by The Helicopter Heist- A Novel Based on True Events (retail) (epub)
Injustice, Thurn thinks. She hates it. She knows how it feels when it strikes.
And the task force leader’s initial long shot has evolved into increasingly manic behavior. She starts to methodically write down the clues Petrovic throws around during conversations in his car and in restaurants. Nothing is enough to send him down on its own merit, but if they cross-reference Petrovic’s insinuations with real events that autumn, Thurn is increasingly convinced that they’ll find something.
She hears his confident tone in her ears, it fills her consciousness, and she wonders what he will sound like when she is finally in front of him, her service weapon drawn and an arrest warrant in hand, pushing him into her car on the way to Bergsgatan and remand prison.
Much more pathetic, she guesses.
62
1:16 a.m.
It’s a cool, crisp night. The scent of moss and pine in the air. In the glow of Ezra’s flashlight, Sami Farhan and Niklas Nordgren go through the equipment. They check that the ladders can be easily extended and secured. They count the number of mailbags, feel the ropes, open the toolbox to make sure everything is there and then put it into one of the mailbags along with the crowbars and the saw. All of this happens in silence, and Ezra shines his flashlight wherever Sami points.
Nordgren and Sami arrived at roughly the same time. It’s ten days since they last saw one another, in Hjorthagen. Nordgren had pulled on his balaclava at the very moment he arrived, he doesn’t want Sami’s friend Ezra to be able to identify him.
Sami has told him that the police helicopter isn’t in Myttinge, but Nordgren takes that information in his stride. He’s counting on problems arising, and that’s easy enough to handle. They can’t do the job if they don’t have the police helicopters under control. It’s that simple. All they can do is keep working and hope for the best.
Nordgren continues to go through the equipment, paying particular attention to his own items. He has already prepared the cut-up Coca-Cola cans with silver tape packages at the bottom. The packages are full of neodymium magnets. He has prepared six cans, but he hopes he’ll need to use only one of them.
He also has four U-channels, similar to an upside-down train track, cut into short pieces. They’re heavier and more cumbersome, which is why the number is smaller. He’s also hoping to use only one of them. He goes through the explosive putty and the detonators and worries about moisture.
“I should test one,” he says, mostly to himself.
Sami has no objections. They’re miles from the nearest built-up area.
Nordgren gets to work. It takes him only a few minutes to discover that the long detonation cable isn’t with the detonators and the battery.
“Which damn cable?” Ezra asks, holding his hands up in the air.
It’s the first thing he has said since the two key players arrived. He knows his place. Nordgren has his balaclava pulled down over his face, and though Ezra has worn one like it many times before, it still commands respect.
Sami, who had been testing the headlamps, turns around.
“The cable,” says Nordgren.
“I took everything that was there!” Ezra shouts. “Do you think I’m some fucking—”
“The long cable’s missing. It’s fifty feet long.”
There’s no doubt in Nordgren’s mind. He knows he packed it.
“I mean, shit, I don’t know…” Ezra begins, but he quickly falls silent.
“What the hell!” Sami says, glancing at his watch.
It’s quarter to two.
“We’ve got to have it,” Nordgren says. “Without that long cable, we can’t blow out the reinforced glass on the sixth floor.”
Sami walks over to the rest of the equipment. He feverishly rifles among the ropes and bags, hoping to find the cable.
But it isn’t there.
“Shit, Ezra!” he hisses.
Ezra Ray looks deeply unhappy.
63
1:17 a.m.
In the apartment in Norrtälje, Michel Maloof places the food on the kitchen table. He had gone into the McDonald’s alone while Petrovic and Kluger waited outside. Three large Big Mac meals with Coke Zero. Extra salt. He sits down and starts eating before it gets cold. Halfway through his burger, he realizes that the others aren’t planning on joining him.
He gets up from the table and goes into the bedroom. They’re busy checking the weapons. Petrovic and the American have taken apart the machine guns and handguns and laid out all of the parts on two sheets.
It turns out that Kluger is as much a perfectionist as the tall Yugoslavian, and every single bullet has to be checked before it can be pushed back into the magazine.
“I could do this blindfolded,” the former marine says in his broad Southern accent, adding, “I have done it blindfolded.”
