Книга - The 15:17 to Paris: The True Story of a Terrorist, a Train and Three American Heroes

The 15:17 to Paris: The True Story of a Terrorist, a Train and Three American Heroes
Anthony Sadler

Alek Skarlatos

Spencer Stone

Jeffrey E Stern


The 15:17 to Paris is the amazing true story of friendship and bravery, and of near tragedy averted by three heroic young men who found the unity and strength inside themselves when they – and 500 other innocent travellers – needed it most.On 21st August 2015, Ayoub El-Khazzani boarded train #9364 in Brussels, bound for Paris. There could be no doubt about his mission: he had an AK-47, a pistol, a box cutter and enough ammunition to obliterate every passenger on board. Slipping into the bathroom in secret, he armed his weapons. Another major ISIS attack was about to begin, but Khazzani wasn’t expecting Anthony Sadler, Alek Skarlatos and Spencer Stone. Stone was a martial arts enthusiast and airman first class in the US Air Force, Skarlatos was a member of the Oregon National Guard, and all three were fearless. But their decision, to charge the gunman, then overpower him even as he turned first his gun, then his knife, on Stone, depended on a lifetime of loyalty, support, and faith.Their friendship was forged as they came of age together in California: going to church, playing paintball, teaching each other to swear, and sticking together when they got in trouble at school. Years later, that friendship would give all of them the courage to stand in the path of one of the world's deadliest terrorist organisations.









MAP (#ulink_799455fb-9687-5702-8387-ea8a0860e74e)
















COPYRIGHT (#ulink_0d8996af-e597-5ef8-8787-74f6ef39db9f)


HarperCollinsPublishers

1 London Bridge Street

London SE1 9GF

www.harpercollins.co.uk (http://www.harpercollins.co.uk)

First published by PublicAffairs, an imprint of Perseus Books, LLC,

a subsidiary of Hachette Book Group, Inc. 2016

This UK edition HarperCollinsPublishers 2018

FIRST EDITION

© Anthony Sadler, Alek Skarlatos and Spencer Stone 2016

Motion Picture Artwork © 2018 Warner Bros. Entertainment Inc. All Rights Reserved

Cover design © HarperCollinsPublishers 2018

A catalogue record of this book is available from the British Library

Anthony Sadler, Alek Skarlatos and Spencer Stone assert the moral right to be identified as the authors of this work

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.

Find out about HarperCollins and the environment at www.harpercollins.co.uk/green (http://www.harpercollins.co.uk/green)

Source ISBN: 9780008292294

Ebook Edition © January 2018 ISBN: 9780008287986

Version 2018-01-15




DEDICATION (#ulink_53bfd781-7ce9-575e-86d9-86e9406583d5)


To my family —S.S.

To Zoe —A.A.S.

To my family —A.S.




EPIGRAPH (#ulink_5350ddad-ac0f-52f3-ba61-c206739d204b)


Chance is perhaps the pseudonym of God when he does not want to sign.

—Théophile Gautier




CONTENTS


Cover (#ua1dd52ef-48e5-599f-9995-3c6acb152318)

Map (#ulink_35299a24-7e3a-5191-8eb5-c2c803be126b)

Title Page (#u98c98ddd-665b-5ecc-85ef-e2a931ddf18c)

Copyright (#ulink_52b61afc-bb88-5fcc-8210-b805b0c6bc5b)

Dedication (#ulink_a5f32c5f-8882-5e0f-81cf-e9d412174638)

Epigraph (#ulink_0dc4ca3d-a2a6-56bc-878a-97cb3b74f2da)

→ PROLOGUE: ANTHONY SADLER

Ayoub (#ulink_9f3cd156-9d70-57bc-b097-1acfda42b553)

→ PART I: SPENCER STONE

Chapter 1 (#ulink_fdc2ae7f-7272-5145-9151-42f503975455)

Chapter 2 (#ulink_ef070005-9ea0-54fe-a538-e8b019b6a5d3)

Chapter 3 (#ulink_5805931b-b273-51aa-9ba4-172f2b9928d9)

Chapter 4 (#ulink_64922eaf-3cab-5872-8db6-a2db3050de82)

Chapter 5 (#ulink_52a56ad9-d45e-5194-a75f-23907866e8a9)

Chapter 6 (#ulink_de55d7ff-c063-51bf-b6f3-1861021cc0d0)

Chapter 7 (#ulink_6a16a055-4f9d-5f2e-8137-b7f5100f0b43)

Chapter 8 (#ulink_9ffe6605-8d51-58a1-b42a-a6425ea7714f)

Chapter 9 (#ulink_5d92e9f2-3ddf-5888-ae2b-969b26bb87f0)

Chapter 10 (#ulink_9624d09b-900b-59a1-9e81-ee580f60b1f6)

Chapter 11 (#ulink_9c67d316-cae4-584a-a6fe-3d377702fd81)

Chapter 12 (#ulink_ef589b7c-762a-5d9c-bf6f-9b8aec6a21d1)

Chapter 13 (#ulink_9a39dd19-cc7b-5cdb-8ea5-392ce59db345)

Chapter 14 (#ulink_94adeeac-524c-5927-9ed2-e03068a47e01)

