There is a three-square-meter hole in the asphalt where the car bomb once stood. Below you can see the two floors of the underground garage. Steel plates in front of the entrance to the garage are peeled back. The foundation is vertically cracked. Both the reception lobby and the canteen next to it in the High Rise are blown apart. The remnants of cars are blown into the nearby buildings. Car parts land a hundred meters away. The abstract woman’s torso in golden bronze beside the fountain at Einar Gerhardsen Square, by the sculptor Knut Steen as a tribute to the Roman goddess Aurora, the dawn, is peppered with metal shrapnel. A cloud of dust lies over the government quarter. The dry, violent crash is heard all over the capital city. Most people think it’s thunder.
Eivind Thoresen has plenty of time. It feels like that. He hears a gigantic crash, and then everything goes into slow motion. The twenty-five-year-old sees flames rushing toward him from the right. He turns his upper body to the left to use his hand to protect his face. His bag, which hangs over his right shoulder, is thrown forward. The flames from the explosion cause burn marks on the hand and arm in front of his face. Small bits of shrapnel strike Eivind’s bag. The pieces are rusty. They come from the van’s undercarriage. The John Grisham pocket book in the bag is pierced through by shrapnel. A small piece of shrapnel strikes the button on the folded jeans and breaks it in two. The cell phone, with Espen still on the other end, is thrust down the sidewalk as the shock wave lifts the law student up and throws him three meters back toward the flower bed in front of S-Block. Espen thinks he has fallen down a flight of stairs.
This is not Oslo. It’s Dresden in 1945, Phnom Penh in 1975, Sarajevo in 1995. That’s how it feels. Norway’s capital has turned into a war zone. Concrete buildings are covered with a grayish-black fetid smoke; streets, cars, and sidewalks are covered with broken glass; confidential papers fly about while alarms howl asynchronically in the background. People call for help. An overturned “No Entry” sign lies on the ground in front of the High Rise, and a black car has its wheels in the air. There is an overwhelming smell of burning. Water spurts out of leaking pipes. There’s blood on the asphalt and flower beds. Most of the ground floor of the High Rise is gone. The blast has blown out the thin walls, leaving only the pillars. The ground floor is similar to the one that was originally built in the late 1950s, when you could drive a car under the building. It was only in the 1970s that simple walls were built around the solid pillars. It’s possible to see Akersgata through the High Rise from Grubbegata. Flames extend wildly skyward from under the helipad on the roof of the Ministry of Petroleum and Energy. The reception lobby in R4 no longer resembles one. The signal panel on the wall flashes “Abnormal operating status.”
Cups and saucers from the kitchenettes are scattered and broken over the floor in the High Rise. Electrical wiring, ventilation fixtures, and water pipes hang down from the ceiling. Filing cabinets are overturned, strewing out kilos of the twenty-two tons of paper kept in the building. The air is filled with the stench of smoke, torn fiberboard, fiberglass, and asbestos dust. Employees are thrown against the bookshelves and come to feeling dazed. The anti-shatter film on the windows is supposed to prevent glass shards from becoming projectiles shooting into the room. Instead the pulverized windows, including the frames, turn into projectiles. A fifty-year-old senior adviser is pierced in the head by a twenty-five-centimeter-long piece of wood from a window sill. It goes in at the jaw, through the masseter muscle, and out via the temple.
The main staircase out to Grubbegata is unrecognizable. Window frames and sills are blown out and lie all over the railings. Each footstep crunches into metal, wood, and glass. Ceilings have collapsed. Potted plants are overturned. In the High Rise’s reception area employees used to go past one of the most famous artworks of Hannah Ryggen, the textile artist, feminist, and anti-fascist,. We Live on a Star showed a naked man and woman embracing each other over a globe, and it was an expression of Ryggen’s faith in people and love. Two naked infants, symbolizing innocence and life, were suspended over the globe and the adults’ embrace. When the timid artist, who had recently lost her life partner, Hans Ryggen, attended the unveiling of the piece in 1958, along with the architect and two workers with tools and ladders, she began to weep profusely. Now the artwork is totally destroyed.
Hundreds of men and women in the government quarter have been exposed to the same event, but each experiences it individually and formulates his or her own particular narrative. In recalling the event, the government employees diverge in their narratives even down to the basic facts, such as how the explosion sounded. Not like a loud bang, more like a muffled, dry rumble. Like the pop of a champagne cork, except louder. Thunder. An earthquake. A gas explosion. Those on the inside elevators hear a distant, strangled sound before they come to a halt; the walls tremble, and everything turns black. Some don’t remember the explosion but rather the silence just afterward, the smell of burned metal, and the sound of paper fluttering through the air.
The window at the clothing store Cubus on Storgata Street is shattered, and smoke gushes in. A twenty-three-year-old employee tries to close the doors, but people, in panic, seek refuge in the store. In another store on 8 Møllergata a heavy lamp falls from the ceiling and almost hits a customer. The maître d’ standing outside the Mona Lisa restaurant in Grensen feels the shock wave from the explosion. The doors and windows of the restaurant implode. Just a few meters away from him a waiter at the restaurant next door is hit by glass from the second floor. He is lying on the ground with a bleeding head. When the maître d’ sees people on the street running with a dust cloud behind them, he recalls the scenes from Manhattan ten years earlier.
