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

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.