Meanwhile, hundreds of people were running away from the Tower Block. Smoke was gushing out of the building and several storeys were on fire; the building could collapse at any moment or there could be another explosion. Others just stood there gaping. Or they got out their phones and rang home.
The security guard who had alerted the police stayed in front of his screens. He found his way back to the pictures of the van that had parked six minutes earlier. As soon as he had viewed the recording again, he rang the police for a second time.
‘It’s a vehicle that exploded,’ he said, and told them about a man wearing a dark uniform who left the van minutes before it blew up.
Three guards came into the Prime Minister’s office in Parkveien, put him into a bulletproof vest and ordered him to follow them to a secure room. The fact that the attack in the centre had been directed at the government building meant it was possible the Prime Minister’s residence could also be a target.
Still, no armed guards were directed to protect the building.
Breivik had the radio on as he drove. He had not heard any blast.
Something had gone wrong; the fuse had not detonated the explosives. It had failed!
The Crafter should have blown up long since, he thought as the traffic came to a standstill in the Opera Tunnel.
A few hundred metres from Hammersborg, however, the Pelican cases had gone crashing over in the back of the van. Perhaps the explosion had happened just then, and he had not heard it because of the noise? Or… it occurred to him, perhaps it was actually the air pressure from the explosion that had made the cases fall over.
He drove on. Turned up the radio. A few minutes later the broadcast was interrupted with the news that there had been an explosion in the government quarter.
Yes! It had gone off.
The first police car reached the scene three minutes after the explosion. Ten ambulances were also dispatched. Several passers-by stopped to give first aid. Oslo University Hospital was put on major incident alert and the accident and emergency department prepared for many admissions. One of the firemen sent to the government quarter was Magnus, Anders’s childhood friend, the one who had just called him at the farm about coming for a visit, who had worried, and wondered when his friend would emerge from his tunnel and be himself again.
Nine minutes after the explosion, a call came through on the police public hotline.
‘Er, hello, Andreas Olsen here. I’m ringing because I saw something very suspicious as I was going past the government quarter.’
The operator said she could not take his tip-off then and there, and that it would be better if he called back. Olsen interrupted her and said he had observed a man in police uniform walking along with a pistol in his hand.
‘I’m sorry, you do realise I can’t take this now, but what’s your name?’
‘This is a concrete lead about a car,’ Olsen insisted. He was the pedestrian with the bunch of roses who had seen Breivik walking up from the government quarter. He gave a brief account of what he had seen: a man with a crash helmet and pistol, who had ‘something strange about him’. The man had left the area unaccompanied and got into a grey van with the registration number VH 24605.
The operator had just read the report from the security guard in the basement of the Tower Block, and put the two pieces of information together. She realised this was an important tip-off and noted it down on a yellow Post-it note.
She took the note with her to the joint operational centre and put it on the leader’s desk. Although the chief of operations was busy on the phone, the operator thought she had made eye contact with her. Her impression was that the supervisor had registered that the note was important.
She went out.
The note sat there.
While a Fiat Doblò VH 24605 was stuck in the queue for the Opera Tunnel, the note sat there.
Untouched on the desk, in a room in chaos, it did not disturb anyone.
The Oslo police district did not have any shared alert procedures, so the chief of operations – who should have been leading the action – got out the telephone book. Once she had looked through the holiday rota detailing who was in charge of what over the summer break, she started ringing staff members one by one. Instead of taking the lead at the joint operational centre and coordinating action with the incident commanders in the field, she gave priority to calling individual officers in for duty. In the acute phase there was hardly any contact between the chief of operations and the on-scene commanders in charge of the secure and rescue operations in the government quarter.
Anders Behring Breivik was still in the queue to get into the Opera Tunnel. He was afraid the whole of Oslo was already shut off because of the bomb attack and that he would never get to the next phase of his plan.
Had he been the police chief, he would have blocked all the main arteries, he reasoned. Perhaps the security forces had already hermetically sealed off the capital.
But no roadblocks were set up, no roads were closed. It was not even considered. No attempt was made to stop the escape of a potential perpetrator. All available manpower was deployed to the government quarter and the rescue work there, including the elite emergency response unit that went by the name of Delta.
In the chaos there was still nobody to pick up the yellow note. None of the police on the streets were asked to look out for a Fiat Doblò delivery van with the registration number VH 24605, or a guard in a dark uniform in a civilian vehicle.
Breivik was still very close by. It took him a long time to get through the eastern city centre and the tunnel under the Oslofjord before he re-emerged at ground level in the western part of the centre. From the Opera Tunnel he drove past the US embassy, which was now swarming with security personnel. The police had taken up positions outside the embassy. He drove right past. Ha, they’ve assumed it’s Islamic terrorism of course, he thought. He amused himself listening to the terror experts on the radio saying this pointed to al-Qaida.
The security mobilisation at the embassy pushed up his stress level a bit and he was afraid someone would react to the fact that he was wearing a helmet and uniform in a delivery van. He had to calm down. The crucial thing was not to crash. He passed the corner of the Royal Gardens, he crossed Parkveien, where the Prime Minister was in a secure room, and he drove up Bygdøy Allé with its exclusive shops. There were clusters of green horse chestnuts hanging on the huge trees. He was in his own district, his own biotope. He passed blocks of luxury flats, he drove past Fritzners gate where he had lived in the very first years of his life. A few streets away, on the other side of the avenue, was the flat he had rented in his twenties. He knew the streets here, the bars and the shops. He knew the escape routes and shortcuts. He now knew he would get out of the city; the police would never be able to close off all the roads to the west.
He sped out of Oslo.
As time went on, there were more reports from members of the public who had observed a man in uniform leaving the van a few minutes before it blew up. The security guards in several ministry buildings viewed the CCTV tapes that showed the sequence of events from different angles. They provided a description identical to the one given by Andreas Olsen.
But no alerts were sent out from the joint operational centre at the police headquarters in Oslo, neither to the force itself nor to the public via the media.