Chapter 15 (#ulink_270930eb-68cd-57bf-9a25-1612d7376d27)

Chapter 16 (#ulink_82e1dc93-5ff5-5940-9e03-d98be52577b4)

Chapter 17 (#ulink_eee01387-5dfd-53f5-a1b0-6fe688ce0fe6)

Chapter 18 (#ulink_766ce4ec-a389-5b4b-87e5-a7e9e0da95c8)

Chapter 19 (#ulink_5225325b-32ef-5c38-ad2a-a54ce364a85c)

Ayoub (#ulink_00c730d0-4c2f-5854-8e1c-a9ccd5ca6a40)

→ PART II: ALEK SKARLATOS

Chapter 20 (#ulink_812a565b-c9fd-5b9a-aabb-935512aa8207)

Chapter 21 (#ulink_9e8f9a25-8af3-5846-a150-ddadf4fc7fb7)

Chapter 22 (#ulink_3cce155d-5d84-58da-8f9e-1a72a3823dd0)

Chapter 23 (#ulink_17a94373-8242-5fd9-a41f-acc623e0438b)

Chapter 24 (#ulink_fda16f5f-73df-5cc3-a832-cec2308c5dd1)

Chapter 25 (#ulink_c24742f3-f8f1-592e-a28c-c67a395ab5ee)

Chapter 26 (#ulink_f0dbb283-ced2-5284-9a7c-4376aa531601)

Chapter 27 (#ulink_ed744ca3-1aad-5237-b984-f623216767c5)

Chapter 28 (#ulink_37d54c50-c122-5eaf-b2c9-722c753e6b85)

Chapter 29 (#ulink_92655698-aca3-5c96-bd69-f72e9b6744e7)

Chapter 30 (#ulink_29209e6b-9858-5b5c-b308-1790fa62d428)

Chapter 31 (#ulink_7af35f82-1975-5649-b0f0-f7547f0e9a68)

Ayoub (#ulink_9c3522c1-c9a2-5a30-abca-113230881187)

→ PART III: ANTHONY SADLER

Chapter 32 (#ulink_1f47b6c4-9a31-55ed-aa9c-d2bf3ac193b1)

Chapter 33 (#ulink_ff4c6bec-5e9f-5636-8abb-4a40003622ab)

Chapter 34 (#ulink_fbae6182-79b1-5d62-8b8d-842031370a38)

Chapter 35 (#ulink_afaf4110-12f9-587d-9bd3-b5e5f26aca5d)

Chapter 36 (#ulink_7ce74aaf-9f90-515f-9f4c-334d766f68e4)

Chapter 37 (#ulink_e9f85d4e-11be-5b10-98b5-21d3b84d44a0)

Chapter 38 (#ulink_00914f6d-0aa2-5942-8555-efbae0bb169f)

Chapter 39 (#ulink_b66d2797-5b64-5bff-a142-0cf3719efe47)

Chapter 40 (#ulink_fa9b4851-2355-5e83-a591-d5d2dea16e68)

Chapter 41 (#ulink_f6906d74-ac24-5c96-847a-499685e3fcb2)

Chapter 42 (#ulink_4da70d14-38a4-5185-ab76-c9a3f831f0b6)

Chapter 43 (#ulink_6dca5e66-f722-5f99-a0fb-495aa03e0cbe)

Chapter 44 (#ulink_681be432-5471-5ab7-8b25-b51212478b2d)

Chapter 45 (#ulink_6b1e26cc-60a8-5b80-831c-58ade9096c1a)

Chapter 46 (#ulink_46ac5514-3a70-521f-bd13-9dcfc8ee35f2)

Notes (#ulink_ebbd2263-c08b-52d9-9991-d90ea6fc510c)

Acknowledgments (#ulink_6483cd2e-1949-50cc-95c4-ccfc4a243854)

About the Authors (#ulink_2a3a2ab2-9141-5469-828a-f0e84c787c66)

About the Publisher



PROLOGUE (#ulink_a790ee5c-92bd-51c5-824b-acedadfd3739)


TUE, AUGUST 18, 11:03 AM

Anthony Sadler:

Still alive dad we’re in Amsterdam and staying at the A&O hostel. We will be here till Friday

Pastor Sadler:

Okay Son—how are you doing?

Anthony Sadler:

I’m great leaving wifi, talk to you in a bit

Pastor Sadler:

Okay

THU, AUGUST 20, 11:07 PM

Anthony Sadler:

Hi dad so it’s 8am on Friday here right now. We head out of Amsterdam to Paris today at 3pm and will get around 6pm. I’ll text you hotel info when I receive it

Pastor Sadler:

Okay son

FRI AUG 21, 4:43 PM

Anthony Sadler:

Call me dad


THALYS TRAIN #9364

Somewhere in northern France.

Five hundred fifty-four passengers on board.

Spencer is holding two fingers against a pulsing wound in Mark’s neck. As the train races through the countryside at over 150 miles per hour, he’s trying to plug the carotid artery because if he doesn’t, Mark dies.

Anthony watches from above.

If there are screams, Anthony doesn’t hear them; if the sound of wind rushing by the windows is loud, he doesn’t register it. He is totally focused. The terrorist is bound, hog-tied on the floor. Mark groans. Anthony feels as if the people lying there below him are the only other people in the world.

