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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
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.
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Source ISBN: 9780007586080
Ebook Edition © July 2018 ISBN: 9780007586073
Version: 2018-05-31
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.