Frederick Forsyth: The Kill List

To all those who helped me with the information contained in this book, my grateful thanks. As so often, some half would prefer not to be revealed. But to those who live in the light and to those who work in the shadows, you know who you are, and have my gratitude.

In the dark and secret heart of Washington, there is a short and very covert list. It contains the names of terrorists who have been deemed so dangerous to the United States, her citizens and interests, that they have been condemned to death without any attempt at arrest, trial or any due process. It is called the kill list.

Every Tuesday morning in the Oval Office, the kill list is considered for possible amendment by the President and six men; never more, never less. Among them are the Director of the CIA and the four-star general commanding the world’s biggest and most dangerous private army. This is J-SOC, which is supposed not to exist.

On a cold morning one early spring, a new name was added to the kill list. He was so elusive that even his true name was not known, and the huge machine of American counterterrorism had no picture of his face. Like Anwar al-Awlaki, the American/Yemini fanatic who preached hate sermons on the Internet, who had once been on the kill list and who was wiped out by a drone-launched missile in North Yemen in 2011, the new addition also preached online. So powerful were his sermons that young Muslims in the diaspora were converting to ultra-radical Islam and committing murders in its name.

Like Awlaki, the new addition also delivered in perfect English. Without a name, he was known simply as the Preacher.

The assignment was given to J-SOC whose CO passed it down to TOSA, a body so obscure that ninety-eight percent of serving U.S. officers have never heard of it.

In fact, TOSA is the very small department, based in North Virginia, tasked with hunting down those terrorists who seek to hide themselves from American retributive justice.

That afternoon, the director of TOSA, known in all official communications as Gray Fox, walked into the office of his senior manhunter and laid a sheet upon his desk. It simply bore the words “The Preacher. Identify, Locate, Destroy.”

Under this was the signature of the commander in chief, the President. That made the paper a Presidential Executive Order, an EXORD.

The man who stared at the order was an enigmatic lieutenant colonel in the U.S. Marine Corps of forty-four who also, inside and outside the building, was known only by a code. He was called the Tracker.

If he had been asked, Jerry Dermott could have put his hand on his heart and sworn that he had never knowingly hurt anyone in his life and did not deserve to die. But that did not save him.

It was mid-March, and in Boise, Idaho, winter was grudgingly loosening its grip. But there was snow on the high peaks around the state capital, and the wind that came down from those peaks was still bitter. Those walking on the streets were huddled in warm coats as the state congressman came out of the Legislative Services Office at 700 West Jefferson Street.

He emerged from the Capitol’s grand entrance and walked down the steps from the sandstone walls toward the street, where his car was parked in readiness. He nodded in his usual genial way at the police officer atop the steps by the portico door and noted that Joe, his faithful driver of many years, was coming around the limousine to open the rear door. He took no notice of the muffled figure that rose from a bench down the sidewalk and began to move.

The figure was clothed in a long dark overcoat, unbuttoned at the front but held closed by hands inside. There was some kind of fretted skullcap on the head, and the only odd thing, had anyone been looking, which they were not, was that beneath the coat there were no jeans-clad legs but some kind of a white dress. It would later be established the garment was an Arab dishdash.

Jerry Dermott was almost at the open car door when a voice called, “Congressman.” He turned to the call. The last thing he saw on Earth was a swarthy face staring at him, eyes somehow vacant as if staring at something else far away. The overcoat fell open and the barrels of the sawed-off shotgun rose from where they had dangled inside the fabric.

The police would later establish that both barrels were fired simultaneously and that the cartridges were loaded with heavy-gauge buckshot, not the tiny granules for birds. The range was around ten feet.

Due to the shortness of the sawn barrels, the shot spread was immediately wide. Some of the steel balls went past the congressman on both sides, and a few hit Joe, causing him to turn and reel back. He had a sidearm under his jacket, but his hands went to his face and he never used it.

The officer atop the steps saw it all, drew his revolver and came running down. The assailant threw both hands in the air, the right hand gripping the shotgun, and screamed something. The officer could not know whether the second barrel had been used and he fired three times. At twenty feet, and practiced with his piece, he could hardly miss.

His three slugs took the shouting man in the center mass of the chest and threw him backward. He hit the trunk of the limousine, bounced off, fell forward and died facedown in the gutter. Figures appeared from the portico doorway, saw the two bodies down, the chauffeur staring at his bleeding hands, the policeman standing over the assailant, gun double-hand-gripped, pointing downward. They ran back inside to call for backup.

Two bodies were removed to the city morgue and Joe to the hospital for attention to the three pellets that had lodged in his face. The congressman was dead, chest penetrated by over twenty steel balls that had entered his heart and lungs. So also the assailant.

The latter, stripped naked on the morgue slab, gave no clue to his identity. There were no personal papers and, oddly, no body hair save his beard. But his face in the evening papers yielded two informants. The dean of a college on the edge of town identified a student of Jordanian parentage and the landlady of a boardinghouse recognized one of her lodgers.

Detectives ransacking the dead man’s room took away many books in Arabic and his personal laptop computer. The latter was downloaded in the police technical lab. It revealed something no one in the Boise police headquarters had ever seen before. The hard drive contained a series of lectures, or sermons, by a masked figure, staring at the screen with blazing eyes and preaching in fluent English.

The message was brutal and simple. The True Believer should undergo his own personal conversion from heresy to Muslim truth. He should, within the confines of his own soul, confiding in and trusting no one, convert to Jihad and become a true and loyal soldier of Allah. Then he should seek out some notable person in the service of the Great Satan and send him to hell, then die as a shahid , a martyr, and ascend to dwell in Allah’s paradise forever. There were a score of these sermons, all with the same message.

The police passed the evidence to the Boise office of the FBI, who passed the entire file to the J. Edgar Hoover Building in Washington. At the national HQ of the Bureau, there was no surprise. They had heard of the Preacher before.

Mrs. Lucy Carson went into labor on 8 November and was taken straight to the natal wing of the Naval Hospital at Camp Pendleton, California, where she and her husband were based. Two days later, her first, and as it turned out only, son was born.