The carpet is covered in blood. There is so much blood. It is astoundingly quiet.

The bell that signals the train doors opening and closing is the only other noise, an eerie, antiseptic chirp. Anthony might as well be in the hushed corridors of a hospital. None of it feels real. Did we just do that?

The train moves along quickly, smoothly—normally—as if they’ve imagined everything that just happened. The motion is almost soothing. No one seems afraid. No one seems here. There are no extraneous people around Anthony except the ones who took part in the drama that just played out. No one except the ones he’s immediately concerned with. He seems to have blocked the rest from his mind.

He’s blocked a lot of things from his mind. Including some important things, like the notion that the terrorist might not have been acting alone—that there might be two more, or five, hiding somewhere on board, about to attack. There’s no good reason to think there’s only one. Still, as far as Anthony’s concerned, there’s only one. He’s become wholly absorbed with only this man, solving the problem that is immediately in front of him, and at the moment it is impossible for him to think about anything he cannot immediately see. His brain has walled itself off like a vault, only occasionally letting light in through the cracks and seams in the metal.

Alek is back—where did Alek go? He disappeared with the machine gun, but he’s back now, collecting ammunition and putting weapons in a bag.

Did that all really just happen?

Alek tried to kill a man. While Spencer was trying to choke him. Alek held the machine gun right up to the terrorist’s temple so that the bullet would have opened his head up and passed right into Spencer. Anthony had been trying to help subdue the terrorist when one of his friends almost killed the other. But the gun didn’t go off. Anthony doesn’t know why.

NO ONE WILL BELIEVE IT. Anthony’s not sure he believes it. It doesn’t feel real; it feels like he slipped into a video game character, his own thoughts not wholly relevant here, as if he were mostly a spectator of even his own actions. It is so quiet, and so calm, it is not yet possible to comprehend the fact that his life has just changed forever.

He takes out his phone and begins filming. He needs proof. For his friends; for himself.

He is not thinking about evidence. What he’s doing doesn’t feel like thinking at all really, it’s more like reacting.

He’d been reacting a moment ago when they were all tying the terrorist up and he heard a noise behind him. A groan? He turned, registered three distinct things all at once—a man in a soaked shirt, blood geysering across the aisle, and the man’s eyes moving toward the ceiling as if something important had gotten stuck up there.

Then the neck slackened, the chin collapsed into the chest, and the man rotated forward out of the seat.

Anthony watched it in high resolution and perfect detail, as if he were able to slow down motion just by observing it. He had a superpower.

Then this: a pool of blood crept from under the man toward the chairs.

Look at the blood. It was bright and pulsing, and a lesson from his human anatomy class bubbled up and presented itself to Anthony—bright because it’s oxygenated, so that’s arterial blood—blood meant for the man’s brain was seeping into the carpet instead, which meant he was even worse off than he looked.

Anthony took off running. He crashed through the train door into the first car and yelled. Too loud? His body was charged through with a new force he couldn’t wholly control. “Do any of you speak English?”

“Me,” “I do,” “Yes,” ten people responded, a dozen, all different accents.

“Do any of you have a towel?”

Silence, confusion. Fuck you guys, at the same moment he decided a towel wasn’t enough anyway. Back to the train car, back to Spencer on the ground, Spencer still tightening knots, and telling him there was a man bleeding out right behind him. Spencer wiped the blood from his face, crawled over to Mark, took off his shirt to use as a bandage. “I’m just gonna—I’ll just try to plug the hole.” Spencer reached forward to Mark’s neck, and just like that, the bleeding stopped.

Spencer hasn’t moved since. Anthony stands above him, standing guard, looking down as Spencer remains unmoving, on his hands and knees, shirtless, bloodied, fingers in a man’s neck, the image so absurd it’s almost humorous.

When did that all happen? A minute ago? An hour?

Anthony isn’t forming memories properly. His sense of time is distorted; the hardware in his brain that makes memory has been co-opted to dump so much adrenaline that his digestive tract has shut down; he won’t sleep for four days, and his sense of time has become plastic.

And where’s Alek?

To Anthony, his friend Alek seems only partially present; here, gone, back, no longer a whole person, just wisps and flashes across Anthony’s vision. He’s there cutting open Mark’s shirt, then gone. Walking away with the machine gun, then back. Alek is like a person in an old tintype photograph who fled midway through exposure, leaving behind just a blurred, ghostly residue on Anthony’s memory.

That’s another reason none of this feels real: none of it makes sense. It doesn’t make sense that it’s so calm on board.

It doesn’t make sense that Alek keeps disappearing.

Mostly, it doesn’t make sense that Spencer got out of his seat so fast it was like he charged the terrorist before the terrorist even showed up.

Anthony has to ask Spencer about that. He feels it as an urgent, corporeal need. Spencer, how did you know? But Spencer is busy talking to Mark, the man with the bullet wound, who’s started groaning again.

“I’m sorry, bud,” Spencer says. “If I move, you die.”

Mark doesn’t seem concerned with the hole in his neck. The woman next to him—his wife, Anthony assumes—is getting more agitated; she thinks Mark might have another problem, maybe he was shot twice, or there’s an exit wound. Alek finally decides to accommodate her.

