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

and snorts, but the big man had ploughed on. “What happened last night is not for gossip and will not be shared, but it was significant. Jonas was missing from his retirement party for a very good reason. Truth is that my impression of his work is that he is superior at getting under the skin of targets, better than any of the rest of us. It is a talent that cannot be taught, is inbred. I have reassessed his value, and I’ll hear no more shit about a dull little creep who knows nothing of what’s around the corner. He’ll have more responsibility and more input. He’s a wise old bird.” Which had stuck. A Wise Old Bird, a Wobby.

A matter of common sense and understanding the opponent. His card index system told him more than the banks of computers on which the Service depended . . . A doubter had once challenged him. Nothing contrite about Jonas’s answer because he was averse to giving ground: he had told of a junior army officer in the early Ulster days who had made a name for himself as an expert at uncovering the enemy’s arms caches. Just common sense, just a matter of lining up the markers that would aid a courier coming for a pick-up . . . a farm gate off a lane, a dead tree left in a field, and a line between the two would reach a hedgerow where it appeared a fox had dug a den – excavate further and find two Armalite rifles and half a dozen filled magazines. A semi-detached house in the heart of a virulently nationalist housing estate on a windswept hill above the town of Newry and a section of a street where there were telephone poles and lamp posts, and there was one place where they were exactly opposite each other. Stand on one side of the street, line up the poles and posts, and follow that line to a house with a concrete slab in front of the doorstep. The officer had been there, a grudging guest of the Parachute Regiment, had stood on the slab, had moved his hips rhythmically and had found the slab rocked under his weight, had told the squaddies to lift it . . . more Armalites and more magazines and the best find that Para Regiment had achieved in a four-month posting. Common sense, what Jonas dispensed.

The swoop for which the team beyond his frosted screen were heading was down to him. A breakthrough of sorts. A sweet paper dropped. The wrapping for a type of humbug. That variety of sweet sold at a confectioner, a particular one, and not from a supermarket. Next door to that shop was a café. He told them it was where they should mount surveillance. Foot watchers, and two vehicles, and a camera above the awning of a shop opposite, and a target of medium value had come into the café and had bought time, and the guy was skilled in anti-surveillance procedures – but the humbugs had screwed him. No need for the one-time Eternal Flame to leave Thames House. He was not praised, did not expect to be . . . For well over a decade he had provided his small insights to the teams working around him. Often enough they were acted on, and success had beamed down on to the team, and individuals had taken the credit for a suggestion and not spoken of him as the source. He had not complained, not argued his corner, had accepted it. Now that he had the support of the AssDepDG he was, at least, listened to.

There was a knock on his partition. A young man’s voice. Was it convenient to speak to him?

“No, it is not. I am having my lunch. I will have finished my lunch at two o’clock and will see you then.”

Jonas had good hearing. A male voice: “Daft old beggar, why did he have to be so rude, on about his fucking lunch?” A female voice: “He’s never changed, everyone says, will never change, and getting to work for him is a serious shit moment.” The male voice said, loud and with too much irony, that he was deeply sorry to disturb the lunch break and he’d be back at two o’clock. With the keen hearing was a refusal to care about either courtesies or kicked feelings. He was paid to think, to peer through the cloud and mist in the crystal ball, to anticipate . . . Failure would be devastating – and a few bruised egos were a minor complication. Responsibility, not that he would show it, weighed heavy on him.

A medium-ranked player would be lifted that evening. Maybe, afterwards, if the team were back before “closing” there would be a short session in a bar adjacent to the building. Jonas looked for more important players, and the search for them burdened him. He wiped crumbs off his lap. Impossible to be a Wise Old Bird every day, to be a Wobby every week and every month, and the responsibility seemed to weigh heavier each hour. Not the “lone wolves” from the home counties or the West Midlands or the North West, not the locally grown incompetents from the British cities; no, the ones Jonas Merrick feared were those boys, and girls coming back from war, hardened by what they had seen and where they had been. He poured coffee from his flask and closed his eyes and it was 38 minutes until two o’clock, and he might sleep . . . and not forget the picture in his briefcase.

Cammy said to them, “I’ll be right back.”

If any of them believed it, he would have been surprised. He had driven the van to the edge of a parking area for a Nature Park; there was undergrowth there and the sort of privacy that was intended for the campers to watch the multitude of gulls that flocked to the dunes and the beaches. They were huddled close to the vehicle. The light had lifted and thin