Pål Martin Sand is standing in front of the window and talking on the phone to Labor Party secretary Raymond Johansen. He is standing with his back to the window that faces Youngstorget Square and doesn’t see the wave from the blast coming toward him from the government quarter. Sand is flung against the wall while Johansen is still on the line. Sand gets up, tells the party secretary that he must hang up, and runs. Below at the Internasjonalen Club two Tromsø musicians are cut on the forehead, head, and arms from the glass showering down from the People’s Theater building. Right beside them is a sixteen-year-old. She calls her father and tells him that she can’t breathe. A glass shard is stuck in her throat.
Most of the damage is not caused by the explosion itself but by the blast wave that ricochets violently for a long while between buildings, like the fertilizer bomb of Timothy McVeigh’s that destroyed a third of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building, damaged 324 other buildings, and killed 168 people in Oklahoma City in 1995. Invisible energy and gas molecules cause unimaginable damage to unimaginable places but behave logically and predictably. Like water, energy finds inroads through the labyrinthine city spaces, with a velocity exceeding that of sound. When the blast wave meets a building, they change direction. The wave ricochets among swaying government buildings, moving up Grubbegata toward the OBOS building and the Swedish church, where the street curves to the left, past a newly restored building from 1895, and the Fredensborg housing center (a program for homeless drug abusers) before they meet a wall of apartment blocks on Fredensborgveien, where number 14 bears most of the brunt. The photographer Fredrik Arff has his studio here. The window in the studio is of the old type, with double glazing. Because the blast wave weakens in its trajectory up Grubbegata, partly due to a loss of power in the open urban space over the Hammersborg tunnel, only the inner pane is cracked.
Eivind Thoresen gets up. He thinks that there must be many who have died here. He hears nothing but catches sight of an older man in glasses, a beige jacket, and a blue shirt. He was standing beside his car, waiting for his wife to come out of the High Rise on Einar Gerhardsen Square when the bomb went off. The bleeding forehead looks dramatic, but his right leg is harder hit. It looks to Eivind as if the foot is hanging by a thread. Again the scenes of destruction seem as though taken right out of a movie. There’s panic, chaos, and smoke everywhere, but Eivind hears nothing because of the ringing in his ears. He realizes that the man is calling for help. His hearing gradually returns; he hears fire alarms and cries for help far, far away. Eivind wants to say to the man, “You must shout louder if you want someone to hear you.”
It’s not the right thing to say. The man obviously needs help. Eivind takes a step toward him and gets a curious glance in return. The glance says, “You can’t help me. Look at yourself.” Eivind is a polite young man and does as he’s told. Then he sees the blood streaming from his left upper arm, just below the edge of his short-sleeved white shirt. It’s strange that Eivind doesn’t faint. And the same thought goes through his mind: “It’s strange that I didn’t faint.” Eivind can’t stand the sight of blood. He turns off the TV when there are surgery scenes. Drawing blood from him is a nightmare. Eivind presses his right hand over the wound and thinks that the problem is solved. “Now I’ve stopped the bleeding,” he thinks. The pressure makes the pain even worse. The blood gushes more intensely and the flow becomes as long and thick as the stream from a water hose. He can’t help anyone. He’ll have to lie down. And wait. Eivind and the older man cry for help in chorus. The law student sees people running away. He sees that they see him, but still they run away. “Damn, if no one stops, we’re going to die,” Eivind Thoresen thinks.
Oda Faremo Lindholm registers the sound of the blast before she sees the shattered windows. The twenty-three-year-old remains sitting on the chair in front of the PC in the editorial offices while her colleagues hide under desks or run to the exit door. She can be a little cocky in a way, a consequence of years of effort to keep hasty decisions and “worst case” scenarios at bay. But then there was this inexplicable feeling that something wasn’t right, that something was fundamentally wrong. As the sports journalists, foreign correspondents, culture reporters, photographers, and editors rushed to the stairs, the alarm sounded. Oda followed the others. It was only on the way down the stairs, heading toward the YMCA building exit on Møllergata, that her heart started to beat very fast. Everyone remained calm, except for one woman who sobbed and shouted in broken Norwegian, “This is a bomb!” Oda thought she probably had been traumatized in her homeland, where bombs and war were a part of daily life. “This is a bomb!” In the meantime she noted the damage to the building on the sixth floor, fifth floor, and fourth floor: the ceilings that have collapsed, the cables that are exposed, shattered glass doors in the offices. “This is a bomb!”
On the sidewalk on Møllergata Oda sees that something is seriously wrong. People stagger unsteadily out from offices and shops. One of them sits bleeding in front of the Glassmagasinet department store. Some girls have salvaged meat, salad, dressing, and pita bread from the dust, glass, and detritus that have fallen from the roof of the Beirut Kebab cafe. A man tries to get into the driver’s seat of a car that is full of broken glass. Oda doesn’t catch all of this; her only impression is of scattered groups staring at the government quarter. They were saying that a helicopter crashed on its way down to the helipad on top of the R4 building, but that rumor is put to rest when Oda goes up to Grubbegata and peeks around the corner toward Einar Gerhardsen Square. She isn’t aware of everything that is happening on Møllergata because she can no longer concentrate on herself, her colleagues, or the wounded. It has just dawned on the newspaper journalist that her mother may be dead.
