"Is he coming? Is he? Oh God, I think he is."

One year ago, a heavily armed man dressed as a police officer appeared on the beach of a youth summer camp in Norway. The kids had no way of knowing he was targeting them for the ills of Europe. Then he started shooting. And shooting. Where were the real cops? By the end of the day, seventy-seven people had been killed, the deadliest attack in that country since World War II. As told by the survivors, these are the beat-by-beat horrors of those terrifying 198 minutes
This image may contain Outdoors Nature Land Shoreline Water Ocean Sea Weather Coast Island Sky Cumulus and Cloud

Two hours after the bomb explodes in Oslo, Adrian Pracon hears two sharp bangs, like a hammer striking metal. The noises come from the lawn down the hill, between the main white building and the jetty where the ferry docks.

The island, named Utoeya, pokes out of a glacial lake called Tyrifjorden twenty-five miles west of Oslo. It slopes up steeply from the jetty, and Adrian is at the top of the hill, near the cafeteria. He is 21, though it's only his first year at the summer camp for young liberals. Already he is charmed, almost smitten, by the place. _This, _he thought after he arrived on a clear Norwegian day, really is a piece of heaven on earth.

There are three more bangs. Adrian sees six or seven people—he's not counting—sprinting up the slope toward him. "Run," they're screaming. "He's shooting! Run!"

Another three bangs. But Adrian does not run. He does not recognize the noises as gunfire, and the words being screamed are so implausible as to be fantasy. People simply do not shoot one another in Norway. Adrian is not so much afraid as curious.

He hears more bangs. Two people at the top of the slope fall, abruptly and awkwardly, in midstride. Adrian steps off the main path, out of the way of the others charging up the hill. But still he does not run. He wonders if he is witnessing an elaborate ercise, if perhaps the organizers are trying to show hundreds of young campers what it would be like to live in a war zone.

A blond man in a black outfit is climbing the hill. He is not hurrying. At the top of the hill, he turns left, toward the field where the kids have staked their tents. Last night, when low clouds curtained the moon and stars, those tents glowed red and blue and yellow from the lamps lit inside, and Adrian marveled at how pretty they were. Like Chinese lanterns, he thought. Now he's stepping around them, walking backward parallel to and ten meters off of the path. The man appears to be dressed in a police commando's uniform: black trousers over what seems to be a black wet suit, a vest with many stuffed pockets and the word politi on the right breast, a backpack. He also is carrying two guns—a rifle with an elaborate sight and a bayonet affid to the muzzle and, in his right hand, a pistol. Adrian stoops into a half-crouch. He now suspects that he should, in fact, be afraid. But why would a policeman shoot people? This must be a prank, he tells himself.

He senses other kids around him, also moving in a slow half-crouch. In the middle distance, he sees a girl coming out of the showers. She's wearing gray sweatpants and a gray sweatshirt with auf stenciled on it. Apparently she did not hear the bangs or the screaming while she was in the showers, because she is walking calmly along the path toward the man with the guns.

The distance between them closes. She is only a few feet from the man when she stops, tenses. It looks to Adrian like she senses something is wrong, like she wants to run.

The man raises his right hand. He shoots her in the head.

The girl crumples to the ground.

Adrian thinks it looks nothing like it does when someone gets shot in the movies.

The man stands over her, fires once more. Her body jerks.

Adrian runs.


Seven hours before the shooting begins on 22 July, Gro Harlem Brundtland makes the short ferry crossing from the shore to Utoeya. She was Norway's first female prime minister and is affectionately known as "the Mother of Norway." She is scheduled to stay through dinner at the camp.

The Labor Party Youth League (Arbeidernes Ungdomsfylking in Norwegian, abbreviated to AUF) has held a camp on Utoeya every summer for sixty-one years. The AUF is by far the largest political youth organization in Norway, and its parent party, Labor, has long been the dominant faction in a coalition government. The island itself, which is small and heart-shaped, was a gift to the AUF from the Oslo and Akershus trade unions in 1950. There are a few buildings—the main white building, the cafeteria, a cherry red schoolhouse, tiny green cabins—and a soccer pitch in a clearing, but most of Utoeya is forest and meadow. A narrow path follows the edge of the island as it rises to cliffs on the western side, then back down to a rocky beach on the southern tip. It has been known for generations as Kjærlighetsstien, the Lovers' Trail.

On Utoeya, Gro will be visiting her granddaughter, who is in the AUF. One of the Oslo newspapers, _Verdens Gang, _decides to do a light feature on the occasion, and a reporter and a photographer are dispatched to follow Gro around the island.

Sara Johannessen, the photographer, takes pictures of Gro speaking in the cafeteria and laughing with campers and touring Utoeya in a pair of borrowed boots. Rain falls, intermittent but hard, and Gro decides to cut short her visit. She leaves after lunch.

The ferry docks on the mainland just before three. On the other side, where Sara has parked her blue Toyota, she coas Gro and her granddaughter to stand together for a portrait. The picture is static and clumsily posed, like an amateur's snapshot, but Sara is pretty sure they have never before been photographed together in the national media. This is my scoop today, Sara tells herself, this horrible picture.


Thirty-five minutes after Sara takes her horrible picture, a white Volkswagen panel van slips past a no-entry sign into a plaza below a seventeen-story high-rise. The building is known as H-Block, and it is part of the government complex in central Oslo. It houses, among other agencies, the prime minister's offices on the top floors.

The driver parks near the main entrance. He lights a fuse that is connected, in the back of the van, to a mixture of fertilizer, diesel, and aluminum that weighs slightly more than a ton. The driver then walks three blocks north, toward a silver Fiat Doblò. A surveillance camera records a grainy image of him: He's wearing body armor and a riot helmet, and he's carrying a pistol.

The fuse has a burn time of slightly more than seven minutes.


Sara is a block away, and her car is still rolling when she hears a dull thump and low rumble, and she knows something terrible has happened because of the concussion that comes with the sound. You could feel it in your stomach.

