Another Time, Another Life (2 page)
The demand remained. If the police wished to retrieve the corpse, that was fine, provided that at most two police officers did so, dressed only in underwear. And if they did not wish to retrieve more dead bodies, they should leave the building immediately. What extraordinarily depressing people, the head of homicide thought as he made his first operational decision in a crisis situation. Of course the police would leave the building. Of course they would see to removing the body. Of course. It was already under way.
Then by radio he contacted the chief inspector of the central detective squad who was leading the forces inside the building and asked him for three things. First, to send a suitable, clearly visible number of men out of the building; second, to see to it that those who remained behind regrouped discreetly on the basement level; third and finally, to appoint two volunteers who were willing to play the part of EMTs in underpants only.
Assistant detective Bo Jarnebring with the central detective squad was one of the first who, with service revolver drawn, and with a warm heart and a cool head, had rushed into the embassy building, and he was also the first to volunteer. His boss had only shaken his head. Even an almost naked Jarnebring would be far too terrifying a spectacle in this sensitive initial phase. The assignment had gone instead to two of his older colleagues who had a more jovial, roly-poly appearance. Jarnebring and two other like-minded colleagues would try to provide cover for the stretcher bearers and if necessary fire their weapons toward the upper corridor.
This duty suited Jarnebring much better, and he quickly crawled up the stairs and took position. His two colleagues succeeded with some difficulty in rolling the lifeless, bloody body up onto the stretcher that they pushed ahead of them. It was not exactly simple to do lying curled up on a stairway, but it worked. After that they very carefully started to ease back down the stairs with the stretcher dragging after them while Jarnebring held the sight of his service revolver aimed steady at the door to the upper corridor. It was at approximately that moment that he acquired his lifelong memory of the German terrorists’ occupation of the West German embassy in Stockholm. There was a smell of burnt telephone.
Suddenly he glimpsed the barrel of an automatic weapon in the door opening, and just as he tried to change position to get a clear shot at the person who was holding the gun he saw the flames in the muzzle of the barrel, heard the reports boom in the narrow stairwell and the ricochets buzzing like angry hornets around his ears. But it was his nose that remembered best the smell of burnt telephone. It was not until the next day when he and a few of the others returned to the site to help clean up that he became clear about the reason for his memory. The staircase banister was covered with black Bakelite, and about eighteen inches above the place where his head had been the bullet from an automatic weapon had carved a yard-long groove in the banister.
The Swedish police lacked both the equipment and the training for this type of effort. The combined practical experience of the police force amounted, counting generously, to no more than three similar events: the murder of the Yugoslavian ambassador in Stockholm in April 1971, an airplane hijacking at Bulltofta outside Malmö in September 1972, and the so-called Norrmalmstorg drama in Stockholm in August 1973. That was when an ordinary Swedish thief had taken the personnel of a bank hostage in an effort to force the release from prison of the bank robber most lionized by the national mass media. Both the airplane hijacking and the Norrmalmstorg drama had ended happily in the sense that no one had died, but in this new case other rules clearly applied; only an hour after the situation had begun the head of the homicide squad had a corpse around his neck and this he greatly disliked.
He therefore decided to change tactics and lie low, very low, as low as possible, if for no other reason than to give the Stockholm syndrome a second chance to have its full effect. Deep down, because he himself was a good person, he had a hard time letting go of that thought. As afternoon changed to evening he had therefore allowed his forces to conduct the police variation of the Swedish hedgehog, and he had mostly talked on the phone. With his own police command, with people from the National Police Board, representatives of the government and the Ministry of Justice, basically with anyone and everyone who managed to get in touch with him.
Late in the afternoon two colleagues from the German secret police showed up at his temporary command center. After a brief description of the situation they left him to form their own impressions. Only a
quarter of an hour later an out of breath chief inspector from the uniformed police came to report that the “German bastards” were going around doling out high-caliber American army revolvers as a gift to their Swedish colleagues. So that they would have “more substantial hardware to hold on to than a lousy Walther pistol when things got serious.” The head of homicide sighed and told the chief inspector to break off these “philanthropic activities” as quickly as possible and take care to see that any gifts already doled out were rounded up.
“Otherwise the boys from tech will go crazy on us,” he added both judiciously and pedagogically. For regardless of how things went with those inside, there would be a forensic investigation at the crime scene at some point, and much of that would involve attributing discharged bullets to the right weapon. This he knew better than almost anyone else, because he had devoted more than twenty years of his career to investigating serious crimes of violence.
The opponents inside the embassy had not in any event expressed any active dissatisfaction with the police command’s new tactical arrangements. They had their hands full with monitoring the situation at the same time as negotiations went on with their own government and the Swedish government about the demands that had been made: immediate release of twenty-six comrades from German prisons, among them the leaders of the Baader-Meinhof group. Transport by air to a friendly host country plus twenty thousand dollars on top of that for each and every one of those released. If their demands were not met, they would start shooting hostages, one each hour starting at ten o’clock that evening. It was as simple as that.
There followed hours of waiting without anything in particular happening while the clock ticked on toward ten. It was decided, for lack of anything better to do, to hasten the preparations for the tear gas attack that had been under consideration for the past few hours.
The time had reached quarter past ten before the final word from the German government in Bonn—via the Swedish government in Stockholm—reached the terrorists at the embassy. Only a few minutes later someone inside must have got tired, went and fetched the embassy’s trade attaché, led him up to a window, and shot him from behind.
