One of Us: The Story of Anders Breivik and the Massacre in Norway (45 page)

Viljar’s skull had been shattered.

Bits of his brain were outside his head.

But he was thinking. He was thinking that it was important
to breathe, not to pass out, not to give up. He was thinking about things that made him happy. That he would go home to Svalbard and drive a snowmobile. He thought about a girl he wanted to kiss.

Then he went very cold and started to convulse. He was shaking. Consciousness came and went.

‘This is going all right Simon, we’ll get through this together,’ he said to his friend who was hanging over
the rock beside him.

Viljar was rambling. ‘We can deal with it, Simon,’ he said, and started to hum.

He told jokes, he sang, he called to Torje.

‘Shush, he might come back and then he’ll get us,’ said the others around him.

But Viljar did not hear them.

Oh if I could write in the heavens, yours is the name I would write …
sang Viljar.

And if my life were a sailing ship …

*   *   *

Torje
had thought his brother was running along beside him, until he looked round and saw Viljar fall, get up and fall again. He stopped and cried out. Then he turned, ran out into the water and started to swim.

What Torje had seen was instantly wiped out of his mind. He would have no memory of the shots hitting his elder brother.

He swam along the edge of the island and found a large crevice in the
limestone cliff. Standing in it, he had water up to his neck. He was there all alone at first, then others came to join him. Those swimming past heard a small, red-haired boy screaming.

‘Where’s Viljar? Where’s Viljar?’

*   *   *

At 17.38, the first patrol left Hønefoss police station. Nobody at the station had a very clear idea of where Utøya was despite the fact that the island lay in their
district and was visited every year by the Labour Prime Minister or party leader. Now they had checked it on the map.

The two officers in the first patrol had pistols and sub-machine guns and were wearing body armour. The tactical commander had ordered them to drive towards Utøya and ‘observe’.

They went at full speed, blue lights flashing.

As they drove, Breivik was moving south across the
island. He had now reloaded the Glock and the rifle several times. He had to avoid running out of ammunition in both weapons simultaneously. Sometimes he changed magazines even though he had a few rounds left. He had got through a lot of bullets, but he still had more.

He fired at someone swimming. Between the trees he spied two figures. A Norwegian man and an Arab woman, he would later call
them. They looked very disorientated, he thought.

One of them was Johannes, Torje’s best friend from Svalbard.

When the Troms contingent had scattered in panic, all fleeing in different directions, the others had lost track of Johannes. He had run towards the southern tip of the island and hidden there, then he had run back on his own, into the woods.

Breivik stood there quietly, waiting for
them to come closer. He did not raise his weapon; that would only make them turn and run. No, he waited.

As Breivik raised his weapon, Johannes cried out to the girl.

‘Run! Run!’

The bullets were faster. Three slammed into Johannes. Two into Gizem. Johannes was fourteen. Gizem had just turned seventeen.

*   *   *

‘Daddy! I want a hug!’

‘No, not now, I haven’t got time.’

‘Cuddle,’ shouted
Eilif. But his father just snatched up his keys and police badge from the shelf by the door at home in Hønefoss. Håvard Gåsbakk put his foot down and raced to the police station, ignoring the red lights. As he swung into the station, he almost crashed into patrol number two, which was just on its way out of the car park.

The experienced police officer had been following the TV coverage of the
explosion in Oslo. Gas tanks underneath the government quarter was his first thought. Then al-Qaida. Gåsbakk had been a member of Delta, the emergency response unit, before he and his family moved to Hønefoss, where police life revolved round thefts from the local supermarket and the occasional brawl. The most daring thing he ever did these days was to climb to the top of the forty-metre pine tree
on his property, which gave him a view over the whole of the Tyrifjord.

As Nordre Buskerud started calling in reinforcements, he had a call from a friend, occupying the line.

‘So terrorism’s reached Norway now,’ said Gåsbakk.

‘Yes, your lot will have to mobilise round the local town hall!’

