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

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СКАЧАТЬ but overweight, Alek quiet and brooding, both profoundly uncool, both happy but uncomfortable in their new surroundings, sat and ate their lunch, just the two of them, like a couple of old-timers at a neighborhood park.

      They watched the other kids mingle, kids who’d established their cliques and clubs and groups and study partners, but Spencer and Alek ate their wax paper–wrapped sandwiches with just each other. Spencer didn’t know precisely how to engage with normal kids, but he had a feeling that sitting just with Alek wasn’t healthy. They both needed new friends. As hard as it would be to try and mingle, as much as he stood to be ridiculed, he had to branch out. So one day at lunch he decided, Let’s go. It’s now or never. He got up, and looked down at Alek. “You coming?”

      Alek shook his head. So Spencer ran the gauntlet alone. Alone, to bounce around from group to group until he found a place where he could fit, for a while, and Alek remained, content, still on that bench, keeping to himself, watching teenage life pass him by while Spencer tried to mingle without a wingman. They’d both wanted to be here, but now that they had what they wanted, this was when their separation began. Spencer couldn’t help but feel he was, in a way, leaving Alek behind.

      He just didn’t know how permanent it was going to be.

      Still, as hard as Spencer tried to blend in, there were a few people who made it impossible. He himself for one; he still never knew what to wear. The small Christian school had stunted his fashion sense and he always felt off. He stuck out in the crowd. Alek didn’t know anything about fashion either, but didn’t seem to care that they were always dressed noticeably different from the kids who’d gone to normal schools. And at football practice, one of the coaches liked to pair Spencer and Alek for the “heads” drill, lining them up, fingers down, and then, lest anyone forget the two had come from the small Christian school, he’d yell, “Watch out, it’s a holy war!” as Spencer and Alek charged each other.

      And then one day Alek was gone. Off to Oregon with his dad. Spencer had to keep it a secret; Heidi didn’t even know until she called Alek one day to find out if he wanted to come over for dinner, and Alek said he couldn’t because he was in Oregon. Just like that. And though it felt cruel and sudden to have his friend gone so quickly, and Spencer missed him, he thought, Oregon, yeah. It’s probably better for him out there. Something about nature, open fields. He wasn’t exactly sure why, but that’s how Spencer pictured Oregon, and that’s what he pictured his best friend needing.

7.

      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 СКАЧАТЬ