The first officer knew there was muscle behind the message coming out of Stockholm, but said anyway: “It’s up to us to weigh the request against operational risk.”
“I just need a couple of pictures taken from the helicopter. You can live with that. Can I at least talk to the flight crew?”
The first officer was interrupted by something on a screen farther away, then came back. “Wait a minute,” he said, lifting a headset.
It was a short conversation. Grip didn’t hear a word of what was said, but he understood that the first officer was talking to the captain. Then they climbed up a ladder and turned a few corners, inside what for Grip was still an incomprehensible maze. Soon enough, they were in a large room with yellow walls and intense fluorescent lights.
“Yes?” said a man standing and bracing his arms on a table, looking at them as though they must have gotten lost. Grip saw the stubble, then the Finnish-sounding name on the flight suit, and realized who they were dealing with.
“We need to schedule a flight,” explained the first officer.
“Right, the captain just called, some kind of reconnaissance, apparently.” There were a few others wearing flight suits in the room, but they barely noticed the visitors, sitting in front of their bulky computers.
“Not a few passes, only one. And you will remain over the water, not go one meter inland from the Somali coast.”
“I wouldn’t even dream of it,” replied the flight commander.
“Excellent.” The first officer stood there for a while, until one of the other pilots looked up from his computer, and then he nodded and left. The unshaven pilot waited until the door had closed, and then said, “First the captain himself calls, and then the first officer shows up—so where do you really want to go?” Grip picked up Judy Drexler’s now somewhat crumpled page and pointed. “But you realize, this is thirty kilometers inland from Barawe. It’ll be just a dot on the screen if we stay on the coast.”
“Of course,” replied Grip, ready to start arguing.
“What’s there?”
“I really don’t know.”
“But something happened on the ground there, and that’s why the Americans flew you out here in a V-22?”
“Yes.”
The man with the decision-making power turned to one of the others. “Olsson, you and I will fly this one.”
With that, the sleepwalker atmosphere in the room instantly shifted. They exchanged a few quick words about map data, location intelligence, and weather that might develop. Grip’s new host took him down into the ship, and in a cabin labeled BOARDING TEAM, he stuck his head into the semidarkness where a pair of bunks stood.
“Wallinder and Sandahl, now’s your chance for a helicopter ride. But make sure you’re properly suited up. See you on deck in forty-five minutes.”
It was crowded in the helicopter cabin at takeoff. In addition to Grip and the two well-equipped soldiers, the helicopter crew’s mission specialist was on board too. As soon as they took off from the ship and shot out across the sea, he opened the cabin door and let off a short burst of machine-gun fire, then turned and announced to the cockpit, “Now we’re in business.”
They passed low over the coast, barely more than twenty meters up. They were far enough away from the ship, but still wanted to make sure a lucky radar operator aboard the Sveaborg couldn’t snitch to the high command. Beneath them, sand and scrub.
With ten kilometers to go, they rose up higher, making an arc around what was still just a dot on the navigation system. The mission specialist began scouting the area with the camera mounted to the helicopter’s underbelly. There was a road, barely more than a rut edged by low vegetation, but still clearly making a straight line through the slightly rolling landscape of gravel and sand. In a depression among some trees, they saw the square shapes of houses built of stone. After a few checks, they confirmed that the dot put them there. The image was blown up to maximum size, making everything look shaky, and still the infrared camera didn’t detect the slightest sign of life.
“We have to go in closer,” said the mission specialist, and the helicopter veered toward it.
“The big house,” he said after a moment, pointing to his monitor, “it looks slightly burned on one side, and the sand next to it is blackened.” When they came around on the opposite side, they saw that where the door had been, there was now just a hole. Part of the roof had collapsed, but it was impossible to see into the building from the air.
“But all this you already knew,” said the voice from the cockpit into Grip’s headset, while he looked out over the desolation through a side window.
“Yes, but I need more.”
Grip and the two soldiers disembarked and crouched down together as the helicopter took off again, sending the sand whirling around them in a nauseating cloud that tore at their skin. It would circle above—twenty minutes, not a second more, that’s what the half-Finn had given them.
Grip had only a borrowed pistol; one of the soldiers raised his automatic rifle and went first through the hole into the house. They’d already guessed what awaited them, from the stench that engulfed them once the rotor wind died down and the still air quivered again in the heat.
Grip tucked his gun back into the holster as he entered. There were no survivors. Stones and mortar were scattered everywhere, and an interior wall had collapsed when the missile exploded. The bodies lay there, less burned than Grip had expected; it was the shrapnel that had killed them—one was missing both an arm and a leg. Four bodies, parts of them swollen and parts sunken in. For almost two days, they’d been lying there. It was dark in the house, despite the light coming in through holes in the walls and ceiling, so Grip borrowed a flashlight and went closer, to get a better look at the men. The soldier who’d left the house shouted something from outside.
