Two Soldiers

by Anders Roslund

  “Cell 9! Now!”

  ———

  He held the piece of metal to her throat and could feel with his thumb that her pulse was racing. His other hand was on her forehead and hairline and she was already wet with sweat, he felt the intoxication surge through him, the heat that became a flush, the lightness and air in his chest, his cock getting hard.

  His hand was shaking and he couldn’t control it even though that’s exactly what he was, in control.

  ———

  The bastard was still standing in the window.

  “Now!”

  And Leon drew yet another line across the already bloody throat.

  “Now!”

  And another one.

  Then he saw it. Alex’s face peering out through the square hole.

  “He’s coming out! He’s coming here!”

  Leon moved back a couple of steps—the metal still against her throat—so he could see better when Alex climbed up onto the window sill, gathering himself to jump, and then suddenly changed his mind, turned around and went back into the cell, grabbed the coffee pot from the machine, and smashed it against the guard’s face, a horizontal movement to the one cheek that was likely to slice through it. Suddenly you could see teeth and a bit of the tongue through the white slash in the skin and it took a few seconds before it started to bleed.

  ———

  The guard with the gashed cheek was supposed to stand still in the window.

  He didn’t.

  So Leon pressed the piece of metal harder and it cut from the inside when she gasped and then fainted, fell back head first. He lifted her up by the hair and when he looked up at the guard who was supposed to listen to him, he was sure he could see his cheekbone sticking out through the wound and the white enamel of his back teeth reflecting the light from the bedside lamp.

  “Cell 12!”

  If life was in danger.

  “Right now.”

  The metal deep into the back of her thigh again.

  “Cell 12!”

  If life was in danger—play along, not against.

  “He’s on his way.”

  The prison warden whose cheek was now red with blood moved over and Leon saw Marko’s face in his stead—he jumped, as Alex had just done.

  ———

  “I’ll cut her throat if you even try!”

  ———

  He was about to turn around and take the first steps toward central security when he heard something hammering against another window a few cells down, again and again, hard, desperate. That face. Smackhead and his fucking hands that were now waving around in the air.

  And my price? Leon was reminded of something he intended to forget. I want my half kilo. The hands frantically banging on the bars and the window. You want to be part of this? Or what? And the lips that were trying to say something. Two hundred and fifty. If I’m in. The hands that hammered and the exaggerated lip movements of that fucking ugly mouth. Right, you’re in. He could see it now, at least he thought he could, the lips forming the words, “I’m supposed to be coming with you!”

  He pressed the sharp edge harder in the guard bitch’s throat and turned around, pushing her in front of him, Alex and Marko right behind, he could almost hear the fuckers running through the passageway underneath his feet, twenty members of the task force leaving the unit and heading to central security, trying to get there before him.

  ———

  The door in the first inner wall was monitored by a camera at face height and Leon looked up into it, and made sure that the light from the two lamps shone on her throat, so that what was pressed against it would flash.

  ———

  The door in the second internal wall was larger, wider, with a camera installed high up and it was already open by the time they got there, he pushed her in front of him, toward central security and the big main gate.

  ———

  The young prison warden on duty in the central security glass box this afternoon had watched on monitor after monitor the four people move from Block D over the prison yard, through the two doors to the window in front of him, a face pressed up to it, with a throat bleeding from several deep cuts.

  If life is in danger.

  Her eyes, they looked straight at him, through him.

  If you believe that a hostage-taker is prepared to carry out his threats.

  She was so frightened, she could easily have been him.

  If the hostage-taker demands to be released, then you have to open the door, in order to save lives.

  It was hard to press the button, his trembling fingers had no strength and the prisoner standing behind her holding the metal to her throat banged her head against the glass several times until the warden put one hand on top of the other and pressed with both. He pressed and pressed until the main gate, which was several meters wide, slowly started to slide open. Then he sat completely still and watched them disappear out through the gate and across the parking place and along the road to the church, his colleague limping badly, and they pushed and shoved and pulled her, four bodies merging with the shadows, getting smaller and more blurred as they got closer to the other community, the one outside.

  She was missing a word. She tried and tried to find the right word to make sense of what she was feeling but it didn’t exist. She had never experienced such pain before. A burning, stabbing, breathless pain, at the back of her left thigh, where her uniform pants were torn and bloody.

  For so long, she had been frightened of the aggression that might explode at any moment. Now, with the piece of metal making small cuts on her throat, she wasn’t frightened anymore. She was furious. The feeling that she always had to hide in order to avoid seeing and feeling now suddenly turned to rage, she didn’t even notice that her leg no longer held her, that she collapsed.

  ———

  The bitch was suddenly heavier when he tried to straighten her up. She fell to the ground. He screamed get up you bitch, and she whispered never call me bitch again, and he looked at her leg and kicked her exactly where the metal had cut her.

  ———

  Julia wasn’t sure whether she was awake or asleep, whether someone pulled her by the arms, dragged her over the asphalt road toward the churchyard and the small parking place there, whether someone opened the back door of a car and pushed her down onto the backseat.

