Anders Roslund: Three Seconds

He counted fifty-seven small red and yellow and green lights on panels that controlled the water and electricity; counted them one more time.

No steps, no voices.

He was certain that no one had heard a body landing on the floor in one of the rooms with a door straight out into the passage that linked Block G and central security. He grabbed hold of a washbasin with his hands and hauled himself up. He was dizzy but the sensation crawling around his body disappeared after a while and he trusted it again.

He searched around in the unnerving darkness.

There was a flashlight on a hook on the wall under a fuse box. He chose that rather than the ceiling light-he could turn on the flashlight and let his eyes slowly adjust to the light. It hurt more than he'd imagined when the dark became light and it's possible he cried our when it was thrown back at him by the mirror above the washbasin.

He closed his eyes and waited.

The mirror didn't attack him anymore.

He saw a head with hair of varying lengths, big tangles that hung loose. He picked the scissors up from the floor and straightened it, cut it as short as he could, only a few millimeters left. The razorblade had also been in one of the desk drawers and later in the same trouser pocket. He leaned down and gulped some water from the tap and then wet his face and bit by bit peeled off the beard he had started to cultivate on his way out of the meeting in Rosenbad, following the decision to infiltrate inside Aspsås's high prison walls.

He looked in the mirror again.

Four days earlier, he had had long, fair hair and a three-week beard. Now he was cropped and clean-shaven.

Another face.

He let the water run, got undressed, and rubbed the piece of dirty soap that was lying on the washbasin. He washed his body and waited until it had dried in the warm room. He went back to the pipe and the sharp metal edges and with his hands felt around and caught the pile of clothes that a few days earlier had been worn by a principal prison officer called Jacobson, before becoming a makeshift pillow to save his neck and prevent the clothes from being soiled by body fluids.

They were about the same height and the uniform fit almost perfectly. The trousers were perhaps a bit too short, the shoes perhaps a bit too tight, but it didn't matter, it didn't show.

He stood by the door and waited.

He should be frightened, stressed, anxious. He felt nothing. He had been forced to adopt this life state when the ability not to feel meant the same as survival: no thoughts and no longings, no Zofia and Hugo and Rasmus, everything he had to remind him of life.

He had stepped into it as he passed through the prison gate.

Only dropped it for two seconds.

When the shot was about to be fired.

He had stood by the window and adjusted the earpiece and for the last time looked over at the church tower. He had glanced at the rug that concealed a body covered with explosives and the barrel of diesel and gas close to their feet and the fuse that was resting in his hand. He had checked his position, he had to stand in profile, he had to force them to aim at his head so no forensic scientist would later question the absence of a skull bone.

Two seconds of pure fear.

He had heard the order to fire on the receiver. He had to stand there and wait. But his legs had somehow moved too early, they had moved without him intending to do so.

Twice he had not managed.

But the third time, the state of control had returned, no thoughts and no feelings and no longings, he was protected again.

The shot was fired.

He stood firm.

He had exactly three seconds.

The time it would take for the ammunition, in a wind strength of seven meters per second and a temperature of eighteen degrees celsius, to leave the church tower and at a distance of fifteen hundred three meters hit a head in a workshop window.

I mustn't move too soon, I know the sniper's observer is watching me with binoculars.

I count.

One thousand and one.

I hold the lighter in my hand with the flame naked and ready.

One thousand and two.

I take a swift step forward just as the bullet hits the window and I hold the flame to the fuse that is attached to the body under the rug.

The shot had been fired and it was no longer possible to see the object through a window that had been seriously damaged.

He now had two seconds left.

The time it would take for the fuse to burn down to the detonator, pentyl and nitroglycerine.

I run to the pillar that I chose earlier, just a couple of meters away, one of the square concrete blocks that carry the ceiling.

I stand behind it when the last centimeters of fuse disappear and the stuff that is wound and taped around a person's body explodes.

My eardrums burst.

Two walls-the one behind the principal prison officer and the one into the office-collapse.

The shattered window is blown out and falls down into the prison yard.

The pressure wave finds me but is dampened by the concrete pillar and the rug over the hostage's body.

I am unconscious, but only for a few seconds.

I am alive.

He had been lying on the floor with the howling pain in his ears when the heat from the explosion reached the diesel barrel and black smoke assaulted the room.

He had waited until it had found its way out through the hole that had until recently been a window, creating a grayish-black wall that blanketed and hid much of the workshop building.

He had taken the pile of uniform clothes that belonged to the older guard and thrown it out through the window, then jumped out himself, onto a roof that was only a few meters below.

I sit without moving and wait.

I am holding the clothes in my arms, I see nothing through the thick smoke and with no eardrums I struggle to hear, but I feel the vibrations of people moving around on the roof close by, policemen who are there to put an end to a hostage drama; one of them even runs into me without realising who I am.

I don't breathe, I haven't since I jumped through the window, I know that breathing in this toxic smoke is the same as death.

He had moved close to those who heard the steps without realizing that they belonged to the man they had just seen die, over the roof toward the shiny sheets of metal that looked like a chimney. He had climbed down into the hole, his arms and legs pressed hard against the walls until the pipe narrowed and it had been difficult to keep his grip, then he had let go, fallen the last bit down to the bottom of the ventilation shaft.

I crouch down and crawl into the pipe that is sixty centimeters in diameter and leads back into the building.

With my hands against the metal, I pull myself forward bit by bit, until I am above a room that is a substation and has a door straight out into the lower prison passage.

I lie down on my back, the pile of clothes under my head like a pillow. I am going to stay in the ventilation shaft for at least three days. I will piss and shit and wait but I will not dream, I will not feel, there is nothing, not yet.

He put his ear to the door.

It was difficult to make out, but there might be someone moving about out there-wardens walking past down the passage, not prisoners at this time of day, it was after lock-up and they would all be in their cells.

He ran his hand over his face and head, no beard, no hair, down his thighs and calves, no dried urine.

The new clothes smelled of another person, some deodorant or aftershave that the old warden must have used.

Movements out there again, more people passing.