Alek is here again.

Alek takes the scissors from the first-aid kit Anthony didn’t realize he was holding.

Alek cuts the man’s shirt and does a blood sweep, running his hand up and down the man’s back, looking for a wound. It’s strangely intimate. The three of them all try to keep a man alive with their bare hands on his body.

There is no blood on the man’s back.

Alek is gone again.

Even Mark is calm. “Guys, my arm hurts,” he says. He says it evenly. He has an arterial bleed, and is only alive because Spencer is plugging it with his fingers, but Mark doesn’t seem to know or care all that much about the fact that he’s dying.

“I can’t move you,” Spencer says. “I’ll lose the hole.”

“Just let me shift a little, my arm’s really sore.”

“Yeah. We’re not worried about your arm right now.”

No one seems to have any sense of how serious any of this is. Mark is unbothered that his head is inches from the terrorist who shot him. They’re lying right next to each other, right there on the carpet. Neither of them cares. The terrorist is unconscious, and Mark is close behind.

They wait.

They ride the train for thirty more minutes.

Anthony knows police in France will want to talk to them. He knows newspaper reporters in France will probably want to as well. Through the fog lifting in his mind he understands that they’ve just encountered a terrorist. We just frigging stopped a terrorist. Spencer and Alek are off-duty US service members. Anthony knows that will matter. Anthony knows that will make this a big story in France.

The train curls into the station, and when he presses his face up to the window he can see the French National Police standing on guard next to SWAT-type vehicles. Still, he does not know what will follow. That they will become celebrities, not just in France but in America too. That they will be on the cover of People magazine, that the CEO of Columbia Sportswear will give them his private jet for a week and that Anthony will ride it home, that his arrival will be captured by cameramen in helicopters overhead, that plainclothes officers will stake out his college classes, that he will sit next to a gorgeous starlet and have a conversation on TV with Jimmy Fallon, that the president of the United States will invite them over so they can see the secret catacombs of the White House, that Alek—Alek!—will be on Dancing with the Stars and make it to the final night, that they will ride a float through their hometown during a parade in their honor, that a glittering Megyn Kelly will win a nationwide contest for their first group interview.

That a trip Anthony only began planning a few months before, when his application for a high-limit credit card he definitely could not afford was miraculously approved, would make him an international celebrity.

All he could think about at that moment was, I gotta talk to Dad.

WHAT ANTHONY WILL UNDERSTAND later is that, at the moment he recognized the threat he was facing, his body was overtaken by a series of physiological changes that prepared him to take it on but prevented him from accurately perceiving his surroundings; that literally changed how he experienced sights, sounds, and feelings. Others called it “fight or flight” but that didn’t do it justice, didn’t express the power of the processes taking over their bodies. This he knew something about; he was a kinesiology major. That the moment he recognized what was happening on the train, chemicals released, arteries constricted, noncritical systems shut down. Sugar was pumped where it was needed, which is why he felt a superhuman level of energy, but also his perception changed. His body jettisoned senses that weren’t mission critical. People didn’t get that—their bodies actually changed. Everything changed, down to tiny muscles that flattened the lenses of their eyes so they could focus on objects in the middle distance. Better to see charging predators or paths of escape, but that same change stole their peripheral vision. They were looking through tunnels.




But the most beguiling thing of all was that he wasn’t processing information accurately, because he was blocking out things that weren’t important. He did not remember any other people on that train car except the ones he interacted with. Spencer. The hog-tied terrorist. Mark moving closer to death. Were there even other people in the car? He could not honestly say he remembered them, though of course he knew that there were.

But most relevant to what he was experiencing at that moment, this disruptive, disturbing inconsistency, was that the moment he recognized the danger and this process began inside him, his perception of time changed. Events presented themselves to him as slower than they were actually happening, and his memory imprinted things out of order. Sometimes his memory was simply blank. There was a reason for this too: as his body was overtaken by physical changes, the hardware in his brain that formed memory was co-opted to dump chemicals. The memory-forming machinery was no longer left to simply form memories—part of what was happening to Anthony on that train was a medical condition with a commonly known name: amnesia. He couldn’t form memories correctly, in effect because the video recorder in his brain was being used for something else.

Perhaps that’s why Anthony never saw that pistol. Or rather, Anthony could not remember seeing that pistol. It’s a funny thing about memory: it doesn’t always feel hazy when it’s wrong. Maybe it’s why witnesses to violent crime swear they saw things they never did, and swear they didn’t see things that happened right in front of them. It’s why burglarized store clerks sometimes don’t recognize what’s going on in the jumpy CCTV footage of the robbery or the shoot-out: what they actually experienced felt entirely different from what they see on the screen.

Sometimes memory can feel precise, a laser-cut model of what happened, so you can see a fully detailed picture right there in front of you when you close your eyes. It can feel certain when it’s wrong. How are memories formed, but through a system of sensors arranged around your body to take in sights, sounds, smells? What if those senses are off? What if they’re calibrated wrong? What if the shape of your eye has changed so that, like through a fisheye lens on a camera, the image you capture is altered? What if even the way you’re experiencing time has changed? Anthony experienced the attack differently from Alek, who experienced it differently from Spencer. The acceleration and near-freezing of time began and ended at different points for each of them. Each have large black spots over their memories of parts of the attack, extraordinary clarity over other parts.

