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

of them any the wiser of the meaning and the relevance of his words. Not for days had he seen Ulrike smile.

Cammy felt strong, went well, thought his resolve healed.

He thought she was 41 years old, almost twice his own age. The previous two nights they had slept together, fully clothed, but arms around each other’s backs, just for comfort. She had told him more in those 48 hours about herself than he had learned in their months together in the gang of brothers. From Rostock on the Baltic. A child when the regime had collapsed and her father, who had been an official in the security police, was out of work, out of fashion and hiding out of sight, and a mob baying at the front door and occasional stone hitting the family’s home. Had been smuggled out and sent to her grandmother’s for safety and her parents had fled, had never sent for her, had disappeared from her life. Had gone to school, had flunked a university course, had taken a job in the Rathaus, number crunching. Had lived alone and never used cosmetics or wore jewellery. And the day after her 35th birthday she had signed up for a course in advanced first aid: learned about car accident injuries, bullet and knife wounds, third world sickness and infection problems, and had passed with an alpha grade and had been expected to join an ambulance crew in Rostock . . . Had taken a plane to Istanbul, had gone across the Turkish frontier.

Cammy came off the track, went across a field and ripped his trousers and his anorak on a barbed wire fence and had not slowed to unpick himself, had torn the material free.

She had been attached to a casualty station and worn the niqab. Then had bought forged black flag papers, taken a man’s name, covered her face and put a growl in her voice, and had met the brothers of Kami al-Britani. Became part of the brotherhood from the first day she marched with them; she rode with them, fought with them, and no allowances were made for her, and she would have spat in anger at any who short-changed her efforts. Calm under extreme pressure. Used to say: “Stay calm. It is never a crisis”. Could fight in the front line, strip and reassemble an AK or an M16, a Barrett Browning or a Dragunov and could prime mortar bombs . . .

Cammy scattered sheep, sent them bleating into the darkness and the wind was blustering into his face . . . If it had not been for Ulrike he might have manufactured a fudge for the promise given for the deaths of Mikki and Tomas and Pieter and Dwayne and Stanislau . . . If there had been a chance that he and Ulrike could have gone somewhere – and somewhere was anywhere – and been at peace, with no weapons, no ammunition and no enemy . . . If . . . then he might have evaded the promise. It stood, was locked in his mind. Would be honoured.

The night before they had clung to each other and weakness had consumed both of them, and he had wept and she had sobbed, and they had clung close. And then she had told him a story, a folk story of the forests of Germany, and had calmed them both, and finally they had slept. Now they walked well and they were around three miles short of a wadi, and there would be cover there, and it was late in the morning to be in the open . . . And his bowels broke, the Damascus Revenge came on suddenly. Cammy had ducked to the side of the road, and there was a ditch to take water when the heavens opened, and he was down into it and dumped his rucksack and his rifle and had his belt loose and his trousers down.

Cammy found himself trapped in a hedge. He had remembered a gap, but a pallet had been wired into the space. Stopped for a moment and heard only distant traffic – no sirens and no dogs. Worked himself loose, and went on. He thought the first train would go at about six that morning with the first of the London commuters surging forward for seats. He had expected to be longer at his mother’s, not have time to kill, again.

It might have been the noise their boots made on the dried track, kicking at dust and stones. Might have been the humming in their heads of the music they remembered, might have been the clatter of their weapons against ammunition pouches and . . . from the ditch Cammy heard the sound of the drone’s purring engine, but could not see it. They lived with the sound of the drones. Many attempts had been made, many theories offered, as to how they should be avoided. He listened. The one answer seemed to be that if a man was in a field surrounded by women and children, then sometimes they would not shoot. He heard it and thought it banked to turn. He might have been 200 yards from Ulrike . . . He thought it sounded like an express train hurtling through the closed space of a tunnel, and saw the light flash and his shout of warning was too late and too soft, and with the thunder of the detonation came the dust cloud which was followed by the blast of the air and then by the pitter-patter noise of the fragments landing, and from the few pieces of the missile’s broken casing came the whine of shrapnel.

Cammy felt, quite suddenly, that his strength – not his resolve – weakened, as if the bank of it was emptying, and he was slowing and the ground here was boggy and his feet sank. His mind screamed with the promise given and he had to drag his feet, mud sticking to the brogues.

He had found a leg. Only a leg. He put it in the pit of the crater and threw dirt down on it . . . Good if he could have