The Kill List Read online

  The defeated Taliban, being Afghans, had somewhere to go: their native villages. They could slip away and disappear. But the al-Qaeda fighters were Arabs, Uzbeks and, fiercest of all, Chechens. They spoke no Pashto, the ordinary Afghans hated them; they could only surrender or die fighting. Almost all chose the second.

  The American command responded to the tip with a small-scale project called Operation Anaconda and it went to the Navy SEALs. Three huge Chinooks full of SEALs took off for the valley, which was thought to be empty.

  Coming in to land, the leading helicopter was nose up, tail down, with its ramp doors open, a few feet off the ground, when the hidden al-Qaedists opened up. One rocket-propelled grenade was so close, it went straight through the fuselage without exploding. It did not have enough time in the air to arm itself. So it went in one side, missed everyone and went out the other, leaving two windy holes.

  What did the damage was the raking burst of machine-gun fire from the nest among the snowy rocks. It also managed to miss everyone inside, but it wrecked the controls as it ripped through the flight deck. With a few minutes of genius flying, the pilot hauled the dying Chinook aloft and nursed it for three miles until he could crash-land it on safer ground. The other two behind him followed.

  But one SEAL, Chief Petty Officer Neil Roberts, who had unhitched his tether line, slipped on a patch of hydraulic fluid and slithered out the back. He landed unhurt in a mass of al-Qaeda. SEALs never leave a mate, dead or alive, on the field. Having landed, they came storming back for CPO Roberts. As they did so, they called for help. The battle of Shah-i-Kot had begun. It lasted four days. It took the lives of Neil Roberts and six other Americans.

  Three units were near enough to respond to the call. A troop of British SBS came from one direction and the SAD unit from another. The largest group to come to help was a battalion from the 75th Ranger Regiment.

  The weather was freezing, way below zero. Flurries of driven snow stung the eyes. How the Arabs had survived the winter up there was anyone’s guess. But they had and they were prepared to die to the last man. They took no prisoners and did not expect to be taken. According to witnesses later, they came out of crevices in the rocks, unseen caves and hidden machine-gun nests.

  Any veteran will confirm that battles quickly descend into chaos, and Shah-i-Kot was faster than most. Units became separated from the main body and individuals from the unit. Kit Carson found himself alone with the ice and driven snow.

  He saw another American—the headdress, helmet against turban, gave the identity away—about forty yards distant, also alone. A robed figure came out of the ground and fired an RPG at the camouflaged soldier. This time the grenade did go off. It did not hit the American but exploded at his feet, and Carson watched him fall.

  He took out the rocketeer with his carbine. Two more appeared and charged him, screaming, “Allahu-akhbar.” He dropped them both, the second one barely six feet from the end of his barrel. The American, when he reached him, was alive but in a bad way. A white-hot shard from the rocket casing had sliced into his left ankle, virtually severing it. The foot in its combat boot was hanging by a sinew, tendon and some tendrils of flesh. The bone was gone. The man was in the first no-pain, stunned shock that precedes the agony.

  The smocks of both men were crusted with snow, but Carson could make out the flash of a Ranger. He tried to raise someone on his radio but met only static. Easing off the wounded man’s backpack, he pulled out the first aid wallet and shoved the entire dose of morphine into the exposed calf.

  The Ranger began to feel the pain, and his teeth gritted. Then the morphine hit him and he slumped, semiconscious. Carson knew they were both going to die if they stayed there. Visibility was twenty yards between gusts. He could see no one. Heaving the injured Ranger on his back in a fireman’s lift, he began to march.

  He was walking over the worst terrain on Earth; football-sized smooth boulders under a foot of snow, every one a leg breaker. He was carrying his own one hundred and eighty pounds, plus his sixty-pound pack. Plus another one hundred and eighty pounds of Ranger—he had left the Ranger’s pack behind. Plus carbine, grenades, ammunition and water.

