Frederick Forsyth: The Kill List

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.

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.