Later Spencer would say he wished he had a video of what happened, but his older brother, Everett, a highway patrolman, disagreed. Everett knew what it was like to go through a traumatic confrontation that felt so maddeningly different from what an unfeeling security camera captured that it was actually disorienting. “It’s better that you just have your memories,” he said.

But that was just it. Their memories were different.




AYOUB (#ulink_b514f9d4-2b49-58ba-8d9f-79e7c2df967a)


In 1985, European officials met in Schengen, Luxembourg, to hammer out an agreement. The purpose was free trade. European countries had similar values, and if you could ease passage between them, you could make trade easier. Easier trade was good for everyone; all economies would benefit. All countries would get richer as goods and services passed seamlessly between them, with fewer regulations, fewer taxes, fewer holdups at border crossings.

The idea was to turn the whole territory into effectively one country—once you were in, you were in. Internal borders would become almost meaningless.

For someone traveling from outside, the challenge would be getting into Europe. Once you arrived, you could move within the continent at will. If you had a Schengen visa, you usually wouldn’t get ID checks. The agreement also made it easier for foreigners, like American tourists, to vacation in Europe. They didn’t need visas at all, and after they arrived in one of the participating countries, they never had to show their passports again, even when they moved between countries.

Not all of Europe signed on to the Schengen Agreement immediately, but among the first seven members were three critical ones: Belgium, France, and Spain. It made Europe, or at least those countries, more appealing to American tourists. And to immigrants.

Ayoub El-Khazzani was born in Morocco, and lived in a place called Tétouan. Its name came from the Berber word for “eyes,” a reference to the watersprings that littered the city; Ayoub was raised in something of a Moorish paradise. His family was not wealthy, not even middle class, but the world that surrounded him was luxuriant, suffused with souks overflowing with handicrafts, pomegranate and almond trees lining the hills. It was a North African crossroad; the clothes and crafts in shops testified to all those who had marched through and deposited part of their culture there, most prominently the Berbers, but also the Moors and Cordobas. It was mostly Muslim and, in a way, a reflection of a bygone period thirteen hundred years earlier, when the Muslim world was at its richest, a cultural and intellectual powerhouse, a place with security and civil liberties where even Christians and Jews were protected because they too were sons of Ibrahim. And although they paid extra taxes for their beliefs because they were of course still infidels, they also didn’t have to fight in the army. Things were fair. Things were balanced, stable, orderly. The great Caliph Usman came along and eliminated poverty. Great scientific discoveries emerged from that place. Al-battani, the astronomer and mathematician who fine-tuned the concept of years lived then, as did the father of optics, Ibn al-Haytham, the man who proved that eyes don’t emit light, but take it in. Al-Farabi, the greatest philosopher after Aristotle, studied there. It was the time of the House of Wisdom, where philosophies were translated from Greek to Arabic so they could end up in the West.

The world owed the caliphate its knowledge; the West owed Muslims.

Ayoub was well east of ancient Mesopotamia, the site of the explosion of culture that emerged where the Tigris collided with the Euphrates, and that became known as the cradle of civilization. But his city gave the cradle a run for its money. It resembled the place and the time that continue to produce such powerful yearning in its descendants.

And which also, occasionally, produces such extraordinary violence in those who believe they can return the world to that utopian period, if enough trauma can be delivered to the powers corrupting Muslims that they shrivel up and retract like severed arteries.

Despite the wealth around him, work was sparse; Ayoub was near that rich, verdant world, but not of it. His family was poor.

In 2005, Ayoub’s father was forced to board a ferry for the short ride to Spain so that he might find better work. Eventually he got a job dealing in scrap metal, extracting value from the things other people discarded.

He was gone for two years, so Ayoub went through his adolescence straddling two kinds of lives. Not fatherless, but his father was absent, living in another country, living on another continent, and yet not even a hundred miles away. There, and not there. Close, but in another world.



PART I (#ulink_35479f84-ba3f-5419-843c-2ad65f04276b)


AUG 13, 11:49 AM

Joyce Eskel:

Spence how is your ankle? What happened?

AUG 18, 6:50 PM

Joyce Eskel:

Hey need to post pictures!!!




1. (#ulink_ef8709d8-a044-542f-8ea4-321718f664d6)


JOYCE ESKEL CLOSED THE COMPUTER with an uneasy feeling.

She didn’t love the idea of Paris. She’d followed the story of the terrorists attacking the magazine there, Charlie Hebdo, a few months back. She’d been reading about Islamic extremists since 9/11, and she knew France had open borders. Paris was a big city of course (she’d been there before, but that was many years ago now) and the odds that the boys would be at any kind of risk were low. She knew that.

Still, she felt something.

Plus Anthony was there, and whenever her son got together with Anthony, things just happened. Two weeks into their trip, she couldn’t quite believe they’d managed to avoid major catastrophe.

Although they’d avoided major catastrophe only barely. She knew about the two drinking just a little too much, so that Spencer stumbled over a cobblestone and nearly broke his ankle, on the very first night of their trip. Spencer told her, when he connected to the Internet, that he might need to call it off and go back to base. Call off the whole trip, done on the first day. Could you even get an X-ray there? Would his insurance cover it?