When Oda was little, she spent a lot of time in the government quarter. Her mother, Grete Faremo, worked in both the Ministry of Justice and Ministry of Petroleum and Energy. Even when she has worked in other ministries in other locations, Oda has always thought of the government quarter as her mother’s workplace because of all the meetings that took place there. Oda is distraught when she calls her mother’s number on the mobile phone. Answer the phone; answer it, answer it. She’s no less panic-stricken when her mother answers on the first ring, even though one would think that would be good news. It almost never happens that her mother does so. Oda usually has to leave a message, to be called back when convenient. Therefore she’s certain her mother is buried under the rubble. “Where are you? Are you alive?” That last question in particular is an unusual one to ask on a Friday afternoon, so the mother asks her daughter to breathe out. That, in reality, isn’t easy to do for a twenty-three-year-old who’s scared and crying. “A bomb has exploded in the government quarter,” Oda says. “Okay, calm down,” says the mother, who doesn’t believe her daughter’s hysteria is proportionate to the events that have caused it. “I’ll check with my colleagues and call you back.” “Huh? She’s hanging up? Here I’m in the middle of bombed-out rubble and she hangs up?” Oda thinks and doesn’t know whether to laugh or cry at the surrealistic situation in which she finds herself.
Oda sits on the sidewalk in the midst of what looks like the great doomsday conflagration, Armageddon, and waits for a new heaven in the form of a phone call. Actually she knows very well that her mother’s workplace is on Grev Wedel Square. But she often has meetings at the prime minister’s office and usually on Fridays with the ministers. Oda doesn’t know that her mother spent the morning at a medal ceremony for Afghanistan war veterans at Fort Akershus and went straight home afterward to prepare for a vacation trip to Montenegro. All around Oda rumors run rampant about helicopters crash landing, attacks on the Cappelen Damm publisher, and assassinations of Norwegian war participants in Libya. She doesn’t care much for the baseless yet plausible scenarios, despite the fact that she was for many years politically active in the Red Youth Party. She’s still only anxious about her mother.
“Can I go now? Who’ll finish today’s edition of the newspaper? God, I forgot to send the Joddski article to the news desk.” Oda wants to get home to her apartment, but the door keys are in the gray Helly Hansen raincoat in the office on the seventh floor of a building that no one is allowed to enter now. Her parents have an extra set of keys. Oda calls her father and tells him about the bomb and the now inaccessible keys. The father responds quietly but somewhat distractedly, “Oda, that’s probably no big deal. Can’t you just go up and grab the keys? You see, the timing is a little bad now—I’m watching the time trial at the Tour de France.” “Huh? They’re hanging up on me again. Do I have to stand here and wait until the time trial is over? Is that how it’s supposed to be?” thinks Oda and hangs up.
Oda’s mother calls up again. Finally. When her mother is afraid, she doesn’t become hysterical, which would be the more natural reaction. She stays calm and focused and looks for solutions. “Oda, I think you’re right. It could be a bomb,” she says. She knows that there’s also the risk that there may be a second bomb. The first one kills people and attracts emergency first responders and curious onlookers, while the second kills the first responders and curious onlookers. “Can you go home?” her mother asks. “No, my house key is in the building and dad’s watching the Tour de France.” “Can you go to Ketil’s? He’s home. Go to Ketil’s.” “I haven’t told my boss.” “Never mind; just get out of the city center.” Oda has no idea what happened during the two minutes from the time her mother, Grete Faremo, Norway’s defense minister, ended the first phone call with her daughter until she called now, but everything suggests that the minister was first informed of the terrorist bomb in the city center by her own daughter and that the minister in the brief interim had confirmed that the explosion was not an accident.
Eivind Thoresen’s friend, Espen, in Lambertseter hears the clamor, noise, and cries for help through the mobile phone lying on the sidewalk by Einar Gerhardsen Square. His suspicion that something is seriously wrong is confirmed when the Tour de France broadcast is interrupted by breaking news of an explosion in Oslo. He has been texting and shouting to Eivind but getting no response. When the call is suddenly cut off, he is perplexed. He calls up Eivind’s mother, who works at a nursery in the suburb of Nordstrand. Espen stammers, using key words enigmatically, mumbling and blustering rather than articulating anything that makes sense. The only thing the mother can make out of what Eivind’s good friend is saying is “Tour de France.”
Eivind was thirty meters from the car bomb when it went off. Because the bomb was located above the underground garage, the force of the explosion went downward before creating an air pressure funnel that rose upward. Fortuitously Eivind was shielded by this air funnel. Moreover, he managed to turn his back so that the clothes in the fitness bag over his right shoulder bore the brunt of the many flying projectiles. A black car used by state security guards also diverted some of the force of the blast away from Eivind. Nevertheless, he was thrown several meters backward onto Einar Gerhardsen Square and was severely injured in the head, legs, and arms. A few meters away from the law student, a fifty-six-year-old administrative secretary lies motionless. Eivind sees that many people are taking pictures of him with their mobile phone cameras. One stops right in front of him and videos the whole scene. He stands there for a long time.
