LITMIR.BIZ

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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

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