Читать книгу The 15:17 to Paris: The True Story of a Terrorist, a Train and Three American Heroes - Anthony Sadler, Anthony Sadler - Страница 20

AS SPENCER WALKED UP to the dais to receive his high school diploma he heard what sounded like a boo.

Could it be a boo?

It couldn’t be a boo, could it?

What, the—why are they …?

It was. It was three people, maybe five. A jokester, a friend, he later found out, thought it’d be funny to get a few people to boo when Spencer went up to get his diploma. But the people nearby must have assumed there was a good reason, so it caught on, and soon the whole damn crowd was booing. Spencer walked across the stage squeezing his fists together, seething inside, ready to explode with anger. His whole family was out there, watching him get booed. He wanted to give everyone the finger, to scream obscenities at the crowd, but he repressed it. He took his diploma and walked off the stage, eager to close this chapter of his life for good. It was a fitting send-off for a postgraduate life that would be thoroughly undistinguished.

Spencer finished high school and started waffling. He took a job at Jamba Juice. He gained weight. He did little for exercise besides the occasional jujitsu class. His brother, Everett, had taken up the sport, and Everett was the one with the car, so Spencer followed him to whatever diversion Everett was willing to drive to. Spencer had always liked martial arts, because Spencer liked martial anything, but he’d grown frustrated with karate. He’d come home from a class and try to practice on Alek’s little brother, but when his sparring partner didn’t position himself according to the rigid rules of the form, Spencer couldn’t show off his moves. He wanted to do moves on everyone, but it just didn’t seem to work against someone who didn’t know karate.

Jujitsu was different. Jujitsu wasn’t like the other martial arts. Jujitsu worked on anyone. It worked if they knew jujitsu, and it worked if they didn’t know jujitsu. Especially if they didn’t know jujitsu.

That also made it practical. Not just because you could choke out your best friend’s little brother no matter what form of resistance he tried to put up. You could subdue any person on the street who tried to attack you, or hurt someone else. As long as he didn’t know jujitsu better than you, you could beat anyone.

At $8 an hour serving smoothies, he couldn’t afford to train, so he walked into new gyms, signed up for free trial memberships, took their classes, then apologized, “You know, actually this location isn’t that convenient for me,” and went to find another free trial.

A dozen different fighting styles from a dozen different teachers.

He couldn’t make any kind of progress, but he liked the camaraderie, and this rare combination of confidence and humility you got from it, even though those two things felt like opposites. Any skinny old man walking down the street could choke you out if he was better trained than you, and that made you respect everyone. But if you were the better-trained one, you could submit anyone, regardless of what advantages they might have over you. At least, he figured, unless they had some kind of weapon.

But mostly he spent those days hanging with Anthony, who’d started college, or texting with Alek. And he spent time around Meghan, the kind-faced girl with piercings and sleeve tattoos who worked next to him at Jamba Juice. She’d just come up from the Bay Area. Spencer helped her move and more than that; without totally realizing it at the time, he provided her a soft buffer to help ease her into a new phase in her life. She wound up doing the same for him.

The Jamba Juice was across from a recruiting center, so servicemen and -women came in all the time and Spencer, who by then was, above everything else, just bored, started quizzing them. Before he learned to tell by their uniforms, he asked what service they were in, and if they could do it all over again, which would they choose? He mined vicarious joy from it: he could see himself doing the tours they did, on the adventures they had. He pictured himself on the deck of an aircraft carrier, in a desert in Afghanistan.

He started to think that the cure for his boredom might just be to join up. But not just join up; he wanted to do it in a big way. He wanted to be the best of the best, make his family proud, maybe be a Navy Seal, a Green Beret. He talked to his friend Dean from Del Campo, who was training to be in the US Air Force Pararescue, and Spencer began reading about it. It harmonized with his own thoughts about how to approach life—an emerging sense that he wanted a change, wanted to go, to leave here for a while and have an adventure, to be where the bullets were flying, to be a little crazy, and take a few too many risks, but to have a good reason. And it fit with the notion that the way you could justify doing that was by helping people. So what better service than one that sent you into battle, dropped you from a helicopter while people were still shooting, to get soldiers stable, get them out, save their lives? Whose very motto was That Others May Live?

