by The Helicopter Heist- A Novel Based on True Events (retail) (epub)
It’s the last barrier between them and the money.
Nordgren pulls a Coca-Cola can from his backpack. It’s been cut in the middle, filled with explosives and a magnet has been attached to the bottom. He pushes the detonation capsule into the explosive putty and fixes the can to the door, an inch beneath the handle. With one hand, he gestures for Sami and Maloof to go back into the storeroom by the reinforced glass. The concave base of the can will direct the explosion inward and away. It’s something Nordgren has done many times before.
He deliberately chooses a smaller charge. He doesn’t know how much it will take, and he doesn’t know what’s on the other side of the door. Where the money is located, where the workstations are.
Nordgren clamps the long detonation cable onto the capsule and joins Maloof and Sami in the storeroom. He moves quickly and confidently. He touches the cable to the poles of the battery, the charge explodes, and he runs back out to the door.
There’s barely a scratch on it.
Nordgren nods. He knows what he needs to do. He applies a new charge in the same place. He tries to stop himself from feeling any stress, doesn’t doubt for a moment that he’ll manage, works methodically. He’s back in the storeroom with the others in less than thirty seconds, and the next charge goes off.
This explosion is considerably more powerful than the last. The smell of burned gunpowder fills the room when the three go in to see whether it worked. The smoke and dust quickly settle.
The door is still barely damaged.
“What the hell are you doing?” Sami whispers.
81
5:29 a.m.
They hear the next explosion at almost the exact moment the last bundle of notes is locked in the cage. The sound makes them jump; it’s louder than before, it seems closer.
“We can’t just stand here, Claude,” Ann-Marie whispers.
It’s unclear whether she is whispering so that the robbers won’t hear her, or because she doesn’t want to worry her colleagues.
“The instructions are clear,” Tavernier replies unnecessarily formally.
“We can’t just stand here,” she repeats, shaking her head.
“Can someone turn off that damn radio?” Tavernier snaps.
He doesn’t see who does it, but a few seconds later the device finally falls silent.
“Don’t worry,” he says aloud. “When the robbers make it into the vault, they’ll realize it’s pointless.”
But just before Tavernier has time to continue, they hear the third blast, and it’s worse than those before it.
“Shit,” he swears.
“It’s the security door!”
The voice comes from someone standing by the bend in the room, and they can see what Tavernier can’t.
“Everyone stay here,” Tavernier orders.
82
5:30 a.m.
If things had been different and they were sitting around a kitchen table, talking about this, Sami Farhan’s frustration would have known no bounds. He would have gotten up, moved around the table and talked nonstop. Gesturing wildly, he would have reminded the others what he had been through, stories he’d heard about cautiousness and a lack of decisiveness, and he would have pointed to Niklas Nordgren and said, “Fuck whatever’s on the other side of the door, just blow the damn thing open.”
But not now.
Not now that they’re on the sixth floor of the cash depot, staring helplessly at the steel-clad security door as their helicopter hovers overhead.
Now Sami says nothing. He trusts Niklas Nordgren because he has to trust him, and he assumes that Nordgren knows better than anyone what needs to be done.
“OK,” says the explosives expert. “Third time’s lucky. Take cover.”
He says it quietly. Without any hesitation, without apologizing. And while Sami and Maloof resolutely return to the storeroom, Nordgren pulls out an explosive frame rather than another can. He fixes the frame to the door, and this time he primes it differently. He knows there’s a risk he’ll take out half the wall with it. He knows there’s a risk that the money on the other side will be buried by plaster and dust and splinters.
Not to mention what might happen to the people working there.
But he has no other option. Though he hasn’t looked at his watch since they got onto the sixth floor, he knows they’re running out of time. Every stage has taken longer than it should have. This has to work now.
83
5:31 a.m.
Tavernier quickly goes over to inspect the steel door. It’s the emergency exit out to the atrium, and even from a distance he can see that there’s a dent in it, right beneath the handle, as though someone had taken a battering ram to it from the other side.
He takes out his phone and calls Valter.
“Can you see them?”
“No. But they must be up with you somewhere, they haven’t appeared on any of the cameras by the elevators or the stairs.”
“They’re trying to blow their way in here,” says Tavernier.
He doesn’t have time to say any more.
The third blast is more powerful than those that came before it, and it feels like the walls are about to come crashing down. Plaster, splinters and dust swirl through the air, and Ann-Marie starts screaming. No one tries to stop her.
Tavernier has had enough.
“Follow me!” he shouts, breaking into a run.
He is still holding his phone to his ear, and he rushes over to the opposite door, toward the stairwell.
Finally, he has become the leader he’s always wanted to be. They follow him, all of them, without any hesitation. The moment they make it into the stairwell, his phone loses the signal, but Tavernier continues—the stairs will take them down to the security doors outside the vault—and the others follow.
I’ll create a new secure position, he thinks. Because real leaders make smart decisions in difficult situations.