  Later, he had no idea how far he slogged out of that lethal valley. At one point the morphine in the Ranger lost effect, so he lowered the man and pumped in his own supply. After an age, he heard the whump-whump of an engine. With fingers that had ceased to feel anything, he pulled out his maroon flare, tore it open with his teeth and held it high, pointing it at the noise.

  The crew of the Casevac Black Hawk told him later the flare went so near the cabin they thought they were being shot at. Then they looked down, and in a lull saw two snowmen beneath them, one slumped, the other waving. It was too dangerous to settle. The Black Hawk hovered two feet off the snow as two corpsmen with a gurney strapped the injured Ranger down and pulled him aboard. His companion used his last strength to climb aboard, then passed out.

  The Black Hawk took them to Kandahar, now a huge U.S. air base, then still a work in progress. But it had a basic hospital. The Ranger was taken away to triage and intensive care. Kit Carson presumed he would never see him again. The next day the Ranger, horizontal and sedated, was on a long haul to USAF Ramstein, Germany, where the base hospital is world-class.

  As it happened, the Ranger, who was Lieutenant Colonel Dale Curtis, lost his left foot. There was simply no way it could be saved. After a neat amputation, little more than completing the job the grenade had started, he was left with a stump, a prosthetic, a limp, a walking cane and the prospect of a looming end to his career as a Ranger. When he was fit to travel, he was flown home to Walter Reed Hospital outside Washington for post-combat therapy and the fitting of the artificial foot.

  Major Kit Carson did not see him again for years. The CIA chief at Kandahar sought orders from higher up, and Carson was flown to Dubai, where the Agency has a huge presence. He was the first eyewitness out of the Shah-i-Kot, and there was a lengthy debriefing with a gallery of senior brass. They included Marine, Navy and CIA interrogators.

  At the officers’ club, he met a man of similar age to himself, a Navy commander on a posting to Dubai, which also has a U.S. naval base. They had dinner. The commander revealed he was from NCIS, the Naval Criminal Investigative Service.

  “Why not transfer to us when you get home?” he asked.

  “A policeman?” said Carson. “I don’t think so. But thanks.”

  “We’re bigger than you think,” said the commander. “It’s not just sailors overstaying shore leave. I’m talking major crime, tracking down criminals who have stolen millions, ten major Navy bases in Arabic-speaking locations. It would be a challenge.”

  It was that word which convinced Carson. The Marines come within the ambit of the U.S. Navy. He would only be moving within the larger service. On his return to the U.S. he presumed he would be back to analyzing Arabic material in No. 2 Building at Langley. He applied for NCIS and they snatched him.

  It got him out of the CIA and halfway back into the embrace of the Corps. It secured a posting to Portsmouth, Virginia, where its large Naval Medical Center quickly found a position for Susan to join him.

  Portsmouth also enabled him to pay frequent visits to his mother, who was in therapy for the breast cancer that took her life three years later. Finally, when his father Gen. Carson retired the same year that he became a widower, he could be close to him as well. The general withdrew to a retirement village outside Virginia Beach, where he could play his beloved golf and attend veterans’ evenings with other Marines retired along that stretch of coast.

  Carson spent four years with NCIS and was credited with tracking down and bringing to justice ten major runaways with crimes to answer for. In 2006, he secured his transfer back to the Marine Corps with the rank of lieutenant colonel and was posted to Camp Lejeune, North Carolina. It was while motoring across Virginia to join him that Susan, his wife, was killed by a drunk driver who lost control and rammed her head-on.

 
; PRESENT DAY

  The third assassination in a month was that of a senior police officer in Orlando, Florida. He was leaving his home on a bright spring morning when he was stabbed through the heart from behind as he stooped to open his car door. Even dying, he drew his sidearm and fired twice, killing his assailant instantly.

  The ensuing inquiry identified the young killer as of Somali birth, also a refugee granted asylum on compassionate grounds and working with the city sanitation department.

  Fellow workers testified that he had changed over a two-month period, becoming withdrawn and remote, surly and critical of the American lifestyle. He had ended up being ostracized by the crew on his garbage truck, as he had become so difficult to get on with. They put his mood change down to homesickness for his native land.

