Kitabı oku: «After the Monsoon: An unputdownable thriller that will get your pulse racing!»

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

Chapter 23

Chapter 24

Chapter 25

Chapter 26

Chapter 27

Chapter 28

Chapter 29

Chapter 30

Chapter 31

Chapter 32

Chapter 33

Chapter 34

Chapter 35

Chapter 36

Chapter 37

Chapter 38

Chapter 39

Chapter 40

Chapter 41

Chapter 42

Chapter 43

Chapter 44

Chapter 45

Chapter 46

Chapter 47

Chapter 48

Chapter 49

Chapter 50

Chapter 51

Chapter 52

Chapter 53

Chapter 54

Chapter 55

Chapter 56

Chapter 57

Chapter 58

Chapter 59

Chapter 60

Keep Reading …

About the Author

Also by Robert Karjel

About the Publisher

1

Mortal fear. Not anger, not surprise. Fear. He jerked so violently that he knocked the machine gun out of the sailboat’s cockpit, before he could get ahold of it again.

The sea was glassy, without so much as a ripple. The sails on the MaryAnn II hung limp. The boat sat motionless, the nearest land five thousand meters below. A nameless position in the middle of the Indian Ocean.

He picked up the gun and stood in a crouch, holding it to his chest. The safety still engaged. He hesitated. A feeble, half-conscious hope: what if they saw that he was armed, the way he saw that they were? But it was useless. They kept closing in.

The fast motorboats—skiffs—had come out of nowhere. They were speeding toward him at the stern. Someone shouted from there, he couldn’t make out the words. He turned toward the hatch, where his family was still unaware, below deck, spending the day out of the heat. He was just about to warn them, when he heard even louder shouts from the skiffs, and his protective instincts took over. They had to be kept down there. Not a chance in hell he’d let them set foot on deck. He cocked his rifle and glanced at the spare magazine lying on the cockpit floor. The only thing he knew was bottomless dread.

The first shot was his, fired straight up into the sky. More a hopeless plea than a warning. A few seconds later, the pirates answered with a volley that hit like whips around the stern, the bullets raising white jets in the water, tall and slender as spears. The last shot tore a trail through the wooden deck, splinters flying.

In that moment, his world was reduced to the men maneuvering their boats and his own gun sights, which at first he found impossible to control. He fired shot after shot, driven by his instinct to keep them away, unable to focus, much less correct his aim. They moved in fast, so close that he could now see their faces. He saw how the recoil threw them backward when they fired. Yet he was completely oblivious to the white trails their shots made in the water around him, or to the dull thuds in the canvas behind. In the battle frenzy, they all shot wildly, and despite the short distance, no one had hit his mark.

But then one boat made a slight change of course, so that he could see not just the bow but also down along the side, and he fixed his eyes on the man steering the outboard motor. A clear target—one that might actually stop them. After a few long seconds, he paused and aimed.

The shot hit the man’s shoulder, the bullet’s power at short range shattering the bone as it burst inside his body, nearly severing his arm. It hung by skin and tendons, while his torso was thrown sideways. In the shock of the moment, a very brief moment, the man sat there, expressionless. The throttle also got thrown to one side, and the boat made a violent turn. The second shot was luckier, hitting the man in the middle of his chest. Just a tremor before he collapsed, dead.