“Right.” Maloof nods. “The burgers are getting cold?”
“That’s fine,” Kluger replies.
“I might have a few fries later?” Petrovic says, to show goodwill.
“No, no,” Maloof says. “Or maybe…can I have your burger?”
“You’re insane,” Petrovic decides.
“So it’s OK?” Maloof asks.
“Totally fine.” Petrovic returns to his machine gun parts.
The realization that Petrovic and the American are like two big children playing with Legos strikes Maloof as he sits back down at the table and tries to stop the lettuce from falling out of the burger when he lifts it from its cardboard carton.
Back in the bedroom, Kluger makes the exact same remark.
“He’s like a little kid,” the American says to Petrovic. “I mean, who eats McDonald’s?”
64
2:05 a.m.
Sami grabs a large branch from the ground and swings it down onto a rock. Splinters fly. But he doesn’t say a word. The helicopter isn’t where it’s meant to be. The detonation cable is missing. He’s also worried that the ladders might be too short.
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.
65
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.
66
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.
The American walks over to the hangar door and studies it skeptically.
“These things are solid,” he says in his nasal English. “You can’t pick these. This needs to be blown open.”
“Right, right,” Maloof agrees.
And then he laughs. It’s comical. The door into the hangar is as secure as can be. They probably installed it on the recommendation of the insurance company, in some attempt to lower their premiums. Blowing it open would work, but the charge would also echo across the entire neighborhood.
Maloof takes out the long-bladed knife that he had been wearing in a holster beneath his coat. He goes over to the door.
“That’ll never work,” says the American, as though Maloof had been planning to attack the steel door with his blade.
But instead, he cuts a long slash into the canvas of the hangar, right next to the door. Since the hangar is made from fabric, he doesn’t even have to exert himself. One more cut, and he’s managed to create a flap that can be pushed to one side, and with a welcoming gesture and a grin, he invites Petrovic and the surprised pilot into the hangar.
Petrovic laughs.
“Smart of them to buy an expensive door.”
Maloof’s grin grows wider, and he follows them in.
The helicopter, a white Bell 206 JetRanger, is where it should be, at the end of its row, making it relatively easy to roll out.
So far, everything is just as Manne Lagerström had promised.
The American quickly inspects the machine. The hangar smells of gasoline and electronics, and the huge, empty helicopters are lined up in three rows. Maloof can’t help but liken them to bees. It’s as though they’ve flown in to rest for the night, and come dawn they’ll wake up again, their heavy, drooping rotor blades suddenly starting to spin, panels lighting up and engines roaring.
Kluger walks around the helicopter, occasionally raising his hand to the metal body. He climbs up and inspects the rotor blades and the mechanics. Maloof and Petrovic leave him to it and head back out to carry in the weapons and petrol cans from the car. When they return, the pilot has finished his checks. Everything is as it should be, the tank only partially filled so that they can fly with a heavy load, and he gives them the thumbs-up. They manage to maneuver the
helicopter out of the hangar using the small tractor. The wheels on the dolly move smoothly over the flat ground, possibly because Manne gave them an extra oiling ahead of tonight’s events.
The white helicopter glistens in the moonlight. Kluger starts the engine, and the rotor blades slowly come to life. A low whirring, rising to a controlled roar. After ten or so seconds of picking up speed, he can no longer see them; they’re just one great big spinning disc above the body of the helicopter.
“OK!” Petrovic shouts over the roar of the helicopter once they’ve loaded the weapons. “See you in a few hours, hopefully.”
“Right, right,” Maloof shouts back.
Kluger is already in his seat. He’s wearing ear protectors but no headphones. He isn’t planning to turn on the communications system during their flight. His feet are on the pedals and his hands on the levers. Petrovic has bought a pair of goggles, but Kluger doesn’t need them. In his experience, they’re more trouble than they’re worth.
Maloof takes his seat next to the American. The two bowl-shaped seats behind them are empty for now.
A second later, they lift off. The wind from the rotor blades tears at Petrovic’s clothes, and he watches the enormous white bumblebee fly away.
He turns around and rushes back to the car.
It’s almost five in the morning.
