The Demon of Dakar aka The Demon from Dakar

Forty-Six

Sören Sköld had been a truck driver for eleven years, the past four of which he had been at Enquist’s timber and construction materials. The truck he drove was a two-year-old Scania. He was pleased both with it and with his job. Wilhelm Enquist himself, closer to eighty years old but still active in the firm, was the one who gave Sören his daily deliveries and doled out good advice as if it was fantastic news.

I know, the driver would think with exasperation, I know everything about today and tomorrow’s deliveries, but he let Enquist talk, tossed his bag into the cab before he circled the truck, and inspected the straps on the tarp.

“Well, off you go,” Enquist said.

The old man is getting confused, Sören thought, which was mean-spirited because Enquist had not shown evidence of any age-related problems other than worsening hearing.

First, he made a trip to a small company south of the city where he delivered a pallet of ready-made fence sections. Thereafter there were doors and insulation to a house construction project and in the same area an order of mortar, nails, and panel clips to a builder Sören recognized from elementary school in Hallstavik. The builder offered him coffee, but Sören said no as he suspected his school friend wanted to dredge up childhood memories. He blamed it on the fact that he was already behind schedule, and drove off in the direction of the Norrtälje prison.

At the entrance to the road to Vätö there was a stationary dark-blue Saab so poorly placed that it blocked the entire intersection. Sören waited a couple of seconds before he honked. He could see two men in the front seat. One of them got out and approached the truck. His face lacked expression, neither irritation nor an apologetic smile since they were blocking traffic. Sören sighed. He hoped they didn’t want help with their car, he thought, and lowered the window. Before Sören had a chance to react, the man opened the door and stepped up on the foot ledge. His breath smelled of garlic.

“We’re taking over,” he said.

There was nothing threatening about him, he actually looked very relaxed. But he had a black gun in his hand.

After that Sören could only recall fragments of what happened. The psychologist he spoke to the following day said it was a natural reaction. What he could remember was that he was suddenly sitting in the passenger seat, and that the garlic-stinking intruder put the truck in gear and drove away. The Saab was gone. The road to the prison was unblocked. Then Sköld’s cell phone rang.

“Don’t answer it,” the new driver said, and only then did the situation sink in for Sören. The truck had been highjacked.

The Scania was expected and was let in through the gate without fuss. If any of the prison staff asked him why there were two drivers, Sören Sköld had been instructed to say that the new driver was being trained.

The truck pulled up to the carpentry area. Then everything happened very fast. The door to the wood shop opened, Agne Salme came out and jumped into the forklift in order to drive it around to the back of the truck. Out of the corner of his eye he saw Sören Sköld, whom he knew well, and an unknown man walking toward him.

Agne Salme stepped out of the truck, put his hand up in greeting but stiffened when he saw the gun in the stranger’s hand. At the same time three men came running from the mini-golf course that was right next to the large open area in front of pavilions two and three.

Agne knew Jussi Björnsson, Stefan Brügger, and José Franco very well. They were all long-timers.

“Let’s take it nice and easy,” the man with the gun said. “Loosen the tarp!”

Sören Sköld automatically obeyed without protesting or saying a word. Agne Salme followed the instructions for a hostage situation and remained completely passive in order not to worsen the situation unnecessarily.

When the golf trio passed Patricio Alavez, who was weeding the strip between the metal fence and the sports field, José Franco slowed down and shouted something to Alavez. Salme saw how the Mexican stared at the truck, hesitantly lowered his basket, stared at Franco who had run on, and then he set off after him.

Jussi Björnsson immediately received a gun from his partner. Brügger, who was the most nervous of them all, went and stood very close to Agne Salme.

“I’m leaving now, you damn slavedriver. Do you understand? Now you’ll have to put your damn shelves together yourself.”

Agne Salme nodded. He was too smart to make any comments. The German had worked in the carpentry area before and Salme knew the unpredictable killer from Rostock too well.

“Fuck you,” José Franco said-he had been doing nine years for attempted homicide, arson, and resisting arrest. He kneed Salme in the groin.

“Stop it! Get in, damn it! Are you coming?”

The highjacker looked at Patricio, who was standing completely passive.

“Venga!” Franco shouted from the back of the truck.

Patricio jumped up and thereafter Agne Salme was forced to his feet.