84
5:32 a.m.
This time, it takes a while for the dust to settle.
Maloof’s ears are ringing when he steps out of the storeroom. The relief he feels when he sees the battered door is indescribable. The gap is more than wide enough. Nordgren is already moving past him with one of the crowbars. He grabs the other.
With the larger of the two crowbars, they manage to force the door open. It falls into Counting with a thud.
Sami already has his gun raised, and he enters the room ahead of the others. He scrapes his hand on the half-destroyed wall on his way in.
He doesn’t expect there to be any staff left in the room, the bank world always instructs its employees to evacuate the premises as soon as they can. But nothing is guaranteed.
With his machine gun at hip level, he searches the room. It’s empty.
* * *
—
Maloof is close behind him. He glances at his watch. They’ve already taken over five minutes, and they still haven’t seen the money.
He starts the angle grinder. He does it by hand. It’s gasoline driven, so it’s a bit like starting an outboard motor or a lawnmower from the sixties. The engine starts with a loud roar. He moves over to the cages where the notes have been stashed and uses the grinder to cut the locks. A shower of sparks cascades beautifully to the floor. The smell of two-stroke gas fills the room.
Nordgren realizes that the staff has managed to lock everything in the cages. Yet more proof of how long it took them to get in. He banishes the thought. He doesn’t want to think about how many police officers are currently waiting outside.
As Maloof cuts open the cages, Nordgren and Sami fetch the mailbags.
The money is bundled up in red plastic boxes. They search for the 500-kronor notes and throw the boxes containing the 100- and 20-kronor notes to the floor.
Maloof moves on to the next cage. He puts down the angle grinder without turning it off, and it spins on the floor as though it had a life of its own. He tests the cage door. It won’t open. He grabs the angl
e grinder and cuts through the last bit.
The second cage contains the larger denominations.
They get to work.
As soon as one bag is full, they drag it out to the next room, into the storeroom by the reinforced glass window, and then throw it down to the balcony on the fifth floor.
All this takes time.
Each of them knows that they can’t spend much longer inside the building, but they continue anyway. They’ve been in a rush since they first stepped out of the helicopter, but they now know that they’re in an extreme rush. Once it looks like there’s no more room for mailbags on the little balcony on the fifth floor, they decide that they’re done.
85
5:35 a.m.
Task Force Leader Caroline Thurn climbs into the police van serving as the liaison center parked outside the Statoil station directly opposite the G4S cash depot. The station is on a slight elevation, which means it has a good view of its surroundings. The blue flashing lights from the patrol cars in the distance lend a cinematic quality to the scene. The sound of the robbers’ helicopter adds to that. Thurn had spotted it earlier, but it now seems to have disappeared into the dark night sky.
She has two options: either send people into the building immediately, risking shots being fired and a possible hostage situation, or wait until the robbers are back in their helicopter and attempting to make their getaway. She has a few more minutes to make her decision.
There are two uniformed police officers sitting in the front of the van, and several other people in the back. One of them is in plainclothes, and he has a laptop computer open in front of him. On the screen, Thurn catches sight of the green, pixelated images typical of live CCTV cameras.
“Who is that?” Thurn asks the nearest police officer.
“No idea.”
“What’s a plainclothes officer doing here?”
“Ask Månsson,” the officer suggests, referring her to the commanding officer.
The officer crouches back into the front seat. Thurn moves toward the back of the van and the stranger with the computer. The man seems to be in his early middle age, and he has a ruddy complexion and thick glasses.
“I’m Caroline Thurn,” she introduces herself. “I’m taking over command out here. Who are you?”
The man looks up at the tall police inspector and nods.
“Palle Lindahl,” he replies. “G4S security chief.”
Lindahl pulls out a business card and hands it to Thurn.
“You got here very quickly,” Thurn comments.
“I live just over there,” Lindahl replies.
He points out of the window and then continues:
“The manager in Counting, Claude Tavernier, raised the alarm with the on-duty guard. That was”—Lindahl checks the time on his phone—“twenty minutes ago. The guard called Skövde, which is where we have our control center. Skövde called me, as they’re meant to. I pulled on some trousers and…walked over. You lot were already here.”
Thurn nods. “Is there a risk of a hostage situation?”
That’s her most pressing concern.
“There’s no need to speculate,” the security chief replies, turning his computer so that she can see the screen.
On it, two men dressed in black are standing in front of what look like tall, bar-covered cages. They are lifting boxes out of the cages and then dumping bundles of notes into fabric bags. One of the men has an automatic weapon, probably a Kalashnikov, hanging from a strap over his shoulder.
“We have over eighty CCTV cameras in the building,” Security Chief Lindahl explains, “I can bring them all up on screen.”
“Impressive.” Thurn nods approvingly. “But sadly that doesn’t help.”
