One of Us: The Story of Anders Breivik and the Massacre in Norway (33 page)

Fertiliser is delivered in pellet form, each pellet coated in a water-repellent material. To make it detonable, it has to be soaked in diesel. So the pellets had to be crushed in order to become explosive.

He cleaned
the barn floor and spread the contents of one of the fertiliser bags evenly across it. Then he rolled his heaviest dumbbell over the fertiliser and shovelled up the crushed pellets before they could absorb any moisture from the air. He had worked it all out on paper and estimated that he would be able to crush fifty kilos in twenty minutes.

His plan failed. The method did not work. The first
bag took him two hours, and the fertiliser absorbed moisture much faster than he had expected. The pellets ended up only partially crushed, and his back was soon aching from rolling the dumbbell to and fro across the floor.

‘Fuck, why can’t anything go as planned???? And the dumbbell set cost me a total of 750 euro and now it has proven to be worthless … what do I do now?’ He decided to raise
his spirits with a three-course meal in Rena. There he remembered something he had read about ‘a Marxist terrorist traitor in the early 70s. I believe he was called Baader or it could have been Meinhof, terror prostitutes for the Soviets and the loyal
dhimmi
whores of the Islamic Ummah’, who had used electric mixers to crush the pellets at home in their apartment. Breivik decided to try out the
Marxists’ method. If a 1970s mixer could do it, the more modern types should definitely be able to.

The next day he went to various suppliers and bought twelve different mixers and blenders, some on stands and some hand-held, to test which sort worked best. Half of them were unusable. The shape of the container prevented the pellets from going round, or the blades were not sharp enough. But one
brand proved effective – Electrolux. Practically all the pellets got crushed and besides, it had a higher speed than the others and could process a good half-kilo of fertiliser pellets in thirty seconds. The next day he went to three different towns and bought six blenders of the same model.

It was three days until the end of May. The days passed in transferring the fertiliser to smaller bags
and preparing it for pulverisation.

By the last day of May he was so shattered that he had to rest. He could hardly move his fingers and worried the damage might be permanent. The whole day was spent in bed. He would have to make some adjustments; three bags of fertiliser would have to do, not five as originally planned. It was simply too much for one person. So the explosive charge would just
have to be smaller.

On 1 June he still did not feel able to get back to the job, and stayed at his PC, updating the log. On 2 June he also stayed in, surfing the web. Suddenly he heard a car drive up to the property. He peered out through the curtains. A man got out of the car and began taking photos of the farm. Breivik went out into the yard. The man said he had come to take some shots of the
Glomma in spate. He’s lying, thought Breivik instinctively. His body language gave him away. He must be a policeman.

He offered him coffee but the man declined, and Breivik suggested they go down to the riverbank to get the best pictures. The man nodded, but carried on taking pictures of the yard area. ‘Landscape photography,’ he explained. It made Breivik uneasy.

But he had no choice. He had
to go on with his preparations.

That evening he rang his mother and said an undercover detective had turned up to take pictures of the farmyard. His mother thought that all sounded very peculiar. He also told her about creepy sounds. There was a creaking that really spooked him out.

‘When can I come and visit?’ his mother asked. She had enquired several times, but it was never convenient. He
said that he was worn out and the ground was very stony. It was so stony that he would have to grow timothy-grass. She could not always follow what he said any more. This was not a good time to come, either. He wanted to get everything finished first, he said.

He had four blenders going simultaneously. They made such a noise that he went back to working at nights, as he would never hear if anybody
happened to come by. Every time he had crushed enough pellets for a fifty-kilo bag, he poured diesel over them, making sure it soaked in evenly. He then sealed the double-layered bags from China with tape and set them aside.

He worked mechanically, all the while calculating and recalculating the time it was taking and adjusting the plan in accordance with his working pace. He soon got into a
routine. He generally took only forty minutes per sack now, his record was thirty-two. He was making progress. There were ten bags piled in the corner. Twenty bags. Two of the blenders broke. He replaced them with new ones.

