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

Wolfboy parked his van under trees. He had come in with a convoy of mourners, would not have been noticed, had attracted no attention . . . He should have had a call by now . . .

He waited.

Two funerals later – and no call on his phone – a camper appeared. Wolfboy saw the couple in the front, and a woman was pointing at him and directing the old guy beside her.

Wolfboy had walked around that part of the parking area and there had been no suspected surveillance vehicles and no one loitering and smoking, no one with a wheelbarrow and broom endlessly sweeping the same ground. He met their eyes. For a couple of minutes, the guy ignored him, looked the other way, and the woman took out a thermos. No call came on his phone. Should have been told that the link guy, the one referred to as Kami al-Britani, was off the train at St Pancras station in London, had crossed to Kings Cross, was on the fast train, a 67-minute journey. A dicker should have identified him, tracked him to the platform, seen him board, then called.

A quarter of an hour passed. Maybe it was the woman in the camper who thought time was up. She climbed out of the front and dragged open the side door, and started to raise the bench seat. The man gave a peremptory wave and Wolfboy was summoned. No pleasantries, no introductions, no laughs. A package was manoeuvred clear of the space under the seating. They heaved and gasped to shift it, and Wolfboy had his rear door open. There was enough floor space for the package and it would fit alongside the customised sheets of metal, what should have been the necessary armour-plating. He saw that both the man and the woman wore gloves, professional. Imagined there would be a place far away where they could dump their vehicle, load what little they had into another car, then torch the camper.

Wolfboy might wait an hour, not longer. Might wait an hour . . . If no call were received, if the schedule were broken, Wolfboy would leave the keys in the ignition, then would walk smartly, purposefully, past the entrance to the crematorium and would head for the bus-stop, and would be on his way home. If no call reached him, if the man who intended to die for the cause had in fact been arrested, if he were now in a bleak interrogation room, then the likelihood, Wolfboy had been told, was that he would talk: it was said that very few resisted questioning.

Just another day at the Station.

Two Reaper drones were flown that day and they quartered the airspace above deserted villages north of the Syrian town of Deir Ezzor and over a desert area close to the ruins of Palmyra.

The nursery on the Station was open, and the canteen staff were busy and lunch was about to be served in the Officers’ Mess. Technical teams worked hard at the maintenance of the electronics required to keep the birds airborne some 2,500 miles away, and pilots flew and sensor operators checked their payload of munitions, and the intelligence people sifted what was passed them . . . Twice that morning the Reaper lenses had fastened on to, focused and made sharp, the whitened bones uncovered by the weather from shallow graves, but that was not unusual. They were seen and noted and then the cameras had moved on.

On the south side of Thames House, Jonas took the lift to the third floor, then set off down the familiar corridor which would take him beyond the coffee machines and the confectionery dispenser to Room 12. He had been via the room occupied by the resident nurse, and his face had been cleaned and the scars covered in Elastoplast strips, and his broken lip had been stitched, which was painful. And had been to see the AssDepDG: no inquests and no hindsight examination, and he had been asked what he intended to do in the immediate future, and had answered. Then had been asked what route he planned to take, and had said what road he had chosen. Must have looked a bit of a sight: the mud had dried on his trousers and their creases were long gone and his jacket buttons were torn loose and his shirt was covered in dirt stains and his tie was crumpled, and he had neither shaved nor been able to polish his shoes. He carried his bag, and arrived at the door of 3/S/12 and opened it. The noise stopped. No conversation, no clicking at a keyboard, and no talking into a phone. Action suspended. All eyes were on him, and they tried to strip into his mind and to read him – might not have liked him nor enjoyed his company – but seemed to want to understand him better. No applause and no congratulations. He saw Tristram and Izzy sitting at the central table, already their resignation letters had been copied to him. He acknowledged none of them but went into his private area. The bag would go back in the cupboard, with the sponge bag, the clean socks and the fresh shirt, and pyjamas. All was as he had left it. He did not have time to waste . . . He reached up and unfastened the two pictures. First off the wall was the view of the stagnant pool where two inked circles showed the tip of a nostril and the narrowed eye. He pulled it off the wall, but carefully so that it did not tear. Next, the original picture was taken down, the beast with the horrid set of irregular teeth. He looked around him, was satisfied and went back into the main area. Jonas made a point of first going to where Izzy sat and he dropped in front of her the portrait of the crocodile’s head, and then allowed that of the water expanse to flutter into Tristram’s place. He said