“The cameras aren’t meant to prevent crimes,” Palle Lindahl replies, sounding offended. “No number of cameras or vaults will keep skilled criminals away for particularly long. Our reasoning is that the perimeter security should stand up to attack for fifteen minutes. That should be enough time.”
“Enough time for what?” the inspector asks.
“Enough time for the police to get here. That fifteen minutes has passed, and you’re here. I can open and lock the doors and elevators throughout the entire building from my computer. You have a lot of people here. I can lead you up to the robbers, if you want.”
Thurn nods thoughtfully and peers out the police van window.
The many uniformed officers are standing outside their blue-twinkling cars, talking to one another in small groups. The reason none of them seem to be hurrying, or expecting orders of any kind, is that none of these officers have been trained for a situation like this. These were men and women who could chase down vandals and muggers, who could keep drunks away from public places, overpower men who abused their wives in apartments in the southern suburbs and in the best case also hit the target during their annual shooting exam. But they had no experience tackling international organized crime.
Ordering these men and women to storm the cash depot would be extremely risky.
And with civilians inside the building over the road, it would be a risk in which lives would be at stake.
* * *
—
Thurn is staring at the computer screen, struck by how calmly the robbers seem to be working. She watches them methodically fill their mailbags with cash. When one sack is full, they swing it up onto their shoulders or drag it across the floor and out of the room. Since they’re coming and going, all dressed alike, it’s difficult to tell how many of them there are. Four, she would guess, but it could just as easily be three or five.
“Where are they?” she asks. “In the vault?”
“No, no,” says Lindahl. “No one gets into the vault. That’s where the big money is. No, they’re up on the sixth floor. We call it Cash. Counting. It’s where we send the notes to be counted. Then they’re sent back down to the vault. We never have more than a few hundred million up there.”
“A few hundred million?” Thurn repeats, amazed.
“Right now, we have over a billion in the building,” Lindahl points out, to put those hundreds of millions in context.
“And there’s no one else there?” Thurn asks, nodding toward the screen.
“The room should be manned…” Lindahl eventually replies. “We have a dozen or so people working in Cash at this time of day. And their orders are to stay put if something happens. But I can’t see them. I don’t actually know…”
“So even with your eighty CCTV cameras, you can’t tell whether your staff are in harm’s way?”
Palle Lindahl shakes his head. “No,” he says. “I can’t.”
“No,” Thurn says.
“But what I can say, and unequivocally,” the security chief continues, without any attempt to hide his sense of wronged irritation, “is that if you storm that building and arrest the robbers, our staff—wherever they are—will be much better off.”
The headphone in Thurn’s ear starts to ring, and she presses the button on the cable around her neck. The pilots have finally taken off, she thinks.
But it isn’t the young helicopter pilot’s voice she hears in her ear, it’s Mats Berggren’s.
“I just spoke to Hertz,” he says. “There won’t be any helicopters from Uppsala or Berga.”
“There aren’t any?”
“Hertz is at Police HQ. I don’t know what’s happening, but the message from the military authorities is that we’ll have to handle this ourselves.”
“Politics.”
“They’ve promised to watch the radar. They can see everything in the air, they say. Apparently they’ve already seen our robbers’ helicopter a few times. Both when it took off and when it got to Västberga.”
“Politicians,” Thurn repeats.
“Hasn’t our helicopter taken off?” Berggren asks.
“No,” Thurn says, glancing at her watch. “But the pilots should have made it to Myttinge by now.”
“The Task Force is getting
ready,” Berggren tells her.
“Getting ready?” Thurn is dismissive. “By the time they get here, there won’t be anyone left.”
But then the inspector spots something that puts her in a better mood. Two riot vans are approaching the gas station. The robbers’ white helicopter has also just dropped down toward the roof. It’s hovering just above the cash depot now. There’s no doubt about it: the pilot has also seen the riot vans.
Thurn nods to herself.
These are the type of officers she’s willing to send into the building.
“Finally,” she says in the direction of the frustrated security chief.
86
5:40 a.m.
The riot vans drive up to the gas station and come to a halt next to Thurn. An enormous police officer climbs out of one of them, he has to be over six and a half feet tall, with a crew cut and shoulders like a bodybuilder. He’s the commanding officer.
“Who’s in charge here?” he barks.
Thurn points to herself. The man nods uninterestedly and glances over to the building and the helicopter hovering above it.
“You want us to take him down?” he asks.
“Take him down?”
“We can shoot the bastard down,” the uniformed officer says with a confident nod.
Thurn looks up at the helicopter. The beefed-up policeman is insane, she thinks. Shooting down the helicopter while it’s hovering above the roof could cause it to explode and fall onto a building full of people. What is he thinking? But before Thurn has time to say anything, Palle Lindahl sticks his head out of the police van.
“The robbers seem to be on the move,” he shouts.
He has his laptop in one hand, prepared to prove his words by showing them the images from the CCTV cameras.
Thurn turns to the riot squad leader.
“Storm the building,” she says to him. “Now. Get them before it’s too late.”