Sailing around the world. A family that dreamed of going to the Great Barrier Reef and back. But this wasn’t just an adventure, it was a new beginning in a life that would otherwise have fallen to pieces. They’d passed through Gibraltar in February and spent a few months in the Mediterranean. It wasn’t hard to find destinations: the Riviera, Sicily, the Messina Strait, and then the whole odyssey of the Greek islands. Outside Rhodes, for the first time they saw dolphins playing by the bow. Near the Balearic Islands there’d been a few days of sun and Jenny had gotten some color, and with her tan came the bright lines around her eyes, the ones she hadn’t had since she sailed as a professional. Her hair was thick and wavy; she’d worn it down past her shoulders as long as anyone could remember. She was the type that, if she felt pressured or uncomfortable, quickly turned defiant, and in school, she often got blamed for starting fights. But here on the boat she felt at home; she felt strong now. For the first time in ages, she liked how her husband looked at her. Carl-Adam, who could win over almost anyone. He was not yet forty, and the first thing people always said about him was that he made you laugh. Yet beyond his joking, there was something larger-than-life about him, and not just because he was a big man. The years of overwork, red-eye flights, five-course meals, and sauternes had gone straight to his waistline. He’d stopped playing golf several years ago, and tennis was out of the question. But he still needed the competition, so instead he’d pushed to become ever more well-informed, quick with the numbers, convincing in arguments. With his brusque smile, he was the one who closed the deals. It became a kind of relentlessness, his trademark, getting things his way in the end, driven to always be the best. Yet out here, he accepted that he’d never come close to Jenny’s level as a sailor. He’d started to lose weight, and he no longer made a nasty comment if she smoked a cigarette in the evening breeze. In Porto Salvo, they’d even left the children on board overnight and gone to a small hotel near the harbor.

“They have the cell phone if they need us,” Carl-Adam said, when she hesitated for a moment. They hadn’t felt this kind of fire in a long time, and they didn’t just make love at night but were also surprised by their desire for each other at dawn. Not sleepy caresses, but instead a force that took ahold of them. This wasn’t dutiful lovemaking, it was pure sex for the first time in years. Back on the boat, Alexandra asked about the bite mark on Carl-Adam’s neck.

They’d talked about it before, but not until they left Crete heading south did Jenny begin to worry. The Suez Canal and the Red Sea lay ahead—no dangers there—but then came the Gulf of Aden. They’d read about it. The pirates. Checklists in the sailing magazines, websites listing the latest attacks. Experts saying: keep away from the obvious trouble spots and stay in close communication with navy ships. Still. Reading about it from far away was one thing; sailing straight into it, another. Carl-Adam dealt with it in his own way. As usual, he preferred action, not just vague advice and relying on others. Alexandria was their last port stop in a big city. They tied up for a few days in the empty cruise-ship harbor not far from the center. A little sightseeing for the whole family, a trip to the pyramids of Giza, and Carl-Adam made his own little excursions in the city.

He returned to the boat one evening carrying something slender wrapped in burlap. He glanced at the port guards through the windows before cutting the strings and taking it out. A Kalashnikov, with two magazines and four hundred cartridges. “Arab Spring,” he snorted with contempt. “They’re losing their grip. Would you believe it, this cost me only two hundred dollars. Two hundred.”

The object lying on the dining-room table didn’t convey the slightest sense of security. Dented wood and dirty metal. With a flimsy bayonet attached below the barrel, and reeking of gun grease. It had to be hidden going through the Suez. Carl-Adam didn’t want trouble from the inspectors sent aboard by the canal company to take bribes, or to give them any excuses. But in the Red Sea, he took it out. Carl-Adam emptied a magazine into a plastic jug he towed behind the boat.

Afterward, he rubbed his shoulder with his thumb. “If they come too close, they’ll eat it.” Sebastian, the boy, played with the empty shells, while his big sister, Alexandra, was quieter than usual that evening.

They passed through Bab el Mandeb, at the southernmost point of the Red Sea, and continued into the Gulf of Aden. The fishing was good here, and Yemeni fishermen steered their skiffs in small fast-moving clusters. The same open boats that the pirates sat in, from those photos online. The same thin, dark figures. Although the fishermen often waved as they passed, Jenny grew uneasy. The Somali coast lay no more than a few days’ sail away.

