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

They’re “extension ladders,” or at least that was what the kid at Bauhaus had called them. One is thirty-six feet long, with three twelve-foot sections, and the other is twenty-four, three eight-foot sections. You unscrew the plastic clips, pull out the two collapsed sections and then screw it back together again.

The longer of the two ladders will be lowered through the glass roof down to the balcony on the fifth floor. They’ll then use the shorter ladder to climb up to the sixth floor and blow a hole in the reinforced glass. But Sami isn’t convinced that thirty-six feet will really reach all the way to the balcony from the roof.

Not that there were any longer ladders suitable for being strapped onto a helicopter.

It had to be enough.

He moves in circles around all their things. Loop after loop, and Nordgren starts to get annoyed. He does the math in his head. To Lidingö and back can’t take any more than forty-five minutes. They’ll be able to get the cable here before the helicopter lands. He’s sure it must be lying exactly where he left it.

Water has worked its way into Nordgren’s left shoe through a small hole. Suddenly, he feels exhausted, but he knows his weariness will vanish the minute it’s time to get going. Since Ezra still isn’t back, Nordgren pulls off his balaclava for a moment. His hair is damp.

Sami’s phone starts to ring and both men jump. The silence in the woods is so compact, the breeze so faint, that it’s not even making the treetops whisper; to them, the phone sounds like it could wake half of Östermalm.

It’s five past two in the morning.

Sami glances at the display. It’s Team 3. Myttinge.

He takes a deep breath before he answers.

“Yeah?”

“The police helicopter just landed.”

Västberga, Marieberg and Norsborg have all called in. Everything seems fine.

“Time for Michel to do something at last,” Sami says.

He calls Maloof in Norrtälje. It’s the first time they’ve spoken since Hjorthagen.

“Morning, morning,” he says.

“Good morning,” Maloof replies.

“All green,” Sami says. “Time to go.”

“Right, right,” says Maloof, hanging up.

4:39 a.m.

Team 3 consists of two nervous teenagers lacking in experience, if not criminal records. They have been lying low in the woods in Myttinge for some time now, waiting for the police helicopter to return to its base. They have no idea how much is at stake; no idea that without their input, months of planning will have been in vain. They saw that the hangar was empty and then started playing strategy games on their phones.

But not on the phone Sami had given them.

When they hear the sound of thudding rotor blades in the distance, long before the helicopter’s blinking warning lights appear in the dark night sky, they’re not even sure it really is the police helicopter at first.

A few minutes later, they hear the sound of the chopper landing on its dolly, followed by the noise of its being rolled into the hangar. Five minutes after that, the pilots leave the area. They lock the huge iron gate with a chain and padlock, then drive away in the car that has been parked outside the fence.

That’s when Team 3 lets Sami know that the helicopter is back.

And then they wait for the green light.

When the phone rings and Sami shouts that it’s time, they feel like they’ve been waiting a long time.

One of the boys carries the two black toolboxes, the other takes the bolt cutters. They move quickly through the trees, involuntarily squatting as they run, as though that will make them less visible. But there’s no one around to see them, nothing but a startled hare or two. The police helicopter base, still considered temporary after six years of use, has been left abandoned and alone in the deep forests of Värmdö.

The boys cross the road. The first uses the bolt cutters to smash the surveillance camera on a post opposite the gates, then he moves on to the chain and the lock. At first, he tries to cut the padlock, but it’s impossible, the shackle is too thick. He tries the chain instead. That proves easier. After just a few attempts, he manages. When he pulls the chain through the steel fence, the noise is ear splitting.

The boy runs back onto the road to keep a lookout while his friend, carrying the black toolboxes, opens the gates and moves into the area. The hangar has two doors, and the boy decides to prepare the boxes in front of the farthest one. He sets them down on the ground and opens the lids.

Inside each box is a rock and a dummy car alarm that Niklas Nordgren bought from Teknikmagasinet in Fältöversten.

The dummy alarms consist of a battery-powered bulb for sticking onto the dashboard of a car. Their red blinking lights are meant to trick car thieves into thinking that the vehicle is alarmed. The black toolboxes are plastic, bought online, and they weigh almost nothing. The stones are just ordinary rocks that Nordgren found in the woods, but without them, a strong breeze would be all it took to tip the boxes over.

The boy switches on the two fake alarms and then sticks them to the boxes. Afterward, he places one of the dummy bombs outside each door into the hangar, takes a few steps toward the gate and turns around.

From a distance, the red blinking lights look ominous, and the black boxes are hard to make out; they’re perfect.

“Let’s go,” he says to his friend, and they start walking along the road.

There’s a bus stop about a mile away.

After a hundred or so yards, the first boy hurls the bolt cutters into the woods. They land so softly they don’t make a sound.

4:40 a.m.

When Michel Maloof, Zoran Petrovic and Jack Kluger pull the door to the apartment in Norrtälje closed behind them, they leave very few traces of themselves, other than the uneaten remains of their McDonald’s meal. Petrovic has promised to make sure someone goes over to get rid of “every last bit of DNA” the following morning.

The men go down the stairs without talking, and Maloof grabs the door so that it swings shut quietly behind them. The street is deserted.

They take Zoran Petrovic’s car, the dark blue BMW. The moon, which was shining brightly a few hours earlier, is currently hidden behind a cloud. Just an hour earlier, Petrovic had asked the pilot whether the moonlight made much difference to night flying.

“Makes it easier to see, but it also means you’re easier to spot,” came his reply.

Petrovic chose to interpret that as meaning Kluger was indifferent to whether the dawn was light or dark.

The American climbs into the front seat next to Petrovic, and Maloof chooses to jump in the back with the weapons. Not because he doesn’t trust Kluger, but just because it’s a bad idea to let any old stranger sit behind you with a loaded gun.

Petrovic has filled the trunk with cans of helicopter fuel. They’ll pick up everything else down in Stora Skuggan.

For once, Zoran Petrovic is quiet as the car slowly carries them out of the small town. Back in the apartment, the American’s aftershave hadn’t been much more than a faint scent of musk, but in the confined space of the car, the smell is stronger. Maloof cracks open the window to let in some fresh air.

“It’s to the right here, yeah?” Petrovic asks.

Maloof glances around. “Yeah, yeah.”

They turn off onto Kustvägen. From there, it takes less than two minutes to reach the helicopter hangar in Roslagen. They park, leaving the weapons in the backseat, and all three men go over to check that everything is as it should be. There are no other cars anywhere to be seen, the hangar is bathed in darkness, and the stillness is absolute. The pines and firs down by the lake are their only breathless audience.