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.