No one talked. It was unsaid that the quieter we did this, the safer. A SWAT agent carved insulation off the bottom of the truck’s rear door and everybody got to the side or down as a probe slid under the door. Not too far, maybe a foot in, then it sat there reading for infrared but there was just too much heat from the truck cab to know for sure. A video camera with a light and a long cable replaced it. We backed away as the cable spooled out. We hunkered down and I thought about Beatty in the seconds before the light lit up the interior cargo area.
A man lay motionless on the truck’s empty bed. There was gear and a backpack that could hold a bomb. The probe slid closer. Close enough for me, yet I hesitated as I tried to make sense of what we were seeing. When it hit me, I said, “That’s Garod Hurin, the bomb maker. Looks like they were holding him.”
“Got it,” somebody said. “What’s in the backpack?”
“I can see into it. It’s empty, and there’s no workspace, not even a chair. They locked him in there. Maybe they wanted to see everything work. Let’s open it up. I’ll go in. I’ll recheck the backpack, so let me go first. But I’m not worried. I can see inside it from here.”
The doors were opened and a robot lifted up and in. It checked the backpack before I clambered up with one of the SWAT guys. It was like climbing into an oven. Hard to breathe, and the heat from the metal truck bed came right through my shoes.
Yet Hurin still had a pulse. We pulled him out, lowered him, and two paramedics made a hard run at saving him. A hypodermic needle punched in as a final effort to stimulate his heart. It failed, and the CPR that followed failed.
“All yours,” one of the paramedics said. “We’ve got someone else with a gunshot wound that needs help. This one here is gone, dude.”
I knelt. I talked to Hurin, but I was talking to a corpse. Drool and blood had spooled from the sides of his mouth. His bowels had released and he stank. The backpack was empty and one of the SWAT guys and I searched his body, and then the truck bed again. We didn’t find anything—no laptop, no secret notebook, no phone with addresses and numbers, nothing, not even ID. When I climbed back down, I leaned over him. His eyes stared up at the sky. He had a thin goatee and artful sideburns. He could have been a thirty-something in a plaid shirt and jeans waiting in line in an upscale coffee shop. Nothing in his look said bomb maker. I wanted it to, but it wasn’t there. He could have been anyone. There was something frightening in that, but I didn’t linger on it.
We left the body on the pavement. A photographer recorded him from all angles, then stepped over him. I could have covered him before leaving. Someone bigger than me might have, but I didn’t. I left him like trash.
Two trucks had blocked the northbound lanes, same as here. Thirteen civilians, five Nevada Highway Patrol officers, including two in the downed spotter plane, and five terrorists died in the firefight there. Seven civilians and thirteen terrorists, including Hurin, died on this side. A trucker was credited with preventing more deaths by exchanging fire with the terrorists, wounding one and giving trapped drivers a chance to escape on foot. A cop told me later that same trucker three weeks ago had threatened his estranged wife with the same gun.
Two wounded terrorists, one from the northbound blockade and the other the man the trucker shot, were at Creech Air Force Base receiving medical care. Neither spoke English. One said he’d crossed from Mexico three days ago. No one had said it publicly yet, but in the Bureau we were shocked by how many terrorist actors there were. ID’ing them would be a priority.
In Pahrump, ten pounds of C-4 was recovered from the warehouse. I wasn’t there for that. Venuti and Thorpe wanted me at the office. I passed on a helicopter ride out and didn’t leave the highway with a couple of bomb techs I knew until after finding Beatty’s remains. I made sure they were covered and marked. I walked one of the ERT over and showed her how I’d identified him.
“He was with them, right?” she asked.
“No, he was one hundred percent with us.”
“One hundred?”
“One hundred. He stopped two of the three drones. He gave himself for us.”
She looked puzzled by that, and it tipped me to the early narrative. I got more as I talked with Venuti on my phone on the ride back to Vegas.
“The media is making you a hero, Grale.”
“But you’ll fix that.”
Venuti laughed, but it was a laugh of relief. Truth was, Venuti would fix it, no question. But we didn’t go there. We moved on to Hurin.