Читать книгу Ranger Games: A Story of Soldiers, Family and an Inexplicable Crime - Ben Blum, Ben Blum - Страница 13

August 7, 2006, was not, of course, PFC Blum’s first experience of Specialist Luke Elliott Sommer. Sommer was one of the very first tabs Blum met at Ranger Battalion.

PFC Blum reported for duty about four months before the robbery, in April 2006. After the exhilaration of surviving the Ranger Indoctrination Program and the princely rides in limousines from the airport to Fort Lewis, he and the other new cherries had passed for the first time through the hallowed gate in the brown-tarp-covered chain-link fence and discovered a ghost town. The few tabs in the barracks dumped out all their belongings and smoked them perfunctorily, then ignored them. The rest of Second Battalion was still in Iraq. The new privates’ only duties were to clean up the barracks and service gear in preparation for their return. When Specialist Luke Elliott Sommer arrived three days later from Ranger School with a brand-new tab on his shoulder and gathered the new privates to watch The Great Raid with him in Charlie Company’s bar, they were glad just to have their existence registered. Five minutes into the opening sequence a sergeant strode in, puffed up with displeasure at the presence of cherry privates in the bar. The privates steeled themselves to get smoked. But Sommer told the sergeant that they were with him, and that appeared to be enough.

Even among Rangers, Sommer stood out: over six feet tall, with dark hair, blue eyes of powerful intensity, and a smattering of fierce tattoos. He spoke quickly but reasonably with a mild Canadian accent about his two combat deployments, one each to Afghanistan and Iraq. He laid out his philosophy on the Rangers for the new privates. “Ranger Batt is like no place on earth. You’re with the best of the best now,” he said. “But you have to play it smart. It’s a political game.”

Near the end of Ranger School, after weeks of slogging through Georgia swamps, climbing rock faces with numb hands and combat boots, and leading all-night ambushes in which even the intestine-clenching certainty of imminent explosions could barely keep you awake and moving, Sommer had fallen out of formation to administer first aid to a soldier with heat stroke, after which he had been recommended for an award at graduation.

PFC Blum listened in awe. This was the first time an active-duty Ranger with combat experience had treated him like someone worth talking to. Specialist Sommer’s birthplace in Canada just so happened to be home to the Kelowna Rockets, an elite youth club that the Littleton Hawks had once traveled up to compete against. Nervous but excited, Blum spoke up to mention the connection. Sommer told him that he had once played for the Rockets, although in a different age bracket. And there was another link between them: the room Blum was staying in now, number 321, had been Sommer’s the year before.

The rest of the Rangers returned from deployment, then were released on April 7 for two weeks of block leave. Alex flew home to Colorado to see Anna and his family. When he returned, he found himself assigned to the second of three gun teams with a private named Womack, whose measured speech and prickly shaved head reminded him of Squidward from the cartoon SpongeBob SquarePants. Their boss, the team leader assigned to teach Privates Blum and Womack how to do their new job, would be Specialist Sommer.

A few weeks later, shortly after Alex’s nineteenth birthday, Ranger Battalion held a parents’ visit weekend. Norm drove out from Colorado in the silver Audi A4 he had promised Alex for use at battalion.

Alex has always worshipped his father. Back when Norm was playing a charming and tolerant host to his friends, he had been the coolest dad around. On this weekend, though, for the first time in his life, Alex found himself embarrassed by his father. Mortified, actually.

“So what kind of guns do you guys shoot?” Norm asked.

“Guns” was a civilian term. PFC Blum winced.

“Weapons, Dad. They’re called weapons.”

He introduced Norm to the specialist in the parking lot behind Charlie Company.

“I just remember, ‘This is Specialist Sommer,’” Norm recalled to me when I asked him about Sommer on the patio behind his house. “I recognized the name. Alex had talked about him, because this had been his boss for a period of time. He was just a big, thick British Columbia kid. Pretty studly-looking, outgoing, polite. He was bright. Before Alex enlisted, my opinion of army guys was that they had nothing better to do with their lives. ‘Alex, you’ve got all this opportunity, why do something like this?’ But the guys I met there were really impressive. Physically, they’re in perfect shape. They’re so committed to their cause, you have to respect it.”

