Target America: A Sniper Elite Novel by Scott McEwen Read Free Book Online Page A

door.
    Gil kicked the door in to see the young man’s face jammed between the commode and the wall, his eyes open, face frozen in shock, with his gun hand still gripping the CZ-75.
    “That’s for Benghazi, cocksucker.” He pulled the door closed.
    On his way down the stairs, he met a group of Australian tourists on their way up and pretended to stifle a yawn, covering his face with his hand.
    “Hey, mate?” one of them called after him. “Have you seen the manager?”
    “No,” Gil said without looking back.
    A half mile from the hostel along Boulevard des Almohades, directly in front of a pier lined with Moroccan naval vessels, he ditched the USP down a sewer drain and hailed a cab for the airport. It was time to get home and find out what the hell was going on.

9
    DETROIT
    Though one would not have necessarily guessed it by his present line of work, Daniel Crosswhite was a Medal of Honor recipient and a former Delta Force operator who had survived many deadly incursions behind enemy lines. He had been discharged from the army six months prior due to a fractured hip and pelvis sustained in his last combat jump. He could still run and fight, just not well enough by Special Forces standards, and so the army had asked him to resign his commission.
    There were other factors involved, of course, primarily the fact that Crosswhite had led an unauthorized rescue mission in Afghanistan to rescue a female helicopter pilot named Sandra Brux. The mission had been a failure and had very nearly resulted in the deaths of two of the men in his command. Even though Crosswhite had gone on to help successfully rescue Brux a couple of weeks later, winning himself the Medal of Honor in the process, this had only caused his superiors to resent his presence in Delta Force all the more.
    Crosswhite now drew a small disability pension from the Veterans Administration, but that barely paid the bills, and he was not the typeto sit around waiting on what he considered to be a handout, especially when so many other veterans were receiving no assistance whatsoever. So he had sought out a former Navy SEAL named Brett Tuckerman to help him with a little enterprise he had dreamed up one night while watching the local news in his hometown of New York City.
    Tuckerman was a true wild card: a gunfighter and gambling addict who couldn’t pass a poker game if he was chained to a D8 Cat going in the opposite direction. His friends within the Special Ops community all called him Conman, a nickname he had come by honestly. He and Crosswhite had first met during the unauthorized rescue mission into the Waigal Valley, and Tuckerman too had eventually paid the price for his involvement in the ill-fated mission by being kicked out of DEVGRU (also known as SEAL Team VI) a few months later—as had every other SEAL involved in the same op.
    After that, Tuckerman had lost all interest in serving in the United States Navy, returning home to Las Vegas to take up the game of poker full-time. He spent the next five months snorting coke and chasing women up and down the Strip. When Crosswhite finally caught up to him, he’d been facedown in his own vomit in a Bellagio hotel room that wasn’t even registered in his name.
    Tuckerman and Crosswhite now sat staring out the back window of a beat-up dog grooming van in Detroit, watching the house of a methamphetamine dealer named Terrance Booker. A decked-out yellow Hummer pulled up in front of the house, and two men got out, each with a bulging black backpack slung over his shoulder. He glanced at his watch, shaking his head in dismay. “Exactly zero three-thirty hours. How are these motherfuckers so punctual? They’re fuckin’ criminals.”
    “So are we,” Crosswhite said, shrugging into his body armor. “They got our goddamn money with ’em?”
    “They do.” Tuckerman wasn’t a large fellow—only five foot six, 145 pounds—but at twenty-nine, he still carried most of his muscle from his days in the