LITMIR.BIZ

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the technician said: “Thanks, but don’t get me mixed up in that. Take it to the guys over there.” He nodded toward a few others who were working on the machine.

      Two of them met him by the tail rotor.

      “Six cold ones,” said the sergeant, smiling wide like someone with an answer to everything, “and you can knock them back as soon as she’s fixed and ready to go. And a whole bottle of Talisker. It was Talisker that you wanted, right?”

      “Yeah,” replied one of the technicians. He looked at the cooler bag, his body shining with sweat. “Salminen’s totally sick of this ship. He can’t stand being on board anymore, and he needs cheering up.”

      “Beer’s on me, but for the whiskey, it’ll be nine hundred.”

      “Nine hundred!” said the other one under his breath, clearly annoyed.

      “Hello? This is Djibouti.” Very discreetly, he took a look around the deck beyond the helicopter. If the wrong officer saw them, he’d be in trouble.

      He got a shrug in reply from the pissed-off technician. The other said: “We’ll drink it on shore, promise.”

      “Doesn’t bother me, either way,” said the sergeant.

      “The cash?”

      “We can settle up another time. Or else, you can take me on a helo joyride. My boss just got one.”

      The technicians laughed for a moment. Everyone knew it would never happen.

      The sergeant drove back out in his white Toyota. It took a while to get out of the port, a landscape of containers and miscellaneous cargo waiting to be sent somewhere else. There were long rows of little Chinese trucks, hundreds of them, of a type never seen inside Djibouti, and huge stockpiles of pipes. By this time of day, the few longshoremen around lay sleeping in the shade next to their water bottles.

      At the gate, a uniformed guard was stationed at the entrance and exit, and anyone leaving had to show proper identification. The sergeant pressed his ID card against the side window without turning his head. In the photo, he was clean-shaven and had an intensity in his eyes that seemed to question what the photographer would actually do with his picture. The guard had to settle for seeing him in profile—with cap, sunglasses, and beard. Neither man bothered to care, and without a moment’s hesitation, he was waved through.

      The road out, one of the few that was paved, led through the city’s low-rise downtown. Despite the miserable state of the roads, there were many roundabouts, a legacy of the French, the last outsiders to hold official power. The sergeant drove through one with a few tired dolphins made of concrete in the center and passed by a small amusement park that never seemed to be open. The neighborhood was a mixture of filthy vacant lots, small workshops, and walled houses. Everywhere, wild dogs limped and stared. He turned down a busier street, with shop advertisements painted on the facades, and a big poster mounted on a pole, with the president’s broad smile and a message of progress. Here people were out, and along both sides of the street stood small stalls, every ten meters, with burlap roofs shielding them from the sun. The same damp burlap covered the goods on all the tables. The vendors were women, and all they sold was khat. The leaves had to be kept fresh to stay potent. It was long after one o’clock, when the women were allowed to set up their stalls, and nearby shopkeepers waiting for customers had been standing for a while, chewing in their doorways. An entire nation was getting its daily buzz.

      The sergeant picked up speed where the buildings thinned out and the asphalt turned to gravel. He passed a few warning signs that marked a military training area, drove a few kilometers without seeing a soul, and then stopped at a gravel yard.

      Even here, they were expecting him. “Damn it, Hansson, we’ve been waiting for almost half an hour,” said Slunga, his lieutenant, when he got out of the car.

      “Had to make deliveries to the helicopter,” he said effortlessly.

      “And that was all you left on the Sveaborg?”

      “What else?”

      Slunga looked incredulously at Hansson. Behind the lieutenant sat two white Land Cruisers and a small bus. There were half a dozen Swedes wearing his same desert uniform, and an equal number of civilian Djiboutians. Beyond the gravel yard were a few low shrubs, otherwise only stone and dust. The others had gotten out, some just standing there, others joking around, some of the soldiers pointing and showing their equipment to the Djiboutians.

      “Yes, but what now?” said the sergeant, swinging his AK-5 onto his shoulder.

      Mr. Nazir, the Djiboutian foreman, looked concerned. He spoke to Slunga in English but looked at Hansson. “I really do not think we should. Maybe tomorrow.”

      Slunga hesitated. “Let’s do this the way we said,” said Hansson, and he started walking. And the whole group set off in a muddle of English, Swedish, and Somali. Several of the younger Djiboutians talked loudly and spat khat juice around themselves, already much too interested in the weapons they got to carry.

      “Are we really?” asked one of the soldiers in disbelief, keeping a tight hold on his own gun. “But we’d set conditions, and Nazir promised that …”

      Slunga heard him and turned to the foreman: “Mr. Nazir, you promised us. Why?”

      The man made a slow gesture with his hands, a prayer for understanding in the face of defeat. Apparently, he’d promised that none of the men would arrive high, and at least he wasn’t chewing himself, but most of the others unabashedly kept a ball in one cheek, and their teeth shone green with the juice. “Please,” he said, “tomorrow instead, but before lunch, like we agreed.” It was not only the Djiboutians who had failed to keep their word. Slunga said nothing but hurried to get away from the foreman.

      “Damn them,” muttered one of the soldiers. One Djiboutian posed with an assault rifle, while another took pictures with his cell phone. “Great, great,” shouted one of the Swedes to them. “You see what fucking nonsense this is,” said another to a third, under his breath, in Swedish. The camaraderie was playacting that existed only in English.

      One of the Swedes stopped walking.

      “Come on, what the hell’s wrong?” someone asked.

      “No fucking cell phones. I will not be in the fucking picture if we’re doing stuff like this. Tell them!”

      One of the Africans lay on his back in the dust with sunglasses on his forehead, pretending to surrender, while another straddled him holding a gun without its magazine and saying “ta-ta-ta” while making his whole body jerk. Mr. Nazir tried to stop them and was clearly humiliated by their refusal to obey. Walking at the head of the whole entourage was a man humping his surroundings with an AK-5 held against his crotch like a huge cock, while his friend shouted encouragement from behind and took pictures.

      A corporal tried to restore order, but finally Hansson had to yell at the top of his lungs to get through to them, so that at least the cell phones disappeared.

      Soon they arrived at the actual shooting range. Hidden behind a hill, it was desolate and flat, with only a few dirt berms built up at the end.

      “We’ll be in deep shit for this.”

      “It’s okay. Not a single fucking person around.”

      “Damn hot, no?” asked a soldier in English, trying to take the edge off what had been set in motion.

      The Swede got a shrug for an answer and a questioning look from khat-shiny eyes. “Bullets, you have the bullets?”

       6

      With Ernst Grip still clutching his shirt, the young man began to return to his senses. He said nothing, had barely come around, but at least he’d wiped his nose, and he stared down at all the blood on the towel. Then he cleared his throat low, as if to regain his dignity, and looked up

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