  It was not. It was caused, as the raid on his lodgings revealed, by a conversion to ultra-Jihadism, deriving, so it seemed, from his obsession with a series of online sermons that his landlady heard coming from his room. A full report went to the Orlando FBI office and thence to the Hoover Building.

  Here the story had ceased to cause surprise. The same tale, of conversion in privacy after many hours listening to the online sermons of a Mideast preacher speaking impeccable English and an unpredictable, out-of-nowhere murder of a local notable citizen, had been reported four times in the U.S. and, to the Bureau’s knowledge, twice in the United Kingdom.

  Checks had already been made with the CIA, the Counter-Terrorism Center and the Department of Homeland Security. Every U.S. agency even remotely dealing with Islamist terrorism had been informed and had logged the file, but none could respond with helpful intelligence. Who was this man? Where did he come from? Where did he record his broadcasts? He was only tagged as the Preacher and began to climb the lists of HVTs—the high-value targets.

  The U.S. has a diaspora of well over a million Muslims, many first generation via their parents from the Middle East and Central Asia, and that was a huge pool of potential converts to the Preacher’s ultra-harsh Jihadist sermons and their relentless call for converts to strike just one single blow against the Great Satan before joining Allah in eternal bliss.

  Eventually, the Preacher came to be discussed at the Tuesday-morning briefings in the Oval Office and he went onto the kill list.

  • • •

  People cope with grief in different ways. For some, only wailing hysteria will prove sincerity. For others, a quiet collapse into weeping helplessness in public is the response. But there are those who take their hurt away to a private place, like an animal his injury.

  They grieve alone, unless there is another relative or companion to hold close, and share their tears with the wall. Kit Carson visited his father at his retirement home, but his posting was at Lejeune and he could not stay long.

  Alone in his empty house on base, he threw himself into his work and drove his body to the limit with lonely cross-country runs and sessions of gymnasium workout until the physical pain blunted the inner hurt, until even the base medical officer told him to ease up.

  He was one of the founder thinkers of the Combat Hunter program, whereby Marines would go on a course to teach them tracking and manhunting techniques in wilderness, rural and urban environments. The theme was: Never become the hunted, always stay the hunter. But while he was at Portsmouth and Lejeune, great events were taking place.

  Nine/eleven had triggered a sea change in the American armed forces, and governmental attitudes to any even remotely conceivable possible threat to the U.S. and national alertness inched its way toward paranoia. The result was an explosive enlargement of the world of “intelligence.” The original sixteen intel-gathering agencies of the U.S. ballooned to over a thousand.

  By 2012, accurate estimates put the number of Americans with top secret clearance at 850,000. Over 1,200 government organizations and 2,000 private companies were working on top secret projects related to counterterrorism and homeland security at over 10,000 locations across the country.

  The aim back in 2001 was that never again would the basic intel agencies refuse to share what they had with one another, and thus let nineteen fanatics bent on mass slaughter slip through the cracks. But the outcome a decade later, at a cost that broke the economy, was much the same as the situation of 2001. The sheer size and complexity of the self-defense machine created some fifty thousand top secret reports a year, far too many for anyone to read, let alone understand, analyze, synthesize or collate. So they were just filed.

  The most fundamental increase was in Joint Special Ops Command, or J-SOC. This body had existed for years before 9/11, but as a low-profile and principally defensive structure. Two men would convert it into the largest, most aggressive and most lethal private army in the world.

  The word “private” is justified because it is the personal instrument of the President and of no other. It can conduct covert war without seeking any sanction from Congress; its multibillion-dollar budget is acquired without ever disturbing the Appropriations Committee, and it can kill you without ruffling the even tenor of the Attorney General’s office. It is all top secret.

  The first transformer of J-SOC was Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld. This ruthless Washington insider was resentful of the power and privileges of the CIA. Under its charter, the Agency needed to be answerable only to the President, not Congress. With its SAD units, it could conduct covert and lethal operations abroad on the Director’s say-so. That was power, real power, and Secretary Rumsfeld was determined to have it. But the Pentagon is very much subject to Congress and its limitless capacity for interference.