Moving on, they passed by Djibouti, where convoys of ships seeking protection from Somali lawlessness were organized. The convoys required a speed of twelve knots, but that was impossible for the MaryAnn, as she would have to rely solely on her engine to keep her place in line. Carl-Adam and Jenny took down the sails and joined a convoy for slow-moving vessels. A collection of the lame and crippled. Freighters and tankers, real tubs, flying the flags of East Africa, Pakistan, and North Korea. Twenty merchant ships—and the MaryAnn. Radar showed them in a formation of two lines, with a few Japanese and Chinese naval ships making a weak show of power on either side. On the common radio frequency, there was constant chatter. Strange languages and obscenities in broken English. “Fuck you, Pakistani monkey.” One night they heard strange moaning and wet sounds on the frequency. Finally they figured out that the night watchman on some ship thought he’d cheer up the convoy by playing the soundtrack to a porn movie. For hours it continued, you could turn down the volume but had to leave it on. Because all of a sudden, things would change into terrified shouts and uncomfortable silences. “They are shooting, shooting …” “Where, where …?” It always sounded confusing. “Who is calling?” Chaos. “Pirates, pirates …!”

They knew the navy ships didn’t scare off the pirates. Ships were getting hijacked even within the convoys. Jenny and Carl-Adam tried, but they couldn’t both stay up all night. They had to take shifts, sleeping badly in between. It wasn’t for this that they’d left home, Jenny thought at some point, but said nothing. Old patterns repeated themselves; they shared shifts up on deck, but she still cooked all the meals below. The children were listless, often seeming downright spoiled, and Jenny got angry when they complained about helping with chores or started fights. Often, it felt crowded on board.

In the Gulf of Aden also came the heat. With the sails down and the engine running, there was almost no shade on deck. Only the black finger of the mast, moving through the hours like the shadow of a huge sundial. The air was thick and hot with every breath, and the children stayed below. Jenny and Carl-Adam took four-hour shifts under the canvas roof of the cockpit. On the digital nautical chart, the northern Somali coast passed by too slowly. Their eyes fixed on what lay ahead: a timber freighter burning coal, its dense smoke rising in a black plume. A couple of ship silhouettes to starboard, and now and then a navy ship speeding past them, making sweeps that seemed mostly random.

“Jenny! Jenny!” It was always Carl-Adam who sounded the alarm. Sometimes he was already carrying the Kalashnikov when she came up on deck, sometimes he nodded with only a “There!” while he followed through the binoculars. A lone freighter in the distance, or a group of fishermen that navy ships had already checked out and reported on over the radio. He didn’t have Jenny’s ear for languages and still had a hard time deciphering what was said over the airwaves. Yet whenever he shouted, her heart would pound. The kids exchanged frightened glances whenever their mother raced up on deck. The seconds it took to understand what was happening, their temples aching before the danger could be dismissed.

They passed the Horn of Africa, and the convoy broke up where the Indian Ocean opened out. The MaryAnn returned to good form and set sail again. They continued east—following the advice of Yachting World—to get beyond the pirates’ range. Nearly to the Arabian Gulf, before turning south to head down through the middle of the Indian Ocean. They were on their way to Mombasa to refill both diesel fuel (the tank nearly empty after the Gulf of Aden) and their food supplies. Even better, they’d spend a week at a hotel and live at the beach. Jenny looked forward to taking walks, to the smell and feel of leaves, and to sitting at tables already set, with someone else cooking the food.

But somewhere out there, the wind died. Mornings, the sea was often glassy, despite their being in mid-ocean. They moved slowly, while the heavy gray storm clouds passed by, always missing them. Jenny longed to get drenched and cool off. At best, the clouds brought a few minutes of teasing, a few barely cool gusts of wind, without the sun’s burning flame being obscured for even a second in the sapphire blue sky.

They didn’t see a single ship for more than a week. Only a gray military helicopter heading straight on its course, far away. A brief crackle on the radio, and the sound of the distant rotor fading out. Then gone. Jenny was the one who saw it, hearing the crackle. Everything so still that she saw no reason to mention it to Carl-Adam.