They chatted for a quarter of an hour. Only after he hung up, did Gåsbakk did notice that a colleague
had rung and left a message on his answering machine: ‘Come in to work. There’s shooting on Utøya.’

The patrol on the way out of the car park spotted Gåsbakk arriving and informed the chief of operations that a more senior officer was now at the station and should take over as on-scene commander.

Gåsbakk dashed into the station, put on his uniform and body armour, unlocked the weapons room and
saw a sniper rifle on a shelf. He took that in addition to his own MP5, because the local marksman was on holiday. He fetched radio equipment and the keys to one of the police cars. Now he had to get to the island as fast as he could.

He got in the police car, but it would not start. Dammit – flat battery. There was an emergency starter in the garage and he finally got the engine going. In common
with all other police cars in Norway, this one had no data transmission display. All agreements, all communication, had to be oral. Amid the constant flow of messages on the communications radio his mobile kept ringing, from the same number. It rang and he rejected the call, it rang, he rejected, he kept on pressing the button until he finally had to take it and say, ‘I don’t give a toss about
the raspberries. Don’t ring again!’ It was an old friend of his mother’s who had picked some raspberries for them. They were ready for collection.

Håvard Gåsbakk took the road to Utøya.

*   *   *

At 17.42, as Gåsbakk listened to his phone message about the shooting on Utøya, a task force of twenty-six men left the capital. It was his old colleagues of the emergency response unit – Delta – redeployed
from the government quarter, now heading for Utøya, thirty-eight kilometres away. These were heavy vehicles, the roads were wet from the rain and there was a lot of traffic. On the way, they overtook a series of ambulances that had been mobilised.

They also swept past Viljar and Torje’s parents, who had not heard anything from the boys since Torje cried on the phone and Viljar tried to reassure
them.

Their parents, Christin Kristoffersen and Sveinn Are Hanssen, had come down from icy Svalbard for the holidays and were visiting friends in Oslo while the boys were at the summer camp. They exchanged looks as a convoy of heavy black vehicles with flashing blue lights thundered by.

‘What’s
happening
?’

It was as if all the air had been forced out of them. It was hard to breathe. The last
vehicle left a swishing sound in its wake.

Just before Sollihøgda, the boys’ parents were stopped. A roadblock was being set up, right in front of their car. Christin leapt out.

‘My boys are on the island! Let us through!’

But it was no good. She tried to force herself past the roadblock.

‘You won’t get through here,’ said the policeman. ‘There are lots more of us. And we’re faster than you.’

Christin realised it would be impossible either to get past by car or to run to Utøya on foot. She went back to the car, where Sveinn Are was sitting quietly. Perhaps they would open the road soon. There had still been nothing on the news about an incident on Utøya.

*   *   *

Mustafa had bought all the parts for the shower cabinet before he took Ali to the football championship in Sweden. He
usually shopped where things were cheapest, and then assembled them himself to make what he needed. At the hardware store in Ski he had had them cut him a 70x120 centimetre sheet to hide the pipework at the side of the cabinet. Bano had always complained that it did not look very nice with the pipes showing.

The only thing still missing was a handle for the sliding door. ‘Typical Dad work,’ Bano
would say if the shower was still unfinished when the girls got back from Utøya. ‘Those doors will never get handles,’ she would say. ‘It’s like all the jobs Dad does round the house.’

The whole family complained about the bathroom. The bathtub was old and stained, and the walls and floor were so ingrained with grime after years of use that they had lost their original colour. Bayan tried to
mop under the bath but she couldn’t get to it; the floor was always wet and the ceiling was sagging with damp. Mustafa had installed an extractor fan but it did not help. His wife wanted to get a plumber in, but Mustafa was, after all, a mechanical engineer who specialised in water and drains, so that was out of the question.

He wanted to surprise the girls with a brand-new bathroom when they
got back from Utøya. So on his return from Sweden, he went to the big store in Ski to buy a handle for the sliding door. That was where he was when he got the calls, first from Ali and then from Bano, about the bomb in Oslo.

Now he was on his way home with the shiny new handle.

The radio was on in the car.