There are two reception guard positions in S-Block. When Hanne Gro Lille-Mæhlum’s colleague went on vacation at 2:00 p.m., she was asked whether she wanted to move over to the desk closest to the main entrance. She said no and was sitting at the inner desk. As a consequence when the bomb exploded, the thirty-three-year-old was shielded by a large, solid machine used for scanning mail. If she had moved over to the colleague’s desk or if the machine had not been where it was, the reception guard’s fate would have been different. Hanne Gro doesn’t remember whether she was standing or sitting in the lobby. She doesn’t remember the blast. She remembers only the sound of broken glass and everything going black.
Hanne Gro is trapped among the desk, chair, scanning machine, and window. She feels as if she’s been run over and shrink-wrapped. Hanne Gro has been thrown diagonally across one of the doors in the lobby and ends up with a pane of glass on top of her. The glass pane, which still has stretch film covering it, is almost intact, but some shards have come loose. When she tries to move out of her unnatural position, her arm is cut, and the glass shards come dangerously close to her neck. Sparks are issuing from the ceiling. In the corner stands a huge potted plant that’s still intact. She hears her own heart beating. Under the desk are the black shoes she took off because of her clammy feet. The mobile phone isn’t where she left it. The tall black rubber boots and the black raincoat with white dots are still in the corner.
The reception guard is trapped with glass right up against her neck, and the blood is dripping onto the floor from the cut on her forehead. She listens for broadcast messages on the communications channel, but there’s nothing. “Have I turned the volume down too low? Damn,” thinks Hanne Gro. In her head she goes through the number of ministers who are in the buildings and of the many VIPS and other guests she knows about. She is worried that she has let in someone who’s not supposed to be there. Maybe it’s some nutcase who’s angry with the labor minister and has decided to destroy the building they’re in? But it’s she who’s been hit, not the ministers who happen to be outside the government quarter. Hanne Gro doesn’t know what has happened, but nevertheless she thinks about all the hours she has spent in various reception lobbies, on the front lines, exposed to potential threats, without being harmed. Her job is to wait for something that preferably won’t happen. But it had to happen sooner or later.
The workers in the ministries run through the lobby and out of the building. Someone stops and says that they have to get her out. “No, don’t touch me,” Hanne Gro says. She’ll wait until the fire department arrives to cut her loose. The alarm panel is behind her. According to standard operating procedures for emergencies, the operations manager has to come here. A group stops in front of the entrance. “Hello, does anyone know what’s happened?” Hanne Gro asks. She wants to know where the fires are but gets no answer. In an effort to appear professional she tries to calm the people around her by saying that the security guards will be coming soon to take charge of the situation. The security control room has video cameras, so they must see that she needs help.
The fire department is located on the other side of S-Block. How long can it take for the firefighters to get here? Hanne Gro feels weak and nauseous. The cuts are pulsating with blood. Blood is streaming from her forehead. She’s losing her vision. “Will I die in this way?” Hanne Gro hears someone banging on the inside of a door. Someone else stops right by her and cries, “Oh my God.” A senior adviser from Government Administration Services, who on his way down from his office on the third floor has passed ceiling parts and ventilation equipment on the floor, shattered windows, and stately photographs of former ministers that have fallen from the walls in the hallways, stops in front of the reception desk on the first floor. He asks how it’s going. “I’m stuck fast and there’s glass in my eye,” Hanne Gro says. “We must try to get you loose now,” the senior adviser says, with the emphasis on “must” and “now.” He ponders for a few seconds before moving the chair and other materials and tilting the glass window pane. While he pries and lifts, Hanne Gro asks for the black rubber boots. They can protect her feet from sharp objects on the floor of the lobby. He suggests that they leave the boots behind. He lifts her up, placing his hands under her knees and neck, and she smells deodorant and hears the sound of his pounding heart. “Wait; I need to get my keys and communications radio,” Hanne Gro says. “We don’t have time for that now,” the senior adviser responds.
Out on Einar Gerhardsen Square, Hanne Gro asks the senior adviser what has happened. She can see only a little through her left eye, right in front of her and down on the ground. “It looks like hell,” he replies and jogs down toward Youngstorget Square with her in his arms. His heart beats faster and he breathes more heavily. Hanne Gro is worried that he will stumble and drop her, thus hurting both of them. In an attempt to calm him down, she says, “You don’t have to run so fast; I’m okay.” The senior adviser ignores her advice. He wants to get as far away as possible as fast as possible.
The glass in the window of Uno Tailors and Dry Cleaning on Youngs-gate Street was blown in by the blast wave. On the premises is thirty-four-year-old Delshad Rasul. Experience with twenty years of war in Kurdistan and knowledge of first aid propels him to rush out of the dry cleaners’ and run in the direction of the smoke that is rising above the roofs. On the way he snatches napkins and dishcloths from Kitchen and Bar on Møllergata. The area between R4 and the High Rise is reminiscent of a war zone in Iraq, he thinks, before he looks around to see who needs the most help. Outside S-Block he finds a young man who is injured. Beside him sits Harpreet Singh, who works at OBOS and who has run out of the turquoise building on Hammersborg Square. Arriving on Grubbegata, he was told to stay away because there could be another explosion. Firefighters who came out of the station told him the same thing. Harpreet runs down Grubbegata anyway, in the opposite direction to that of many others, until he comes to Eivind Thoresen, who lies severely injured outside S-Block. But Harpreet Singh knows only minimal first aid. The first thing he says to Eivind is, “You look like hell.”