Jenny was down in the children’s cabin, distractedly helping Alexandra with her math homework, when she heard her husband’s clattering on deck. She listened. A shout in the distance. It wasn’t Carl-Adam’s voice. And then a shot, followed by silence.

And suddenly, all hell broke loose. A bullet tore through the deck, whistling just above their heads. Jenny shouted at the children to lie down on the floor and ran as she’d never run before, like an arrow, to get her head up into the cockpit. She saw Carl-Adam standing at the rail, holding the Kalashnikov in front of him. And there beyond him, a fast little skiff. Full speed in a wide arc around them, not even a hundred meters away. Dark figures, flapping T-shirts. Weapons in hand, a couple of them raised in some kind of gesture. Threat, victory? Her thoughts stuttered as she tried to understand—not here, nobody would come here, there was nothing here. A shout again, a strange voice from somewhere behind her, at the bow, her view blocked by the cabin roof in front of her. All her impressions converged in a split second, while she was still on her way up to the deck.

The instant she took the final leap, there was a series of quick shots. She flinched, and in the same instant the vicious bullets hit the water at the stern. Carl-Adam followed the skiff with fear in his eyes, raising and lowering his arms a few times.

Jenny sensed something at the bow. She turned around, and now with a clear view, she saw a second skiff. “Carl-Adam,” she cried. They were close, heading straight at the MaryAnn. “Turn around!” He didn’t react, was overwhelmed, unreachable. Only watching the one boat he could see. “There are two!” Not even ten meters left, before the other one would reach the bow.

New shots came from the boat farther out, throwing up spray at the stern, where Carl-Adam stood. Jenny’s gaze wandered from the bow to her husband. He raised his arms at last and fired a few shots. He must have hit something, she didn’t know what, but the boat veered away sharply, out of control.

She shouted: “Bow! The bow!” And watched the man who sat at the front of the skiff, the one her husband couldn’t see, stand up and take aim. Straight at her, it seemed. She crouched behind the cabin roof in fear. A shot.

Carl-Adam twitched as if he’d been punched. His weapon was tossed aside, and he fell to his knees. Blood. Something thudded into the MaryAnn. Jenny ran to the stern, grabbed Carl-Adam with both hands, got a confused look in response.

“I shot,” he said. “I shot one.”

Blood covered her hands. Behind her, she heard steps running. In the bow, they’d already come on board. She tried to say something to Carl-Adam, and he said something back that she didn’t understand. There was something wrong with his leg. The man who came on first was tall and gangly, with bloodshot eyes. Barefoot. Without a word, he pulled back his gun and rammed it into Carl-Adam’s back. Jenny lost her grip on him when he collapsed. Two other men pushed past. They disappeared with their machine guns leading, down below deck. She thought about the children and was overwhelmed by the feeling that something had come to an end.

2

The helicopter pilot on the HMS Sveaborg shoved the magazine into his pistol, pushed the pistol into his shoulder holster, and pulled on his flight helmet. All the other shit, he was already wearing. It was time to take off, again.

He’d lost count of how many times he had taken off from the ship. Had lost count of most things now. No longer kept track of how long they’d been out on their mission off the Somali coast, or even when they’d return home again. Mission, the word alone—whose salvation were they seeking here? His flight suit had salt stripes from old sweat, like the rings on a tree. He hadn’t washed it as often as he should. There were so many shoulds. He shaved at most once a week, something so unlike him that at least he noticed. There was also the creeping feeling that maybe he’d stopped caring about real things. That idea bothered him more than his stubble when he looked in the mirror. In his emails home, he didn’t think there was anything to say, nothing to talk about in a stream of identical days. His wife sent pictures of the house, of the flower beds and bushes turning green again in spring, and of the kids’ sports practices. They struck him as familiar and so terribly distant at the same time. He sent no more than a smiley face or a thumbs-up in reply. The last time they’d escorted a ship into Mogadishu, he’d stood on deck and watched the shelling around the port while he ate a packet of biscuits. Were there two bloated corpses floating past him as he took out the last one, or was it three?