The alarm had been triggered when security had seen the three golfers leaving the sport area. About one minute later the truck left the prison grounds. Law enforcement was notified, but the situation looked anything but good. There was a traffic accident on the approach to Spillersboda, and a patrol car was at the scene. In Gräddö, a house had caught on fire, which required attention from both the fire department and the police. Several minutes later a dispatch was received about gunfire between Finsta and Rimbo. A truck and two cars had been shot at from a wooded hillside. No one was hurt but all available patrol units were directed to the spot.

Police officers Sune Bark and Kristian Andersson were located north of Norrtälje, on their way back from Grisslehamn, where they had been questioning a retired man about a series of burglaries in the area, when they received word of the gunfire. They were ordered to proceed directly to Finsta.

A quarter of an hour later they received a counterorder: they were to drive straight to the Norrtälje prison facility.

Bark was a recent graduate of the Police Academy and the most serious event he had encountered to date was a violent drunk on the ferry to Blidö. This incident had occurred off-duty, but he had felt compelled to intervene and had done so with great aplomb. The neutralizing of the drunk man had been facilitated by the fact that the latter was seventy-seven years old and basically unconscious by the time he was brought under control. Bark had received praise for his efforts.

Andersson had spent more than twenty years on the force, most of the time in a radio patrol car, and thus had seen and heard considerably more. He had been called out on a number of incidents, escape attempts and even successful escapes. This time the situation was grave, he realized as they received more information from central dispatch, and he made an effort to repeatedly impress this fact on his partner.

“We have hostages to consider,” he said, “and we are faced with an armed opponent who is probably capable of anything.”

In the next moment he swore at a driver who apparently hadn’t noticed the patrol car’s flashing lights and sirens. Andersson swerved expertly and drove on the wrong side of a highway divider in order to advance more quickly.

They spotted the Scania at a parking lot approximately one kilometer from the prison. Kristian Andersson braked, turned off his siren, and passed the truck slowly but could not see a person inside. One hundred meters on he made a U-turn while Bark contacted central dispatch.

They knew that when an inmate facing a long incarceration escaped, he was usually nervous. Inmates serving ten years who saw a chance to escape were not afraid to use any means when in a tight situation. But after two or three days on the run, hunted by police and with their faces in every newspaper, hungry, thirsty, and cold, they tended to become more cooperative. So the initial phase of an escape was often the most critical.

Kristian Andersson instructed Bark to remain in the car and stay in touch with the team at headquarters, which had hastily been assembled, then he stepped out of the car and took out his weapon.

The tarp on the back of the truck fluttered. A red Amazon drove up at slow speed. The driver, an older man, stared at him and swerved in the direction of the ditch for a moment before he regained control of the car.

“Make sure to close the road to traffic!” Andersson shouted, before he carefully approached the truck. He kept to the side of the road, came to a bus shelter and stayed there for several seconds. Nothing was happening at the truck.

He jumped a low fence into a private garden, crossed a raspberry patch where the occasionally berry could still be seen, stepped into the adjacent lot and came increasingly closer to the truck.

Partly obscured by a bush, he stared through an open door into the empty cab. A shoe lay on the asphalt. The truck was abandoned. The inmates and their rescuer had fled. Kristian Andersson looked around and discovered two faces in the window of a house some fifteen meters back on the lot. He instinctively fell down on one knee and raised his gun.

Kristian Andersson let out a curse. The thorns of a gooseberry bush scraped his hands and for a moment he was transported to the garden of his childhood home at the foot of Kinnekulle hill. Harvest time. Currents, gooseberries, and raspberries. White plastic bins and buckets, insects and thorns.

The couple in the window were staring intently at him as if they were waiting for him to act. He could make out the woman’s gray hair, and the dark frames of her glasses made her look like an owl. They probably had nothing to do with the escape. They were simply afraid.

Andersson rose up and ran doubled-over up to the door of the house and felt the handle. It was unlocked. He entered and called out that they should remain calm and move away from the window.

“Have you seen anything?” he shouted and walked into the hall. The woman appeared. She looked much younger than his initial impression, perhaps around forty-five.

“They jumped into a car,” she said.

“What kind of a car?”

“A van,” the man said, who had now joined them in the hall.

“Color and make?”

“Blue,” the man said. “Maybe American. What is going on? Has there been a burglary?”

Kristian Andersson left the house and the couple’s questions and ran back to the patrol car. Sune Bark was talking agitatedly into the dispatch. Andersson grabbed the microphone from him.