Two Soldiers Read online

  ———

  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 out
side, 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.

  Gabriel, this is long, 11 pages.

  He had made a hole in the bars that was big enough. He had boiled water in the coffee machine, which was the last thing he’d grabbed with him as he ran back to his cell, to avoid the exploding door. He’d scratched a cross on the reinforced glass window with a five-kronor coin.

  Now he threw the hot water at it and then smashed it with a chair leg at the point where the two lines met, and when the glass reinforced with plastic crumpled, he punched the next pure glass pane with his fist.

  It was open.

  The wind was really blowing.

  We r there.

  The forklift truck wasn’t running anymore. Searches. The heavy footsteps had disappeared. One cell at a time.

  New name. New rules.

  There were other footsteps now, lighter, more determined. Come out and show us your hands. He heard the first door, the one opposite, opening.

  Riot.

  The next door, the next one would be him.

  Escape.

  He loosened the extension cord that was biting into his back, fresh blood on his hands, come out of your cell, I said, then tiptoed over to the door to listen, don’t touch me you fucking pig bastard; they weren’t done yet, opposite.

  Kidnapping. Murder.

  Leon wanted to rest for a moment, his back to the cell door, he looked at the window with a hole in it and the wind blowing through.

  They would change walls.

  He knew what was needed, the other wall, he knew it.

  Papers. TV.

  Explosion.

  He smashed the two bottles on the concrete floor, unwound the rings of copper wire, and broke the plastic felt-tip pen tubes and the brittle carbon rods and knotted together the meters of vacuum cleaner cord.

  No clues that anyone might understand.

  Then he went slowly over to the window, as if he wanted to draw out those few meters, the wood and porcelain under his feet, and, as he got closer, more glass.

  The wind got stronger and when he felt it against his face it was much warmer than he’d imagined.

  C u soon. One love and all my heart.

  Ur brutha 4 life.

  Leon.

  now

  part two

  (ninety minutes)

  The warm wind in his face.

  A strange feeling, an open window in a locked cell.

  ———

  He got snagged as he pressed his torso through a hole in the bars that he’d cut with tips of two carbon rods and the window he’d broken with boiling water. He had to bend his knees so he could stand on the ledge, half in, half out the window, that made it easier. He was sweating, shaking from his feet to his heart, which was thumping, but the prison yard below him was empty so he had to wait a bit longer.

  ———

  They had carried out the final wreckage from the cell opposite. The rattle as they undid the handcuffs and then the loud voice that ordered the prisoner back into his cell. They would lock it again any minute now and open the next one.

  ———

  Footsteps.

  Just what he was waiting for.

  Someone walking across the asphalt below, gravel dust.

  He was sure of it, just around the corner of the building and coming closer, he would see a head and uniformed shoulders only a few meters below.

  ———

  A woman. The guard bitch. The one that wasn’t much older than him, who’d opened his cell door every fucking day and wouldn’t leave until she’d got a good morning, the one he knew was named Julia.

  She had no idea.

  It was easy to jump. Leon landed just behind her, she didn’t even have time to turn around before he was up again and had hit her hard on the back of the head with his hand. She fell to the ground, he pulled her up again by the hair, the sharp piece of metal against her throat.

  “Three steps forward.”

  She didn’t move. She’d heard him, he knew. He pressed the
hard sharpness against her skin, a superficial cut that started to bleed.

  “Three steps forward!”

  They were in exactly the right place. A bit farther down, a bit farther away, right in front of the cell window. The bastard guards would be able to see her clearly.

  He pressed the piece of metal harder again, she had to feel it and do what he wanted her to do.

  He whispered in her ear.

  “You’re not going die. Not yet.”

  They both looked up at a cell window on the first floor, D1 Left, that didn’t look like the others as it had a big hole in it.

  A few minutes. Maybe one more.

  Then they heard it, the voice that screamed search at them, followed by the rattling of keys and the creaking of the cell door being opened.

  A few seconds of silence.

  “Come out with your hands up!”

  Silence again and come out, for Christ’s sake feet running in and stopping and then going over to the window.

  “You up there! Stand fucking still!”

  Two faces framed by the hole in the window, he took another step forward, pushing her in front of him, pulling back her head so they could see the sharp metal against the delicate skin.

  “Cell 9!”

  More feet on their way into the cell, heavier than before.

  “Get him to come here.”

  Leon grabbed hold of Julia Bozsik’s neck and hair, jolted her back as he moved the piece of metal from her throat to the back of her left thigh, stabbed hard and cut deep and then he put the bloody metal to her throat again.