“There,” he said, when Grip came out, pointing with his weapon. At first it looked like just a scrap of cloth in the sand, maybe a hundred meters away. But then Grip made out the shoe soles, and he walked up to them. The man lay in a way that suggested he’d leapt into the air at the moment of death. Now the wind was calm, but it must have been blowing hard earlier, as the body was mostly covered with sand. Grip began pushing it aside with his foot. He’d noticed that the men in the house were wearing sandals, but this one wore proper shoes. His shirt was white, stained with dried blood. Grip shoved hard with his foot, to make the sand fall away from the man’s face. He lay with one cheek down. To make certain, Grip had brought a printout of his passport photo, but he didn’t even need to take it out. The man’s face was completely untouched. It wasn’t hard to imagine the events that lay behind that leap across the sand. The man’s instinct had been to get away from the house, away from the poor suckers inside. Somehow, he’d managed to avoid the first hit; maybe he’d just gotten outside and started running after the explosion. But against those with infrared and night vision in the desert darkness, he had no chance. He made it a hundred meters, a maximum of twenty seconds, then someone had fired again.
Khalid Delmar lay stretched out in the sand with a cloth bag over one shoulder. Grip felt around and took out four passports. Two American, one Belgian, and one Danish. All the pictures were of young Somalis, whose journey back home had ended suddenly.
Grip glanced up toward the helicopter’s black silhouette high above and went over to the soldiers.
“We have to bury them.”
“We didn’t bring shovels, and we only have ten minutes left,” replied the one who was in radio contact with the helicopter.
“The man over there,” said Grip, pointing behind him, “he will get a decent burial.”
When the helicopter landed to pick them up, all three were breathing hard. They’d done what they could, using their hands and feet. A pile of earth and sand rose up where Delmar had fallen, with a ring of stones as some kind of marker. Although it was strangely quiet in the helicopter on the ride back, and Grip felt the two soldiers’ eyes on him, he said n
ot a word. When they’d landed aboard the Sveaborg again, finished up, and were ready to leave the helicopter on the flight deck, the first officer came up.
He stood with his legs wide apart in the breeze and asked Grip, “Well, did you find anything interesting?” The pilot who’d led the mission stepped forward and said, “Nothing. Impossible to see anything from that distance,” so that both his own crew and the two soldiers would be on the same page.
“Gravel and sand,” Grip added. In his back pocket, he had four passports and a leather bracelet that had fallen off Delmar’s wrist when he’d laid the body out, before they’d covered it up.
A few hours after the sun went down, Grip went out into the sea air. He stood alone on the quarterdeck. Above him was the helicopter, lashed down for the night, but the sides were open to the sea. He went all the way to the back and stood in the stern, gazing at the wake’s white line out into the night.
He’d just been up in the radio room, talking with Judy Drexler over the satellite phone. On an encrypted line, the conversation had been short and devastating. He confirmed what they’d both feared.
“I’m sorry” was all she could say, and Ernst Grip couldn’t even say that.
He’d also told her about the other four found at the same location and given her the names from the passports. They were all between nineteen and twenty-three. “But hardly completely innocent,” Grip said.
“And not savvy enough to turn off their cell phones when they were brought together like that.”
There had been a long silence, with only space speaking on the satellite channel, before Grip added, “He was just getting them back home.”
Now Grip took the four passports he was holding and tossed them into the sea. Four dark flakes spinning in the white foam of the wake. Then, nothing.
The last thing Judy Drexler had said was “Anything else?” She knew. Of course, she did.
“I need something major to give my bosses,” said Grip, who was far beyond tiptoeing, “so that everything that happened in Somalia and Kenya can be conveniently forgotten.”
“Otherwise, things might get uncomfortable for us, concerning the death of a Swedish-Somali?”
“Not just for you, mostly for my own sake.”
“Thank you, I just wanted you to say that, and not take this for granted. I’ve already prepared something. We’ll get it out in time for the evening news.”
Grip weighed the leather bracelet in his hand after the passports were tossed into the sea. It was strung with black wooden beads, like prayer beads worn around his wrist. It was just a reflex that made him take it when it had fallen off Delmar’s arm into the sand. The need to have solid proof of something. But evidence was of no use, not now. What he needed was to cleanse himself, and then to free himself. The bracelet needed to go the way of the passports; that was why he’d brought it up on deck.
But it went back into his pocket again. The wake had swallowed enough, and for a while, he couldn’t understand his own reluctance.
58
When it was still nighttime in Stockholm, CNN broke the news that while American special forces led an operation to protect vital national interests, they also rescued the Swedish hostages. And as usual when it came to special forces, nothing more came from the American side. The morning news shows on Swedish TV had to scramble to find archival images of helicopters and soldiers with pixelated faces, and someone from the Swedish Defense University played commentator, offering a few educated guesses. The evening papers took a harder angle, given time to write proper headlines and throw together a few feature pages. The boy’s death had been leaked, and in a short statement, the foreign minister was forced to admit that the Swedish government had been informed of the family’s release. The opposition party complained that they “certainly hadn’t been informed we were fighting a war in Africa,” and the comments from celebrities who’d lent their faces to the ransom fund looked slightly disappointed, as if they’d been cheated out of something.
Didricksen, being old-fashioned, still had paper copies of the major newspapers on his desk.
