that was coming. Not until the bathroom door had closed.
The man with the nosebleed moved restlessly at the end of Grip’s fist, while the man on the floor looked up. He was still panting, and there was something broken in his eyes. The whole world knew what anonymous security officers, handcuffed men, and full bathtubs added up to. Behind the closed door, they heard the water still running, and their friend’s senseless shrieks.
After the Monsoon Page 4