She saw boats in the channel beyond. Campers and people from the summer cottages dotted round the fjord’s edge were pulling frozen, terrified youngsters out of the water.
Ina and her helpers had also heard the shots from the pumping station. Shots, screams, cries, shots. One of those compressing her wounds whispered, ‘They’re dying, they’re dying, they’re dying,’ over and over again. Then it all went very quiet.
Ina’s own strength was failing. She had lost a lot of blood. Lying there drowsily, she saw a raindrop glistening on a leaf.
Just imagine something being so beautiful, here, now, she thought.
In Salangen, Gunnar had the phone in his hand. Just after six he had seen a line of text running along the bottom of the TV screen. ‘Shooting on Utøya’, it said.
‘Tone!’
‘Tone!!! There’s something on here about a shooting on Utøya.’
Simon’s mum came rushing in. She burst into tears.
‘My boy!’ she cried.
‘But you know, Tone, our Simon’s a fast runner and a good swimmer, so he’ll be fine,’ Gunnar reassured her.
But panic had seized Tone. She had to gasp for breath.
‘It’s bound to be some disagreement between a couple of individuals. We mustn’t worry, there’s nothing to indicate Simon’s involved. There are lots of people on the island, after all.’
But Tone was still anxious.
A few minutes passed. There was no more information about Utøya. ‘I’ve got to find out about this,’ muttered Gunnar and rang the number from which Simon had last called them.
‘Hello, excuse me, this is Gunnar Sæbø, Simon’s father,’ he said. ‘Simon just rang us from this phone.’
‘There’s a lunatic going round here shooting. I can’t talk,’ Julie Bremnes whispered back.
‘But have you seen Simon?’
‘Er, no, we were running together but then we spread out, I haven’t seen Simon for a bit,’ whispered the sixteen-year-old, who was lying in a bay a little beyond the steep slope. ‘I’m hiding, I can’t talk any more,’
‘The girl was taking cover, she could only whisper,’ Gunnar told Tone. ‘We can’t ring again, we can’t ring any more. It might get someone hurt.’ But they called the numbers rolling across the screen. Numbers for next of kin, it said. They never got through.
Tone stood there crying. ‘My boy! My child!’
Gunnar rang the friends whose birthday party they had been invited to that Friday evening.
‘We’re going to be a bit late,’ he said. ‘We’ll come as soon as we’ve made sure Simon’s okay.’
‘Now it’s fucking kicked off.’
As the massacre at the pumping station was in progress, around thirty men from Delta, plus the local police, arrived at the bridge by the golf course.
Their banter was irreverent.
‘Terror on Norwegian soil.’
‘Yeah, it’s started with a bang.’
They had been informed that their target was wearing a police uniform. Like the Taliban in Afghanistan, thought Gåsbakk. They were also fond of putting on police uniforms, to infiltrate the population before they attacked.
The message that this was, in all likelihood, a young, blond man in a police uniform had not reached them.
As Delta established itself at the rendezvous point, the police boat put in at a stone buttress just below the bridge. The heavily armed officers lost no time going aboard. They were eager to get on with the operation; they were in action mode now and wanted to get there the quickest possible way. ‘That’s about it,’ called the boat driver. The red dinghy was registered to carry ten people, and the officers were heavy: each of them had about thirty kilos of equipment, on top of shields and battering rams. With just the driver on board, the bow was steady, but as the men moved about to go further back in the boat and make space for the others water came in over the sides, down into the bottom and over the fuel tank.
‘I’m going to be part of this,’ was the general attitude. ‘We’re going over to take him out. We’re saving lives here.’ Nobody wanted to be left behind. Nobody wanted to miss the action. With ten of them on board, the driver called a halt.
The boat was lifted from the rock it had been resting on. It suddenly sank so far down that the sides were just a hand’s breadth above the water.
‘Hit the gas, top speed!’ called Håvard Gåsbakk as the boat puttered slowly along. ‘Hit the gas!’ he shouted again to the boat driver.
‘I’m at full acceleration,’ answered the driver. ‘It doesn’t go any faster.’
After a few hundred metres the engine started to sputter, before giving up completely. There they all sat, ten heavyweights armed to the teeth, in a rubber dinghy bobbing on the waves. Some of them started loosening their suits. If the boat sank, they would sink with it, forced down by the weight of their gear. They cursed. They cackled. They swore.
They heard the salvoes from the island.
A holidaymaker came to their rescue. He slowed down so the wash from his boat would not swamp the red rubber dinghy. It was lying so low in the water that any sudden manoeuvre could swamp it.
The heavily armed special forces officers were standing in water up to their knees and the fuel tank and fuel hose were floating around with the paddles and other equipment. The first thing to be heaved over into the camper’s boat was a shield. Then the officers moved over into the boat one by one, while the boat owner transferred to the red rubber dinghy. Once in it, he had no option but to take to the oars.
One of the policemen raised a hand in the air and cried, ‘Many thanks, comrade!’ Then they headed for Utøya.
But again they made slow progress, because this boat, too, was overloaded.
Another craft came alongside, and four men jumped over into it.
Finally they picked up speed. Both boats accelerated. But all the transfers had wasted precious time.
Anders Behring Breivik was surprised that Delta had not turned up. He saw a helicopter circling overhead and thought it must be the police. He was amazed at how low it came, because he knew the helicopter had a thermal-imaging camera that could detect signs of life from a distance, even through vegetation. The helicopter was in a two-hundred-metre line of fire. He could have brought it down with ten shots, but that would mean revealing his location, if they had not already seen him. Why didn’t they shoot him? Perhaps the helicopter was just reporting back to Delta on where to deploy when it reached the island.
A thought occurred to him. Did he in fact want to survive this? He thought of all the demonisation that was to come. He had everything he needed to kill himself, and if he was going to do it, he should do it now.
He weighed up his life for a moment.
He came down on the side of living.
He had to keep to the plan. Phase one was the manifesto, phase two was the bomb and Utøya, phase three was the trial.
All at once he felt a huge urge to survive. He thought about ways of surrendering, to ensure he would be able to continue to phase three. He feared it would be difficult to capitulate. Delta would execute him at the first opportunity.
He had no armour and there was not much ammunition left now. Seeing another abandoned mobile phone, he decided to ring the police again. It was 18.26. He had been on the island for over an hour. This time he got through quickly. But not to where he wanted. An error at a base station meant that all calls from NetCom accounts were transferred to Søndre Buskerud police district.
‘Police emergency line.’
‘Good afternoon, my name is Anders Behring Breivik.’
‘Yes, hello.’