by Kirk Russell
My shot caught him liver-high and he sprayed bullets off to his left as he sat down. But he wasn’t quite done. Like the first man, he slowly stood as if making some sort of statement. My next shot puckered his shirt just beneath his sternum. “Try that,” I said.
When his legs collapsed, I picked up my phone. Venuti was agitated, high energy, and I was jittery. My hand holding the phone shook.
“There’s a blockade like yours, but without drones, stopping northbound traffic. A handheld missile there brought down the Nevada Highway Patrol spotter plane. They’re holding all aircraft except our SWAT.”
“I got the second shooter. Hold on, Beatty’s calling me.”
“Assume he’s with them. Do not give him anything.”
I switched to Beatty’s call.
“Jeremy, where are you?”
Beatty’s response broke up.
“Say again.”
Now his voice was clearer, and I could tell he had me on speakerphone.
“I’m coming hard up the southbound side of 95. Where are you?”
“On the north with a good view of the southbound lanes. Three drones are nose to tail out in front of an 18-wheeler. Two have their wings on, and the last one is almost there. Same drones you were flying.”
Beatty asked, “What do you think the target is?”
“Creech.”
“We can’t let that happen.”
“Creech knows. They’re taking action. You worked years there. Does Creech have a way to shoot them down?”
Beatty didn’t answer right away, and when he did his voice was low and quieter. I could hear him, but it was as if he’d taken a step back.
“They do and they don’t,” he said. “These will come in low and fast.”
“Where are you? There’s a sniper on top of the trailer of that semi. Our SWAT squad is airborne and will deal with him, so hang back. Keep your truck away. Tell me how else we can disable these drones. Are they operating them from the truck? I see two people in the truck cab.”
“Those are the pilots.”
“I’ll try to put shots through the truck cab windshield.”
“I see it all now,” Beatty said.
When I turned and looked down the highway, I saw his truck, small but coming fast.
“Pull over and talk to me about how we disable these.”
“Is your SWAT team coming?”
“They’re coming. Do they target the truck not the drones? These things may get in the air before they get here.”
I lifted the rifle to take a shot at the cab, and the sniper almost got me. The bullet sounded like a loud bumblebee going by. I ducked and told Beatty, “Definitely two in the cab.”
“Then that’s it.”
“What’s it?”
There was a pause and I heard Beatty talking as if to Laura and then himself. I kept my head down but twisted and watched his pickup closing. When Beatty spoke again, his voice was even and clear.
“You see the lead drone rolling, right, Grale?”
“I see it and I’m still trying to get a shot at the truck cab without getting killed.”
“I can’t let this happen,” he said, and only then did I understand and yell into my phone, “Pull over! We’ve called Creech. They know. Our SWAT copters will get here, we’ll take out the cab.”
“Your SWAT isn’t here.”
“Creech will shoot them down.”
“It’s not that easy.”
“Jeremy! Jeremy, listen. I need your help!”
“You’re going to get it.”
Beatty centered on the two highway lanes. His engine roared as he passed by and the first drone lifted off. The second started to roll and I sighted on the sniper whose focus now was the pickup. I heard Beatty say, “Clear my name. Give me your word.”
“Hit the brakes. Pull over. Blackhawks are on the way.”
After I squeezed the trigger, the second drone lifted off and the roof of Beatty’s pickup caught its tail. That made a hard, bright slapping sound and the drone still rose, though its left wing dropped as its shadow swept overhead. A deafening explosion came seconds later when it pinwheeled into the desert south of me.
Jeremy’s pickup hit the third drone straight on. The explosion was loud, dense, and sharp. Debris rained and clattered onto the highway and median. A big cactus to my left was cut down. The blazing chassis of Beatty’s pickup careened off the highway, flipped, and kept burning. I saw multiple bodies on the highway and the sniper lying on his side, still on the truck roof with his long gun and a pool of blood spreading around his head. I saw the cab of the truck burst into flames.
When I was sure the sniper wouldn’t be doing anything very fast, I staggered to my feet and out to the highway, and then walked through smoke with my gun ready. Down the highway I heard a firefight at the other truck. I heard sirens. I walked toward the burning cab of the truck and saw only bodies.
Jeremy was dead. I saw what he did, and yet I looked for him as if somehow he’d be alive. There was nothing left of the pickup except burning tires and chassis. Inside the semi’s cab I saw two shapes, both sitting upright and wreathed in fire that roared and was too hot to get close to.
A Blackhawk helicopter passed by fast and low, then swung around and landed. SWAT agents jumped out with guns on me, then ran past, moving on.
I went body to body and found one man alive. He was on his back but bleeding internally, his fingers tracing a distended belly as if exploring something new and interesting. I looked at his other wounds and guessed he had maybe five minutes. I couldn’t do anything for him and he just stared when I questioned him. When he lost consciousness, I walked away.
After the fire was extinguished, I looked in the truck cab at the two blackened bodies, one big enough to be the Eastern European pilot, but no way to ID either. The heat off the still-smoldering cab was enough to make you squint and more than enough to have heated the truck’s cargo bed, yet I still had hope and waited at the cargo doors as the SWAT guys approached.
“If there’s anyone in there alive, we want to keep them alive.”
54
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 bow
els 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.
“Are you certain it’s him?”
“It’s him. They’re bagging his body. He died not long after we found him. He took bad shrapnel wounds when Beatty’s pickup hit the last drone straight on and everything blew. Shrapnel perforated the side of the truck and he caught a piece in the head. My ears are still ringing from the explosion. There’s nothing left of Jeremy’s truck but the chassis. He clipped the second drone and it crashed across the highway. He hit the third straight on.”
