Jonas Bonnier - The Helicopter Heist - A Novel Based on True Events

Nordgren went to fetch his huge rucksack from the trunk.

The bag was full of plastic explosives, batteries and detonation cables. Like always, he kept the detonators themselves inside his vest.

Together, the three robbers walked toward Jakobsbergsgatan. The sun had risen, but it was hidden behind a haze of white cloud. The smell of chlorine and old beer lingered in the air, and a confused gull was flying between the buildings up by Oxtorget, but they couldn’t hear any of the nightlife that probably was still going on around Stureplan. A street sweeper passed by with its brushes spinning, and the sound of its industrious swishing faded as it turned the corner.

They spotted the police car at the same moment.

It was driving straight toward them, no faster than five miles an hour.

The police were looking for someone or something.

Without having discussed how they would handle a situation like this, Niklas Nordgren stopped, squatted down on the sidewalk and pretended to tie his shoelaces. Sami Farhan sped up and sneaked around the corner onto Jakobsbergsgatan, and Michel Maloof continued heading straight for the police car.

Rather than being three men in a group on Malmskillnadsgatan at five in the morning, they now looked like three strangers with different agendas. They seemed less threatening.

The reason Maloof, Nordgren and Sami were on Malmskillnadsgatan that early August morning was that Nordgren was worried. The plan was to blow a hole straight through the roof of the cash depot where Alexandra Svensson worked. They would have ten minutes in total, and Nordgren had promised that the explosion wouldn’t take more than a couple of those precious minutes.

But earlier that week, he had learned from Ezra’s sister Katinka that the roof of the cash depot in Västberga consisted of three layers. Concrete on the very top, joists beneath that and then the sheet metal protecting the inner ceiling. Blowing a hole in the sheet metal with a U-channel was possible. The joist layer was nothing but wood and insulation, and he could manage that with a saw and a crowbar.

The question was how thick the concrete was.

To avoid any surprises on the day, Nordgren had started looking for buildings that had been built in the same way, so that he could carry out a test. The partially completed building on the corner of Jakobsbergsgatan and Regeringsgatan in central Stockholm was the result of his search.

Its roof was constructed in the exact same way as Västberga’s. Over the summer, the builders had managed to lay the foundations, construct the load-bearing outer and inner walls and build the floors and ceilings on each of the eight floors. There was an entire skeleton for Nordgren to practice on, with no risk of anyone getting hurt. But since the building was still under construction, they had been forced to get up at dawn to beat the builders to the site.

Maloof was just a few steps from being able to turn the corner onto Jakobsbergsgatan, a pedestrian street, when the police car rolled up next to him. Nordgren was ten yards away, still busy tying his shoelaces. He heard how close the police car was, but managed to stop himself from looking up. It was the most careful knot he had ever tied.

A moment later, out of the corner of his eye he saw the blue-and-white car roll on. He made sure not to get up. As Maloof disappeared around the corner, out of sight, Nordgren took the opportunity to tie his other shoe, and then he got up.

He resisted the urge to turn and check whether the police car had stopped at the crossroads of Mäster Samuelsgatan. Instead, he rushed to catch up with his friends, who were already some way down the steep slope of the pedestrian street.

“Puts you on edge,” Sami said.

“With a bag full of explosives in the middle of town, we’ve got reason to be,” Nordgren added.

They reached Regeringsgatan without meeting anyone else. Farther down the street they could see a young couple making out furiously; the girl was pushed up against the wall and was practically climbing the man’s leg. They could hear the sound of the street sweeper in the distance.

The iron gate outside the building was locked with a chain and padlock. Nordgren pulled out some clippers. That was all he needed to cut the chain. He opened the gate and they sneaked inside. Nordgren put the chain back in place, with the cut-off section hanging inward. To a passerby, everything would look normal.

“Should we use the elevator?”

Just the thought that the three of them might get stuck in the slow, creaking, rickety building elevator, fully visible from all directions and with a rucksack full of explosives, was completely idiotic.

And it felt no better a minute or so later when they actually stepped inside it.

“This is insane,” Sami said.

“Right, right,” Maloof agreed.

Nordgren didn’t say a word. In just a few minutes’ time, he would be trying to blow a hole in a concrete roof in the heart of Stockholm. He didn’t want to admit it, but the idea was starting to seem doubtful to him. Though at the same time, the alternative was worse: not having done his homework and being forced to realize that it was impossible at a more critical moment.

The elevator seemed to take forever, and when they finally made it up to the roof, the view wasn’t what they had expected. They had been talking about it in the car, how they would be able to look out across the entire city, but the neighboring buildings blocked their line of sight. The haze in the sky suggested it would be a warm day.

Nordgren glanced around. He pointed to a big pile of timber.

“We can use that to shield ourselves,” he said.

And with that, he started to prepare the explosives. Like always, he would try a small charge to begin with.

Sami read his thoughts.

“We can’t do that now,” he said. “You know what I mean? We’re on a roof. In the middle of town. The police are driving around right below us. You know? We can’t be testing and testing and testing. We’re not out in the woods anymore.”

“No…” Nordgren began hesitantly.

Caution was a virtue he was reluctant to give up.

“Right, right,” said Maloof. “One time only. No more. One charge to… see if it works. Then we run.”

Nordgren heard what they were saying.

“OK,” he mumbled, bending down to dig deeper into his rucksack.

They were right, of course. In a few weeks’ time, when they were standing on the roof of the cash depot, they wouldn’t need to be discreet or precise, it would be a simple matter of blowing a big enough hole to be able to get down to the joist level. And that was the morning’s task. To see whether it was possible.

Niklas Nordgren took a small yellow plastic cone from his bag. It was the type soccer teams used when they practiced moving laterally. The shape of the cone was perfect, given that the aim was to aim the explosion directly downward.

Nordgren filled the cone with explosives. He was using red plastic explosives with a detonation velocity of twenty-five thousand feet a second. He wanted to create a concentrated explosion so that he could guarantee a hole. Semtex would have managed the same task, but the explosives used by the military were both more expensive and more difficult to get ahold of. He pressed a detonator into one edge.

“OK,” he said. “One try. No more, no less.”

He clipped the detonation cable onto the loose wires of the detonator, and the three ran behind the pile of wood and squatted down.

“It’s going to be a hell of a bang,” Nordgren said matter-of-factly.

Maloof and Sami got onto their knees. They had their hands over their heads, and Nordgren touched the exposed metal of the detonation cable to the poles of the motorbike battery.