The more he thought about it, the more he resolved that pararescueman was the perfect job for him. Maybe the only job for him. More than a job, it was a calling. They were elite, the Navy Seals of the air force, but somehow almost more badass since their purpose was saving people.

He wanted it badly. He had to have it. He imagined himself flying above the battlefield in Fallujah, in Kunduz, deploying a parachute at a thousand feet or leaping off a helicopter with a harness and rappelling down to a wounded soldier, talking a man through his most frightening moments. Putting hands on him and drawing him back to life. It raised his pulse. Nothing else would do. Plus he’d end up with a paramedic license, and after his contract was up he could get a job at the local fire and rescue department. It all made perfect sense.

But he was overweight. And he hadn’t ever really worked very hard at anything. Ever. Now that he thought about it, not once in his life had he ever really applied himself. Everett was the achiever, Everett who passed the California Highway Patrol test. Kelly, his talented and hilarious sister, had gone down to LA to at least give the entertainment industry a try, and what had Spencer ever done? What risks had he taken? He’d never been very motivated to study, perhaps a bad taste from the private Christian school that never went away. He’d given up football to focus on basketball, given up basketball when he couldn’t get playing time.

The only thing he could really remember was once, when he was working as a bag boy for the local grocery store, a man tried to run out with $300 worth of stolen liquor. Spencer helped run him down, chased him out into the parking lot where an off-shift cashier laid him out. That was it. When else had he ever gone above and beyond the call of duty? He couldn’t remember. He’d barely summoned the interest to try higher education. He’d signed up for a few classes up at American River College but couldn’t stay focused, couldn’t see the point.

Here he was then: he didn’t have college, he didn’t have a plan, he spent his days pressing, blending, cleaning, then going to the market to sweep and tidy up there, then hanging out and going to bed. The least glamorous life he could imagine was his own. Maybe the worst part of it was, he kind of liked it. He had no pressure on him and his mother had stopped pushing; she’d resigned herself to letting Spencer live his life out at his own pace. He loved his other friends. He and Meghan had a warm, if never articulated, protective instinct for each other, and Dean was a stabilizing force, loyal to Spencer and always available for a little advice. Should he really be asking for more than that? Maybe he had what was important: a steady job, the occasional bender, some good friends. In Meghan blending smoothies next to him, in Dean, in Anthony starting at Sacramento State across town, Alek just across the state line. Life was pretty good.

But without glory.

What if he grew old, never having pushed himself to accomplish anything?

He felt he could do more; he wanted more. Being a pararescueman felt like exactly that: something more.

His first big personal project was going to be trying to join one of the most elite units in the entire military.

“Hey, man, big news,” he wrote to Alek. “I’m signing up for air force pararescue.” He figured Alek would be thrilled for him. A minute went by, five minutes; finally, later in the day Alek replied, “That’s great, good luck.”

A little lukewarm for such a momentous decision, but that was Alek. Never one for words.

If Spencer was going to have it, he needed to be in peak physical form, and sporadic jujitsu classes during trial gym memberships just weren’t going to cut it. But he couldn’t afford to do them more regularly.

No problem; he’d set off on his own journey.

He started working out twice a day. He ran six miles, swam two thousand meters, then hit the weights, then did it all again the next day. He gave up his favorite foods, ate cleaner than he ever had. He had liquid dinners for a year. Jamba Juice was the perfect job, even if it was only $8 an hour and the work was monotonous, because when the boss wasn’t around he could make his vegetable juice concoctions—and juice was freaking expensive.

He did his first pull-up. He’d never been able to complete one before; too much weight to carry, but now he had less. Now he was stronger.

Six months passed, then eight; he dropped fifty pounds. He convinced the manager at a swim club to let him come in early before the guests arrived, pull the pool covers back, and practice holding his breath under water. He’d need to do two whole laps to qualify, and a whole lot more if he wanted to actually make it through the program. All he talked about at Jamba Juice was the pararescuemen, which he learned to start calling para jumpers, then just PJs, like it was a club he was already part of. All he thought about, all he talked about, was what he had left to do before joining the PJs, what he’d do when he was there. Meghan smiled and shook her head.