Later that day Sommer showed up again, joking his way into a room full of privates and launching his big frame up Alex’s back like an extension ladder. Norm was puzzled by his son’s kowtowing formality in response but soon learned that cherry privates and tabbed E4s were strictly separate castes. “There was such a divide between private and specialist, tab and nontab,” he told me.

Ranger Battalion had been set up as a kind of war-themed day camp, with several activity stations to choose from. Sommer asked Norm if he and Alex would like to join him for the walk to Range 7, where parents would have the opportunity to fire automatic weapons. He told Norm to call him Elliott. Norm was happy to oblige. While they chatted about Sommer’s childhood, swapping jokes and hockey lingo, Alex cringed in silence.

“I liked him,” Norm recalled. “I like Canadians. I like hockey guys. I’m thinking, ‘I’m glad Alex has a hockey guy in addition to these Ranger guys. The hockey relationship’s a deep bond.’ I’m thinking, ‘Alex is really comfortable here. This isn’t all bad. So my kid lost his personality, but at least he’s around quality guys. He’s going to learn a lot about life.’”

At the range, Sommer took Norm into a pitch-black tent and strapped goggles on his head that popped the room into the horror-movie depth of night vision, then set him up outside with a squad automatic weapon, the same M240 model Alex trained with. The barrel climbed uncontrollably as Norm shot bursts at the metal targets fifty yards away. Sommer went next. To illustrate, Norm leaned forward in his patio chair, holding an imaginary assault rifle to his shoulder and taking aim at the lawn mower parked beside a broken planter across the grass.

“He’s just, boom boom boom boom. Just, ding ding ding ding. He was right on the fucking target. He didn’t fucking miss. You’re thinking, well, you don’t want to be on the other end of this.”

By the time the trio walked back from the range, crammed into the shoulder of a busy four-lane road with troop carriers whizzing past, the dynamic between Sommer and his son had begun to bother Norm. They were just a couple of kids—Alex was nineteen, Elliott only twenty—but Alex almost seemed to enjoy playing the role of subordinate. It made normal conversation impossible.

“Every time with Alex it was, ‘Yes, Specialist Sommer. Yes, Specialist Sommer.’ So we’re walking back, and I go, ‘Alex, do you guys have to do this? It’s just the three of us. Why don’t you relax a little? His name’s Elliott. Just call him Elliott.’ That’s when Sommer says, ‘Uh, Mr. Blum, that’s not how it works around here.’”

Sommer turned to Alex and barked a command. “Private Blum! Get out in that road and beat your face!”

Alex turned without hesitation and charged into traffic. Norm stared in disbelief as his son pumped off push-ups with his bare hands flat on the hot black asphalt, Specialist Sommer yelling counts from just above. Armored trucks rocked to a halt on either side of them. Alex’s form was perfect, eager, proud. His chest dropped over and over to within a millimeter of the double yellow lines. When Sommer finally called him off, Alex sprang to his feet and both jogged to join Norm on the shoulder. Traffic rumbled back up to speed.

“Sommer goes …” Norm wrinkled his forehead in an effort at recall. “‘He does whatever I tell him to do and he has no vote or say about it. He’s my …’ I don’t think he said ‘bitch.’”

Before Norm flew home at the end of the weekend, leaving the Audi behind, Specialist Sommer told PFC Blum to see if his father would loan him $200. Norm agreed. Two weeks later, Sommer paid him back.

A few days after my conversation with Norm, Alex and I met in his father’s driveway to talk about his training.

“Hope you’re ready to get smoked,” Alex said, hauling up the garage door.