She grabs her cameras from the reporter sitting in the passenger seat, tells him to park the car, and then runs toward the blast. Building alarms, jostled by that same concussion, ring in a shrill chorus, and glass falls from above, shards and panes and whole plates shattering on the pavement. And yet it seems strangely quiet. The normal sounds of the city, the traffic and the trams and the footsteps and conversations that all layer into a background drone, are mute. Scraps of paper flutter in the air, dance with the smoke. The smell reminds her of a freshly struck match, only stronger.

Sara turns the corner toward the side of H-Block where the bomb went off. There is a smoking crater where the lobby door used to be. Draperies in red and white flap in glassless windows: They've nearly all blown out. Small fires burn. There are bodies, and parts of bodies, on the pavement: Eight people were killed when the Volkswagen exploded, and investigators will find more than one hundred pieces of the dead scattered in the streets and even on rooftops. There is a lot of blood.

Sara photographs the wreckage and the wounded and the rescuers. She photographs a woman who has blond hair and a bloody blue shirt and a foot-long wooden stake poking out of her head. It's part of a window frame from her tenth-floor office, and it stabbed, like a javelin, between her skin and her skull. She is one of nine people badly wounded by the explosion. More than 200 others suffer minor injuries.

It all seems unreal, Sara thinks. I keep waiting for someone to yell, "Cut! More blood! More fire!"


The crew at the late-night café on Utoeya didn't finish cleaning up until almost three in the morning, so Munir Jaber sleeps late and misses Gro's speech. He is 21 years old and was born and raised in Oslo, where he is the AUF district secretary. This is his fourth summer on Utoeya. It's the spirit of the place, Munir says. Getting to know new people, getting new friends. It's a place for us to really sit down and discuss the future. What do we want Norway, and the world, to look like when we're adults? What kind of society do we want to live in? Until then, they practice. Everyone on Utoeya is required to contribute to the communal functioning of the camp—hauling trash or organizing social events like Wednesday night's speed-dating or Thursday's karaoke or, for Munir, flipping burgers in the late-night café. Utoeya, for us, it's the place where we live the world we want to see.

After a lecture on student politics, Munir's phone begins to chirp with tweets and texts. There has been an explosion in Oslo. He tries to find out more online. The early reports are sketchy. There is brief speculation that a gas main might have ruptured. But it becomes clear within a half hour that a bomb has been detonated and that the government block was the target.


At 4:30 P.M. the kids on Utoeya pack into the cafeteria for a meeting. They are wet from the rain, and the air inside is moist and hot. They know only that there has been an explosion in Oslo, and they are at once frightened and confused. This is little Norway, Adrian Pracon tells himself. Things don't explode.

Monica Bsei does her best to calm several hundred kids. She is 45 years old and the island manager, a job she has held for twenty years. Everyone in the AUF, and probably everyone who’s ever been in the AUF, knows who she is; they call her Mother Utoeya, and she is trying now to be maternal, comforting. She announces that the rest of the day’s activities have been canceled and that the ferry will run only as needed instead of every hour. Also, large screens will be erected to view the prime minister’s press conference. "We are safe," she tells the kids. "We are in the safest place to be."

Adrian follows her to the main building. He wants to be useful. He offers to buy fizzy drinks and snacks for the staff getting the screens set up, and he leaves to go back up the hill to the commissary.

His mother calls as he steps outside. She is in her native Poland, visiting family. Both of Adrian’s parents are from Poland. They fled during the crackdown on the Solidarity movement, afraid they would be arrested with the other leftists. His parents are one reason Adrian is involved with the AUF, which is pro-immigrant. My parents did good. They had a future here, and I have a good future. Why kick them out?

Adrian lights a cigarette on the lawn. His mother has seen the news about the bombing in Oslo, which is being televised across the planet. She wants her boy to go home.

"No, I’m not going to go home," he tells her. "We’re in the safest place in Norway."


Two of Freddy Lie’s three daughters are on Utoeya. Cathrine, who is 17, is there for the second time, and Elisabeth, who is a year younger, is at her first island camp. Sometimes Freddy thinks his girls joined the AUF just so they could go to Utoeya, but that’s not completely true: Elisabeth believes she can change the world. She wants to help people, and especially she wants to help animals. Oh, yes, the animals. Very important. She would say, "The fur, it stays on the animals." She is also a number-one picker, a top recruiter, for the AUF in the stfold southern district.

Freddy’s girls are worried about him. He drives a dump truck in Oslo Monday through Thursday, but he’s added a few Friday shifts lately. Cathrine and Elisabeth don’t know if he’s in the capital when the bomb explodes. They call his mobile. Freddy always answers. If they call me one hundred times, ninety-nine I take it. Freddy is at home, in Halden, a border town south of Oslo, but he’s left his phone in the car. He misses the call. On the island, his daughters start to panic. They are certain he has been blown up. By the time Freddy retrieves the mobile, just before five o’clock, there’s a message from his ex-wife. "Call Elisabeth."

He dials her number. She is giddy with relief. Through a window in the cafeteria building, Elisabeth sees Cathrine walk by outside. Cathrine points a thumb up so her little sister can see it, but tentatively, more of a silent question than a statement. Elisabeth smiles, gives her sister a thumbs-up in return. Their father is safe in Halden.

Freddy and Elisabeth talk for sixteen minutes and forty seconds. Elisabeth complains about the rain, teases that she might want to come home if the sky keeps emptying on the island. If it’s still raining Saturday, Freddy teases back, he’ll bring her a survival suit, and maybe a pair of goggles, too.

He tells her not to worry. He’s safe.


The man who parked the white van at H-Block takes his helmet off and sets it on the passenger seat of the silver Fiat. He has two guns in the car. One is a nine-millimeter semiautomatic Glock pistol, and he’s etched mjölnir on the grip. Mjölnir is Thor’s hammer. The other gun is a .223-caliber Ruger Mini-14 rifle, and he calls that one Gungnir, which is the spear wielded by the Norse god Odin.

_ Elisabeth Lie _

He has named the Fiat Sleipnir—after Odin's eight-legged horse—but he's stuck in traffic. The drive should take less than forty minutes on clear roads. But because he's blown up central Oslo, the city is evacuating and the roads are jammed. He has not factored panic and chaos into his plan.

