The Kill List Read Online Free PDF Page A

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.
    PRESENT DAY
    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