The Kill List Read Online Free

in silence, over and over again.
    Unlike those around him, he knew Arabic, the Arab world and the complexities of the religion of Islam, subscribed to by over a billion of the planet’s inhabitants.
    He recalled Professor Abdulaziz, gentle, courtly, serving tea and prophesying a long dark night for the world of Islam. And others. He listened to the rising buzz of rage around him as the details came through. Nineteen Arabs, including fifteen Saudis, had done this. He remembered the beaming smiles of the shopkeepers of al-Jubail when he greeted them in their own tongue. The same people?
    At dawn the entire regiment was summoned on parade to listen to the regimental commander. His message was bleak. There was now a war on, and the Corps would, as ever, defend the nation whenever, wherever and however it would be called upon.
    Major Kit Carson thought bitterly of the wasted years, when attack after attack on the U.S. in Africa and the Middle East had led to one-week-long outrage from the politicians but no radical recognition of the sheer size of the onslaught being prepared in a chain of Afghan caves.
    There is simply no way of overestimating the trauma that 9/11 inflicted on the U.S. and her people. Everything changed and would never be the same again. In twenty-four hours, the giant finally woke up.
    There would be retribution, Carson knew, and he wanted to be part of that. But he was stuck on a Japanese island with years of the posting yet to serve.
    But the event that changed America forever also changed the life of Kit Carson. What he could not know was that back in Washington a very senior officer with the CIA, a veteran of the Cold War named Hank Crampton, was scouring the records of the Army, Navy, Air Force and Marines for a rare type of man. The operation was called the Scrub, and he was searching for serving officers who knew Arabic.
    In his office at the No. 2 Building, CIA compound, Langley, Virginia, the records were fed into the computers, which scanned them far faster than the human eye could read or the human brain digest. Names and careers flashed up, most to be discounted, a few retained.
    One name flashed up with a pulsing star in the top corner of the screen. Marine major, Olmsted Scholarship, Monterey Language School, two years Cairo, bilingual in Arabic. Where is he? asked Crampton. Okinawa, said the computer. Well, we need him here, said Crampton.
    It took time and a bit of shouting. The Corps resisted, but the Agency had the edge. The Director of the CIA answers only to the President, and DCI George Tenet had George Bush’s ear. The Oval Office overruled the Marine protests. Maj. Carson was summarily seconded to the CIA. He did not want to swap services, but at least it got him out of Okinawa, and he vowed to return to the Corps when he could.
    On September 20, 2001, a Starlifter rose above Okinawa, heading for California. In the rear sat a Marine major. He knew the Corps would take care of Susan, bring her later to accommodations on the Marine base at Quantico, where he could be near her at Langley.
    From California, Maj. Carson was shipped on to Andrews Air Force Base outside Washington and thus presented himself to CIA headquarters, as per orders.
    There were interviews, tests in Arabic, a compulsory change into civilian clothes and finally a small office in No. 2 Building, miles from the senior ranks of the Agency on the top floors of the original No. 1 Building.
    He was given a pile of intercepts of broadcasts in Arabic to peruse and comment. He chafed. This was a job for the National Security Agency over at Fort Meade on the Baltimore road up in Maryland. They were the listeners, the eavesdroppers, the code breakers. He had not joined the Corps to analyze newscasts from Radio Cairo.
    Then a rumor swept the building. Mullah Omar, the weird leader of the Taliban government of Afghanistan, was refusing to give up the culprits of 9/11. Osama bin Laden and his entire al-Qaeda movement would remain safe