The landing for the ferry to Utoeya is at the bottom of a trail from a two-lane road that runs by the shore. The man pulls off the road at about four twenty but does not drive down the trail. He knows the ferry, an old military landing craft called M. S. Thorbjrn, leaves on the hour, and he believes waiting with the captain for forty minutes is too much time for too many questions.

As five o'clock approaches, he shows his ID—his picture above the word politi and below the badge number L109—to the ferry captain. The man explains that he has been sent to make sure the island is secure. The captain helps the man lug a heavy case on board the Thorbjrn.

On Utoeya, the man is met on the lawn by Monica Bsei and Trond Berntsen, an off--duty policeman volunteering as the island's security guard. Trond wonders why no one from the police has contacted the island. Trond asks if the man knows certain other officers. It does not appear that he does.

The man suggests they all go up to the white building, where he can more fully explain. Trond and Monica turn, walk across the lawn.

The man shoots Trond in the back and the head, five rounds in all. He shoots Monica once in the back and twice in the head.

At the top of the hill, near the cafeteria, Adrian hears sharp bangs. Like a hammer, he thinks, striking a piece of metal.

Munir stays in the cafeteria building after the meeting about the bombing ends. He is hugging a friend when he hears a series of pops. They sound like firecrackers or balloons, and Munir is annoyed. Who would do such a childish thing at a moment like this?

Then people crash through the doors, panic on their faces, screaming for everyone to run. Munir yells for the kids to get out, to keep low, stay beneath the windows. Everyone drops, and the floor is covered with crouching bodies, like a knee-deep pond rippling toward the back exit. One head rises. "Wait," a voice says. "What are we running from?"

Munir realizes he doesn't know. He walks to the door and peeks out onto the flat clearing. There's a girl on the ground. She's not moving, and blood is leaking from her head. He can't decide if it's real. He backs into the building. Through a window, he sees a man in a black costume, holding a gun. Wow, Munir thinks. How fake is that uniform?

Another pop. The gun seems real, and even if it's not, Munir is worried that campers will trample each other in their panic. He tries to bring some order to the stampede.

The shooting is closing in. Munir can hear shots near the windows, the door, then inside. There are so many bangs. The man shoots a boy eight times, another five times. He kills five girls with eighteen bullets. Then he moves to the next room. He kills five more there.

Some of the kids, they don't even move, as if they're paralyzed. But most of them run. Munir sprints out the door while the man is still killing people in the building. He heads toward the soccer pitch and then beyond, where Utoeya slopes down to an open rocky beach called Bolshevik Bay.

The ground is soaked with rain, and Munir slips, falls, gets back on his feet. There are others with him, but his vision narrows to the beach. He realizes there is no place to hide at Bolshevik Bay. Swim, swim, swim, he tells himself, you can't hide here. He kicks off his shoes, strips off his shirt.

But he does not swim. The rain is cold on his skin, the lake water colder on his feet. He is a district secretary, and kids from his district have been left behind. He feels responsible for them. With three friends, he edges west along the water, takes cover behind the first big rocks rising from Tyrifjorden. The pops and bangs come closer, and he judges the position of the shooter by the sound: approaching Bolshevik Bay, now at the top of the beach, then moving farther west, toward the Lovers' Trail.

Munir and his three friends break for the cafeteria building. He is the fourth in line, legs churning. The shooter sees them. Bullets spit dirt and mud from the ground. Munir nears the clearing where he stumbled on the way down. He falls again. One of his friends turns but does not stop. "Munir," his friend screams, "if you want to live, get up and run."


Freddy's phone rings at five twenty-five. It's Elisabeth, and she's screaming. She forms no words that Freddy can understand, and if there is noise in the background, he does not hear it. I don't know. The brain, it locks up. All I hear is my daughter screaming. He does not know why she is screaming, does not know what has happened in the ten minutes since Elisabeth joked about the rain.

Freddy fears she has been raped.

His friend Anita Eggesvik is with him. She also has a daughter on the island, Marthe, who is Elisabeth's close friend. Anita calls her while Elisabeth screams in the background. "You must help Elisabeth," she tells Marthe. "Run to Elisabeth."

Marthe tells her mother, "There is a policeman on the island shooting people."

Elisabeth is crouched against a wall, holding her phone to her right ear. Marthe tells her, "Come, we must run." But Elisabeth doesn't move. She stays there, ducked down against a wall.

Freddy hears his daughter scream for two minutes and seven seconds. And then the man in the police costume shoots her in the left temple. The bullet goes out the right side of her head and destroys her phone. Then the man shoots her twice more.

On Freddy's end, the line goes dead.


There are clothes scattered on the rocks at South Point, where Utoeya edges into Tyrifjorden. Campers have already stripped down and started to swim away. After Adrian saw the man kill the girl in the gray sweats, he thought only, Get to the water. But now he stops, hesitates. He knows he's going to swim, but he doesn't want to ruin his phone. He takes it out of his pocket and wraps it in a sweatshirt on the ground. He stops again. He's going to want to buy some smokes when this is over, so he takes out his wallet, wraps it with his phone. Then he steps into the water.

Tyrifjorden is stinging cold. Adrian swims ten meters, then thirty. He's wearing boots, green pants, and a T-shirt, and soon he feels the lake pulling him under. He's going to drown, and he wonders if he's going to drown for some stupid ercise, for a prank. That's a lousy reason to die.

Adrian starts to swim back to the island. But the water is still sucking him down. He sinks, kicking and thrashing. His toe scrapes a rock, settles on it. He can stretch, tip his head back, get his face out of the water. He makes a slow, floating leap toward Utoeya, lands on another rock, then another. Eventually he can stand properly, and then he can walk. The water is up to his chest, then his navel, his waist, his knees.

The man with the guns is standing in the trees above South Point. He's pointing his rifle toward a knot of kids farther out in the lake. Plumes of water spray up around them, timed to the bangs from the shore. Adrian decides the bullets are real.

