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After the Monsoon: An unputdownable thriller that will get your pulse racing!
Robert Karjel
PERFECT FOR FANS OF I AM PILGRIM, NOMAD AND HOMELANDYour sins can never truly be washed awayA mysterious death…A Swedish army lieutenant drops dead on a shooting range in the African desert. Tragic accident? Or murder? Agent Ernst Grip is sent to uncover the truth.A family in danger…At the same time, Somali pirates kidnap a wealthy Swedish family. Why is no one back home willing to pay the ransom to save these innocent lives?A world where no one can be trusted…As Grip investigates, he is drawn deep into a web of intrigue, greed and double dealings. And soon he is forced to wonder – in a world where friends become enemies in the blink of an eye, how is it possible for anyone to survive?
Copyright (#ub9af41bb-ed11-5bbd-b4aa-a811752420cc)
Published by HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd
1 London Bridge Street
London SE1 9GF
www.harpercollins.co.uk (http://www.harpercollins.co.uk)
First published in Great Britain by HarperCollinsPublishers 2018
Originally published as Efter monsunen in Sweden in 2016 by Partners in Stories
Copyright © Robert Karjel 2018
Translation copyright © Nancy Pick and Robert Karjel 2018
Cover design by Dominic Forbes © HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 2018
Cover photograph © David et Myrtille/ Arcangel.com (http://Arcangel.com)
Robert Karjel asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.
A catalogue copy of this book is available from the British Library.
This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.
Source ISBN: 9780007586080
Ebook Edition © July 2018 ISBN: 9780007586073
Version: 2018-05-31
Dedication (#ub9af41bb-ed11-5bbd-b4aa-a811752420cc)
For Josefin and Elvira
Contents
Cover (#u8112a987-df89-529c-9a05-4be5ab1273f2)
Title Page (#u1bf5c1fb-42e8-5962-8fac-33fed5a14858)
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 (#uaaf26e0b-0219-5c1a-bda5-b727ee68d4c4)
Also by Robert Karjel (#u1b35fc22-4417-5bd8-b6c6-73ea91460745)
About the Publisher
1 (#ub9af41bb-ed11-5bbd-b4aa-a811752420cc)
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.
