The Crocodile Hunter by Gerald Seymour (best summer reads of all time txt) 📕

thought him a new friend would find him cutting and uninterested. It was the common ground that sealed his relationship with the dog. He had plans for it, seemed to see the action playing out. He tapped his pocket, felt the angular shape, was satisfied.

Tristram came back into the front room.

He closed the door behind him, made more noise than he’d wanted, and there was the sound of a toilet flushing at the far end of the hall. She cursed. He groped his way across the dark room and flopped into the chair by the window and landed in her lap.

“What the hell am I supposed to do?” he snapped.

Izzy whispered, “I did not think, Tristram, that when I applied to join our glorious monarch’s Security Service that an important factor would be the ability to control the bladder flow of a fellow officer while engaged in covert observation duties. That was not on my list. I thought intellect, ability to sponge up facts fast, to make human judgements, would all be top ranked. You?”

“Thought I would strut around, walk tall. Feel I was part of something special.”

“For fuck’s sake, not be in the élite! Most overworked word in the English language and I only slap it on the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps and the Kazakhstan Presidential Protection Battalion, and the Democratic Congo parachute regiment . . .”

“This hardly fits the bill.”

“Just heard from the Wise Old Bird. Needs our ‘vigilance’. Back on the crocodile stuff, looking for ripples . . . Can I ask you something, Tristram?”

“Please.”

“Do you have a girlfriend right now?”

“Is that a chat-up line?”

“It’s not.”

“I don’t have a girlfriend right now. That good enough? I did, and I’d put my application in and I was going for a first interview the next day, and I told her that I’d got this appointment. Of course she asked where, who with, what was involved. I said to her that I couldn’t say. That was the instruction, not to tell parents, wives, girlfriends or boyfriends. I didn’t tell her. I thought the job more important than her – she walked out, kept walking. Not seen her since, nor heard from her . . . so, no girlfriend.”

“It was not a chat-up line.”

“Heavy stuff, Izzy. And you?”

“Haven’t.”

“Feeling a bit isolated?”

“You could say that.”

The psychologists would have emphasised the dangers of inter-office romance. The induction courses warned of the loneliness of the work that pushed officers, under stress, into relationships. They were both staring out of the window, through the glass that was clear now that the rain storm had passed, and the house was quiet. He thought of the intrusion into the family’s lives, down to using the downstairs toilet without asking. Could have shouted up the stairs that it was about “defence of the kingdom”, keeping innocent people alive, or “the greater good of the greatest number, and cheap at the price of a few human rights violations”. Both watched the house across the road, no new lights had come on, no shadows moved; there were no ripples in the water. Tristram knew what his future would be, doubted that it differed from Izzy’s.

He kissed her gently on the fullness of her cheek.

And she kissed him . . . and both would have understood where that led.

They broke apart but were still close and kept watching the target house. Tried to maintain “vigilance”, as demanded of them. Looked for any slight motion in the water.

Chicken wire divided the cemetery from his mum’s garden, and the hedge of untrimmed conifers had grown through it, bent it and had broken it. He knew there was a gap where the wire could be lifted and a body could crawl under it. If they were there, then they could be in the kitchen, their feet under the table and their weapons across their thighs, or they could be in the sitting-room, near the doors that opened into the garden, or they could be in a van parked in the street in front. Or they could be in the kitchen and the sitting-room and in a van outside; they could be mob-handed and waiting.

Cammy had stood over the graves and felt the anger rip. When the last of the brothers were gone he had wept, had allowed tears to swell his eyes, and the promises had stacked up but not how to honour them. That had been Benghazi . . .

. . . a rubbish town. Parts of it as damaged as Aleppo or Raqqa or Kobane or Deir Ezzor. He had reached the city – no money, no food, no water – travelling courtesy of a tanker driver whose job was to clear cesspits, then take the tanker into the desert, squirt its contents, then go back for more. He had ridden into the city with the stink of the vehicle permeating him, and had been dumped, and had walked for no more than a quarter of an hour. And had been picked up. “Picked up” in Benghazi meant captured – blindfolds, wrists tied, face down in a pick-up. At first they might have seen him as worth something as ransom, or as a spy, or simply as useless shit, but had taken him to a leader. Had fallen on his feet, a black flag leader, an emir with control of a sector of the city. Cammy had said where he had come from, had told the guy where he had fought, had seen the cloud of doubt, suspicion, clear. Had told the guy his name. This emir was Egyptian, spoke perfect English, had a brain, and had smiled, a little awe. “You are Kami al-Britani?” He had said he was. “You are the Kami al-Britani who punched the hole in the defence line at As Sukhnah on the Deir Ezzor road, that was you?”

A stalled attack, he and his brothers sent for. A coordination with two suiciders each in an armoured vehicle. The defenders had been Syrian government. Cammy and his brothers had not hung around to watch the show when the black flags had come into the