Adrian does not move. He is standing knee-deep in the lake, completely exposed. The others in the water are off to his right, maybe far enough that Adrian is out of the man's peripheral vision. He believes he might be invisible if he stands completely still. He hears the man with the guns yell, "I'm going to kill you all." Adrian is close enough to see his face, which turns bright red. "You're all going to die!"

Then the long gun is pointed at him. Adrian sputters, "No, don't shoot," but the words come from his throat in a muffled splatter of water and air. He imagines his grave, his parents standing over it, his Australian shepherds, Mike and Bella, pawing the ground. He thinks, This is a shitty way to die.

The man stares at Adrian through the gunsight, as if he's deliberating. He does not say anything. Adrian does not say anything. Seconds pass, slowly. Then, abruptly, the man lowers the gun and steps away behind the trees. Adrian wonders if the rifle jammed. But then he hears two more pops in the distance, probably near the schoolhouse.

The police emergency lines in the North Buskerud district start ringing just before 5:30 p.m. on 22 July. There are only four officers on duty in the entire district, which is headquartered ten miles north of Utoeya in the little city of Hnefoss, and the calls come faster than the operator can answer. The senior officer, a sergeant named Håkon Hval, has been watching news of the Oslo bombing and waiting for his shift to end. He picks up a line. "There's a guy in a police uniform," a hysterical voice tells him, "walking around Utoeya shooting people."

Håkon does not believe this. He has worked in North Buskerud for eight years, and he has never been to Utoeya, because there's never been any need. Also, police in Norway do not shoot people. This is a sick joke, he thinks. But the phones keep ringing. Phones are ringing in South Buskerud and Oslo, too. He realizes, very quickly, that this is not a joke.

Already, commandos are racing from Oslo. Håkon sends two of his officers to the ferry landing, and he heads behind the station with another man to hitch the red police boat to the back of a Volvo.


Hege Dalen and her fiancée, Toril Hansen, are preparing to celebrate at their camp on the eastern shore of Tyrifjorden, in a plot by the road where they've parked an RV and, attached to it, erected a sitting room under an awning. This is their second summer at Utvika, and 22 July is Toril's daughter's tenth birthday. They're planning a party.

The rain keeps the women and the girl inside the enclosure. The television is on, and they are watching the reports from Oslo. And then they hear noises from Utoeya, which is not unusual. Sounds carry across the water.

The noise that Hege hears, that everyone at Utvika hears, is a series of staccato cracks. Is that fireworks? she thinks. Yes, she believes it is, and she is annoyed. Don't they know what is happening in Oslo?

The fireworks keep popping, the rain keeps falling, the television glows. Hege hears engines, and tires on the dirt road. Through the clear vinyl, she sees a black SUV leading a convoy toward the jetty. She recognizes them as Deltas, Norway's elite police unit. Then she watches as the convoy spins around, turns back up the path, and speeds out of Utvika.

She finds this odd. Hege and Toril and other campers walk to the jetty. And then they see the kids, dozens of them, bobbing in the water. They are only heads and flailing arms, scattered like lobster buoys across the lake. The jetty is the closest point to Utoeya, but the kids are moving in all directions, like atoms smashed loose. Hege does not know what is happening, but she knows it is not good.

Boats are launched. Toril climbs into one with a man who steers out into the lake to fish kids from the water. Hege stays at the jetty, waiting for people to come ashore. Within minutes, she helps two girls, wet and shivering, onto the jetty. "A policeman is shooting," they tell her. She begins to walk them up the path to the café at the top of the camp, then detours to her trailer to retrieve her cell phone. One of the girls spoke to her mother less than an hour before and told her she was safe on Utoeya. She needs to call her back.

Boats bring more campers, dozens, then hundreds. The people at Utvika gather blankets for wet survivors. Hege loses track of how many kids borrow her phone. One is a girl, maybe 18 years old, with long black hair. She is nearly hysterical, and she wraps herself around Hege. She refuses to go to the café, refuses to leave the jetty, because she left her brother on the island and she won't leave until she finds him. She uses Hege's phone to call her brother, over and over, but he does not answer, and Hege does not leave her.


Håkon pilots the red boat through a corrugated-metal tunnel in the middle of a causeway. He's steering south, toward Utoeya's ferry landing, but when the boat emerges from the tunnel, Håkon sees the black SUVs and the flashing blue lights of the Delta units at the foot of the causeway.

He turns the boat hard, then slows and eases up to the boulders. Eight Delta operatives pile in. Their combined weight pushes the bow down onto the rocks, grounding the boat. Håkon can't get it to move. The police shuffle toward the back. The stern briefly dips and water sloshes over the gunwale, but the front rises clear.

Håkon reverses, turns toward Utoeya, throttles the engine. It runs for a minute, maybe two, then quits. Water has fouled the fuel system. The engine won't restart. Norway's elite police are stalled and adrift.


Munir is hiding next to one of the cabins in front of the cafeteria building. Nettles prick and tear at his skin. Raindrops fall on the leaves and spook him; they sound like footsteps, like someone is coming, like he's been discovered.

He moves deeper into the thorns, but slowly, silently, stopping after every step to fluff the wet leaves and hide his tracks. At the corner of the cabin, he turns over a leaf so he can see its dry, lighter side. He figures out he can use it as a sort of mirror: He positions it so the leaf will catch a shadow if anyone is sneaking along the wall toward him.

Munir watches the leaf for a very long time. He can hear the popping sounds echoing across the island, but they do not seem to come close. He's freezing, shirtless and shoeless in the rain, and he's tightening every muscle to keep from shivering, from jostling the nettles and the leaves. His teeth are chattering, and the sound is very loud in his head. He sticks his tongue between the molars on his right side, like a baffle. The noise stops, but he tastes blood. He's bitten into his tongue.

A helicopter is thumping overhead. There are more shots. From the water, he hears the engines of small boats. He does not know how long he has waited in the nettles, but he decides he has two choices. He can continue holding out for someone to find him, or he can get to the water. He calculates his odds, then sticks his head out of the thorns.