Ten months passed; he topped out at thirteen pull-ups and still didn’t feel ready. He’d built his weight back up as almost twenty-five pounds of muscle, but wouldn’t enlist until he could do fifteen pull-ups and seventy pushups in two minutes.

A year passed and still he didn’t join; he wouldn’t risk it all being for nothing, he wouldn’t screw it up, he couldn’t screw it up, it had become his identity and even though he felt like Superman he could be better. So he would wait, and wait, and only sign up for the test when he knew he was ready.

Finally he heard from Dean, who’d been kicked out of pararescue training for a pulled groin, and had some advice. “Look, Spencer, you gotta pull the trigger. If you don’t do it now you’ll never do it. You’ll get hurt, or something will come along in life and distract you from it. Sign up now.”

So he did. He signed up. He’d built up too much muscle though, was thirteen pounds overweight. Within three weeks he’d lost it; within a month he was in a car with the recruiter, driving out to a Cal Fit so he could take the special operations physical test, jittery with nerves. But then something amazing happened: he passed every single fitness test. He performed better than everyone else on every test but one, and he ran his best recorded time, a mile and a half in under nine minutes. It was all almost too good to be true. He’d tried as hard as he could to prepare, and he was prepared. He was flying high. A few months later he spent the night at the sprawling DoubleTree hotel near the Arden Fair mall, and went out in the morning to MEPS, the Military Entrance Processing Station, for the final step. He was about to achieve the only thing he’d wanted for a year, the thing he’d worked the hardest for in his life, something for which he had to physically transform himself, and he began to feel the fulsome contentedness of having found a purpose and then proven himself capable of achieving it.

They drew his blood. He stripped down to his boxers so the doctor could check his body for abnormalities. He had none. Everything now was routine, just formality; he could hardly contain his excitement. And the very last thing to test for was vision; the very last vision test was depth perception.

“Which circle is different?” the doctor asked. Spencer was moments from glory, already thinking about what he was going to drink that night to celebrate. He looked into the contraption. It was old, he thought. Funny, how ancient the crap they use here is.

But okay, focus.

“Um, let me see,” he said. He saw twelve rows of black circles, all exactly the same. That was strange—or else that was the point! It was a trick to see how you responded to some kind of cognitive challenge. “They’re all the same, sir.” A beat passed.

“Well, pick the one you think is different.” The doctor had no levity in his voice. Now Spencer wasn’t sure what to do. He could swear they were all exactly the same shape, but the doctor insisted he pick one that looked different. So he guessed. “Number three is different, sir.”

LATER, AFTER ALL THE TESTING, he went up to the air force liaison office to check out, and the staff sergeant handed him a list of jobs he’d qualified for. He scanned it, couldn’t believe it, scanned it again.

“Sir, sorry, but the job I wanted isn’t on here. I don’t see pararescue.” The staff sergeant took the paper back and looked at it again.

“Looks like you didn’t qualify.” He handed it back.

That can’t be. “Sorry, sir, excuse me.” Spencer sensed people in line behind him swaying with impatience. “But what do you mean by didn’t qualify? I passed every fitness test and completed all the examinations. None of the doctors told me anything was wrong …”

“It looks like you didn’t pass depth perception.”

“Sorry?”

“You don’t have depth perception.”

“Depth perception?”

“You lack depth perception. Can’t be a PJ without it. Choose another job from the list. And I’d pick quickly if I were you, or you might not get anything. Pick before you leave. We’re open for another thirty minutes.”

“PJs is the only thing I’m here for.”

“If you leave today without picking a job, you might not get anything. Twenty-nine minutes left now. Pick fast.”

And that was it. Just like that, it was over.

Later, when playing it back in his mind, he thought, Lack depth perception? What a load of crap. Then how could I pick up a cup? How did I play basketball? But it didn’t matter; there was no way of appealing the decision. Spencer was unfit for service. He would not be an air force pararescueman, not ever. A year of punishing himself, for nothing. He’d never felt so deflated in his life. He went home, closed the door behind him, and he wept. When he was done, he felt empty, all his motivation completely depleted. He was zapped. He felt foolish for having worked so hard when such a small stupid thing was waiting all along to derail him.

Depth perception?