It was uncanny, how they brought the mischief out in one another. She couldn’t figure out their relationship, two mostly laid-back kids who didn’t seem to have much in common, but when they were together … She remembered once when they were in eighth grade how they’d redecorated the neighbor’s house with a dozen rolls of toilet paper, then took turns ringing the doorbell and diving for cover in the hedges. When together, the two just seemed to love trouble.

So she sat down after closing the computer, and thought about the feeling. Twenty years ago she might have dismissed it; now she knew what it was. The still, small voice. She called it “intuition” to those who wouldn’t understand; to those who would, she called it what she knew it was: God. Preparing her for the events that would follow, just as he’d done countless times before, once she learned to listen, warning her when her children were in danger. What mattered now was what to do with it, and so she decided to do what she always did in situations like this: she prayed. Joyce Eskel closed her eyes, bowed her head, and prayed that things would turn out okay for the boys in France.

BY THEN, JOYCE HAD LEARNED to leave a lot up to God. She’d learned early, when Spencer was a baby, when she first brought the kids to their new house, fresh off a traumatic divorce and a devastating custody battle. She’d taken them to her parents’ first, a single mom feeling like a failure and wondering what had just happened.

For a time that was a refuge for her, but she couldn’t rely on her aging parents forever. She mustered up all her strength and got a job, and with her parents’ help she found a house with room for the kids to roam. The neighborhood had a swim club and a tennis club, all within walking distance. Joyce excitedly pointed it all out to the kids that first day, but when they pulled up to the house, the kids got out of the car looking deflated. To them the house was old and ugly. It was the best Joyce could do with almost no income of her own, but the carpets were worn through, the rooms stank, and the paint was faded. It was a signal to the children that their big bright lives with two loving parents and a big happy home had been blown apart, and this was what was left. An ugly old ranch-style, beckoning them into a new and uncertain world.

But Joyce had a vision. She would turn this place into a colorful home for the kids. It was a mighty burden she had: the three kids and a messy divorce, the children’s father not so far away but mostly out of their lives, finally a new job but as a worker’s comp adjuster for the state, which meant the kind of long days that could wreck you and leave you gasping for air. It meant constant exposure to the ugliest human qualities; the things people do to each other, the things that happen to them. The way wily people manipulated the system to get a buck; the way the system suppressed people in need. Every day she was submerged in desperation, and in greed. She hardened. She began to feel that her whole life prior to her failed marriage and her new job she’d been embarrassingly naïve. She’d always assumed the best in people. That everyone was capable of goodness; that everyone was inclined to act on it.

Not anymore. Now she read bullshit professionally, and her children were beginning to pick up the skill.

When Spencer cried in his room because it was cleaning day—what an emotional child he was!—she gave no quarter.

When she lay in her room and yelled out to Spencer and Everett, “What’s all the noise?!” as long as Spencer said, “We’re just having fun,” even if it was in an oddly pinched, high voice, she let them be.

Of course, she didn’t know that most times, outside on the floor, Everett was sitting on top of Spencer’s chest, holding him by the wrists and making him punch himself, saying he’d swing harder if Spencer snitched. “Tell Mom, ‘We’re just having fun.’ Say it!”

Even then, as far back as when Spencer was a four-year-old, he was picking up on his mother’s skepticism. He had a hard time accepting rules, no matter from what height they came. Joyce took him to church with her, sat him right up front every Sunday, and when the pastor asked who’d like to receive salvation, Spencer raised his hand. Every single week; the pastor smiled every time. “I got you, buddy.” Joyce tried to teach him the scripture. “You don’t need to do it again and again every week!” But the rule didn’t make sense to Spencer, that you only had to do it once. Who decided that? Why was it up to that person? Maybe it was insolence, maybe Spencer just wanted to eat more than his fair share of the savior, but Joyce started to see it differently, that Spencer had a tender heart; her boy wanted to be right with God every week. So she decided to stop fighting. She saved her energy for the fights that mattered.

She pinched pennies and turned the ugly old house into a warm family home, fires always burning when it dropped below fifty, shrubs well tended and grass always mowed. Saturday was cleaning day. She wanted her kids to go out into the world, when they were ready, knowing how to leave it a little better off than they found it. Having won custody, she tried to raise them herself, to keep the kids safe and fed and help them with their homework. And daily she felt she could use an assist, so she looked up and asked God for his favor. She did it in times of particular struggle, or particular need, but also when an opportunity presented itself, like when the couple next door started talking about moving out, and Joyce recognized a chance. She went around the property and found strategic places to pray, conveying upward her preferences for the next tenant. Ideally a single mother like her, please, because it’d be nice to have someone to commiserate with. Ideally one with children the ages of her own, so that the children’s social lives might improve, without Joyce having to drive them more.

And he answered, proving his grace in the form of a young mother coming off her own divorce with two kids in tow and one in her arms. Spencer’s sister, Kelly, took the new neighbors flowers from the yard to welcome them, and then came trotting back, bubbling over with excitement. “Mom, she’s kind of like you!” Joyce invited the woman over for coffee, and the instant they began talking, Joyce’s eyes widened with surprise. “You used to be a flight attendant too?” Joyce had traveled the world that way, and Heidi had as well. The country too. Heidi had worked for a bus company before that. She laughed. “Guess I’ve always been in the travel business,” and her latest trip had brought her right here to Joyce. As they spoke, a series of uncanny coincidences revealed themselves, and the two women talked over each other.