One of the police detectives, well situated in a so-called nest at a
neighboring embassy, saw the trade attaché being murdered, and when he reported his observations—“I think they shot him in the back or the neck”—the head of the homicide squad suddenly lost heart. The promised effects of the Stockholm syndrome, this good, consoling cigar, seemed more remote than ever. It had been less than ten hours and already two of the hostages had been murdered.
A while later he started to hope again. Eleven o’clock passed without anyone else being shot, and only a few minutes later the terrorists inside the embassy suddenly released three female secretaries from among their hostages. A ray of hope in the gathering April darkness, and … maybe still, thought the head of homicide, for a tear gas attack was not something he was looking forward to. That could only end with further misery. At the same time the authorities had a good idea of how many hostages there were. A rapidly shrinking group, which would not last longer than early morning if the terrorists made good on their promise to execute one per hour.
The release came at a quarter to midnight. The head of the homicide squad had left the construction shed where he had set up his temporary command room to finally stretch his legs, take a breath of fresh air, and smoke yet another cigarette. First he saw the flash of light from the embassy building, then he felt the shaking in the ground below him, and only after that did he hear the series of explosions. The clouds of glass splinters, building material, smoke, and last of all the screams from the people inside the building. People climbing out of windows, throwing themselves out, jumping, clinging to the façade, tumbling, falling, getting up again, or remaining lying. That was how he remembered it when he thought back, in just that order: the flashes of light, the shaking, the detonations, the smoke, the screams, the people.
In contrast to the TV reporter who led the live broadcast from the scene, the head of the homicide squad had not jumped off the ground, and whether his feet did rise or spread was none of his doing in any event. On the other hand he had thought a bit. I’ll be damned, he thought, despite the fact that normally he never swore. Then he put out his cigarette and returned to his chair in the temporary command center. Clearly high time, for inside it was already a complete circus.
Half an hour later it was almost all over, and wonder of wonders,
with one exception all of them—the terrorists and their hostages and his colleagues down in the basement of the embassy and in the vicinity of the building—seemed to have survived the explosion. A number were wounded, a few were even seriously wounded, but they were all alive.
The terrorists were seized, and if he and his colleagues weren’t completely mistaken, it was a clean sweep. In any event everyone his detectives and investigators had been able to observe and count up earlier in the day and evening. One was still inside the embassy; he had just been found, or at least half of him, and he had been identified several hours previously. Four of the culprits were seized in the parking lot behind the embassy building, where they had most likely gathered in a vain attempt to flee in the rented car in which they had driven there twelve hours earlier—which was stupid of them because the police had already secured that car in the afternoon.
The fifth and last of the terrorists was seized as he was staggering around in the garden of the Norwegian embassy. Sooty and with clothes smoldering, hair singed off, burned all over, blinded, completely confused, he was at first mistaken for one of the hostages. But that part had been sorted out. Three of them were taken to the hospital, one in poor and one in miserable condition, but two had been in good enough condition to be sent directly to the jail in police headquarters after bandaging. All of them were in handcuffs, and two of them with ankle shackles to be on the safe side.
Jarnebring had left just after two in the morning, one of the last from the squad. Remaining were his colleagues with the uniformed police who would attend to guarding the barricades, and the technicians who stood trying to stay warm while waiting for the fire department to finish up. At home a worried wife was waiting, on the verge of climbing the walls, along with three small sleeping children of which the oldest had passed out from excitement in front of the TV several hours ago but without having been the least bit worried.
He himself felt strangely absent, and when his wife told him that his best friend and closest colleague Lars Martin Johansson must have called ten times during the afternoon and evening, he only nodded and pulled the telephone cord out of the jack to be on the safe side. Then he fell asleep, slept without dreaming, and woke up six hours later. He was
completely clear in the head despite the strange persistent feeling that what had happened had not concerned him. The odor of burnt Bakelite was still there too. It will pass, he thought. It will pass.
During the Second World War the English leader Winston Churchill would often maintain that “He who is forewarned is also forearmed.” During the most difficult years he had repeated this almost like an incantation, in Parliament, in his cabinet, and in public speeches to his severely tormented population: “He who is forewarned is forearmed.” And in hindsight, considering how it all actually ended despite the initial miserable odds, this must have been true for him in any event, and for a sufficient number of his countrymen. But this time, in Sweden, it did not apply, for when something did happen it seemed to have come as a total surprise, despite the fact that the warnings had been arriving thick and fast for several years.
The first government official who found out what was going on was not the minister of justice—which it should have been—but the prime minister. It turned out that way owing to the simple workings of human nature.
As soon as the dispatcher on duty at the police command center was sure this was serious and not just another false alarm, he pulled out the list of procedures that applies in such situations from the folder on his desk. The rest was routine. First he called the head of the homicide squad, who was his immediate superior at the police department in Stockholm. The homicide chief answered on the first ring, hemmed and hawed a few times, and asked the dispatcher to get back to him as soon as he knew anything more. Then the dispatcher called the contact person at the secret police who, in accordance with instructions, phoned the assistant undersecretary at the Ministry of Justice who was responsible for the practical aspects of the ministry’s and the government’s contacts with the secret police.
There was a busy signal at the assistant undersecretary’s office, and while waiting for the call to go through—because the seconds were ticking by painfully slowly, and so that he could at least have something better to do if the bastard on the other end of the line was to continue gabbing for all eternity—he moved the beeping receiver to his left hand and with his free right hand used his other telephone to dial the direct number to the prime minister’s undersecretary. The undersecretary
answered at once and was informed in less than a minute. And just as the secret police officer put down the receiver he heard the previously occupied assistant undersecretary shouting “hello” in his left ear, and what happened after that was completely in accordance with instructions.