The myth is that we panic and act irrationally and selfishly in disaster situations. It’s equally true that people keep a cool head, have a heightened sense of fraternity, and offer a helping hand. Researchers who interviewed terror victims in the subway attacks in London in 2005 say that the usual sullen annoyance and suspicion very quickly gave way to cooperation and compassion among the passengers. Faced with life or death decisions for oneself or others, one’s senses are heightened, the blood pumps faster, and the performance bar is raised. We often answer correctly if the wrong answer leads to punishment. If soccer players in a penalty shootout know that scoring a goal means victory for their team, the success rate is 92 percent, while that rate is cut by half if scoring has no impact on the outcome of the match. Moreover, according to psychologist Pål Johan Karlsen, it is possible to increase the degree of rational behavior in chaotic situations if we already know about emergency preparedness. It helps, for instance, to know where the emergency exits in a building are. Harpreet and Delshad have differing levels of expertise in first aid, but both run to the government quarter to try to save lives despite being warned of the risks involved.
Delshad knows that the most important thing is to stop the bleeding. He breaks off a branch from the green tree next to the flowerbed. The branch can be used to make a tourniquet. Harpreet and Delshad also get a plank and borrow a policeman’s Maglite flashlight. They fish out clothes for bandaging the wounds from Eivind’s bag. The first garment Harpreet takes out is a white T-shirt that he uses to bandage Eivind’s left arm. Delshad loses contact with Eivind several times. He is falling asleep, so Delshad slaps him in the face and talks more intensely to him, saying that Eivind is strong, that it’s going to turn out all right, and that he promises to visit him in the hospital. The law student wonders whether he is still alive. “Yes, you’re alive.” Since he can’t feel his legs, he wonders whether they are still there. Delshad and Harpreet calm him by again saying yes. Eivind has lost a liter and a half of blood. He feels hot, very hot. Then he feels freezing cold and starts to shiver. He thinks he’s going to die because he has seen in movies that a rapidly fluctuating body temperature is the beginning of the end. Delshad spreads a blue G-Star jacket over him and holds his chin up so that the air passages are kept open. Eivind feels no pain, other than when Delshad and Harpreet give the flashlight and plank one more turn to put more pressure on the wound. A policewoman comes over and asks to borrow clothes to bandage wounds and cover the dead. “Help yourself. I don’t think he will mind,” Harpreet says.
The senior adviser puts Hanne Gro Lille-Mæhlum down on a chair next to the Deli de Luca convenience store on Torggata. Along the way she has been checked by an English-speaking doctor who said that her eyes seem to be uninjured. But the heavy bleeding from the cut above the eye has to be stanched. On Torggata she meets a fellow student and colleague from the reception desk. The colleague has blood on the white top she changed into after she went off guard duty because she has been helping an injured woman. The senior adviser fetches a glass of water and paper from the convenience store. Hanne Gro becomes skeptical when she sees that he has put on blue gloves. “What do you know about first aid?” she asks as he washes away the blood from her face and arm. She’s worried about getting infected and doesn’t touch the armrest of the chair.
The two reception guards discuss whether it’s safe to be on Torggata. “We should probably get out of here as fast as possible,” the colleague says. Hanne Gro agrees, but someone has to look after the High Rise, where, according to the guard shift schedule, she should be at a quarter to five. Above all, it’s difficult for her to imagine going anywhere without shoes. Her colleague takes off her shoes and gives them to her. “You need them more than I do,” she says. The shoes are black and white, with small blood stains. When Hanne Gro realizes that her colleague doesn’t have an extra pair in her bag (as she’d assumed), she starts to protest. “No, I’m not going to take them,” she says and gives the shoes back. The senior adviser lifts her up again and carries her toward Youngstorget Square, where roadblocks have been set up.
A newspaper photographer takes a picture of the senior adviser carrying Hanne Gro on Torggata. The photo became a symbol of the heroism shown in and around the government quarter after the explosion. It looks as if she’s so injured that she can’t walk on her own, but in fact she’s being carried because she can’t walk wearing only socks on the cobblestones strewn with broken glass. Hanne Gro thinks how embarrassing it would be to tell her superior that she had taken off her shoes before the blast. She thinks about the needlessness of a man having to use up energy to carry her just because she was airing her feet. And she thinks about how practical it would have been if she had put on uniform pants today (instead of a skirt). For all she knows, the images and videos taken today will be shown on newscasts across the country. Maybe even abroad.
Hanne Gro is placed on the fountain in the middle of the square, with blankets over and under her, next to the wounded and traumatized. Paramedics flock to the improvised field hospital, where they check, clean, and bandage wounds. “Yes, the weekend just started off with a bang,” she says, and asks if they have sterile gloves on. She gets help to look up the phone numbers for her boyfriend and her father. The senior adviser calls Anders, her boyfriend, for her but gets only his voicemail. He leaves a message. “I’m sitting here with your girlfriend, and she’s fine. But you can’t call her now because she doesn’t have her mobile phone. She’ll try to call you from another phone some time later.”
