LITMIR.BIZ

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      “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.

       11

      “See you later.”

      “Sure,” Grip replied, opening the door to Mickels’s jeep at the gangway of the HMS Sveaborg.

      The dock was nearly a kilometer long, but the Sveaborg was the only ship there. Huge container cranes loomed, unmoving and seemingly abandoned, on either side of her. Whether their red-brown color was rust or the original paint was difficult to say. In the late afternoon, the sun shifted from white to yellow, and the only human in sight was the watch officer.

      An hour before, when they’d left the French base in Mickels’s car, Grip had said on a whim, “Can’t we go to the shooting range first?”

      It turned out that all Mickels had to do was make a call from his cell, since the shooting range was officially part of the US base. Fifteen minutes later, Grip stepped onto the dusty gravel. Just as he’d expected, the place was completely surrounded by desert, with the city barely visible as a gray zone to the southeast, and, in the other direction, the silhouettes of distant mountains in the haze. The place felt alien, a no-man’s-land. After a few steps, the black of his shoes disappeared under the fine dust. He kicked an empty shell. There were hundreds near where he stood. How many bullets were buried in that embankment—and which one was the one?

      In front of the mound, he saw the big rusty stain in the sand, shapeless and darkly ominous. When Grip pressed the toe of his shoe into the middle of it, the bloody sand cracked like crusty snow. Tens of thousands of bullets and shell casings, six identical assault rifles in a locker. Here was a job to keep the forensics technicians busy for a decade. A troubling thought. This shooting range in the desert, this blank space that gave up nothing. Only silence. If he were looking for the right questions to ask, he wouldn’t find them here. Grip did a dutiful lap, but then flattened the stain with his shoe and nodded to Mickels that they could get back in the car.

      The empty dock looked as battered and unchanging as the desert. And just as with the bloodstain, Grip saw the Sveaborg as an island of uncertainty. Not an intruder exactly, but out of place.

      “You’ll find the duty officer on the third deck,” said the watch officer, once Grip had presented his ID. He walked up the gangway and into the shade below the helicopter deck.

      “Welcome aboard!” said a man in a navy T-shirt and shorts. He wasn’t wearing the khakis of the watch officer on the dock: everything past the gangway was Africa and desert, but everything on board was pure Sweden. The man led the way. It cooled off as soon as they reached the ship’s interior, passing the whirling fans and the clatter of activity in that endless maze of gray corridors and steep ladders. Even if Grip wouldn’t admit it, the layout was confusing. He could never have found his way back out if he’d had to. They moved inward and upward. Gradually the detailing became more polished and a little quieter, and then they came to a door made of varnished wood. The man knocked, and when a voice replied within, he said only, “Please,” and disappeared.

      The door opened. Grip left the noisy jumble behind and saw in front of him: power expressed in mahogany and fine rugs. Also, it was two against one. The captain’s cabin resembled the boardroom of a shipping company, down to the pair of ship portraits on the walls. The captain himself sat in a corner sofa, with his arms confidently outstretched. The first officer stood to the side, and slightly in front. A well-rehearsed chamber play, Grip thought, taking a few more steps forward.

      “Welcome aboard,” the first officer added. He was the third person wearing a Swedish uniform who’d said that to Grip in the past few hours, only now, he didn’t buy it. The captain nodded quickly; he was the meaty type who gave the impression of being very busy. Always making people feel he’d rather be doing something else. The first officer was dark and more chiseled, with a penetrating gaze.

      “Right, you’re the one from the police,” he said.

      “Security police,” Grip corrected him. That little addition was rarely a disadvantage, when it came to balance of power.

      “Yes, this is tragic,” continued the first officer. “We’re still … shaken.” He seemed to mean it.

      The captain drummed impatiently on the leather sofa. “Tragic, but completely out of bounds.”

      The first officer followed his lead. “We didn’t know anything beforehand about the excursion to the shooting range.” The captain’s career had to be protected, no blotches on his record. “You’ve got everything there, in our report about the incident.” The first officer nodded toward a printout on the coffee table, which was otherwise bare.

      “Thanks, I already received a copy from Mickels.”

      The captain stopped himself, just as he was sliding the report over.

      Mickels would catch hell for that, Grip thought, for upstaging his boss with an outsider.

      “By the way, where are you holding Slunga’s remains?”

      The captain looked vacantly at Grip, who’d directed the question his way.

      “Where’s the body?” Still that same look, and Grip realized that he didn’t know. The captain only waited, hoping to be rescued.

      “We’re keeping it on board,” said the first officer. “In the cold room. We have a couple of mortuary compartments, just in case.”

      “How convenient. Autopsy?”

      “We’re a combat unit, not a forensics clinic. He’s down there, in the same condition as when he came in.”

      “Excellent, then at least there’s one thing that’s been left untouched.”

      “Excuse me, what are you driving at?”

      “Just that everything seems to keep rolling along, even though a person has just been shot to death.”

      “Yes, it probably looks that way,” replied the first officer, “but that’s because we have other problems to deal with. It’s real here. Every extra hour in port is an hour lost at sea. Out there, ships are getting hijacked and people are being shot all the time.”

      “And a dead Swede …”

      “An accident at a shooting range in Djibouti is tragic, but the world doesn’t stop for it. So what do you want us to do differently?”

      Well, what the hell did he want? They couldn’t have isolated all the Swedes in the MovCon unit, he realized that. Was it the report that annoyed him, slapped together and approved so quickly? No, it wasn’t

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