He spots a girl hiding nearby. He scuttles over to her, not covering his tracks this time but still as silently as possible. The girl isn't making any noise, and Munir whispers for her to keep quiet and stay with him. Together they sneak down to Bolshevik Bay.

They see bodies on the beach ahead. None are moving. Closer now, and Munir can see blood. He counts five bodies at Bolshevik Bay and three on the rocks nearby. He recognizes most of them as friends. But he cannot cry out, and he cannot hesitate. We have to keep it together, because we don't know where the shooter is, he thinks. But we are broken.

Munir tells the girl to get into the water, to swim away quietly. She grabs Munir and pulls him into Tyrifjorden, and they thrash from the shore. They are halfway across the lake, aching with cold, when police in a small boat putter up next to them. Munir is wary—the man shooting kids on the island was dressed like a policeman—but what choice does he have? He climbs into the boat.


Adrian collapses on the rocks next to the gray sweatshirt wrapped around his phone and his wallet. Rain is falling again, and he's shivering in his wet clothes. He strips off his blue tee, puts on the sweatshirt, and lies with his legs in the water. For some reason, his legs aren't as cold if he keeps them in the lake.

He doesn't want to call his mother, and he's worried his father's bad heart will give out if he calls him. He dials the police but he can't get through. He logs on to Facebook. "Someone is shooting on Utoeya," he types. "I love you all." Then he calls his friend Svein, on the far shore of Tyrifjorden. "Send help" is the only part of the conversation he'll remember.

Adrian is alone on South Point, and he decides to stay there. The shooter has already made one pass along this shoreline, already moved on to other targets. Lightning doesn't strike twice, he tells himself.

His phone rings. It's a reporter from the newspaper in Skien, his hometown, wanting to know what's happening. "I've seen five people dead," Adrian tells him. "Call the police."

The reporter wants Adrian to send a picture. Adrian says he'll try. "Don't call anyone else," Adrian says. He's worried a buzzing phone might attract the shooter.

He calls the police again, gets through. The operator tells him officers are on their way, the very best officers. Adrian wants to know if they're coming in a helicopter, and the operator says yes. This reassures him.

Then he waits. Across the water, he can see the strobing blue lights of police cars and ambulances. Above him he hears the chop of a helicopter, and he watches it hover for a few seconds. They promised me a helicopter, he thinks. The helicopter flies away. It makes another pass. It belongs to a news crew.

He hears hushed voices and feet padding from the bottom of the western cliffs. Then he sees kids, maybe twenty of them, coming around the last rocks before South Point. A girl sees him shivering, drapes a raincoat over his shoulders, and wraps her arms around him, trying to keep him warm.

There is talk of swimming away. Adrian says no, he's talked to the police. "They are coming," he says. "They said just to stay safe."

Then some of the kids are ducking and juking, peeking over the rise. "Is he coming?" They bob their heads, trying to see through the trees and bushes. "Is he? Oh God, I think he is." The kids are frantic, fear rising in their voices. "He's coming, yes, fuck, he's coming."

And then the man with the guns is there. Two kids sprint past him, toward the interior of the island. A few more stomp into the water, start to swim. Adrian just lies on the rocks. He's exhausted. He's almost drowned once. He can't swim away, he can't run.

He pretends he's already dead. And when he makes that decision, it's as if a switch is tripped in his central nervous system. His body stops shaking, his teeth stop chattering, and he is perfectly still. But his heart is pounding. He is stretched out on his side, his left arm splayed above his head, the rain jacket still covering his right shoulder and part of his face. He pushes down hard against the rocks, tries to subdue his heart. It does not work.

The shooter is near him now, down on South Point. The bangs are impossibly loud. Adrian remains completely still, but he opens his eyes. He sees a girl, stripped to her underwear and knee-deep in the lake, crying hysterically. A hole appears in her back. Then a second one. The girl is still screaming and still stumbling farther into Tyrifjorden, and then she goes quiet and tumbles over. Adrian notices the water is red.

He closes his eyes again. More shots, and he feels the deadweight of a body fall across his legs. Don't move. Don't breathe.

Beneath the jacket, where his face is hidden, he raises an eyelid enough to see a sliver of rocks. A black boot steps in front of him. Then a second.

Don't shiver. Stay dead.

He feels heat at the back of his head. It's from the muzzle of the Ruger, hot from dozens of bullets already fired through it. It lingers, the warmth spreading to his neck.

Then there is an incredible noise. Adrian believes his head is exploding. He feels a twitch in his shoulder, like the flick of a finger, but his head feels like it's been torn apart.

And still he does not move.

Adrian waits, then opens his eyes. The shooter is gone. He realizes he has been shot, but the wound does not seem terribly serious. The bullet was surely meant for his head, but the rain jacket obscured the shape of his skull: The round grazed the back of Adrian's neck and hit his left shoulder. His left ear seems to have taken the worst damage, absorbing the shock wave as it bounced off the rocks. He can't hear out of it.

There are ten kids on South Point. Five are dead; the other five are wounded. One of them, a girl, is in the water, upright but limping. Adrian helps her out of the lake and sees a wound in her right leg. There is no blood, just a hole deep and round as a golf ball. They sit together. The blue lights are still flashing across the water, but the helicopter is gone. Adrian tweets: "Shot on Utoeya. Many dead."

He turns to the girl. "It would be really nice," he says, "to have a cigarette now."

"Yeah," she says without looking at him.

"Do you think the shop is open?"

The girl laughs and Adrian laughs, and then they laugh about their water-wrinkled fingers and the cabaret scheduled for tomorrow night that probably won't happen, and they keep laughing, because there is nothing else to do until someone finally gets them off Utoeya.


Two Delta squads land on Utoeya in commandeered civilian boats at 6:25 p.m., seventy minutes after the shooter disembarked from the ferry pretending to be a policeman. Four men go north, where the survivors point. For more than an hour, gunshots have echoed around the island, and so no one is sure where the shooter is, or even if there is only one. The second team, six officers, move south, toward the schoolhouse.