Saturday 4 June. Six bags. Sunday 5 June. Four bags. Two more blenders fell apart. Monday 6 June. Bought two new blenders.

That afternoon, he reached the end of the third
sack. He had now crushed 1600 kilos of fertiliser pellets and soaked them in diesel. There was fertiliser dust everywhere. His green workwear had turned grey. ‘Surely I am going to die from cancer within twelve months as I must have gotten a lot of this crap into my lungs even though I used a 3M mask…’ he wrote in the log, adding: ‘Watching
The Shield
, a couple of episodes a day on average. I
downloaded all seven seasons at the beginning of May.’

Next phase: to synthesise picric acid, also known as Mother of Satan. He had all the equipment and chemicals he needed. They were easily obtainable, he wrote in the log, ‘unless you’re called Abdullah Rashid Muhammed’.

To make the bomb go off he had to have a primary and a secondary explosive. The primary one was DDNP – diazodinitrophenol
– the secondary was picric acid. He would have to synthesise both of them from scratch.

A car pulled up outside. Too many goddamned visitors. It was a neighbour who wanted to buy the clover and timothy that had grown on his fallow land. Breivik explained that for various reasons he had not been able to harrow his fields, but that he was intending to grow potatoes and vegetables. The neighbour
was surprised to hear his plan and said it was pretty futile growing vegetables in the stony soil round the farm.

Breivik started talking about a farm he wanted to buy in Røros instead. ‘It’s even harder growing veg in the cold ground up there,’ the neighbour pointed out.

They took a stroll down to the field, and Breivik was afraid his neighbour might see the fume hood fan sticking out of the
living room window. They agreed on a price. The farmer would come back two weeks later to harvest the crop, which had grown wild on nothing but rain and sunshine.

Weird kind of guy, the neighbour mused on his way home. The new tenant had listened politely, almost servilely, to all his objections. He clearly hadn’t a clue about farming.

Breivik carried on producing picric acid. Once the first
batch was done he put fifty grams of the powder in the oven to make it ready to test it. If correctly made, it should ignite when he tried to set it alight. Nothing happened. The log was strewn with expletives. He’d followed the instructions, hadn’t he? ‘Could the compound I have manufactured be inert???? Unfortunate circumstances rams cock in the arse once again…! I start to have serious doubts
and my morale starts to shatter…’

As dusk approached on Saturday 11 June, heavy clouds came in over the farm. High in the air a thunderstorm was brewing, and big drops of rain came drumming down onto the roof. There was a sudden crash, lightning flashed across the sky, the computer gave a bang and the power went off. When the electricity came back on, the PC was dead.

Breivik sat down to pray.
It was a long time since he had called to God. ‘I explained to God,’ he wrote in his diary, ‘that unless he wanted the Marxist-Islamic alliance and the certain Islamic takeover of Europe to completely annihilate European Christendom within the next hundred years he must ensure that the warriors fighting for the preservation of European Christendom prevail. He must ensure that I succeed with my
mission and as such; contribute to inspire thousands of other revolutionary conservative nationalists, anti-communists and anti-Islamists throughout the European world.’

The PC was still dead.

*   *   *

Two days later he made a test bomb and took it to a remote part of the forest, a few kilometres from the farm. There was still thunder in the air, which was good, because nobody would think
twice about a loud bang. He lit the fuse and waited. ‘It was probably the longest ten seconds I have ever endured…’ he wrote afterwards.

The little lump exploded.

He drove off straight away, in case anybody came to investigate. He headed to Elverum to celebrate with a slap-up meal. He drove home via the detonation site to study the small crater. The DDNP had exploded as it should, but the dried
picric acid had largely failed to detonate. He would have to purify it still further.

In mid-June his financial mask began to slip. Ten of his credit card bills were due and he had received formal reminders about various other amounts he owed. If it went as far as debt recovery and his creditworthiness was in doubt, he would not be able to hire a car and it would be well nigh impossible to carry
out the plan. The biggest unpaid bill was for the fertiliser, but nor had he paid last month’s rent on the farm. The bills for the fume hood fan, the hotplate stirrer and the spare fan he had not even used were now due. He had just one week to find almost eighty thousand kroner. As well as withdrawing as much cash as he could from those ten credit card accounts, he would also have to ring the
farming cooperative and ask for extra time to settle their bill.

