TARGET ONE by Jack Mars

Author:Jack Mars [Mars, Jack]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2022-12-22T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER ONE

Marrakech, Morocco

Noon

That same day

Jacob Snow bided his time, waiting for the target to make the first move. He’d been sitting at a food stall in the vast plaza of Jemaa al-Fna in Marrakesh for half an hour now, watching Karim ibn Mohammed eating a steaming bowl of harira, a Moroccan soup made with tomato and chickpeas. They guy was eating slowly, savoring it as much as he savored torturing captives on the Dark Web.

Dubbed the “Master of Pain” in various online forums, Karim ibn Mohammed was a Dark Web celebrity. He’d killed numerous so-called “enemies of Islam,” including a cop in some hick Moroccan town down south who had the audacity to arrest one of Karim’s operatives.

That video had lasted fifteen minutes. The Moroccan cop, an old guy who looked like he had spent most of his career issuing parking tickets, lived until the very last second.

Jacob had forced himself to watch. Unlike what a lot of people thought, CIA operatives don’t get desensitized to sights like that. Well, Jacob had to admit that they do get desensitized a little. It was the only way for the mind to survive the onslaught, but the spirit didn’t get desensitized. Every time he saw one of Karim’s videos, his faith in humanity died a little more.

And after watching all those videos, he was now watching the star of the show, eating his soup without a care in the world.

Jacob would make him care soon enough. By the end of the afternoon, the Master of Pain would be in a very dank, dark jail cell. Or he’d be dead.

Jacob knew which fate he’d prefer for the barbarian.

The Jemaa al-Fna was the perfect place to hide in plain sight, and the perfect place to stalk a terrorist. The huge square, bounded by old buildings and the city’s main mosque, throbbed with activity.

The center was taken up by dozens of food stalls serving everything imaginable. Grills sent up waves of heat into the air already seared by the African sun and gave off rich smells of lamb, chicken, and goat. Vast, steaming pots full of soup added to the smells and heat. Blenders whirred to pulp fruit for juice, and knives rat-tat-tatted against cutting boards, sounding like machine guns as chefs hurriedly diced vegetables for the next hundred tajines.

Surrounding this food market were open, but not empty, areas. Here traditional storytellers stood on chairs, recounting ancient tales to captivated audiences of robed and hooded Moroccans. A puppet show nearby entertained a gaggle of open-mouthed children, and beyond that, a gaggle of tourists, equally openmouthed, watched a grizzled old snake charmer do tricks with an Indian rat snake, a perfectly harmless species whose main defense mechanism is to look like a cobra.

Jacob got bitten by a real cobra once when on assignment in Pakistan. He didn’t blame the old coot for playing with a fake one. Jacob still had the scar on his ankle where the beast had bitten through his army boot, and he

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