Now he sat strapped into the cockpit and waited for final preparations to be completed on the helicopter deck. He leaned forward and squinted up through the glass canopy at the aft mast. A peregrine falcon was sitting there, despite the noise from the engines and the spinning rotor. For a week, he’d seen it following the ship, mostly perched there, watching, or gliding on the winds around the ship. Now it had prey in its beak, Christ knows where it’d been caught, because it was not a fish.

A fresh splash of seawater hit the rotor, spotting the glass. The ship rocked in the rough seas of the southwest monsoon. Newly arrived, it had brought strong winds over the past few days. The pilot tried to get comfortable, but he couldn’t, not with his bulky vest bursting with all the survival equipment someone else had decided he needed. The worst, comfort-wise, was the bulletproof vest beneath his flight suit, with its heavy protective plates front and rear. It weighed almost twenty kilos. But he wanted that vest, even though it would drown him if he crashed into the sea. Stray bullets were what scared him the most, beyond the fear of being taken hostage by any of the insane militias based in the Horn of Africa. The flight crews no longer joked about why they’d save one last bullet in their gun.

The ship lurched again, and the helicopter’s shock absorbers reluctantly responded. The copilot rattled off the final checklist items, and the gunner in the rear, after swearing about something, announced: “Cabin check complete.” Outside, the flight deck crew stumbled off, carrying the lashings they’d removed from the helicopter. Already, big flowers of sweat darkened the pale blue fabric of their jumpsuits. Even in the strong wind, it was impossible to defend against the heat.

They had an extra passenger in the helicopter. An hour before takeoff, the ship’s first officer had told the pilot: “You know, we’ll have Lieutenant Slunga aboard, the head of MovCon.”

MovCon, the logistics unit, normally kept to their unloading duties in Djibouti. The HMS Sveaborg had made a brief stopover in Salalah a few days before, when the ship’s air-conditioning had broken, and they’d quickly arranged a delivery of spare parts to the nearest port. It was Slunga himself who’d organized it, then stayed on board when they cast off again. “MovCon performs miracles, but they work their asses off, especially Slunga,” said the commander. “He’d probably appreciate a ride.” One of the few rewards the brass on board could give their men was a trip in a helo, if the pilot in command didn’t object.

“Of course we’ll take him.”

Before takeoff, the pilot helped Slunga put on his gear, a slimmed-down version of what the others wore, and they’d introduced themselves. The lieutenant, with his white-blond hair, projected something both friendly and preoccupied. He chatted about his family, especially his son whom he clearly missed a lot, and never stopped asking questions. But as soon as Slunga’s attention wasn’t required, his thoughts drifted away, and he seemed startled when the conversation started up again. He grabbed a cup of coffee before takeoff but took only a sip.

Now Slunga was in the aft of the cabin with the gunner. Amid all the commotion around him, he seemed finally to have forgotten what was bugging him, and he sat down looking expectant as the engines roared.

A gust ruffled the falcon’s feathers up on the mast, while on the helicopter deck, the pilot tried to get a feel for the motion of the ship, looking for the sweet spot in the erratic rhythm. The deck light turned from red to green, and he got his chance as the aft heaved upward. The helicopter lifted off through the gusty winds in one long sweep over the starboard side.

They flew under radio silence at low altitude toward the coast. After the tension of takeoff, they got a half hour of peace. The sea always seemed calmer and bluer from the air than when you stood on deck. The short period of calm invited conversation, sometimes even confidences.

“So …,” asked the pilot, “how’s it going?”

The gunner knew exactly what he was talking about. “I was in her cabin yesterday, but she said that now that we’re on duty, everything’s off. But the next time we’re in port, she wants to go out.”

“And you want to go in,” laughed the copilot. The gunner said nothing.

“Are you serious about her?” asked Slunga, the extra passenger.

“Yes, he is,” replied the pilot for the young gunner.

“Do something special, then, don’t just take her out for a few beers.”

