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

salient and gone through the gap but it would have been bad for the boys who had taken Assad’s pound, 500 to the US dollar. He was hugged, was a celebrity . . . Did he want to fight in Libya, would Benghazi be a new home? Spoke briefly, vaguely, of a promise . . . Was there for four days and was aware that, while he was fed and resting, messages were sent, and answers returned. Arrangements were made. They seemed disappointed that he would not be staying with them. There were scrawny Arab kids there and a couple of Chechens and a Russian deserter who kept a grenade attached to his shirt and swore he would pull the pin if there was any danger of capture and repatriation to Kremlin territory: they were not going to be his brothers. He had been sent on his way and a driver set him down at the Educational Hospital on the south side of the port city of Sirte, and a cargo tramper would give him a berth if he came on board in secret, at night. He carried money, and contact details for the French city of Marseilles – five days’ sailing. The emir and his people knew him to be a “walking dead” and might have thought it a waste of a fighting man’s talent, but accepted that a promise had been made, had shrugged, had told him he would be remembered in their prayers. That had been the start of his effort to fulfil the terms of the promise. This was a diversion but he was near the end.

He felt the stiffening wind drying his body.

Noted that a moon now showed through the surging cloud ceiling.

Stood motionless, listened, heard nothing. Would not hurry would wait until he was satisfied and beyond the hedge was the small back garden and beyond the garden was the little patio and the kitchen door, and alongside the door were the French windows opening out from the living-room. Felt good now, at peace, and his mum would hug him. He would wait a few more minutes, then move and find the place where the wire lifted in the depths of the hedge.

Only a brief diversion, then Cammy would again be on his way and would have his mum’s money in his pocket and would start his last journey, where his promise would be kept, where people would be waiting for him.

Clothes straightened, buttons fastened. Neither Baz nor Mags did romantic kisses afterwards, but he gave her backside a smack. They were up and off the lower bunk because the engine pitch below them had changed and through the porthole they had seen that the ferry had started to manoeuvre, and in the far distance they could see the ribbon of lights at the port. No more talk of this being – yet again – a critical moment in the process of bringing an RPG-7 launcher and six projectiles into the country of their birth, their lives, their reluctant income tax payments when such had seemed unavoidable, into the country that would have believed it owned their loyalty. Done all that, been there, and both would have been bloody idiots to have doubted that the next few minutes would be hairy, arse-pucker time. He was straightening his hair, she was applying lipstick when the cabins erupted . . . Passengers were told that they were near to docking, were called to their vehicles. A matter-of-fact announcement boomed around them.

“You good, girl?”

“Course I’m fucking good – what else?”

They left the cabin, headed for the staircase that led steeply down to the vehicle deck, and immediately ahead of them would be the UK checks for passports and customs, and they could not know how it would be for them.

“Keep smiling, girl.”

“Course I’m fucking smiling – what else?”

He held her hand as they waited at the tail of the queue above the staircase: another old couple coming back from a holiday.

He passed the rose bush. Came to the kitchen door, where he would have dumped his first tricycle and his first bicycle, and they’d have weathered in the rain and the wind. It was through the kitchen door that he had gone with his mum when he was first awarded the place at the college, wearing his new, laundered secondhand uniform. Had gone out of the back door and then had hurried around the side to where his half-brother waited in the car, engine going. Mum had not wanted him seen by the whole of the cul-de-sac in his new uniform, with his hair cut in the style they wanted it. His mum had thought it would seem ostentatious if he were paraded in their road, off to a school – with a scholarship taking care of the money – that no other parent nearby could even dream of.

The door needed paint and putty. There was enough thin light for him to see the bare wood around the glass, and the stains where it was rotten and needed chiselling out. His half-brother would have done it had he been there. He grasped the handle . . .

There were guys in the Amn al-Kharji part of the security units who were supposed to teach basic self-preservation as the black flag scene crumbled and men were drifting away, not deserting but looking for new combat theatres. They had not used him, but this guy had joined them and they’d escorted him into Barghuz, had him among them for two days and always kept Ulrike as far away from him as they could manage. He had been well wised up and had spoken of phone monitoring, about properties that would have had electronic beams around them or low-set tumbler wires, about bug mikes fastened in trees or against walls, and cameras. The whole lot of it . . . Cammy had crossed the rear garden, gone along the fence that was askew – probably had useless wet-rot posts – and every few paces had paused and listened some more. The guy from the