The Kill List Read Online Free PDF

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.
    • • •
    P eople 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.
    The aim back in 2001 was that never again would the basic intel agencies refuse to share what they had with one another, and thus let nineteen fanatics bent on mass slaughter slip through the cracks. But the outcome a decade later, at a cost that broke the economy, was much the same as the situation of 2001. The sheer size and complexity of the self-defense machine created some fifty thousand top secret reports a year, far too many for anyone to read, let alone understand, analyze, synthesize or collate. So they were just filed.
    The most fundamental increase was in Joint Special Ops Command, or J-SOC. This body had existed for years before 9/11, but as a low-profile and principally defensive structure. Two men would convert it into the largest, most aggressive and most lethal private army in the world.
    The word “private” is justified