They find the man in a clearing at 6:35, the Ruger on the ground, the pistol in a holster. He holds his arms out to either side, not straight up like a cornered criminal but waist-high and palms up, like a saint embracing his flock.

A commando yells for him to get on the ground. Another tells him to get on his knees.

"What should I do?" the man asks, his voice calm and flat. "Do you want me to get on my knees or lie on the ground?"

The police want him on the ground. And then they are on him, cuffing his hands, one officer's knee in his back.

"You are not my targets," the man tells them. "I consider you comrades."

The man has, in fact, already twice offered to give up to police. Thirty-five minutes earlier, at 6 p.m., he dialed 112 and was routed to North Buskerud. "Yes, hello, my name is Commander Anders Behring Breivik of the Norwegian Anti-Communist Resistance Movement," he told an operator. "I'm on Utoeya at the moment. I wish to surrender." Twenty-six minutes later, he rang again. That call went to South Buskerud. "We have just completed an operation on behalf of the Knights Templar, Europe, and Norway," he said. "It is acceptable to surrender to Delta." Both calls were dropped.

He did not, however, stop killing. In a little more than an hour, he shot ninety-nine people, almost all of them more than once, half at least three times. He killed sixty-seven, the youngest 14 and the oldest 51 but most of them teenagers. He also killed a 17-year-old boy who, in his terror, fell off the cliff on the west side and fractured his skull and his pelvis and tore his lung and his spleen. The sixty-ninth kill was another 17-year-old boy, who tried to swim from South Point. Divers found him at the bottom of the lake.

He had planned to kill everyone on the island, to drive them, panicked, into Tyrifjorden to drown—_to use the water as a weapon of mass destruction, _he would later explain.Also, he wanted to film himself beheading Gro Harlem Brundtland. Still, with the eight dead in Oslo, Anders Behring Breivik killed seventy-seven people on 22 July, the bloodiest day in Norway since World War II and the worst mass murder by a lone gunman in modern Western history.

The police have never heard of Breivik. Nor are they aware of a modern Knights Templar, most likely because there is no such organization. But Breivik is very clear in his motives, and he is very open. Earlier that day, before he parked the Volkswagen van at H-Block, he e-mailed a document to 8,000 acquaintances and strangers explaining what he was about to do and why. It has an ominous title—"2083: A European Declaration of Independence"—and is illustrated at the end with photos of Breivik pointing guns and sheathed in a biohazard suit and sporting regal costumes he has made befitting a commander. The document (he calls it "the compendium") is 1,500 pages long and praises, among others, Pamela Geller and Robert Spencer. He claims it required several years and almost $400,000 to produce.

It is written, densely and ponderously, with a pretense of scholarship. It is also historically illiterate and thematically illogical and can be reduced to an index card: Liberals are willfully enabling radical Muslims to destroy European civilization. Therefore, liberals must be killed.

Breivik never denies committing the crimes, only that they are, in fact, criminal acts. He believes Islamicization is an existential threat to the West and that hunting teenagers at a summer camp and blowing up office workers and pedestrians is the brutal yet necessary beginning of a counterrevolution.

He believes history will revere him.

He fears only that he, and thus his ideas, will be found insane.


Freddy doesn't know where either of his daughters are, and Anita doesn't know where Marthe is. They are in Halden, a border town in the south of Norway and 110 miles from Utoeya, but Freddy and Anita drive almost all the way to the island in an hour.

Freddy's ex-wife calls, tells him she's spoken to Cathrine. "Hi, Mom," she said. "I've been shot in the stomach and the arm, but it's okay. I'm okay." His ex-wife gives him a number, and Freddy dials it. A medic who loaded Cathrine into a helicopter answers. He tells Freddy that Cathrine has been flown to a hospital. Freddy drives off to find his oldest daughter.

Anita stays at the hotel where survivors are taken. At six fifty, Marthe finally calls. She tells her mother that she ran into the water when the shooting started and that she stayed there, neck deep and bitingly cold, until it stopped. But she was alive and uninjured.

Freddy doesn't find Cathrine until 1:30 a.m. She's in a hospital bed, unconscious, her chest sutured and bandaged. A machine breathes for her. She'd sprinted away in a zigzag line and made it to the rocks below the Lovers' Trail before the man shot her. One bullet hit the inside of her upper right arm. A second went through her right shoulder blade and lung and two ribs before exiting her stomach. She found a place to hide, then held a rock against her belly for two hours to stanch the bleeding. She will be in the hospital for nineteen days before she's well enough to go home.

Freddy doesn't know where Elisabeth is.


Adrian and the girl with the hole in her thigh are fetched from the island in a little boat by an old man who complains that the police didn't give him petrol. Adrian finds this darkly amusing: Everyone's got a problem.

Onshore, Adrian insists he isn't badly hurt, but a medic listens to his heart and lungs anyway and then raises his eyebrows. "Wow," he whispers. Adrian is, in fact, badly hurt. The bullet has shattered into dozens of fragments that carved a jagged channel through the muscles in his upper arm. It missed the major vessels, but he's still lost a fair amount of blood. Had the shot been a millimeter to the right, Adrian would have probably lost his arm; two centimeters, he'd probably be dead.

At the hospital that night, a nurse asks him if he needs anything.

"Is the shop open?" he asks.

"No, it's closed," the nurse says. "But I can get you anything you want."

"What I'd really like is a cigarette."

The nurse goes out into the hallway and bums one. Then she helps Adrian into a wheelchair and pushes him out onto a balcony so he can smoke. It is against the rules, but no one tells him to put it out.


By Saturday night, those who were on Utoeya are divided into three categories. The largest is the survivors, which includes Munir and Adrian and one of Freddy Lie's daughters. The second is the bodies, thirty-seven, that have been removed from the island. The smallest is the sons and daughters who haven't come off the island yet. They are almost certainly dead, and everyone knows that.

Anders Behring Breivik has never denied his crimes. He fears only that he—and thus his ideas—will be found insane.

Elisabeth Lie is not among the first group, nor the second. Still, Freddy hopes. Maybe she is in a tree, he tells himself. Like a bird.