He managed to defer payment for half the fertiliser, and wrote in his log that he could ‘keep my head above water until mid-July’.

His activities at Vålstua were extremely hazardous. The barn was full of chemicals, the liquids were unstable and his working process was experimental. He had scarcely any safety measures. Sometimes
he freaked out when he read about security precautions and all the eventualities that could lead to explosions. Contact with air was dangerous; contact with metal, concrete and plastic could increase static electricity and cause a detonation. So could friction and impact, and proximity to petrol, diesel and electric sockets. He was scared of what would happen to him if the explosive material went
off. ‘The blast wave/flame would probably cauterise my wounds, resulting in an extended and extremely painful death.’ He made sure to keep the Glock to hand in his working area, so if he survived an explosion but lost his arms he could still shoot himself in the head by pulling the trigger with his toes.

Everything was covered in a layer of grey aluminium powder. The strong fluids and acids were
gradually staining and eating into the floors and furniture.

After a long night’s work towards the end of June, he woke up at eleven the next morning to find that he had received a text message. It was from the girlfriend of the convicted hash-grower and had been sent an hour and a half before. She wrote that she was on her way to pick up some stuff from the barn. In that case, she could be there
within the half-hour.

It would take him at least twelve hours to clear up and make the barn presentable, dismantle his equipment, sweep up and clean the place. That meant he would have no choice but to kill her on arrival and then evacuate the farm. He rang her. Luckily she had not yet left. They arranged that she would come two days later. He used the two days for thorough cleaning and tidying.
He had to move all the equipment down into the ‘spider cellar’ full of cobwebs, hide the damaged tabletops under cloths and the floors with rugs. It set him back by at least two days.

She arrived late in the evening and wanted to stay the night. Breivik got up early the next morning to check whether she was snooping round. If she got suspicious, he would have to kill her. She was hard to read,
so when she had packed up and was ready to leave he offered her a bite to eat so he could try to glean a bit more about what she had seen.

He also tested out a few of the ideas from his book on her, but no, she did not want to discuss politics. He poured her more coffee. They chatted. She did not seem to have noticed anything. He could let her live.

*   *   *

The farm stank of chemicals: ‘it
smells like fresh egg fart,’ he wrote in the log. He had to shut the windows to help the liquid reach room temperature more quickly and he worried about his health and everything he had inhaled.

Then his network interface card shorted again and he was without a PC. He ordered a new card and carried on with the production of DDNP. Once he had purified the last batch of picric acid, he went off
to Elverum and bought three portions of Chinese takeaway, beef with noodles and fried rice. ‘Yummy! I took an early night as I didn’t have a PC.’

The next day he went to pick up the new network interface card and started paying bills. When he had paid nine out of the ten credit card bills there was another power cut and the computer short-circuited. Seconds later he heard a clap of thunder. ‘What
the hell, not again!!! And it isn’t even raining!!’ How was it possible to be so unlucky, he asked in his log, just two hours after he had repaired the PC after the last stroke of lightning? He watched an episode of the TV series
Rome
and tucked into the last portion of Chinese takeaway to help him over his setback.

The following day he filtered crystals out of the picric acid. There were fewer
than he had reckoned on. He had to be more accurate and decided to take some time out. He gave himself Sunday evening off to go to the Rena festival but did not think much of the choice of local foods on offer – organic kid meat, smoked sausage, crispbread, cheese and honey – so he took himself off to Elverum for some more Chinese takeaway.

‘There was a relatively hot girl in the restaurant today,
checking me out,’ he wrote in the log afterwards. ‘Refined individuals like myself are a rare commodity here so I notice I do get a lot of attention. It’s the way I dress and look. They are mostly unrefined/uncultivated people living here. I wear mostly the best pieces from my former life, which consists of very expensive brand clothing, Lacoste sweaters, piqués etc. People can see from a mile
away that I’m not from around here.’