At the Emergency Medical Assistance Communications Center (AMK Center) a chaotic picture of the situation is painted. First, there are reports of an explosion in the XXL sports store, three blocks from the High Rise. The leader of the paramedics doesn’t see any damage in the sports store. By Glassmagasinet department store he sees bloodied faces, and in Grensen he’s stopped by desperate people who surround the ambulance asking for help. He receives a voice message over the radio that the vg building is hit. This is confirmed when he comes to Akersgata and sees the broken window glass. He goes right and notices that the damage is more extensive there—that is, until he comes to Grubbegata. Despite difficulties in the communications network he manages to convey the following to the center: “The High Rise is the target. Requesting all available resources. Terror.” The team leader’s thoughts are not of just any war zone but the one in the Middle East. “It looks like Beirut,” he tells those who are coordinating the emergency rescue operation from the AMK Center.
The paramedics who come to the aid of Eivind Thoresen were summoned from Skøyen district. Speed limits were exceeded and a bus mirror was broken along the way. The ambulance had first come to Grensen before it was ordered to Youngstorget Square, but the driver is still at a loss as to where they are most needed. They’re standing outside the Kitchen and Bar restaurant on Møllergata when a newspaper photographer comes running down from Einar Gerhardsen Square and says that a young man needs urgent medical assistance. Coincidentally the photographer knows one of the paramedics, Stian Eriksen, rather well. With his colleague Tore Lund, Stian runs over to Einar Gerhardsen Square. Stian, like the former soccer player lying on the sidewalk, is most anxious about the legs, so he cuts up the blood-spattered jeans. The paramedic says that he is impressed by Delshad’s and Harpreet’s efforts to help Eivind. They have more than likely saved Eivind’s life.
Because the ground is more uneven than normal between Møllergata and Einar Gerhardsen Square, Stian and Tore consider using a stretcher without wheels. It shouldn’t be too heavy a load. “You don’t weigh more than seventy kilos, do you, Eivind?” Stian asks. “Well, now the stretcher is going to collapse,” Eivind replies with a slight twinkle in his eye. His smile broadens considerably when he’s finally lifted into the yellow ambulance and gets a shot of morphine.
Bus 37, going to and from Nydalen district, runs on one of the busiest bus routes in the capital. The resourceful paramedics have stopped the bus driver and asked whether the long red vehicle can be used as a makeshift ambulance to transport those with minor injuries to the emergency ward. The driver is forewarned that the seats are going to get messy, but he dismisses this concern, saying he’s used to mess because he drives the night bus to Stovner suburb on weekends. The passengers on the bus get off on Akersgata. The elderly, gray-haired yet athletic bus driver fills the seats with the wounded before he again starts up the bus, drives through Grensen, and turns left by the cathedral toward the emergency ward. The ambulance drives in front of the bus to clear traffic. It becomes somewhat surrealistic in the bus when the automated voice over the loudspeaker announces all the stops at which the driver has no intention of stopping.
Journalists struggle to get a clearer picture of the situation in the government quarter. Photographers are snapping pictures randomly without really knowing in what context the images will be printed. Is it an accident or a terrorist attack? Some immediately think that the explosion was caused by an attack on the Cappelen Damm publishing firm on Akersgata. On June 20 the police had to be called when the publisher introduced Flemming Rose’s book The Tyranny of Silence, which featured a facsimile of the Muhammad cartoons. There was a threat of demonstrations, the building was evacuated, and twenty police officers were dispatched, but it was just much ado about nothing. Have Muslim fundamentalists been more motivated this time around? Or perhaps it’s an attack against Norway’s biggest tabloid, VG?
Pablo Burgos is on Akersgata with his wife and two children. The Spanish tourist has a bloodied face and is limping. “I’ve never experienced ETA’S rage and never thought I would be confronted with terror in little Norway,” he tells a journalist. A twenty-five-year-old vg photographer, Sara Johannessen, is taking pictures of a fifty-year-old senior adviser in the Ministry of Justice with a piece of wood sticking out of his forehead; he was working overtime on a draft action plan about domestic violence. Just a few hours earlier Sara was on Utøya covering Gro’s speech to the AUF youths. The plan was to stay there the whole evening.
Anders Mølster Galaasen is a sociology student and freelance journalist, as well as Hanne Gro’s boyfriend. When Anders sees the unfamiliar mobile phone number flashing on his phone display, he thinks it is about an ad they posted on the website finn.no. But the couple has already found a new place to stay. The ad should have been removed. A text message pops up and reminds him that he has voicemail. Just to be sure, he calls up the voicemail. “Strange message,” he thinks. However, it’s not unusual that Hanne Gro has left her mobile phone at home. He listens to the message again, and it sounds no less strange the second time around. Perhaps she has to work overtime? Anders is still trying to figure it out when a friend calls and asks if he has control over the situation. “What situation?” Anders asks. “Have you talked to Hanne?” What Anders thought was the sound of thunder in the dark sky was—if he is to believe his friend—a bomb explosion in the government quarter. “Yes. Or no. . . . But I’ve got a message on voicemail from a colleague of Hanne’s. He says that she’s fine. Now I understand what he meant.”