  If that was the case, then it wasn’t her standing by, watching.

  ———

  Leon opened the trunk and checked that what was supposed to be there was there—the stepladder, the arc torch, the rifle, the replica and the ones they needed now, each wrapped in a towel: a Sig Sauer and a Tokarev. He sat down beside the bitch in the backseat when the first police car sped by—sirens, blue lights, on its way to Aspsås prison—they waited in the seclusion of the church parking lot until it had passed, then started slowly to drive into the small town of Aspsås, finally accelerating when they left the last houses behind.

  He’d taken a firm hold of one of her arms and taped it to the other after she managed to reach the handle on the back door and open it. His first blow hit her on the nose and mouth. She let go and he pulled the door shut, grabbed hold of her arms, held them and taped them together, hard. Her wrists and fingers, thighs and feet, and it was when he was going to put the first piece over her mouth that she bit him on the back of his hand, her teeth sinking in deep. He hit her for the second time, across the jaw and ear, a third punch to her forehead, a fourth on her chin, and then he pulled off her shoes and socks, rolled the dark fabric into a ball and forced it into her mouth, taped over her bloody lips bit by bit.

  “I’m done.”

  A lay-by at the edge of a wood, overlooking a lake, they stopped but left the motor running, carried her around to the trunk, closed it and swapped places, Leon now in the driver’s seat as they set off again at high speed.

  ———

  She lay on her side. Her head hit against the metal every time the car stopped or
took a corner or accelerated. Julia kept her eyes closed at first, but opened them again, darkness, there wasn’t any difference. The tape and the socks, but most of all fear, she retched when she tried to breathe in air.

  They were all shouting at each other, three youthful voices that had been in the prison for about as long as she had, who had frightened her and made her long to get away. People who were close to her had warned her about what could happen—and now it had. Her mom had given her a lift on the first morning and still met her in the visitors’ parking lot after every shift. At some point during the week her dad always managed to leave new four-color brochures from universities and colleges on the kitchen table in her apartment. Jocke held her hand a little tighter, lay a little closer when they slept.

  The car braked more suddenly than before, lurched more violently and she hit her head against the wall of the trunk; they had left the main road and were driving on a smaller one now.

  She tried to see again but saw nothing, tried to smell but smelled nothing, she listened but they weren’t shouting as loudly anymore. The trunk felt like a coffin and she was shaking and lost all feeling, first in her toes, then her feet, then her lower leg.

  Her knees had gone to sleep when the car stopped.

  She had tried to count, lost it twice when the pain took all her attention, but she figured nineteen right-hand turns, seventeen left-hand turns, and forty-three slowdowns. They didn’t say anything at all when they closed three doors at the same time, hurried footsteps, and her eyes, everything was brilliant white when they opened the trunk, it was hard to see their faces, but she could see something red behind them, she was sure of it, the edge of another wall around another prison.

  It was getting darker, but still light when they parked the car by the corner of a seven-meter-high wall.

  Leon opened the trunk and looked into the eyes of the taped-up bitch as he shoved her legs to one side so he could get the aluminum stepladder, the arc torch, and two Kalashnikovs, one real and one replica. He handed the cutter to Alex, who ran with it in his arms to the metal shell protection fence by the first wall, got down on his knees, turned it on.

  Forty-five minutes ago they had cut their way out.

  Now they were going to cut their way in.

  ———

  The prison warden on duty that evening in the central security glass office was keeping an eye on sixteen monitors showing black-and-white sequences from thirty-three security cameras in Österåker prison and had just sat down with a cup of coffee when he saw something odd on the middle screen. Three dark shadows transformed into a flaring light by the first protection fence, then again by the next one. He didn’t really understand what he was seeing until the shadows ran up to the wall, put up a stepladder, and started to climb.

  ———

  Marko had crawled through the holes in both fences, then extended the four-part stepladder to its full eight-meter height and put it up against the wall, Alex a couple of steps behind with the cutter, Leon last with the loaded rifle on his back.

  The wind was stronger up there, it felt so good on their faces when they stood on the top of the wall, pulled the ladder up and then dropped it down on the other side.

  ———

  It had happened so fast.

  He’d worked in central security for nearly two years. This was like nothing he’d ever seen before.

  First, he pressed the blazing red button that was the direct line to the County Communication Center in Stockholm, three armed men, a breakout, next the button right beside it that raised the alarm on six pagers in the breast pockets of six uniforms of the Österåker task force, protective equipment, prison yard, then on the keyboard in front of him formulated a silent alarm on each screen in each wardens’ office in each unit, escape attempt, secure from inside. And then he turned back to the moving images on the screen again, two shadows climbing down the ladder on the inside of the wall that then started to run toward the metal cages in the prison yard.