It was a mistake, it had to be. He was sure of it. But there wasn’t anything he could do about it. It was as frustrating as it was demoralizing, that someone in some position of authority had decided that some useless old device could determine whether or not you got what you’d worked so hard for. An old piece of metal. He would have been a good pararescueman, he would have been happy, and he would have saved lives, and whoever it was up there making decisions was preventing that.

So what was the point? Why had he worked so hard? He hadn’t accomplished anything in his life, but at least before he could always say it was because he hadn’t really tried. Now he couldn’t say that. It was almost worse.

He called Dean, who had cleared the initial medical testing to get into pararescue training but had now been forced to drop out twice after injuries, and was waiting to get in for a third try. Dean offered some encouragement. It helped for a few minutes, and then his encouragement ran out like a pill wearing off, and there was nothing Spencer could do. He’d failed. His eyes had failed.

Spencer’s eyes are no longer working so he’s running blind. He’s entered into a gauntlet and his senses have left him. The whole world narrows to a single unprotected corridor, and everyone else is hiding. He is running straight for a man with a weapon he knows is there but can’t see, because he can’t see anything; tiny fibers in his eyes have tensed and pulled the lenses flat so everything next to him disappears, and he is running down a dark tunnel with a speck of light at the end. Then that’s gone too, and he is simply running, waiting for bullets to tear through him. His last coherent thought is, Maybe I will delay him enough for others, and then he launches himself.

A blast of light and pain across his face, his mouth exploding with the taste of pepper and metal—gunpowder. Has the bullet gone through his mouth? His forehead roars with heat, he knows now he’s been hurt badly but not exactly how, or if a bullet struck him, or what exactly just happened, but he is on the ground and he can move, so he begins to fight. He struggles to pin the man as he starts to lose vision again, blood curtaining his eye, which is swelling shut anyway. The man is skinny, but his power is astounding, superhuman. He must be on a drug that gives him abnormal strength. They fight in the aisle, Spencer can see almost nothing, light and shapes, he tries to control the gun but can’t get it in his grip, every time he feels his fingers glance off metal it slips away again, pulling from his hand, he cannot see well enough to know he dislodged it when he hit the man, and is now trying to pull from the man’s grip a weapon the man is no longer holding.

They scramble to their feet, Spencer tries to hit him but they’re too close, so he grapples at the man, pulls him into a clench, holds him close to his own body, and now they’re standing. Spencer works himself behind the man, remembering the staple of jujitsu, the rear naked choke, just trying to protect himself, swaying with the terrorist, so when the terrorist jerks right Spencer jerks right with him, this part is like a dance, trying to stay even so he doesn’t lose balance, because if he loses his position he’s exposed to whatever weapon the terrorist has ready next. He hooks his elbow under the man’s neck so that their bodies are flat against one another, and then Spencer summons all his strength and launches himself backward. Flying in tandem across the seats, his own body padding the terrorist’s fall, his own skull slamming against the train window so hard that sparks of light fill his vision and a head-shaped inkblot of blood smears the window behind him. The man rotates powerfully in Spencer’s grasp, and Spencer tries to pull his forearm tighter under the man’s neck, desperately trying to choke off blood flow to the man’s brain. But the man will not stop struggling, does not even seem to weaken, and a wave of terror goes flitting through Spencer’s thoughts. This man should have been out in seconds. Alek is yelling something, thank God Alek is here, and Anthony is right there next to him, if only to see what is happening, and then the gunman’s fists are curling backward. 180-degree uppercuts into Spencer’s face and he can feel that they’re working, sapping his strength, glancing off his eye that’s already swollen and bleeding, his face feeling like a raw piece of meat being beaten with a rock, the top half of his vision is blurred, like something’s hanging over it. How much time has passed? What if he loses control—what if he dies and can’t stop this man? Spencer is bleeding into his swollen eye and fighting half blind. The terrorist has an astounding store of strength and still does not seem to be tiring at all. Spencer is pinned against the window, doesn’t know how many weapons this man has, doesn’t know what happens if he loses this fight and the man takes the gun back, if the man slips from his grip he’ll have all the odds in his favor and he’ll find that machine gun again and then he’ll really get to work—and just now Spencer hears, from some distant corner of his consciousness, a familiar voice.

“Stop, fucker!”

It’s Alek, holding the machine gun up to the terrorist’s head.