The next two hours were the most animated I had seen from Alex since his arrest. He rolled around on the cement of the garage floor shouting synchronizing codes to demonstrate a “talking guns” drill he had practiced on the quad with Womack, swapping in and out at Sommer’s command and cycling bursts to keep the barrels cool. He grabbed printer paper and pens from Norm’s home office to draw diagrams of the bullet-riddled live-fire shoot houses that had to be rebuilt every few months, remembering jogging excitedly back to the barracks alongside buddies who had once more succeeded, through a mix of professionalism and luck, in not killing each other. He dug cardboard boxes and soup cans out of the recycling bin to build a three-dimensional map of a company-wide training mission, pointed out breach points to each building with a golf club. He slipped into voices for sergeants and tabs with theatrical relish as he issued commands down the chain. I could almost see his gear-laden teenage form in digital-print fatigues and combat boots floating at twilight into the mock city in the hills where they staged the exercise, mind compressed inside his helmet by the pulse of chopper blades. He talked me through the sequence as if it were a favorite movie: dropping to a hover with dozens of other black helicopters over a dark field, leaping from a cabin packed tight with men and gear into open air on a thick black rope that charged up through your thighs and gloves like an animal, watching the grass beneath you widen, ripple in coiling eddies, hit through your boots with the total shock of body woken to itself. It was as close to battle as PFC Blum ever got. Hours later, as they flew home through the dark, Corporal Sager, a friend of Sommer’s from British Columbia who had taken over as Alex’s team leader after Sommer moved to a line team, let him sit in the helicopter’s door with his legs dangling in the wind.

“The moon was full,” Alex intoned. “We were flying along the highway. I was strapped into the Black Hawk with the 240 hanging between my knees. The wind was pushing my right pant leg across my lap. Sager leaned over. He said, ‘I wouldn’t let you sit in the door if you hadn’t done a perfect job.’” Alex paused for a moment to savor the memory. “I was so happy that I’d made him proud. I knew if we’d been in Iraq, he would have trusted me to be in the door to engage the enemy. The highway cut through mountains covered in pine trees. We were eight hundred, nine hundred feet up. I remember watching a lone car weaving through them, the faint lights on a Honda or a Toyota or whatever it was, and thinking it had no idea we were up there, no idea what we’d just done.”

Those months were transformative for all the cherry privates. At night and on weekends, they ventured into Tacoma with new eyes. Every door was a potential breach point, every bar counter a red zone concealing hidden gunmen, every Denny’s dining room partitioned into lines of fire. Civilians looked more and more like another species entirely. Cherry privates watched in bemusement as men and women with giant poofs of hair puzzled over menus, smoothed napkins over their laps, wiped their children’s mouths. One night after raiding airplane hangars, Alex and his buddies went out to see the new X-Men movie at the AMC multiplex near the highway, and all they could talk about, lined up there in the dark among teenagers who had no idea they were surrounded by Rangers, was how simple it would be to take down the theater. They all tried to outdo each other in assessment of the tactical problem, which was almost identical to that of a hangar: three exits, red zone in the projectionist booth, big interior space with a bunch of sheep to herd. Piece of cake.

Talk of hitting spots around Tacoma was a reliable way to show off knowledge and sound hard, a real-world application of their classroom sessions planning raids on satellite photos of al-Qaeda complexes. Whenever they watched heist movies, they laughed at how much better they could do the job themselves. Tabs were fluent in the lingo of tactical planning, but the sharper of the privates were already picking it up. In this PFC Blum was lucky to enjoy the special mentorship of Specialist Sommer.

Even after his replacement as Blum’s team leader, the specialist popped in once in a while as Blum broke down M16s or shined boots to ask him for a ride into town. He was friendlier to the privates than other tabs were, taking more than a few of them out to facilities around Tacoma to war-game, but Blum seemed to be a favorite of his. Sommer thought the silver Audi was cool, nicknaming it “the Transporter,” after one of his favorite movies, in which a disillusioned Special Forces operator runs criminal errands in an Audi A8. Blum tried to hide his nervousness about the stick shift. No matter where Sommer wanted to go—Chili’s, Starbucks, Quiznos, Dairy Queen, the supermarket, a porn shop—he made a little lesson out of it.

“Where’s our infill?”

“Side door by the booths.”

“Right. Red zones?”

“By the counter. From the kitchen. Behind that soft-serve thing.”

“You forgot the bathroom, Blum. Bang. You’re dead.”

As they ate, Sommer would regale him with tales of Iraq and Afghanistan and of his youth in Kelowna, a city of several hundred thousand east of Vancouver. His mother was a Royal Canadian Air Cadets instructor, but since Sommer had dual citizenship, he had chosen the U.S. Army, because Rangers were the ones who scoured the world of the vilest bad guys. He singled out one group in particular for his venom: the Hells Angels Motorcycle Club, a gang that Blum was surprised to learn maintained a stranglehold on Kelowna. Sommer detailed their offenses: drug dealing, extortion, squatting in houses and ejecting their elderly inhabitants. He fantasized about gathering a team of Rangers to take them on.