“You adored your parents too?”

“You worry about being overprotective of your boys?”

“You also look back, a little embarrassed at how naïve you used to be?”

Joyce had been delivered a replica of herself. The only difference was Tom, a rock of a man whom Heidi had started dating, and who took to her kids like they were his own. He plied them with pizza and Chris Farley movies, had a good job, and was so obviously a strong man with a good soul. But Heidi was reluctant to take the plunge with him, she said; she didn’t want to marry right away because she still didn’t trust herself after what she’d just put her kids through. But he was there, a stand-in father for her kids, and soon for Joyce’s too.

The two became like sisters; their two houses became two wings of the same estate. They might as well have had no doors or walls because the kids moved through them so freely. Joyce was sure the Lord had something to do with it, that it was he who deserved the credit for this new friend. Or perhaps more accurately, he deserved most of the credit and Joyce perhaps just a little bit of gratitude herself, if you please, for having thought to ask him in the first place, thank you very much.

They were two pillars leaning in on one another, doubly strong. Each was exactly what the other needed, at exactly the moment each needed the other the most. They were both strong-willed and wise, but both in desperate need of support, and for someone with whom to let her guard down, because the kids needed stability after what they’d been put through. Each woman felt guilty. Each felt the need to subdue her own feelings for the sake of the children, because what the children needed was a dependable parent, not an emotional one. It was only with each other that each could let down her guard and admit to even having feelings.

Joyce and Heidi filled a missing piece for one another, and as if that wasn’t enough, their children were just the right ages. Joyce’s son Everett was still the oldest, and Heidi had Solon, the youngest of the new crew, but Heidi’s son Peter was Kelly’s age, and Heidi also had a young son who, it turned out, was born within a few months of Spencer. A quiet child with an occasional flare for the dramatic. She’d wanted to call him Alex, for Alexander, a good Greek name like her first son Peter’s, but when a speech therapist next to her at Lamaze class pointed out it was hard to say the s in Skarlatos after an x, Heidi decided to tweak it. He would be Aleksander. People would call him Alek.

Spencer and Alek became as close as their mothers; they were always together. Alek was usually quiet, a reserved child, but he had a sense of humor and of self-expression that came out in the most unexpected ways. A fleeting obsession with Batman during which he wore a Batman muscle costume all day, every day, for months, even out on errands with his mom, earning compliments from cashiers and supermarket stock boys.

He played a tin soldier in the church’s Christmas production, done up with the full French-style moustache, drawn on with a makeup pen. When an audience member came up to him after the show and kneeled down to congratulate him, the six-year-old Alek looked up and considered the man. He frowned, then he said, “So do you want my autograph?”

Alek was still water running deep, picking up and feeling more of what went on around him than he let on. A barbeque Joyce and Heidi held ended early when the police showed up at Heidi’s door, claiming they were responding to an emergency. Joyce looked at Heidi, who raised her eyebrows—she didn’t know of any emergency. It took half an hour for the moms to find out that Alek, who hadn’t been getting enough attention during the festivities, had decided to call 911 and report a crime in progress. Alek explained to Spencer, who defended his friend; Alek was guilty only of laziness, not sabotage. He’d picked up the phone at Spencer’s house to make the fifteen-foot phone call over to his own, but his finger slipped when typing the 916 area code. An honest mistake!

Or like how well Alek understood Spencer. Spencer’s favorite topic of conversation during his first five vocal years was his own birthday. Without letting on, Alek picked up bits and scraps of things Spencer said about it, and then, when it was finally time to bake a cake for the neighbors, Alek asked Heidi if he could be in charge. He dragged her to the toy store, made her buy three plastic army men and a tiny American flag, and wedged them into the top of the cake in a loose approximation of the marines at Iwo Jima.

Spencer walked into the kitchen on his tenth birthday, saw the cake, looked over at Alek, and then smiled, overwhelmed by the feeling that never before in the whole grand course of human history had a more perfect gesture been performed by one friend for another.






ALEK SITS NEXT TO HIM, looking out the window. Spencer is slumped in his seat, feeling himself beginning to fade. He takes a photo of the laptop on the tray table, the half-sized bottle of red wine, and posts a picture: “First Class Baby!”

Then his eyelids go heavy, and he leans back to bask in the wonderful, heavy swaying, slipping in and out of much-needed sleep.

Soft, reassuring motion, R&B on the noise-canceling headphones. He does not know how long he’s been asleep when there is a moment of foggy disruption, a distant jangling behind the music. Body in uniform at full sprint across his vision, the half realization that he is waking up, tumbled headlong into a movie scene already under way. Headphones off. Eye contact across the aisle, Anthony’s face screwed up in confusion.

