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?”
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 at Grip. It was as if he’d said he was ready to proceed, to wait patiently, to do whatever was expected of him. Beneath the arch of his eyebrows, his eyes revealed an underlying sadness.
“Secure!” someone shouted from farther back in the apartment, and just as Grip was about to pull the youth out toward the living room, the other two security police officers came rushing into the bedroom. They were dragging the suspected terrorists along with them, both with their hands cuffed behind their back. One looked scared and stumbled along, while the other looked tall and defiant with every step.
He glared at Grip and the one who was dragging him. Impressive, thought Grip for a second, that the man could resist such a show of force. But that didn’t explain the look in his eyes. At the same time, the young man he was holding grew anxious, lurched and mumbled something, as if the other’s expression was a call to arms. Grip shook him and he grew still.
Grip wondered what they were planning to do to the two men in the bedroom. “What’d you find out there?” he asked.
“We need to get more,” said one of the security police officers, without looking at him. All the SWAT guys were somewhere else. At first, Grip didn’t realize what was happening. Something unspoken had been agreed on, and the three detained men understood more than he did himself. He had a deep sense of foreboding when one of them whimpered. Out of reflex, he tightened his hold on the young man’s shirtfront. When one of his coworkers yanked open the bathroom door, the terrified prisoner threw himself down on the bed, trying to stay away from the open door. He lay on his back and kicked, before he was captured again. He pleaded. They were going to get him in there, some kind of shit was about to go down, but the Säpo guy who held him couldn’t drag him by himself, so the other officer had to let go of the defiant one and grab the man’s legs. And in that instant, the man wound up and threw a powerful kick.
Ernst Grip saw in a split second what was happening,
