Two Soldiers (16 page)

———

The broken tables, chairs, cupboards, sinks, plates and glasses and a smashed TV set, trashed billiard table, a fridge and a freezer in pieces, and a tipped-up stove. They sat in the middle of it all, fourteen prisoners on the corridor floor, dipping their plastic mugs into the big metal bucket and filling them, drinking it up, spitting out the apple cores, and filling them again. Two of them—both junkies who weren’t used to alcohol—threw up several times and were punched hard
don’t fucking waste our mash
by those who guarded every single drop. Leon stood at a distance, keeping an eye on the evil-smelling liquid and the door to Cell 10, where Smackhead was doing what he was supposed to do. Soon, when the bucket was empty, they would all get up on his command and, full of alcohol, would together drag all the debris and push it against the door to the unit, which was locked from the outside, locking it from the inside with a barricade of broken furniture, a floor mop, and two billiard cues rammed between the doorframe and door handle.

———

Half done. The other half—he peeled the plastic off either end of the two remaining lengths of the cord, threaded each through an empty felt-tip pen, and used electrical tape to make two handles. His fingers got black as always when he taped the carbon rods to one end of each cord.

———

Drunk on moonshine and power and the fact that fucking something had happened that broke the silence and tedium, the fourteen inmates ripped to pieces the last remaining curtains, pulled off the wallpaper strip by strip, tore up the gray-and-yellow linoleum that covered the hard concrete floor. While they did this, Leon went over to the barricaded door, listened to the first members of the Aspsås task force arrive—he guessed about twenty of them with helmets, shields, batons—and heard them immediately start to take off the door’s two hinges. And when he moved over to the kitchen window that looked out across the prison yard, there they were: four special police force vans drove in through the main gate and across the asphalt toward Block D and parked immediately outside the entrance. Eight fully equipped policemen jumped out of each van, armed with Tasers and Sig Sauers. They ran into the building and up the stairs to the door where the prison’s own task force made way, ten minutes, no more, then they’d be in.

———

Sonny Steen’s hands weren’t shaking anymore. He’d make it. He’d always had a relatively good supply of amphetamines; anyone who made machines in a high security prison could regularly pick up his pay. But it was more about beating the system, so apart from the carbon rods, he made them from parts he could get from things inside the prison wall and that were permitted as individual items, but which together combined to make something powerful and forbidden. What had started as a welding course in Tidaholm prison had continued in Kumla prison with the Finn who claimed that you could make a cutting torch. He had experimented and worked out the rest over the years he’d been locked up inside.

Now he was going to put the two parts together.

The double cord—with the plug at one end and the two bottles with the copper wires wrapped round and round them at the other.

And then the two slightly longer cords, with the carbon rods at one end and nothing at the other.

That was where the two parts would be joined.

The copper wires from the empty end were twisted into the copper wires that were wrapped around the two bottles. And it was ready. A plug that became two cords, that became two bottles with copper wire wrapped around them, that become two new cords, that ended in two carbon rods.

He knew that it worked. But couldn’t help himself.

The plug in the socket, the carbon rods held carefully against the bars on the window in front of him, a few seconds only, but you could already see an obvious cut where the flame had touched the metal that was supposed to lock them in.

He opened the cell door and ran through the broken porcelain and wood with the cutting torch in his arms to Cell 2, he put it down near the door and nodded as he walked down toward the other end of the corridor; Jensen was standing there.

———

Leon saw Smackhead open the door to his cell, go in for a couple of seconds, then come out again right away, a short nod before returning to his own cell.

It was ready. It was in there.

He had waited a while between the now empty mash bucket and the barricade of junk that blocked the door into the unit, until the persistent noise of a drill on metal stopped; the troops outside had worked their way through all the hinges and a new noise took over, loud and pulsing, an alarm had been triggered, the sniffer, the detector that smelled its way to dynamite.

“Back,
now
.”