“It’s hard,” replied the gunner, sounding blue. “You know, you only get one day ashore.”

“Not beer and a disco ball,” continued Slunga, “not with the life you live out here. Give her peace every minute of those twenty-four hours. Take her away from it all, to the beach, where it’s only her and you, with no one from the ship around.”

“That’s a sweet dream, but how can I make it happen from here?”

“Not you. I’ll do it, and I know just the place. If you say she’s worth it.”

“Are you serious?”

“Doesn’t MovCon have anything better to do than arrange love nests?” the copilot tried to joke.

“What could be more important?” said Slunga. There wasn’t a trace of irony.

They flew in silence for a minute, before the pilot broke it. “The first officer says you’re working hard these days.”

“Did he mention me specifically?” replied Slunga.

“Why?”

“No, nothing. We have enough to do, sure, we work around the clock. But I have all the people I need. I’ve even managed to hire a crew of locals on the base in Djibouti. It’s just that you’re on the ship out here, while I’m ashore with my little gang. Strong personalities, and lots of distractions near the base and in town.”

“Discipline problems?”

“Sometimes.”

“You’ve got to keep them on a short leash.”

“I try to.”

For the last few days, the Swedish patrol vessel HMS Sveaborg had been skulking outside a known pirates’ nest not far from Bosaso.

As they reached the beach, the helicopter climbed to a few hundred feet, and then the cabin door opened wide and the machine gun emerged, ready in case of trouble. With their powerful cameras, the crew started taking videos and stills. The beach was more than a kilometer wide, but what interested them stood by the water’s edge: a half-dozen open boats, their hulls resting wearily on their sides, right on the sand where the tides came up, along with some improvised shelters built from rubble, and the fuel storage, with oil barrels covered by orange tarps.

“Not many awake,” said one of the pilots, about the stillness below.

“Sleeping off their khat highs.” With the cabin door wide open, they had to half-shout to make themselves heard over the wind and the rotor’s roar.

“There, at two o’clock,” yelled the copilot. The gunner turned the high-magnification camera sitting in a gimbal under the fuselage, the movement making the TV screen flicker. Then it stopped and came into focus.

“Weren’t there some oil drums here before?”

“Nothing left but marks in the sand.”

The camera moved again. “And I can’t find that pile of RPG grenades we saw yesterday.”

“High tide was just after sunset.”

“Seems a few snuck out at night.”

On the second lap around the camp, the radio crackled. They couldn’t hear a thing but figured it was the ship. Distance was a problem, and the pilot had to corkscrew up to a higher altitude before they got a voice.

“Snowman from Mother, do you read us?” It was the combat control officer on the Sveaborg.

“Not even a half hour out. Always something,” said the copilot in a tired voice, as he pressed the transmit button. “Snowman here.”

The Sveaborg had received a distress call from a merchant ship. The helicopter was given a position, and the pilot turned around and picked up speed toward the sea. While the copilot went over the adjustments on the radar screen, the gunner pulled in his machine gun and closed the cabin door. Instantly, the wind noise died down in the helmet headphones.

Soon afterward, an agitated voice came on the radio, heard through constant interruptions in the transmission. It was the skipper of the MV Sevastopol, a Russian freighter. If there was anything you learned in the Gulf of Aden, it was how to understand all the world’s accents in English, shouted over Channel 16. “Calm down, calm down … Please, say again … Who is shooting?”

But they got the gist. “Shit!” swore the gunner, who felt tricked by the pirates sneaking out at night. It took a while to get more out of the skipper than “Two boats, two boats” and “Please hurry up!” The pirates were shelling the bridge with bursts from their automatic weapons, and it seemed the ship had also taken some grenade hits. The men in skiffs had tried more than once to hook ladders onto the sides, and one of the freighter’s crew members was badly hurt. But so far, no pirates had gotten on board, and the captain was maneuvering his ship as well as he could to keep them off. “Please hurry up!”