He prepared the bags of ammonium nitrate and powdered aluminium, and shifted them from the spider cellar to the workbench in the barn. He felt something tickling his nose and screamed when he discovered a big black spider inside his mask. He was usually very careful to check there were no creepy-crawlies in his gloves, clothing and mask, but this one had sneaked in undetected.
Outside, the neighbour was still at it. He had said it would take six hours to cut the clover, but he had taken three days so far. It was holding things up at the farm. The nitromethane that Breivik now had to mix in to the powdered aluminium was highly explosive and he was not keen to do that indoors. When would the wretched neighbour be finished?
‘You’re not to come without ringing first,’ Breivik yelled when he found the neighbour standing in the yard one day.
‘That won’t work if I’m to look after your fields,’ the neighbour retorted angrily. Here in the country, you just popped by. If you saw that your neighbour was in then you told him what your business was.
The city boy always locked the door after him. He kept the curtains closed.
The first ANFO bomb was made by students at the University of Wisconsin in 1970, in protest against the university collaborating with the authorities during the Vietnam War. A physics researcher was killed. Later the IRA, ETA and al-Qaida all followed the same instructions. They were also used by Timothy McVeigh in 1995, when 168 people were killed in Oklahoma City.
Anders had studied them all.
What remained now was to blend the ammonium nitrate – the artificial fertiliser – with the aluminium powder, which would intensify the force of the explosion. It made a terrible amount of dust. He was covered all over in aluminium dust, which spread with him wherever he went. He had a special set of clothes and shoes to wear inside the barn. He had bought a protective suit from a British professor of mathematics who was selling off surplus stock, but he could never bring himself to use it; he got so hot and sticky when he was hard at work. One day, when Anders had been working for six solid hours and had just gone inside to get something to eat, the neighbour turned up in the yard again. Breivik’s face was covered in shimmering powdered aluminium and his hair was striped with grey. He hurried to the sink and rinsed off his face, but there was no time to do anything about his hair.
‘If you like, I’m happy to clear away the stones from your field so you can start growing your vegetables,’ suggested the neighbour, standing on the doorstep. He also offered to apply the fertiliser so the land was ready for cultivation. He could hire a couple of men and have it done within a week. Breivik had already bought the fertiliser, hadn’t he?
‘I’ve changed my plans,’ Breivik replied tersely, and sent the neighbour away. Later that evening, when he was watching another episode of True Blood, a car with four men drove into the yard.
The neighbour must have realised what he was up to with the fertiliser and tipped them off!
It was only four Poles looking for work.
Actually, he would have loved to have the Poles to help him mix the fertiliser with the aluminium powder; it was hard going. One little bag in two hours! He considered using the electric cement mixer he had bought second-hand. But he was worried that the friction of the motion and the contact with the metal could cause the mixer to short-circuit. In the worst-case scenario, this could generate sparks, which might cause a detonation. But all the same, mixing by hand was so time-consuming that he had to risk it. If he was going to pull off this operation he would have to at least halve the time required for mixing. ‘In any case; let me die another day…’ he wrote in the log.
It turned out to work without any problems. As usual he had been far too concerned about safety, he concluded. The mixer was not particularly efficient, however. It left lots of lumps and he still had to use his hands, but now he was able to log a rate of ninety minutes per bag, with the aim of reducing it to sixty. Even so, it was hard work for just one person and he was starting to understand why Timothy McVeigh had only made a 600-kilo bomb. He must have come up against the same problems and learned the hard way. The tenant at Vålstua nonetheless felt he had slowed down over the past week, and resolved to pick up the pace.
He had now been at the farm for seventy days. On 1 June he hired a van from Avis, went shopping and apologised for it in his log.
‘Considering the fact that I am currently working on the most dreadful task, I bought a lot of exquisite food and candy today.’ He had to recharge his batteries and boost his morale before returning to his strenuous mixing work every morning. ‘Good food and candy is a central aspect of my reward system, which keeps me going. It has proven efficient so far.’ Whenever he was dreading a task, be it extreme hard labour or something involving risk of injury or death, he downed a can of Red Bull, a noXplode shake or an ECA stack to help him cope with throwing himself into the job.
Mixing powdered aluminium, microballoons and fertiliser was the worst task so far. The dust even stuck to the inside of his mask, because he had run out of filters. Once he got started he could not even take cigarette breaks. ‘I literally turn into the tin man, with a layer of aluminium dust all over me.’
Towards the middle of July he started feeling sick and dizzy, and feared it could be the result of diesel poisoning. His work clothes had soaked up a lot of diesel. Such poisoning was not fatal, but it weakened you for a time and could lead to kidney failure. To counterbalance all the crap he had ingested these past months, he took vitamin and mineral pills with a herbal supplement that was supposed to strengthen the liver and kidneys. He felt worse and worse, and decided to wear the protective suit while mixing the last four bags. He should have done this from the start, because it turned out to work very well, apart from the fact that his T-shirt and boxers were drenched in sweat by the time he finished.
Every day he took his dose of steroids and drank four protein shakes to build as much muscle as possible. It was important to have the physical advantage.
On Friday 15 July he went to Rena to catch the train to Oslo, where he would pick up the hire car he had ordered. There were a few people at the station waiting for the 15.03 to Hamar, where you had to change if you were going to the capital. An elderly man on his way to Elverum to fetch a computer that had been in for repair was standing by himself on the platform.
Anders went up to him and asked if the train was expected on time. He told the man he ran a farm near by. The train arrived. Anders boarded it, and the man got on behind him. As he was passing the young man hailed him and invited him to sit with him.
Anders got straight to the point.
‘Islam is in the process of taking over Europe,’ he said. Muslims had been killing Christians throughout history. You could call it genocide.
The elderly man listened with interest. The boy was bright and well read, he thought, though their taste in reading matter clearly differed. The man pointed out that many Muslims had also been also killed in the name of religion in the Crusades. He counted as a political veteran, he said, and told the younger man about taking part in the first demonstration against the Vietnam War, in Los Angeles in 1964.
‘So you must be a communist!’ exclaimed Anders. He was a Christian himself, he said.
The man replied that one should love one’s neighbour and follow Jesus’s example. Breivik became evasive. He was not interested in Jesus and love and caring and stuff like that, he said.
‘I earned twenty-six million kroner before I was twenty-eight,’ he said, and now he was using the money to support people behind the scenes who would throw the Muslims out of Norway.