He hurried toward the kitchen and the only thing that had remained untouched, the coffee machine, then the TV corner where he grabbed the extension cord from the trashed television set, and with the coffee machine in one hand and the extension cord in the other,
you have exactly ten seconds to move away from the door
, he ran down the corridor. The explosion that blasted open
the locked door was powerful. The first boot-clad steps could be heard on the naked floor when he sat down in his cell where his bed had been, the cutting torch close at hand but hidden by the pile of porcelain that had once been a sink; he leaned back against the wall, waited.

Lennart Oscarsson was standing in a prison unit that lacked
furniture, floor covering, wallpaper, a kitchen, a wardens’ office, lighting, toilets. A prison governor who, while watching forty fully armed riot police walk across the prison yard to their vans, ordered the task force of twenty fully armed prison guards to lock all the cell doors as the inmates had, on their own initiative, gone into their cells and sat down. He gave a light kick to the empty bucket surrounded by empty mugs and spat-out apple cores and fresh vomit. Moonshine. He’d always found the smell nauseating.

Following an incident some years ago when a prisoner had been shot by a police sniper
at the same time
that he was ripped apart by an explosion, he had worked intensely to improve security—installed explosive detectors in the corridors and larger spaces, granted permission for more cameras, installed metal detectors in every entrance, and acquired more sniffer dogs.

It made no difference.

He kicked the bucket again and then wandered through the battered wood that had once been a table, doors, and cupboards that sixteen prisoners had reduced to splinters over the past hour and a half, which had been scattered down the corridor when the riot police had forced open the door, even the dented stove lay on its side and the heavy billiard table was broken in two, both pieces leaning against each other. In his first years as a young and newly qualified prison warden, who had had his temporary position extended by three months at a time, they’d had three, four, sometimes five disturbances a year, but that was to do with the times. The number had dropped later, due to increased security, with only the occasional disturbance most
years—he made a quick calculation, thirty-seven disturbances, thirty-eight including this one. They never really disappeared. He would continue the work to increase security, but it made no difference; a prisoner who wanted to instigate a disturbance would always succeed in doing so.

This time the broken sinks and wardrobes were not just shards of porcelain and splinters of wood, he felt an underlying tension that prodded and shouted at him, something wasn’t right, but he couldn’t work out what or why.

Moonshine.

He nudged an apple core with the toe of his shoe, side-stepped some vomit.

Thirty-seven disturbances before this and not a single one had started without alcohol—someone in the unit who made moonshine and doled it out with drops of frustration and aggression and the need to lash out. This time, according to both wardens, the prisoner who had started it all, Leon Jensen, appeared not to be drunk or high when he attacked the wardens’ office with boiling water, nor were there any signs that the other prisoners were either. This time, Lennart Oscarsson sank down onto his haunches by the now empty bucket and tried to see what wasn’t there and could therefore not be understood, they had only started drinking
after
the disturbance had begun—in order to stoke it, not to start it—enough alcohol to fuel them for a couple of hours until tiredness or the police overwhelmed them.

“All this.”

He got up and went over to the only person moving around in the chaos of the corridor who wasn’t wearing black overalls and a white helmet.

“I want you to tidy away anything out here that could be used as a weapon.”

The head of Aspsås prison task force nodded.

“And in two hours we’ll do a search of all cells, one at a time. We have no idea of what we might find behind these doors, what they might have managed to take in with them, what they might use against us.”

The head of the task force should immediately inform his twenty colleagues that they would be going home late tonight.

“Empty each cell and question every inmate, then lock them in again. They’ll stay in there until this has been fully investigated. I want to know what all this is
really
about.”

Lennart Oscarsson stood there longer than he needed to, waded through the mess, bending down every now and then to pick something up, to run his fingers over the paperless walls and deep holes in the concrete where only this morning there had been cupboards and doors. Their home, the only home they had for the foreseeable future, and they had chosen to wreck it. And it would stay like that for a while, neither he nor the director general of the prison service had any intention of rushing to acquire new furniture. If this was how they wanted it, this was how they could have it.

