The Kill List Read Online Free Page A

inside Afghanistan. And the rumor was: We are going to invade.
    The details were sparse but accurate on a few points. The Navy would be offshore in strength in the Arabian Gulf, delivering massive air power. Pakistan would cooperate, but grudgingly and with dozens of conditions. The American feet on the ground would be Special Forces only. And their British equivalents would be with them.
    The CIA, apart from its spies, agents and analysts, had one division that involved itself in what in the trade is called active measures, a euphemism for the messy business of killing people.
    Kit Carson made his pitch and he made it strong. He confronted the head of the Special Activities Division and told him bluntly: You need me. Sir. I am no use sitting in a coop like a battery hen. I may not speak Pashto or Dari, but our real enemies are bin Laden’s terrorists—Arabs all. I can listen to them. I can interrogate prisoners, read their written instructions and notes. You need me with you in Afghanistan; no one needs me here.
    He had made an ally. He got his transfer. When President Bush made his announcement of invasion on October 7th, the advance units of the SAD were on their way to meet the anti-Taliban Northern Alliance. Kit Carson went with them.

2
    T he battle of Shah-i-Kot started badly and then went downhill. Maj. Kit Carson of the U.S. Marines, attached to the SAD, should have been on his way home when his unit was summoned to help out.
    He had already been at Mazar-e-Sharif when the Taliban prisoners revolted and the Uzbeks and Tajiks of the Northern Alliance mowed them down. He had seen fellow SAD Johnny “Mike” Spann caught by the Talib and beaten to death. From the far side of the vast compound, he had watched the British Special Boat Service men rescue Spann’s partner, Dave Tyson, from a similar fate.
    Then came the storming surge south to overrun the old Soviet air base at Bagram and take Kabul. He had missed the fighting in the Tora Bora massif when the Americans’ paid-for (but not enough) Afghan warlord had betrayed them and let Osama bin Laden and his entourage of guards slip over the border into Pakistan.
    Then, in late February, word came from Afghan sources that there were still a few diehards hanging on in the valley of Shah-i-Kot, up in Paktia Province. Once again, the intel was rubbish. There was not a handful; there were hundreds of them.
    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,