“He switched back to our side in the end?”
“Don’t be a jerk, Dan. He was always there. You know he was always there. I was on the phone with him as he came up the highway. I couldn’t talk him out of it.”
Venuti didn’t respond to that, instead asked about my arm wound, which stung but had been cleaned and bandaged. We talked about Creech, where the drone had reached a flight trailer and killed two drone pilots who’d gone back to the trailer to retrieve gear. The explosion had destroyed the trailer and heavily damaged another. I was sorry to hear about the pilots.
“Between you and me, they disobeyed orders to go back in and get their gear,” Venuti said.
Okay, I thought, but that doesn’t change anything.
“Didn’t Creech see the drone coming?” I asked.
“It’s unclear. We know it came in very low. We have eyewitnesses in Indian Wells who saw it arrive.” Venuti paused and I knew what was coming. “Why do you think the targeting was so precise and who is it that knew which trailers were which?”
“With Google Earth and a little bit more information you can get there. It’s not that hard.”
“Here’s another question. Our agents found two middle-aged male bodies in a Dumpster at the warehouse in Pahrump. Any guesses?”
“They may be the mechanics who modified the drones.”
“Where’s Edward Bahn in all this?”
“You’re asking my opinion?”
“We’re being asked to put it together tonight.”
“He was there for money and didn’t know what was going down.”
“Where are you getting that?”
“From what Jeremy told me.”
“How is that credible?”
“Why wouldn’t it be?”
“Okay, what did Beatty the hero tell you?”
“That Bahn was pushing him hard to take ownership of hiring the drone pilots. Bahn threatened to come to us with stories of a drunken Beatty in a bar talking about getting even with the air force. He figured we would lap it up, and he was probably right.” I waited a beat and added, “Beatty sent me an audio file. I copied you. Did you listen to it?”
Instead of answering that, he said, “There are times I wonder if you’re really one of us. Bahn is dead. A helicopter crew found his body and the security pair. We’re out there now. I wish we had Beatty’s handgun to compare ballistics.”
“If it was in his truck, it can be found. I’d like to find it too, so we can finally end this bullshit talk about him. And you’re right. You don’t know it, but you’re right—he’s the only hero in this.”
“Call me when you leave the hospital. You get debriefed tonight, so go easy on any painkillers.”
“I don’t need to go to a hospital.”
“You’re going.”
At the hospital a nurse pulled cactus needles out of my forearms, and they ran me through radiology looking for a bone break before cleaning and redressing the gouge on my arm. It had cut through some muscle and went about a half-inch deep. My arm throbbed. It was tender and didn’t want to be moved. After the wound was cleaned and wrapped again, I rode the elevator up to Julia’s room.
“Uncle Paul, I’m so glad you’re okay.”
“I’m okay and I’ve got to go get debriefed, but I want you to know we’re getting you out of here tomorrow morning. We’ll go from here to your family’s house.”
When her tears started, I was sure it was about going to the house, but I was wrong.
“You got them, Uncle Paul.”
“Yeah, we got them.”
Eighteen terrorists, including the three drone pilots Beatty was training, and Garod Hurin were dead, but more than half were part of a sleeper cell in Las Vegas. A phone one of the terrorists had led to a raid on a house in Henderson and two in Vegas. That was cause for a lot of disquiet in our office, but I could catch up on that later. I went from the hospital to a debriefing that lasted until sundown. By then the media had declared it a tragedy, but an American victory.
America persevered. America fought back. The FBI had cracked the plot and prevented a significant attack that might have crippled the vital drone program. An FBI special agent named Paul Grale, whose sister and family had died in the Bar Alagara attack, was a hero. Former drone pilot Jeremy Beatty also played a role, but his involvement was under investigation. A longtime TV terrorism expert termed Beatty’s action a suicidal attempt at redemption, but the media sensed something was off and pushed to interview me. They’d gotten my home number, and Jo screened those calls when I got home.
Then I took a call from Venuti, who told me the FBI director was flying out, and a press conference was scheduled for early afternoon tomorrow.
“You need to be there. We may let the media talk with you. Are you ready for that?”
“I’m fine with it. Are you?”
“Dress for it. It’s national TV. I
t’ll probably go global. The SAC and ASAC will stand behind you with the director. It may not be appropriate, but they’re asking if your niece can be there.”
“It’s not appropriate.”
“Your call.”
“I just made it.”
“It might be healing for her.”
“It’ll be a circus.”
“Okay,” he said, but he was disappointed and the Bureau wanted the photo op of us standing together, two survivors, the young niece and the career-agent uncle. A storybook ending that I was fucking up. He huffed and stalled a little, then finished with “Paul, from all of us here, thank you. We’ll see you tomorrow.”
55
Toward midnight Jo and I ate a pizza and drank beer, sitting at the iron table by the lap pool. The night was warm. Not long after eating, Jo waded into the pool, but I just wanted to sit and be. Her hair was cut shorter than six months ago, and as she left the water it dried straight and flat against her head. Her face looked beautiful in the soft yellow light. She wrapped a towel loosely around her body, sat down close to me and gently removed the bandage on my arm. She inspected the wound and added some unneeded ointment. She didn’t need to do that, but it calmed me to feel her touch.
“Promise me you’ll keep being lucky,” she said as she rewrapped it. “How’s your head?”
“I’m okay but sorry we didn’t put it together before the drone attack.”
“You fault yourself?”
“Sure.” I paused, then said, “I’m sad about Jeremy. I was talking to him. I tried to stop him.”