TAKING DOWN A TERRORIST
How three American tourists foiled attack on high-speed train to Paris. Excerpt,
Alek starts moving back through the train. The only notions occupying his thoughts now are tasks that need completing; advancing to the next level. He feels logical, as clear as he’s ever been, a computer operating without noise, silently running a single program. He is not thinking — it does not feel like thinking — it is ratcheting down a checklist.
He moves into the next train car, following the terrorist’s path in reverse, moving past the bathroom where the attack began. He walks through Carriage 13: empty. The café car: empty. He registers the detritus of fleeing commuters: open laptops, cell phones, iPads, books. It looks like a place from which people have dematerialized in the middle of whatever they were doing. A marooned plastic cup, lolling on a table after falling from a hand that has disappeared. Another empty car, then another. Then, in the last two cars, a site that nearly bowls him over. Every single person huddled together, hundreds of them.
For the first time, the gravity of it strikes him. All these people. If that man hadn’t been stopped in the front — if we hadn’t stopped him — and he’d made it back here with all that ammo, to all these people, confined in one
small place with no way to escape ... the immensity of it pulls him from his state. “Is anyone hurt?” He goes back to the second train car from the front. He begins clearing the AK-47 when a train employee comes to him with damp paper towels to help clean up blood. The train employee is trying to be useful. It enrages Alek. Alek has shifted into a military kind of perception, dividing labour, triaging tasks; his level of adrenalin is still high, only now it’s mixed with the emotional tidal wave that started to swell when he saw the huddled passengers at the back of the train. He is not prepared for a distraction from the tasks that need to be done. This man is disordering a to-do list and Alek is too amped up to accommodate disorganization. Things in their order. It’s not time to clean up — that’s a step whose turn has not yet come — the employee is throwing it all out of order.
Alek tries to ignore him. He asks Chris to ask the man for some space. Chris has an innate ability to speak sense into people. Chris whispers to the man and the man retreats. Alek finishes emptying the weapon, places it on a seat, moves to Spencer’s side. He asks Spencer if he can help. Spencer is trying not to move, trying to keep the bleeding man from moving, but Mark is groaning, and his wife is insisting Mark got shot in the chest. Alek knows Mark did not get shot in the chest, but he does not know how he knows. Spencer seems to agree, but he says, “Check anyway.”
Alek takes the box cutter from the terrorist and slices open Mark’s shirt. He does a blood sweep, running his hands all over Mark’s torso to see if blood comes up, which would mean there was another wound. He doesn’t find any. He stands up.
He looks at Anthony, who has a look on his face like he’s just witnessed some ridiculous slapstick accident, a man and a banana peel. Alek doesn’t know what’s funny. Did he do something? Say something? Is there a smudge on his face?
And then he understands. All of it. There is a terrorist tied up on the ground, Spencer is bleeding in a million places, and meanwhile the train is whirring along quietly, a big smooth machine oblivious to the menagerie inside it.
Alek is on the same page now. He stands next to Anthony, this friend he had not seen since middle school, a person he was surprised was coming at all, a person he didn’t totally get, and the two of them, without even really needing to say anything, know they are thinking exactly the same thing. It is all absurd and ridiculous, and together they stand there and laugh.