“We’ll see if this holds up,” he said, flipping through the Aftonbladet, while Grip stood on the carpet in front of him. “But it’s good,” he said, looking up over his reading glasses.
“It’s damn good. We Swedes didn’t have to kill a single person. As I understand it, none of the pirates survived.”
“They fought back, so that’s how it usually goes.” Didricksen looked down at a picture that had been blown up to a half page in the newspaper. A grainy cell phone photo from the airport in Djibouti, where Jenny Bergenskjöld walked hand in hand with her daughter up an airplane stairway. Her husband was nowhere to be seen. “This family then,” he said, drumming his fingers on the newspaper, “what do we think about them?”
“They’re dealing with a lot. Believe me, that’s one hostage who won’t go on a book tour.”
“Yes, we’ll see. So far, the illusion has been preserved. I’ll say thank you for now, and then I guess I’ll reprimand you when it gets shattered.”
“What are the ministers saying?” Grip asked.
“Nothing. It doesn’t get better than that. I understand that the foreign minister canceled his visit to Djibouti and the navy mission down there.”
“I’m sure the captain of the Sveaborg is bitterly disappointed. It was that visit and trash sorting that took up most of his attention.”
“I don’t know how much the foreign minister cares about recycling, but when our own soldiers are shooting each other, and epilepsy medications don’t get where they need to go, you can be sure he’ll keep it at arm’s length. And that applies not just to the ship but to the entire Horn of Africa, for some time to come.” Didricksen put down his glasses and looked at Grip. “And when the country’s leaders choose to look the other way, it’s an invitation for others to do the same.”
“Yes, Boss,” said Grip, when the silence lasted too long.
“Did you let Simon Stark take part in actions I don’t know about?” The old man looked straight at him.
“You mean, when I sent him home to Stockholm?”
“Not so much that, as that he suddenly went quiet. You know as well as I do that I sent him to keep an eye on you.”
“And you know I sent him home to reassure the generals. The daily operational decisions you tend to let me handle myself.”
“That’s the way we usually do it,” Didricksen went on. “But through some unusual channels, I’ve ended up with information on my desk about an unpleasant event on Lamu Island in Kenya. Chaos, a man with his throat cut, and an Italian who died long ago showing up on Interpol lists. A source suggests we were involved.”
“Uh-huh. And what kind of source is that?”
“A police chief in Djibouti, apparently.”
“A very credible witness.”
“Maybe not, and he’s demanding money, but after all, someone has been murdered. And these events on Lamu Island are pretty important, for the Kenyans.”
“How much do you want to know?” Grip asked.
“Neither I nor anyone else needs to know more, right now. The hostages came home, and no Swede was involved in a killing. Well, that Hansson was, but now he’s dead himself. So if anyone suggests otherwise, we just shake our heads and put it aside. Right?” His words were not a rebuke, nor were they intended to put Grip on the defensive. Despite the desk between them, and one standing and one sitting, it was the first time the two had met, for just an instant, on exactly the same level.
“To me, letting things lie seems quite sensible, Boss.” Didricksen sank back in his chair again, like a dog returning to the house after checking the fence around his property.
“I do believe in keeping things at arm’s length, as a principle,” he said then, still careful.
“I’m returning to the bodyguard group tomorrow,” Grip said. “At the moment, aiming at cardboard figures and wrestling in a basement is all I could wish for.”
“No, no, not guarding any ministers. You said it yourself, arm’s length. I’m planning to return to the princesses again.”
“Back to a life in Haga Park.” Didricksen smiled at the thought.
“Well, you do get to go places,” Grip objected. “The one who shops nonstop, I think she’s gotten a place in London.”
“No risk that she’ll travel to Africa, and you’ll be recognized?”
“For her, I’d say that’s simply out of the question.”
59
It was just over two months after Edward Hopper’s sketch of Night Shadows had been sold at Sotheby’s, on New Bond Street.
Ernst Grip walked from Marylebone, one subway stop away. The building he entered had a nice stone facade and a doorman. He phoned, and then Grip was allowed to take the elevator up.
Ayanna opened the door and looked at him for a second. They hadn’t seen each other since they’d said good-bye at the airport gate in Nairobi.
“Come in!” She was barefoot and obviously felt at home in the apartment.
“Wow,” said Grip, walking from the hallway into the living room.
“I can afford it,” she replied with a shrug, “given what I brought with me.”
“Not for long, at this rate.”
“It is not mine. I am renting.”
“Even a grand piano.”
“I give piano lessons now.”
“Is that the plan?” Grip asked, looking up at an oil painting. He couldn’t decide whether it was an original or a copy.
“Now you are being stupid.”
“I’m sorry, I didn’t mean it to sound that way, but I think you’re underestimating yourself. Is that what you’re going to use the money for, renting an expensive apartment to give piano lessons?”
“And you overestimate what is possible, for someone like me.”
“Not for you, never for you. So tell me, what’s really going on? Not long ago, you sat playing in a bar in Djibouti, and now you’re sitting at a grand piano in London’s most exclusive neighborhood.”
After the Monsoon Page 35