All the bodies are removed by Sunday evening, but Elisabeth's is not autopsied until the following Friday, a week after she was shot twice in the head and then once more because she was close and not moving and Breivik had a lot of bullets. Freddy understands why it took so long to identify her. Seventy-seven people, he thinks. Someone has to be last.


At the end of the jetty at Utvika, there is a large rock with wilted flowers at its base and an engraved metal plate attached to its face that says 250 survivors of the Utoeya massacre reached safety at the camp on 22 July 2011.

Hege Dalen is now friends with seven of those survivors, all of whom she came to know in the weeks after. Two of them, in fact, planned to rent cabins at Utvika on the anniversary. "We'll have a beer," one told her.

She will not share their names. "They have been through enough," she says. She tells me about their mothers and fathers, though, who learned their children were alive and safe at Utvika because of Hege's phone. "For mothers to know someone's taking care of their babies..." She does not finish the sentence, and she seems about to cry.

Toril made at least four sorties into Tyrifjorden on 22 July to rescue swimmers in a little boat. "And when the boat was full," Hege says, "they had to leave people. Toril says that was so hard." Later, when the shooting was over, Hege and Toril got into their own small boat and motored to the island. They retrieved six kids, but they saw others on the west side, hiding in the rocks. They tried to coax them out, but the kids wouldn't come. Hege and Toril realized they were dead.

Hege is back at Utvika for a third season, and this particular afternoon belongs to a blue and glorious Saturday at the end of April. But she is there alone, without Toril. She will not say why, exactly, and she also will not tell me how to reach her fiancée. Finding Toril would not be difficult—she was at Breivik's trial—but Hege's refusal to help seems more a mournful request than obstruction. "In a way," she says, "that day has affected us to where it's part of our problem."


Sara Johannessen clicks through images until she finds a photo of Gro Harlem Brundtland with AUF kids on Utoeya. Gro is wearing borrowed boots, and the girl she borrowed them from is beaming in the foreground. Her name is Bano Rashid.

Breivik shot her twice in the head on the Lovers' Trail. "She's dead," Sara tells me. She points to a boy in the same picture. "He's dead." She pauses, seems to count. "Half the people here are dead. He's dead, she's dead, her, her, him, her..."

In the days after 22 July, Sara photographed flowers, thousands, probably hundreds of thousands, maybe millions. It began with roses laid that night outside the Oslo Cathedral, and then more came the next day and the next, and when the shops ran out of roses the people brought lilies and orchids and carnations until there were wide seas of blooms at churches and monuments and the whole city was perfumed by blossoms.

Sara and her boyfriend opened their apartment for weeks to any of their friends and colleagues who needed a respite. Many did. They talked and hugged and vented and napped and ate. They bought pizzas from the corner market until the stock was depleted, and they drank all of Sara's good wine and the whiskey, too. "It was perfect," Sara says.

She seems to blush, but only for a moment: "Maybe I shouldn't say this, but I was glad I was a girl." The men, and they were mostly men, tried to be stoic. Sara didn't have to pretend. "I could sit on laps," she says, "and I could cry."


Breivik's trial begins on Monday, April 16, in a courthouse a block from the high wooden barriers still surrounding the government quarter he blew up, and it will last until June 22. Although Breivik pleads not guilty, there are no material facts in dispute. On the fourth and fifth days of the trial, he recounts in detail how he killed seventy-seven people, much as he did last August, when he led investigators around Utoeya to show them where he shot each person.

The main question at the trial is whether Breivik was criminally insane on 22 July and, thus, whether he will be locked up forever with or without compulsory psychiatric care.

The trial is so long because it is so detailed. On the first Friday in May, a forensic pathologist describes how the bodies on Utoeya were processed and examined. He describes how spiraling bullets disintegrate into tiny pieces as they tear through soft tissues. And then he begins listing each person Breivik killed with gunshots—how many times each had been shot and where the bullets had entered and whether they died from injuries to the head or the chest or some combination of the two. This alone takes several days.

On May 7, a pathologist points at a mannequin in an Oslo courtroom, showing exactly where each bullet struck Elisabeth Lie. Freddy is there, and he knows what the pathologist will say. In the months since 22 July, he has read all the statements and looked at all the photographs and studied all the reports. "That was a way to prepare to be here," he tells me the next day. "That is a way to survive for me. I didn't want to hear it here for the first time."

At a pub across the street from the courthouse, he is seated at a sidewalk table with Anita, drinking beer and hand-rolling cigarettes. He has sad eyes and stubble and a gold hoop in his ear. On his right wrist is a black rubber bracelet embossed in white letters with a thought that a young woman active in the AUF named Helle Gannestad tweeted eight hours after Breivik's arrest. "If one man can cause so much pain," it reads, "imagine how much love we can create together." It's become sort of a national sentiment.

Freddy also has a copy of_ Dagbladet,_ which in that day's edition has a story about Elisabeth and Cathrine, and there is a large photograph of both girls spread across a page, their heads tilted together, both of them smiling. Elisabeth's family didn't want her to be remembered as victim number nineteen on the seventh page of an indictment.

"Elisabeth," Freddy says, "she was the perfect one. She was pretty, she had a lot of friends. If one of her friends had a problem, they came to her."

And Cathrine? She still gets winded climbing stairs, but Freddy says she's doing better, physically. "Cathrine, she says, ‘Why me? Elisabeth was the pretty one. She had all the friends. Why did she die? Why not me?' " Freddy looks away for a moment, then turns back. "What do you say to that? Speechless."

He does not hate Anders Breivik, though he does not refer to him by name. "That fucking maniac" is what he calls him. Maybe he would hate him, certainly he would hate him, if he thought about it. But he doesn't. "I don't give a damn," he says. "Why should I care? I still have two children. I need to take care of them. To hate him, it takes all your energy. From day one, he's been a zero to me."