Three years ago Anders wrote an article in the news magazine Ny Tid about how Norway’s war on terror was different in Afghanistan than in Sri Lanka, and he speculated on whether it was due to Norway’s peacemaker role in the latter. The article, with the highlighted keyword “Grubbegata,” is titled “Rising Fear of Terrorism in Norway.’ Tore Bjørgo from the Police Academy and the Norwegian Institute of International Affairs told the news magazine that he didn’t rule out the fact that there could be a terrorist attack in Norway in the near future, and he rattled off a few factors that made it probable: Norway’s participation in Afghanistan, Iraq, and the Balkans and its peacemaker role and substantial oil production. In light of the increased risk of a terrorist attack in recent years the city council has therefore decided to close Grubbegata in the city center in order to “prevent possible car bomb attacks in the government quarter,” as the journalist wrote. The city council was initially skeptical about the proposal before the Norwegian Directorate of Public Construction and Property, but the Conservative Party and the Progress Party changed the minds of the council members after pleas from the police and the prime minister’s office. At the end Anders Mølster Galaasen questioned the city council leader, Erling Lae, on his evaluation of the risk of a terrorist attack in Oslo. “I think we should leave it to others to evaluate,” he responded.
While Anders stares mesmerized at the images from the government quarter on the website vg.no, he calls up the unfamiliar number and gets to talk with his girlfriend. Hanne Gro says that she has some minor injuries but is otherwise unharmed. Soon she will be taken to the emergency ward. She’ll call him from there. In the meantime, she says, he must call her father in Brumunddal and his mother. The images on TV will surely be distressing to them. When Hanne Gro sits up in order to take the next ambulance to the emergency ward, she looks upward to the People’s Theater façade, and her eyes stop at the Labor Party’s white logo with a red rose beside it. Hanne Gro has hitherto thought only of her own building and the High Rise. When she was evacuated from S-Block, she couldn’t see anything due to her eye injury. Now she gets a glimpse of the magnitude of the situation. “Is this a terrorist attack?” she asks. “Who could have come into the building with so much explosive? Where are my other colleagues?”
The prime minister was talking on the phone in the Inkognitogate office when he heard a faint rumbling in the background. His adviser, Sindre Fossum Beyer, was in the kitchen. The sound was faint. Must be thunder, he thought. Jens Stoltenberg continued undeterred in the conversation with the parliamentary president, Dag Terje Andersen, until Fossum Beyer came running into the office. The adviser had talked to someone at the party office who reported that there had been an explosion in the government quarter. Stoltenberg told him to check with security guards but wasn’t too worried. He thought that in the worst case it was a gas leak that had led to a small explosion. The communications officer, Arvid Samland, called to ask whether Stoltenberg was unharmed. Stoltenberg thought it a strange question. The only hint of drama so far was the word “financial crisis,” found in the speech he would give to the youngsters on Utøya tomorrow. Samland’s trembling voice worried the prime minister. The communications officer’s office is on the fifteenth floor of the High Rise. Although the office faces Akersgata and not Grubbegata, the window shattered, and Samland was thrown backward. He walked downstairs and described to the prime minister what he saw. In the background Stoltenberg could hear the sound of shoes treading on broken glass.
Rumor has it that there are two bombs, not just one. The guards lead Jens Stoltenberg down to a secure location next to the gym. From the small room in the basement, he calls his wife, Ingrid Schulerud, who is on the Hvaler Islands with their children, Axel and Catharina. Then he calls his father, former foreign minister Thorvald Stoltenberg. Samland and his colleague Arne Spildo have arrived at the building behind the palace with bloodied clothes and bandaged wounds. It is then that the enormity of the situation starts to dawn on the Norwegian prime minister. The two communications officers are severely injured even though they were not in close proximity to the explosion. The prime minister assumes that there must be many casualties in the government quarter, so he calls the justice minister, the health minister, the defense minister, and the foreign minister. He thinks, as do several others in those initial minutes, that it’s a terrorist organization behind the bomb, but he says to himself that it’s too early to tell. We know nothing yet. Therefore he is eager to get the justice minister back to Oslo so that they can hold a press conference. Getting the defense minister or the foreign minister may send the wrong message. The building on 18 Inkognitogata comprises 670 square meters, but the bunker in the basement is small and is soon crowded. The prime minister’s staff takes up the space in the hallway and gym. The exercise bike has to be moved out.
The Peugeot is fully packed with clothes, wife, cat, and two daughters. The family was on the way north to the cabin in Østerdalen Valley. Justice Minister Knut Storberget’s mobile phone was out of range for a while, but he finally received a voice message in Engerdal municipality. Knut and the others in the car listened to the message via the hands-free speaker. Communications officer Trond Øvstedal says that there has been an explosion. The Ministry of Justice building was one of the hardest hit—there were forty-five employees at work. Øvstedal called while he was on the seventh floor. In the background the family can hear sirens and alarms going off. They can hear glass splintering while the wounded communications officer makes his way through the debris in the building. Storberget turned off the road and told the family to go to the cabin without him. The forty-seven-year-old got off outside Sølenstua Camp Ground in North Østerdalen. Soon afterward the sheriff of Engerdal picked him up. The car is civilian but has blue emergency lights, so they could drive as fast as possible. It’s a three- or four-hour drive in the car. Storberget calls up all the relevant state departments and institutions. Soon his iPhone has gone from 100 percent battery capacity down to 4.