The soles of his shoes crunched with every step as the pieces became even smaller, slowly past the cell doors that remained silent, each one sitting inside in their own dross.

He stopped outside cell number 2, Leon Jensen’s cell, staring at it as though he expected it to talk to him, give him an answer.

You started all this.

And I cannot fathom why.

Leon sat on the cell floor and looked at the lamp that was
switched on above his bed. What had been a lamp above what had been a bed. Now it was a hole in the concrete wall that separated him from the other world.

In two hours we’ll do a search of all cells, one at a time
.

A voice outside, the prison governor’s voice, and it was loud, almost piercing.

I want to know what all this is really about
.

The cell door was locked and on the other side, only a few steps away, the uniforms had started to tidy up, he could hear irritated shouts, porcelain against glass, and after a while, something that sounded like an engine, a forklift truck that carried away one broken piece of the corridor after another.

He had two hours left.

———

The cell window was constructed in layers. A grid of four horizontal and three vertical iron bars. Behind the bars a window, glass reinforced with plastic, behind that yet another window of pure glass.

In order to get out through the bars, he would have to cut the iron in six different places.

He’d done it before, his first time in Mariefred prison—each cut had taken fifteen minutes.

———

He used a sharpened piece of metal—that had been taped to the wooden boards on the bottom of his bed—to scrape the coloring off
the iron exactly where he was going to make the cut. Then he put the plug of the cutting torch into the only socket in the cell, took hold of the handles that had once been the plastic tubes of felt-tip pens, pressed one carbon rod to the metal and brought the other as close as possible, almost jumped when the welding flame flared up.

———

It was amazing how easily the electricity flowed between a negative and a positive pole, between two carbon rods that had been in ordinary batteries, cutting through the metal.

———

Every now and then they talked among themselves outside the locked cell door, among the broken shards that tore at their fingers, or sharp points and parts of a billiard table that needed some back put into lifting it. The forklift drove backwards and forward, and there was rattling, clinking, thumping as twenty prison guards carried trash bags and cardboard boxes down the bare corridor.

As long as he could hear them, they couldn’t hear him.

———

He was sweating profusely, his breathing was labored and he couldn’t understand why, it wasn’t hard work, wasn’t demanding, but still he was shaking.

———

There was another layer of metal inside all the bars, a column of ball bearings that would turn when touched, in case anyone tried to cut into it. But it was perfectly possible to cut it with a welding flame. Leon also wrapped one of the bedsheets tightly around the bars to make sure that they didn’t slip and they fell to the floor, one by one.

The grille had been cut at six points to create a hole forty centimeters wide.

That wasn’t enough.

He tied the extension cord that he had taken from the TV corner first around his waist and then around one of the bars that was still in the window, loosened the sheet and stuffed it in between the cord and his skin so that he wouldn’t bleed too much, and then lay down on his back.

He had never looked out of the cell window from the floor before, still sunny and perhaps a bit of wind, you could tell by the way the clouds scudded across the sky.

He closed his eyes until his breathing slowed, he wasn’t sweating as much, droplets clinging to his forehead and hairline.

Both feet against the wall under the window.

And he pulled on the extension cord tied to his waist and the bars, dug his teeth into the material of his T-shirt so he wouldn’t scream with pain when the plastic cut deep into his skin, pushing on both legs as, gradually, the bar bent back, enough to make the hole bigger, so that a body could squeeze through it and out.

———

Leon lay on the floor without moving. The clouds were still small and didn’t seem to hang together, but they were moving even faster across the blue, it was getting windier.

He didn’t hear the forklift as much now, or shouting and steps outside his door, they were quieter, as was the tinkling and clattering.

He still had time, but no longer hours, it was minutes and seconds now, and they were running out fast.