“These guys are like the insurgents of Canada. A few Rangers would wipe these motherfuckers out, easy.”

“Hell yeah they would.”

Hooah. Get some. Blum was thrilled to be included by a tab in this kind of swaggering banter. Specialist Sommer impressed him: funny, experienced, highly motivated to stamp out evil wherever it might be found. Of course, in Blum’s heart of hearts, he was a little more into defending America from freedom-hating jihadis than Canada from some aging biker gang. But he wasn’t about to say that. The range of Sommer’s expertise in tactics, weaponry, and politics was formidable, and he was drilling PFC Blum on the skills he would soon need to perform flawlessly in Iraq: securing sight lines, covering hostages, taking quick charge of the package. The package might be a terrorist leader, a stash of guns, a hard drive full of enemy plans, anything. If you didn’t get out with the package, the mission was a failure.

When I asked Alex how it felt to complete these extracurricular exercises, he emphasized their similarity to the work Rangers did every day. As a nineteen-year-old private, he had simply been grateful for the chance to improve his skills. He was dreaming of heroic feats in Iraq. It seemed clear enough, though, that he had also found them profoundly exciting—like a video game you got to play in real life. Not that this distinguished them much from the rest of his training. Blowing the heads off plastic terrorists with assault rifles was another real-life video game, and Alex and his comrades played a lot of others on their Xbox, especially a game called Hitman, whose Mafia storyline dovetailed with a real-world game they called “Sommer Syndicate.”

By July, Sommer’s vigilante fantasy had expanded to include building a team of Rangers that would take over Kelowna and keep the Hells Angels out for good, sustaining themselves with protection money from local businesses and living by a strict code of honor. Once in a while he would toss a pistol to Blum, Palmer, or one of the other privates he was tight with and call “suicide check.” The requirement then was to point it at your head and pull the trigger. To examine the chamber first was an insult, forbidden. The godfather, “Don Terrino,” commanded absolute trust. In return, he was available to help out when it really counted. Once, when Blum pulled charge-of-quarters duty after two straight sleepless nights of field drills, he passed out at the desk and woke to a furious sergeant demanding to see his supervisor. Blum went upstairs and instead got Specialist Sommer, who somehow managed to calm the guy down and keep Blum out of trouble. The import of this anecdote didn’t sink in for me until another soldier told me about a friend of his who, after being caught asleep on CQ duty in Iraq, was court-martialed and stripped of his rank, becoming an instant pariah in his unit. His girlfriend broke up with him. A week after he got out of the brig he committed suicide.

In civilian life back home in British Columbia, where Sommer had gone by Elliott, his near-poetic facility with wild tales had earned him the nickname “B.S. Elliott.” Among his close associates at battalion, his bullshitting and over-the-top craziness was known as the “Sommer factor.” He liked to pop his dental retainer—one false tooth lodged in the middle to fill a gap he’d earned in a fight—in and out as a joke. Other tabs played along with his games. One day at the 240B gun-mapping range, Corporal Sager gave Blum his keys and asked him to move his truck so he wouldn’t get a ticket. Blum came back glowing from the trust that this personal errand implied and discovered Sager talking to Sommer on the curb. Sager raised his eyebrows at Blum with an air of jokey conspiracy. “You planning to take out some Hells Angels, Private?” he asked.

“Definitely, Corporal.”

In late June, Blum drove Sommer to a casino off I-5 along with PFC Palmer and an older tab named Byrne whom he had never met before. After Byrne made a recon run, they all brainstormed the tactical problem of taking it down: breaching the vault with plastic explosives, escaping in Humvees. As usual, Sommer took the normal Ranger chest-beating one step further, going so far as to diagram the mission on Google Earth satellite images in the same way raids were marked up in the classroom. But whenever PFC Blum started to think this was all getting just a little too real, Sommer would throw in some crazy detail about bringing Bravo Company along to fast-rope in from Black Hawks while Maggot Squad covered them with 240s, and soon it was all laughter and comfort again.

