Target America: A Sniper Elite Novel Read Online Free PDF Page A

three and a half million people, catering to many different corporations from all over the world and boasting the largest artificial port in North Africa. It was a modern city that had kept in touch with its cultural past, but it was not without political and religious turmoil. Since 2003, at least seventeen suicide bombers had blown themselves up there, killing more than thirty-five people and injuring well over a hundred. Most of the bombers were known to have been linked with Al Qaeda.
    Gil was waiting for a Russian contact named Sergei Zhilov. A former member of the Russian Vysotniki (Rangers), Zhilov was now a freelance operator who prowled the African continent from Casablancato Mombasa, Kenya, in search of mercenary work. The CIA had employed him shortly after the 2012 attack on the American diplomatic mission in Benghazi, Libya, to help root out Islamic terrorists in North Africa—specifically terrorists linked to a group called Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula(AQAP), an extremist organization operating predominantly out of Yemen, though it had originally formed in Saudi Arabia in direct resistance to the al-Saud monarchy (the Saudi royal family). AQAP was known to be the primary force behind the attack on the American mission in Benghazi, during which two former US Navy SEALs, Glen Doherty and Tyrone Woods, had been killed on a rooftop by mortar fire while helping defend American diplomatic personnel.
    Gil had come to Casablanca at the behest of SAD (Special Activities Division of the CIA) director Robert Pope to hunt down and kill two AQAP operatives known to be hiding within the city. Though Gil had never known Doherty or Woods, he was a fellow Navy SEAL, and he had taken their deaths personally. So when Bob Pope had offered to bring him out of retirement and put him back into the game for the purpose of eliminating AQAP insurgents, he had been unable to turn down the offer.
    Gil’s wife, Marie, had not taken his decision to go back in very well. In fact, she’d more or less kicked him out of the house because of it. She told him he could either turn down Pope’s offer or find another place to live, because she could not go back to worrying about him 24/7 whenever he was not at home.
    Gil was sickened by the thought of separation, but he just wasn’t ready to give up the life of an operator, so he had kissed her and left the house, with tears welling in his eyes.
    The CIA had not been permitted its own in-house operators since the Cold War, so at Pope’s “suggestion,” Gil was hired by a PMC (private military company) called Obsidian Optio Inc. Obsidian held security contracts with the CIA all over the world, and this made it easy for Gil to move around without drawing attention. Another benefit to being officially employed in the private sector was that he was well paid, even though he did virtually no work for Obsidian itself. In 1989 the United Nations Mercenary Convention strictly forbid governments from contracting of mercenaries; however, countries sidestepped thistechnicality by never referring to the mercenaries they hired as mercenaries. They were “security specialists.”
    Sergei Zhilov entered the café dressed in khaki trousers and a maroon T-shirt. He was a big man, with reddish hair and green eyes, knotted muscles in his neck, shoulders, and arms, and he was sweating like he’d just come from a dead lift competition.
    Gil raised a hand to get his attention, and he came to sit at the table.
    “Can I get you a cup of coffee?” Gil had blue eyes and sandy blond hair that he kept cut high and tight in military fashion.
    Zhilov shook his head. “That I don’t drink,” he remarked in a gravelly voice, resting his arms on the table, the veins in his forearms bulging like power cords beneath the skin. “Bad for digestion.”
    “More for me then.” Gil took a drink of his coffee and set down the cup. It was a fine white coffee cup bearing the inscription “Rick’s Café.” “So have you