  ———

  Leon stood on top of the wide wall and watched Alex getting down on his knees again with the gas-fueled arc torch and a few seconds later cutting out a rectangle in the corner of the metal cage as three inmates stormed over the yard. The first one, tall and broad with a shaved head, threw himself down toward the hole, forced his way through, the second one immediately behind.

  “Only Reza! No one else!”

  The two others had heard but didn’t stop and Marko aimed his gun at the ground near them, then fired three shots.

  “No one else!”

  They looked so small to someone standing on the top of a concrete wall, seven meters up.

  Alex, Marko, and Reza ran toward the ladder and Leon breathed in and out and in and out and in and this was easy, no one in the way, it was just him and the wall and the wind that meant he had to stand a bit firmer on his feet. A Kalashnikov weighed four kilos and had a magazine of thirty bullets. He lifted it and aimed at them, he wanted to laugh and fired into the sky and then at the woods over there, five six seven shots, one for each breath. He swayed a bit as he tended to do when he was concentrating, and after a while looked straight into the security camera on one corner of the wall, straight at someone who right then was sitting in a security office looking straight at him. He felt a tickling from his legs up to his arms and he laughed into the camera, giggled, aimed, fired, and the glass shattered and showered down, close to Alex and Marko and Reza, who were almost up now; they helped to pull up the ladder and drop it down on the outside.

  ———

  The man in the blue prison service uniform, who was sitting by himself in the central security fish tank, had seen a face on the screen and through the air vent heard the sound of a Kalashnikov, counted eight shots.

  Alarm, secure from inside, lock.

  He knew the security regulations. And had done exactly what he was supposed to. But he was trembling all the same.

  He knew that a total of eleven police units were now on their way from Stockholm and Arlanda and Norrtälje, that Österåker’s own task force was already out in the prison yard, forcing the prisoners back in, including the two who had crawled through a square hole, only to stand still at the base of the wall, that the prison wardens in each unit had locked all the cell and unit doors and were in their secure office. It didn’t help. He was still shaking as he, on the screen, saw the four men leave an eight-meter ladder and run toward a waiting car through two protective fences that had been cut open. He could still hear the unfamiliar sound of automatic gunfire in the late summer evening, and his colleagues were out there, and he hoped that none of them had been injured.

  Julia tried to turn over, stretch out her legs, arms. If she put up with the tape cutting into her skin, if she made small, small movements, she could manage to kick the metal, but the sound was muffled; she heard it best in her head.

  She would have been walking back from Slussen by now, slowly up Götgatsbacken, it was warm and that kind of evening—people, bicycles, cafés, and friends laughing at tables outside restaurants. They’d meet at Medborgarplatsen by the hot-dog kiosk with the Danish-sounding name, like they usually did. She’d be a bit late and start to run, and Jocke would be sitting on one of the benches waiting for her—he always was.

  She kicked again. That damned metal sound.

  The car had been standing still for several minutes by the red thing that she was certain was another prison wall.

  It had been a short drive. There was only one other prison nearby.

  Österåker.

  It was easier to breathe when there were no violent stops and sharp bends, when she could keep the socks away from her throat. A couple of times she imagined that someone had walked past, someone who might find her, she’d tried to shout but the words just got stuck on the tape and her lips and she had kicked the metal again that was still muffled.

  She heard someone shooting. An automatic, she knew that. First seven shots in quick succession, then one more,
she had identified the sound of splintered glass and maybe metal falling somewhere nearby.

  Who were they aiming at? Who had they injured? Who wasn’t alive any longer?

  Footsteps running, coming closer, the doors were wrenched open, the engine started.

  She curled up, it was difficult to get enough air again, the more she breathed in the less seemed to reach her lungs, she was dizzy and what had previously gone to sleep from her feet up, started again. There were more voices now, a new one that was higher than the others, but didn’t sound as loud. And soon there were smaller roads with sharper bends and she felt even dizzier, and she tried to focus on the only thing that was important, counting, thirty-five right-hand turns and thirty-four left-hand turns and fifty-two slowdowns before they suddenly stopped.

  Sirens.

  She could hear them clearly.

  She tried to scream, kick, police cars were nearby.

  And then disappeared.

  They were going to go to the movies, have a glass of wine. Jocke would be sitting on the bench waiting, she was normally late, but not this late, she was seldom this late.

  She guessed it was another ten minutes until they stopped the next time and left the road. She was thrown against the trunk wall as the car drove over grass, maybe a field or a meadow. They opened the doors and jumped out and she recognized the voice, the one who had cut her throat, Jensen, he was the one who yelled cunt as he passed the trunk and hit the metal hard with his hand.

  ———

  The sun was setting. Half an hour until dark.

  He aimed his gun at the third prison in ninety minutes, one of the low security ones with no wall, held the butt hard and aimed while Alex cut the first square out of Storboda prison’s outer fence, twelve seconds, moved on to the next, which was thinner, eight seconds, and that was precisely when Uros ran over the asphalted prison yard. Leon looked at his watch, 19:25, five minutes until lockup.