Now that they were spending more and more time together, Specialist Sommer told PFC Blum that he could begin to call him Elliott. Blum was flattered by the offer but found himself too uncomfortable to accept, sticking instead to “Specialist Sommer” as regulations required. Sergeants cracked down hard if they saw a private fraternizing too closely with a tab.

“He kept it in military-speak,” Alex told me. “It was always, ‘This is the infill, and I need you to map this out for me, and this and this and this.’ I was like, ‘Okay, okay, okay.’ It was just like homework for me. Maybe in his mind he was like, ‘Yeah, he’s in on it, he’s good with it.’ But at the same time … This is actually the main question I have. Was he like, ‘I have to keep this power over him’? Or was he like, ‘We’re actually equals’?”

On the afternoon of Thursday, August 3, just after PFC Blum successfully completed the rigorous multiday testing phase for the Expert Infantryman Badge he would need for combat duty in Iraq, Sommer asked him for a ride to the Bank of America branch on South Tacoma Way, where he had a checking account. While Sommer engaged in a lengthy transaction with a teller, Blum sat in a plush chair in the lobby and gave the place a once-over. Afterward, at a nearby Quiznos, he charted out on a napkin how a Ranger team would hit the place, trying his best to impress the specialist with his tactical acuity.

For PFC Blum, the morning of August 7 really was in many respects no different from an ordinary day: a long series of more-or-less arbitrary orders from superiors, some making sense, some not. Sergeant Congdon came by to release them for block leave. Corporal Roe came by to announce the soft armor inspection. Specialist Sommer came by to pick up PFC Blum’s soft armor. Blum and the other privates wandered into each other’s rooms to kill time until their flights. Two hours later PFC Blum was in the squad room watching TV with a few other privates and their squad leader, Sergeant Waterhouse, when Specialist Sommer leaned in the door and gestured for him to come out into the hall.

“My grandma just died,” he said.

PFC Blum had no idea how to react. Was it his place to give comfort? In fact, as Alex would learn years later, Sommer’s grandmother had just suffered a botched biopsy that would soon lead to her death but had not yet passed away. The story Sommer had given to superiors was that his Canadian friends were here to ride north with him and visit her in the hospital.

“I’m sorry, Specialist,” Blum ventured, which was how he truly felt.

“I need your car keys,” Sommer said.

“Sure.”

As he watched the specialist walk away with his keys, Blum realized to his dismay that he was now in danger of missing his evening flight. His buddy Anderson from Bravo Company was supposed to drive him to the airport in the Audi. Back home in Denver, Anna was waiting. But there wasn’t anything Blum could do about it. He returned to the squad room.

Around 1500, Privates Anderson, Ryniec, and MacDonald decided to take Ryniec’s old Ford Explorer into Tacoma for an afternoon snack at Applebee’s. From there they would drive MacDonald to the airport to catch his flight. Anderson planned to go in to the airline counter to see if he could switch his own flight to tonight. If he managed to do so, Alex’s ride would evaporate. His best bet was to load his hockey bag in the Ford and go with them to the airport now.

“You sure you don’t want to come, Blum?”

“Nah, I have to wait for Specialist Sommer.”

They all slapped hands with him, pulled it in for the clinch, exchanged a few last words of excited anticipation for deployment, and disappeared down the hallway.

PFC Blum received two phone calls in the next hour from friends carpooling to the airport and offering rides. He was forced to decline both offers.

By 1610 he was all by himself in the squad room, slouched in a pile on the sofa, alternating his attention between the TV and the clock. His cell phone lit up again: Specialist Sommer.

“I need you to come downstairs and drive,” Sommer said. “We’re going to the bank. We’re going to take care of it.”

It was a warm July afternoon a few days after the mock mission in Norm’s garage when Alex and I drilled down to the deepest level yet on these crucial few minutes, in a conversation on my mother’s balcony that would resonate with me for years. A brigade of storm clouds were bearing down in slow motion from the Rockies.

“‘We’re going to take care of it,’” I repeated.

“Yeah,” said Alex.