Now he is fully awake and crouched between the seats. A gate in his brain has lifted, and a tidal wave of adrenaline is crashing in; his muscles tighten and time decelerates for him. He sees a glass door slide open, a skinny man with an angry face wearing a backpack the wrong way, strapped to his stomach, and somehow Spencer knows without having to think that the bag is full of ammunition and swung to the front because that way it’s easier to reload. Spencer can hear the footfalls as clear and loud as if the man was stomping on purpose; he steps forward, reaches to the ground, and picks up a machine gun that for some reason is lying there. He lifts it up, and Spencer can hear the metal-on-metal cha-chunk of the weapon being cycled.

A beat passes. Someone has to get this guy. A sliver of frustration sparks off something in his brain. I’m gonna die here—then an electrical charge surges through his entire body and one more final thought tumbles home with a flood of energy, a notion stored away from a classroom at Fort Sam two years ago that his brain now accesses like a hard drive retrieving a kernel of information: I am not going to die sitting down. The realization verges on euphoria. Sound compresses so he no longer hears the screams, and the shattering glass he only now understands is what woke him filters into a thin and distant memory, like the noise itself has been sucked from the train into the past and now all he hears, the only noise in the entire world, is heavy, clomping footsteps. The terrorist is getting closer. He hasn’t started shooting yet.

Spencer gets up and starts running. Alek’s voice comes to him as encouragement from another universe, cheering him on: “Spencer, go!” and Spencer locks eyes with the terrorist; then his vision narrows, his more extraneous senses leave him. He does not register sound at all, his peripheral vision collapses, and he can see nothing but a small part of the man he is charging, a square of fabric, and he aims for that.

He realizes that he is totally exposed.

There is no cover.

There is no other distraction for the shooter because everyone else is crouching.

He is a big, easy target. He is exposed for one second, two seconds, Here is where I die, three seconds, four seconds—the terrorist cocks the gun back again, lowers it at Spencer, and as Spencer pumps his legs, he hears with total, focused clarity the shooter pulling the trigger and the firing pin striking a bullet.

Then everything goes dark.









2. (#ulink_5dbf5dda-68ce-520c-ae75-7865ca3084b0)


GUNS WERE PERHAPS the only difference between Heidi and Joyce. Spencer had free rein to play with whatever kind of toy he wanted, and his mother had given in to the fact that her boys loved guns, because—well, boys love guns. She had to laugh at Heidi who, bless her, still grasped on to her misplaced hope that Alek and his siblings would grow up in a gun-free household. Good luck, Joyce thought. The two new surrogate sisters established boundaries to deal with the one part of parenting that caused friction. The trash cans between their two houses marked the demilitarized zone: no guns on Heidi’s side.

It was just a few years later that Joyce walked out to see Heidi, waiting in the driver’s seat of her SUV, while a commando team of camouflaged teenage paintballers piled into the back. She was overrun; she’d given up. Joyce couldn’t help herself. “Man, Heidi,” she yelled, “looking good with all that camo!”

Heidi looked out the window, and tried to suppress a smile. Then they both exploded with laughter.

By then Alek and Spencer had formed a kind of impromptu league of war games. They tipped over trash cans in the street and dove behind cars, they gathered neighborhood kids to serve as comrades, lined up on opposite ends of Woodknoll Way, and charged, pelting each other with so many airsoft pellets that the gutters ran neon yellow and green, as if the roads of northeast Sacramento had been drenched by psychedelic rain. Other kids wanted in. Soon there were five to a side, then ten, running kamikaze charges at each other from opposite ends of the street.

There was no strategy at first, then it was just that if you got hit you were out, but how could you prove someone got hit? Arguments broke out, so it grew more intense, then became refereed by a set of unwritten and eagerly disputed rules, veritable conventions at the summit of Woodknoll Way, where two dozen arguing kids hammered out the finer points of make-believe warfare, all in an attempt to even the scales and maintain some sense of fairness. This became especially necessary because Alek began bringing firepower other kids couldn’t compete with. One day he came out to fight with what Spencer figured must be a $150 replica Colt 1911 gas-blowback CO2-powered pistol. Alek could fire rounds at 350 feet per second, so the other kids were diving behind cars and tumbling into hedges while Alek strafed the neighborhood like a pint-sized Tony Montana. Order had to be restored. So they started dividing up teams according to quality of equipment. Alek would be paired with whomever the new kid was who wanted to play but only had some pissant little peashooter.

Down a few streets from the Stone-Skarlatos Forward Operating Base, there was a kind of nature reserve behind the Schweitzer school, where the teachers used to teach things like Albert Schweitzer’s philosophy of reverence for life and peace, but that the boys colonized for the purpose of intensifying their philosophy of reverence for imaginary war. Behind BMX bike platforms and half pipes recast as antitank obstacles blocking imaginary tanks from amphibious landings on an imaginary Omaha Beach, they put on masks and fired off paintballs by the bushel. Paintballs were expensive on an allowance, but better than airsoft because you couldn’t cheat as easily. You could spend less time arguing and more time fighting.

Spencer never got tired of it, and Alek didn’t either; they’d started a little insurgency in their leafy Sacramento suburb; they fought into the night. And Spencer tried to make those days stand still, because even then he had the sense that other forces were coming along to change their lives; powerful forces beyond their ability to control. Something big and hard to see and almost impossible to confront, stronger than just him, which he and Alek would try to weather together, but that would eventually drive them apart. At least for a time.





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