After the Monsoon: An unputdownable thriller that will get your pulse racing!
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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 clearance.” 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.
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.
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