When they heard shots and saw a man armed with a Kalashnikov and a handgun strolling down the aisle of a European high-speed train, two off-duty US servicemen sprang into action.
“Let’s go, go,” Alek Skarlatos, a member of the National Guard, said to his pal Spencer Stone, a US Air Force airman.
No need to tell Stone twice. He charged 30 feet down the train car, grabbed the gunman by the neck and tackled him.
Skarlatos was right behind him.
“I got the handgun away from the guy and threw it,” said Skarlatos, a 22-year-old from Oregon.
“I grabbed the AK, which was at his feet, and started muzzle thumping him in the head with it.”
Thwarting a massacre was an unexpected bump in a long-deserved vacation for the two American heroes. Stone is on leave from Lajes Air Base in Portugal, and Skarlatos is fresh off a mission to Afghanistan.
Suddenly, their lives began to resemble the pages of a Tom Clancy novel — and they were earning high praise from President Obama and Francois Hollande, the president of France.
The two heroes were traveling on the Thalys high-speed train from Amsterdam to Paris with a fellow American, Anthony Sadler, 23, a senior at Sacramento State University.
The three men — friends since middle school and reunited in Amsterdam for a European vacation — were sitting at the back of a car on the Thalys express whizzing through Belgium when gunshots rang out.
A train staffer sprinted past. Then the shooter, Moroccan-born 25-year-old Ayoub el Khazzani, entered the car, his weapons slung against his bare chest.
Within seconds, the Americans jumped into action.
Sadler recounted: “Spencer makes first contact. He tackles the guy. Alek wrestles the gun away from him. And the gunman pulls out a boxcutter and slices Spencer a few times.”
The terrorist nearly sliced off Stone’s thumb. Stone, a 22-year-old California resident, was also stabbed in his neck, in the eye area, and in his hands.
“The gunman never said a word . . . except to demand his gun back. ‘Give me my gun, give me my gun,’ he said,” Sadler recalled.
“And the three of us beat him until he was unconscious.”
A fourth passenger, British businessman Chris Norman, 62, joined the Americans in fighting the gunman.
Norman admitted he was a reluctant participant.
“My first reaction was to sit down and hide,” he said.
But the Americans’ bravery changed his mind.
“My thought was, ‘OK, I’m probably going to die anyway, so let’s go,’ ” Norman said.
Once El Khazzani was knocked out, the brave passengers tied up his legs and hands.
A fifth passenger got into the fray and was wounded as he worked to disarm the madly thrashing gunman.
“In the aftermath, we saw that a man’s throat had been split and he was bleeding profusely,” Sadler recalled.
Stone, an airman first class, stemmed the passenger’s bleeding and saved his life.
“Spencer, who has some paramedic training, just clogged up his neck so he wouldn’t die,” Sadler said. “This is all in the midst of Spencer bleeding profusely himself. It was just really heroic of him to do something like that.”
In a stroke of life-saving luck, the gunman’s weapons malfunctioned.
“He had pulled the trigger on the AK, the primer was just faulty, so the gun didn’t go off, luckily,” Skarlatos said. “And he didn’t know how to fix it, which is also very lucky.”
The handgun was also unloaded.
“There was no magazine in it, so he either dropped it accidentally or didn’t load it properly,” Skarlatos said.
That gave Stone time to disarm El Khazzani .
“If anyone would have gotten shot, it would have been Spencer for sure,” Skarlatos said.
Grainy video shot on Sadler’s cellphone moments after the attack show Stone with his shirt off, his neck and back covered in blood, holding the injured passenger beneath him.
The gunman, wearing white jeans and sneakers, is tied up on the ground, not moving.
“Dude, I tried to shoot him,” said one of the Americans.
Not everyone aboard was a hero.
Jean-Hugues Anglade, a well-known French actor, was with his two children and his partner.
He accused train staffers of “inhuman abandonment” for locking themselves in a baggage compartment and leaving passengers to deal with the gunman alone.
“We heard passengers screaming in English: He’s shooting! He’s shooting! He has a Kalashnikov!” Anglade told French magazine Paris Match.
“Staff members ran…then locked themselves [into a safe compartment].”
“The gunman was coming towards us, he was determined. I thought it was the end, we were going to die, he was going to kill us,” he said.
The actor madly searched for a way to escape.
“I broke the window to pull the alarm to stop the Thalys,” he explained. “Glass badly nicked my middle finger to the bone, and the engines idled. But we were still trapped inside.”
Anglade said he and his family desperately sought help from the train staffers in the baggage hold.
“We had our backs to the wall, glued to each other against the metallic motorized doors. We were banging above, we shouted for staff to let us in, we would yell, ‘Open!’…But it was in vain…Nobody responded. Radio silence,” he declared.
“This abandonment, much distress, loneliness — it was terrible and unbearable! It was for us, inhuman. The minutes seemed like hours. I protected my children with my whole body, continually repeating that everything was fine,” said the actor, who starred in the 1986 film “Blue Betty.”
Top Thalys executive Agnès Ogier denied that the train’s staff was running away. Instead, she claimed the agents saved a number of passengers and alerted the driver to stop the train.
“One of our controllers was near the gunman. He felt the bullets whizzing by. He took the five or six passengers near him to the baggage car,” Ogier said.
The throat-stabbing victim and a French-American dual citizen who suffered gunshot wounds are recovering from their injuries.
Doctors at a hospital in the French city of Lille operated on Stone’s sliced hand. He emerged from the hospital all smiles late Saturday. His hand was in a cast, and there was tape across his eyebrow.
Obama called the three Americans shortly after Stone’s release to congratulate them on their courage.
“It is clear that their heroic actions may have prevented a far worse tragedy,” a White House official said in a statement.
French President Hollande called and thanked the Americans and will meet them for dinner on Monday.
The mayor of Arras, the town where the train stopped after the carnage, awarded the trio bravery medals.
Stone’s mother cried as she spoke of her son to The Telegraph of London.
“It is absolutely in his character,” said Joyce Eskel from her home in California. “It didn’t surprise me at all. It makes me nervous at times, but I am thankful that he is that way.”
Anglade was also grateful.
“We were stuck in the wrong place with the right people. It’s miraculous,” he told French TV.
But the Americans stayed humble about their courageous actions.
“We just did what we had to do. You either run away or fight. We chose to fight and got lucky and didn’t die,” Skarlatos said.
El Khazzani ’s name is on security watchlists in France, Belgium and Spain due to his links to extremist terror organizations.
He was identified by fingerprints taken during a Spanish drug investigation back in 2013. In February 2014, Spanish authorities warned French anti-terror police that El Khazzani might enter France.
The Telegraph reported that in 2014 El Khazzani also travelled to Syria where he received military training.
It’s believed he moved to Belgium from Spain last year.
French police now have 96 hours to question the suspect, and Belgian authorities also began an anti-terror investigation into the incidence.
El Khazzani denied any terrorist links in preliminary interviews with police, saying he was only trying to rob passengers on the train.
With Post Wires