Sveinung Sponheim had left his office on the seventh floor of 44 Grønlandsleiret and was on his way home to the Nordstrand suburb. The acting police chief in Oslo was looking forward to putting on training clothes and cycling for an hour toward Enebakk before starting the weekend by spending some quality time with his family. He is on Kongsveien Road, just off Solveien, when his mobile phone rings and someone tells him that there has been a bomb explosion in the government quarter. One person has been confirmed dead so far. Sponheim has neither heard nor seen anything, even though the road overlooks the whole of Oslo. He turns the car around and summons his staff on the phone. For better or worse it’s right in the middle of a shift change for the police. Many of the officers are on their way out to start their vacation. Many have to cancel flight tickets or jump off trains. One officer runs over from the SATS training studio and shows up in athletic tights.
The health minister, Anne-Grete Strøm-Erichsen, is with her husband on an eleven-day Arctic cruise around Svalbard. She has just seen a polar bear eating a whale on an ice floe in the Arctic Ocean. The weather is gorgeous. Her state secretary calls on the ship’s satellite phone to tell her people are on the way in rubber dinghies to escort her to land. The health minister is being summoned to Oslo. The governor of Svalbard commandeers a helicopter from Longyearbyen, but there’s no place to land. She’s hoisted up into the helicopter hovering twenty meters above the ship with the aid of straps under her arms.
Jonas Gahr Støre changes hooks on his fishing tackle outside the cabin in Kilsund village. Maybe there will be fresh fish for dinner. While the foreign minister is fixing his fishing gear in the rain, he receives a short text message from the Foreign Ministry: “Powerful explosion in the government quarter. Get online.” On the PC in the cabin Støre sees images from the government quarter, and the enormity of the situation dawns on him. He yells to his son to say he must get over to the mainland. Wearing fishing clothes, he gets into the family car and drives by himself from Arendal to Oslo.
Fabian Stang, the mayor of Oslo, is driving in the same direction. He was in the grocery store close to his cabin outside Kragerø when he received a code red message (situation 01) from the head of the Emergency Response Unit (call sign: Delta), which carries out counter-terrorism operations. At first he thought it was a drill. “Strange timing,” he thought. Soon after, Stang got a phone call confirming that it was real and not just a drill.
The smoke still hangs like a blanket over the capital, but the swirling fragments of paper documents have settled on the ground. Nevertheless, no one thinks that the terrorist attack in Norway on July 22, 2011, is over. The police fear there are more coming. Police officers on duty in the government quarter chase away curious onlookers and photographers, all the while shouting, “Run, run; get away from here. It was a bomb; there may be more bombs.” It’s possible that there may be another bomb in the government quarter. But there may also be a terrorist attack on the palace. Or the parliament building. Or is Oslo in the midst of a Mumbai scenario, where terrorists blew up a hotel before they went in and gunned down guests? Or the attack may just be a diversionary tactic. If so, what’s going to happen next—and where? If the intention was to harm as many as possible in the government quarter, the timing could hardly have been more off. The summer vacation period means that only one in ten employees was at work on Friday afternoon. And why today, July 22? If the purpose was to spread fear, anxiety, and panic, the perpetrator has succeeded.
At Elvebakken High School by the river Andreas Olsen heard a faint rumbling in the background to the music to which he was listening. The disruption was not sufficient enough for him to stop and take off his earphones, probably because the explosion merged into one of the most intense, bass-heavy, and manic songs on his playlist: Prodigy’s “The World’s on Fire.” “Too close, you’re too close / Too close, too close to the wire / Too close, you’re too close / Too close, your world’s on fire.” He continued homeward to his Grünerløkka apartment, carrying tulips and chocolates and thinking about the Tour de France, which he’d be watching on TV when he got home; the tapas dinner at a restaurant that he planned to suggest to Marianne; and the coming vacation week, which must be planned out. The family has rented a cabin on the Hvaler Islands through the Oslo Fjord Recreation Department, after which they’d be going to the Uppsala Reggae Festival. He has many funky Kingston albums to listen to over the weekend.
When Andreas gets home to the apartment, there’s no cycle race on the TV2 channel but a news broadcast about an explosion in Oslo. Andreas thinks that it’s related to Norway’s involvement in the wars in Libya or Afghanistan. There is also something about a cop on Hammersborg Square. The gun, the civilian vehicle driving in the wrong direction down a one-way street. The illegal driving maneuver makes sense only if the intention was to get away from the crime scene. But the man Andreas saw through the car window was white-skinned. A right-wing terrorist? Andreas has been following the neo-Nazi movement closely for the past twenty years. For a while he was the anti-racism officer in AUF’S county council and attended anti-racist demonstrations in eastern Norway. He knows that these extremist groups have been passive for a while and that acts of violence tend to start small and then escalate rather than start with a large-scale operation. Yet one never knows.
Andreas Olsen calls the emergency number, 112, and gives a description of the suspicious policeman he saw hurrying away from Grubbegata. Andreas thinks he’s white, in his thirties, and fairly short, with a helmet, visor, and gun. And yes, he has the number on the green license plate of the small gray van stored on his Sony Ericsson mobile phone. The police issue an all-points bulletin.
Around four in the afternoon a message goes out to the national media that Norway’s prime minister is unharmed and safe. A journalist at an online newspaper unfortunately forgets to type two crucial letters, so his message appears as “Stoltenberg is injured.” The flowers for Marianne remain wrapped on the kitchen counter in the Torvbakkgata building.