They were talking about who could be behind the Oslo bomb when a text message came through
to Mustafa’s phone:

Welove you more than anything in the world banoANDlara

theres a man with a gunHere will ring when we are safe

It was tricky typing on the boy’s phone; it did not have the same settings as hers. Lara had wondered whether to send the text, because she did not know where Bano was. She dared not tell her parents. So many shots, it never ended! And every single shot could be
Bano. Lara and the four boys were still hiding in the bay beyond the little pumping station, where lots of the young people were now gathered.

Her father replied.

what’s happening?

A few minutes later, Lara texted again.

Somebody shooting don’t know where Bano is

Then her father wrote:

Can you ring me?

There was no answer. He sent another message.

I know it not true, you are not Bano or Lara

A new message from the same unknown number lit up his screen.

We love you so much. But somethings happened

It was 17.47.

*   *   *

At the same time, the joint operational centre in Oslo sent out a message to all units.

‘01 with important message to all. In connection with both the explosion in the government quarter and the shooting on Utøya in Nordre Buskerud it has been observed that
the suspect is wearing a police or security guard uniform – out.’

When the message went out over the radio, more than two hours had passed since Andreas Olsen, the guards in the government quarter and other eyewitnesses had first reported that the man was in uniform.

Five minutes later, at 17.52, the local patrol from Nordre Buskerud police station reached the MS
Thorbjørn
jetty. On the way
there, the officers in the car had been informed by their chief of operations: ‘Helicopter on its way, possibly also Delta.’ They were told to exercise caution, and to wait for the police boat.

When they got out of the car they could hear the shots. They were being fired in a steady stream, controlled and distinct, from two different weapons, never simultaneous or from more than one place on
the island at the same time. From this they deduced that it was a lone perpetrator.

The two policemen were standing on the jetty observing, as they had been ordered to do. Observe, and wait for the police boat. They were heavily armed. And they stood waiting, while the shots rang out on the other side of the strait.

Official police instructions are that when the situation is defined as ‘shooting
in progress’, officers are obliged to make a direct intervention. No such actions were undertaken.

Utøya was six hundred metres away.

On a sunny day, there would have been lots of boats in the fjord. Today, it was empty. The boats lay moored close by. The local patrol made no attempt to fetch one to approach Utøya. They did nothing but listen to the shots.

Since there was a clear line of sight
over to the island, the patrol was worried about being shot at. The officers took refuge behind a container on the jetty. Three minutes after arrival, at 17.55, the patrol reported that the rendezvous point would have to be moved up to the road. Eventually one of them went up to the road to direct the traffic and clear the way for the emergency response unit. The two officers lost connection.

Nordre Buskerud police district had a boat of its own, a red rubber dinghy, which was kept in a trailer outside the police station. But it was not kept in a state of readiness. The incident commander had to inflate the boat and put petrol in the engine. The Hønefoss fire service, on the other hand, had a large and steady boat ready and waiting at the quay by the fire station. They rang at an early
stage and offered assistance, but their offer was turned down because the local police had their own boat. When the police station later rang back to ask to use the fire boat after all, they could not get through. The chief of operations rang the fire station again and again, but she was dialling the wrong number.

Neither the emergency response unit coming from Oslo nor Håvard Gåsbakk on his
way from Hønefoss had been given any definite information about where to rendezvous. Gåsbakk, however, took it for granted that it would be at the MS
Thorbjørn
jetty, straight across from the island.

The Delta emergency response unit did not know where Utøya was. The first patrol had GPS in its vehicle, but the small islands in the Tyrifjord were not named on the system. The Delta troops in the
black cars tried to make contact with Nordre Buskerud police to get definite instructions about where to meet and to alert them to the fact that extra boats would be needed for their personnel. But the emergency network did not yet extend as far as Nordre Buskerud and analogue police radio coverage only worked until Sollihøgda, which was halfway there. Consequently, the telephone was the only form
of communication open to them, but the switchboard of the local operations centre was jammed with incoming calls and did not answer the emergency response unit’s call.