After months of army talk and job commiseration and, more recently, exultation at the conquering prowess of the five-year-olds he had been granted permission to coach at the rink despite his lack of a license, Alex and I seemed to our mutual surprise to have entered the ranks of each other’s closest friends. His loyalty, I had discovered, was hard-won but immense. He called regularly, kept up with the details of my life, told me stupid jokes when I seemed down, even grew a beard to match my own. But for all his efforts to explain how he could have believed the robbery was a training exercise, I still kept getting hung up on small details. In his lawn chair he was sunk into a very different slouch from the kind in the squad room years ago, his hat pulled low over his eyes, his lips popping on and off the mouth of his beer bottle to hide his nervousness. He had only recently begun trusting me with the more difficult details of his story.

“But,” I said, “I mean … you know what that means. You guys have talked about the bank.”

Alex made a pained noise through his teeth. “Well … I think he didn’t specifically say it, so it was kind of like—and I think that’s where the mind-set goes, where it was like—and I, like I said, I … You’re always under the impression that he wouldn’t do something wrong.”

Within a few months, after driving Alex to frustration by repeating the same questions over and over, after asking as many other people as I could think of, after reading thousands of pages of court documents, I would begin to see all the arguments about what Alex “knew” at each stage as serving mainly to illustrate that our conventional sense of “knowing” one thing or another was absurdly insufficient as a representation of the humongous junk wad of partially contradictory beliefs tangled in layers of self-justification and denial that constituted a mental state.

Law, I realized, had to file these wads into bins labeled with categories of knowledge and intent on an industrial scale that forbid unlimited attention to each one. I began almost to envy those who could just call Alex guilty and stop thinking about it. For them, arguments about his state of mind were pointless quibbles. What really mattered was what his nineteen-year-old Ranger incarnation now did: flip the phone closed, shove himself into the couch for the spring-launch to vertical, walk through the empty hall with flip-flops smacking his bare soles, and jog down the stairs—mad at the specialist, even more certain now that he would miss his flight, but outwardly unprotesting.

PFC Blum pushed through the stairwell door to the parking lot behind Charlie Company. The asphalt wavered in the heat of the August sun. PFC Palmer was already in the back of the Audi with the two Canadians. Blum climbed into the driver’s seat, next to Sommer.

It was a beautiful Pacific Northwest afternoon. Thin clouds pushed into the satiny blue sky as if through slits from another world. The road from battalion took them past the Stryker brigade barracks, the PX, the commissary, to the line of departing cars at the main gate. After the wave-through by the MPs, they were off Fort Lewis grounds. The freeway ran along the barbed-wire perimeter fence before leaving the forest that obscured the base interior. Barns and small trading posts drifted by on either side. Traffic thickened and slowed. Every minute that passed Blum counted against his chances of making his flight.

Sommer too was growing impatient. “Exit here,” he said abruptly.

The Audi swung off the freeway into a maze of side streets.

It was hard to keep up with all the specialist’s sudden orders to turn at approaching stoplights. PFC Blum worked at the clutch with his sandaled foot as he hunted with the stick for the invisible slots between gears. He feared stalling. Palmer and the Canadians were doing things in the backseat that he was too busy to pay attention to, even as he caught glimpses while whipping his head around to check blind spots and palming the wheel to cut across lanes.

“Most of the time,” Alex said as the first raindrops rattled my mother’s balcony’s pine boards, “people are like, why didn’t you notice what was going on in the back? But A, I didn’t know my way around Tacoma. B, there was a ton of traffic. C, I’d only been driving a stick shift for five months and was still learning. D, we were going on back roads to a place where I was absolutely lost. I was with someone who I totally respected and didn’t want to get lost with, so that’s another factor.”

“When you say people are always asking, what kind of people do you mean?”

“FBI guys, prosecutors.”

“What was going on in the back?”

“See, I don’t really know.”

In South Tacoma they hit a patch of construction that backed them up half a block. This neighborhood looked a lot like Denver: box stores, grassy medians, strip malls with dirty stucco walls. Hot wind blew through the open windows. Long-armed balloon men bowed and waved outside a string of car dealerships festooned with plastic flags. Road crews in orange vests ushered cars through one by one. Finally they emerged onto a clear stretch of frontage road. Beside them on the freeway, tankers lurched and braked above a glimmering ribbon of cars. Specialist Sommer directed Blum to cut left under the big green highway signs giving miles to Seattle and Portland. A block of warehouses and loading docks went by before the neighborhood turned residential. Telephone lines splayed overhead in the blue. Sommer thought he recognized a church he had flagged earlier as a landmark, realized he was mistaken, then recognized the right one.