Freddy's other surviving daughter is Victoria. She was 7 when Elisabeth was murdered and Cathrine was maimed, which means she was too young to really understand. But she has questions, and they occur to her at random times, like when she is playing happily on the floor and then she climbs into her father's lap and weeps and asks whatever it is she wants to know. Freddy cries with her, and he answers as best he can, and then Victoria is satisfied and goes back to playing on the floor while Freddy is still crying on the couch. "The children," he says, "they get an answer, they're okay. But we can't let go. We can't."


There are times, still, when Adrian will be in a shop or in a crowd on the street and he will see the long barrel of a gun pointed at his chest. The moment always passes, but it's always real, and it's always terrifying.

He lives alone in Skien with Mike, one of his Australian shepherds—"the best shrink I could ever have," he tells me one day in the middle of Breivik's trial. He had to give Bella to his father, because two big dogs are too much for him to handle, and he has to hold Mike's leash in his right hand, because his left arm still doesn't work properly and probably never will. He's missing some muscle, and there are seventy or so fragments still embedded in his flesh that work their way up to his skin every now and again. "So there's always a reminder," he says, "that there are pieces of evil in me."

He smoked a lot over the winter. He got hate mail from right-wingers, and once, down by the water behind the mall, a little thug told him, "You weren't killed then, but someday I'll make sure you are." When he went out, he left notes in his apartment saying where he'd gone and who he was meeting in case that person turned out to be a lunatic assassin and the police had to search his apartment for clues. He also wrote a book, with a Norwegian journalist, about his hours on Utoeya. It's called Heart Against Stone, which is a reference to his desperate effort to quiet his pounding heart in the moments before Breivik tried to kill him. He often wonders why he is still alive, why the man with the gun didn't put a bullet in his chest when he had a clear shot, and how he managed to miss the head of a still body at point-blank range. Adrian decided it was luck, and that perhaps all of life is endless luck.

Maybe that's true. On the sixth day of his trial, Breivik explained exactly why he didn't shoot Adrian when he had his first chance. "I thought," he told the court, "that he looked right-wing."


Munir Jaber has olive skin and black hair and chocolate eyes. He is the son of immigrants from Eritrea and Morocco, but he is Norwegian by law and birthright and upbringing and culture. He is also one of the people Breivik considers an existential threat and, because Munir is a young, liberal political activist, a legitimate target. This is something Munir is aware of but does not dwell on, which is also because Munir is young and liberal and, as young liberals tend to be, optimistic.

"We literally turned our backs on the terrorist the same day, the same hour," he tells me in early May. "We turned our back to the terrorist and turned toward each other, to taking care of each other."

His phrasing is deliberate, too. " ‘The terrorist,' " he tells me. "Always write ‘the terrorist,' not ‘the shooter.' "

Munir has never spoken about his last hours on Utoeya, but he is supposed to testify in three days, and in the atrium of the building where the AUF and the Labor Party are headquartered, he decides it would be good practice to go through it all. He is thorough and linear. At the precise moment he describes the sound of gunshots inside the cafeteria building, a waiter drops a tray on the lobby floor. It hits with a sharp, echoing slap. Munir startles, then laughs awkwardly.

But he does not really want to talk about Utoeya. He wants to talk politics, how there will always be terrorists but they will never be more than a very few, and the answer, the trick, is to engage such people. "To bring out facts," he says. "To have constructive debates."

"My values have been strengthened," he says. "I'm more determined to work for the society we believe in, to make opportunities for people to have possibilities in their lives."

And Munir's ideals extend, in a tangential way, to the terrorist who would have shot him if he'd gotten close, the terrorist who has been granted a ten-week trial that began with six days of explaining why he killed seventy-seven people. "We have confidence in the system; we have confidence in the trial," Munir says. "And we believe this person has to be treated like any other criminal, good or bad. We have to stand for our values. If we don't stand for what we believe in, we fail."


The clouds were low and thick over Tyrifjorden one morning in May. A light rain fell, dissipated, then fell again. Utoeya, mist barely lifting above the highest trees, looked from the water much like it did on 22 July. I made a slow loop around it in a rented outboard, starting at the north, Bolshevik Bay, and puttering counterclockwise toward the western cliffs. At the edge of the water, before the cliffs reach their highest point, there is a cinder-block hut called the pump house. From the island, it looks like a good, solid thing to hide behind; from the water, it looks like a trap, a dead end with nowhere left to go but into the open water. Breivik killed fourteen kids at the pump house.

The boat rounded South Point and motored toward the jetty. A police officer was standing on the rocks, alone. It was Håkon Hval, and he was there at that moment by happenstance: He'd brought the national police commissioner and a television crew to the island so they could film part of a documentary.

He did not chase me away—Utoeya is open to the public—but rather helped tie up the boat. I told him why I was there, and he nodded and told me to stay by the water until the TV crew was finished. A cold wind gusted across the lake, and we stood there in awkward silence, as is often the case when lone police officers encounter unfamiliar reporters.

"If you want to know anything about the island," Håkon said eventually, "now is the time to ask."

Håkon was on the island a few minutes behind the Delta squads. He said the west side was the worst, in terms of the number of dead and wounded. But the survivors were curiously quiet. "They were more or less paralyzed," he said. "They weren't screaming. They were just sitting there."

The rain had been heavy on 22 July, and Tyrifjorden was rising. Some of the dead, the ones closest to the water, had to be pulled farther up onshore so they wouldn't float away. That was one of the first things Håkon did on Utoeya, move bodies like driftwood.

When the sun went down, Håkon was in a boat not far from shore. Divers were in the lake, searching the depths for bodies that might have been drowned, and Håkon was providing security. It was very quiet. Håkon could hear waves licking at the sides of the boat, and then, from the island, he could hear something else: a chorus of chirping and buzzing and snippets of pop songs. In the darkness, he saw tiny lights flickering on, then off, then on again, like fireflies. There were hundreds of them, scattered along the Lovers' Trail and on the lawn below the cafeteria and in the tent field and where the bodies lay. Mobile phones lighting and ringing and nobody answering.

"There was nothing you could do," Håkon said. "You just had to wait until they ran out of electricity."


Sean Flynn is a GQ correspondent.