  Rumsfeld needed a weapon outside congressional oversight if he was ever to rival George Tenet, Director of the CIA. A completely transformed J-SOC became that weapon.

  With the agreement of President George W. Bush, J-SOC expanded and expanded, in size, budget and powers. It absorbed all the Special Forces of the state. They included Team 6 of the SEALs (who would later kill Osama bin Laden); the Delta Force, or D boys, drawn from the Green Berets; the 75th Ranger Regiment; the Air Force’s Special Ops Aviation Regiment (the Night Stalkers’ long-range helicopters) and others. It also gobbled up TOSA.

  In the summer of 2003, while Iraq was still blazing from end to end and few were looking elsewhere, two things happened that completed the reinvention of J-SOC. A new commander was appointed, in the person of General Stanley McChrystal. If anyone thought J-SOC would continue to play a largely domestic Homeland role, that was the end of that. And in September 2003, Secretary Rumsfeld secured the President’s agreement and signed the EXORD.

  The Executive Order was an eighty-page document, and within its pages, buried deep, was something like a huge Presidential Finding, the highest decree in America, but without specific terms. The EXORD virtually said do what you want.

  About that time, a limping Ranger colonel named Dale Curtis was finishing his one-year, post-injury paid sabbatical and convalescence. He had mastered the prosthetic on his left stump with such skill that the limp was virtually undetectable. But the 75th Ranger Regiment was not for men on prosthetics. His career appeared over.

  But like the SEALs, a Ranger does not leave another Ranger in the lurch. Gen. McChrystal was also a Ranger, from the 75th, and he heard of Col. Curtis. He had just taken command of the entire J-SOC and that included TOSA, whose commander was retiring. The post of commanding officer did not have a field-action posting. It could be a desk job. It was a very short meeting, and Col. Curtis jumped at the chance.

  There is an old saying in the covert world that if you want to keep something secret, do not try to hide it because some reptile from the press will sniff it out. Give it a harmless name and a thoroughly boring job description. TOSA stands for Technical Operations Support Activity.

  Not even “Agency” or “Administration” or “Authority.” A support activity could mean changing the lightbulbs or eliminating tiresome Third World politicians. In this case it is more likely to mean the second.

  TOSA existe
d long before 9/11. It hunted down, among others, the Colombian cocaine lord Pablo Escobar. That is what it does. It is the manhunter arm called upon when everyone else is baffled. It has only two hundred and fifty staff and lives in a compound in northern Virginia disguised as a toxic-chemical research facility. No one visits.

  To keep it even more secret, it keeps changing its name. It has been simply the Activity, but also Grantor Shadow, Centra Spike, Torn Victor, Cemetery Wind and Gray Fox. The last title was liked enough to be retained only as the code name of the commander. Upon his appointment, Col. Dale Curtis vanished and became Gray Fox. Later, it became Intelligence Support Activity, but when the word “Intelligence” began to attract attention, it changed again—to TOSA.

  Gray Fox had held his post for six years when, in 2009, his chief manhunter retired, took a headful of really top secrets and went off to a log cabin in Montana to hunt steelhead trout. Col. Curtis could hunt only from behind a desk, but a computer and every access code in the U.S. defense machine is quite a head start. After a week, a face came up on the screen that jolted him. Lt. Col. Christopher “Kit” Carson—the man who had carried him out of the Shah-i-Kot.

  He checked the career list. Combat soldier, scholar, Arabist, linguist, manhunter. He reached for his desk phone.

  Kit Carson did not want to leave the Corps for the second time, but for the second time the argument was fought and won over his head.

  A week later, he walked into the office of Gray Fox in the low-rise office block in the center of a woods in northern Virginia. He noted the man who limped as he walked to greet him, the cane propped in the corner, the 75th Ranger tabs.

  “Remember me?” said the colonel. Kit Carson thought back to the freezing winds, the boulders beneath the combat boots, the gut-tearing weight on his back, the let-me-die-here-and-now exhaustion.