Was it really possible that PFC Blum never noticed what was going on behind him?

As Alex talked, I found myself grasping for the kinds of analogical scientific explanations that had always served for me as reflexive responses to mystery. Rather than young men inside that silver Audi A4, maybe it was better to imagine five entangled waveforms, three struggling to pull on bulletproof vests and hooded sweatshirts below the sight of people in adjacent vehicles, one yelling commands, one stomping frantically at the clutch in flip-flops and flower-print shorts. Maybe it was only when the humongous junk wads of quantum probability inside their heads were measured, again and again, by prosecutors and judges and psychologists and cruelly adamant cousins, that they collapsed into the simplistic points that endured. Measurement changes what it measures; questions commit us to the answers we give. But maybe this was just a complicated way of saying that all Alex remembered, or all he could admit to himself that he remembered, was that he never saw the guns.

“There’s the alley,” Sommer said, pointing to a strange blue shed with a gabled roof and no windows. “Right up there.”

Gravel pinged under the wheels. On the left was a chain-link fence woven through with beige vinyl. On the right was a series of lean-to garages. Blum and Sommer stared through the windshield at the bank’s rear parking lot. The time was 5:11 p.m.

“That’s a lot of people,” observed Specialist Sommer.

Even now, Alex told me, whatever part of his mind did more than follow dumbly along had halfway managed to convince itself the game ended here.

Of course he’s not really going to do this. Sommer would never do this.

“What do you think?” Sommer said to the space behind Blum’s head.

“Maybe we should take a lap around the block and get a better idea of things,” came a voice from the back—PFC Palmer’s.

“Yeah,” added the voice of one of the Canadians. “We could look through the windows. See how many people are inside.”

In the parking lot, a steady trickle of civilians walked out to their cars, pushed buttons on keyless entries, climbed in. The bank was probably closing. Nothing, Blum felt certain now, was going to happen. He could go home and see his girlfriend. He could sleep in his own bed. He shifted the car into reverse.

PFC Blum did not know that all four of the others had stayed out late the night before practicing dry runs by flashlight on Noble Hill.

“Fuck it,” said a new voice from the back. “If we don’t do it now, we never will.”

There came the sound of a door unlatching, a small melodious chime.

PFC Blum’s gaze was directed toward Specialist Sommer, so his first glimpse into the strange new world pouring like gas through the opening rear door was of Sommer’s expressionless face. The specialist’s hands fumbled in the front pocket of his sweatshirt to pull out a laser-sighted pistol, then something black and flexible: a ski mask. Past him, through the right passenger window, the unmistakable barrel and wood stock of an AK-47 assault rifle accelerated into view, followed by a dark-clad body. Specialist Sommer pulled the mask down over his eyes. There was a flurry of shouting and movement. Doors slammed open, doors slammed shut. Blum was alone with the luxuriant hum of the still-running Audi.

Say your father takes you deep into a dangerous foreign country, then abandons you there with no means of getting out. Everything you believed is wrong. The sun does not rise. Jesus Christ robs a bank.

“When you were little,” Alex asked me, “did you ever get lost in the mall?”

The specialist was no longer beside PFC Blum to assure him that this was all okay. The specialist had crossed over into someplace else. Four figures in sweats and ski masks ran down the alley in ragged formation, empty duffels flapping, two with AK-47s held across their chests and two with dangling pistols. The last of them—Luke Elliott Sommer, soon to be distinguished on security-camera footage by his gray shirt—waved at an approaching pickup truck before running on. The truck braked hard. Behind the steering wheel, the terrified eyes and mouth of a middle-aged woman shrank away down the alley as the truck wove off wildly in reverse, bright red in the afternoon sun.

It was then that PFC Blum realized that he was in the strange position of deciding for himself what to do next. The sob of helpless remorse called up in him by the sight of this unfamiliar woman’s fear had triggered one thought I recognized as coming from the guy I knew: This is all wrong. I have to get out of here.