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

and the cheese and the milk, and started back to the parking area where the Iranians would be . . .

He would be welcomed when he came home, hugs and kisses and probably tears, and would stay a pocketful of time before moving on. He had made the contact and would be met at the final stage of his journey. Good hugs and good kisses and talk of love that would sustain him when he slipped clear of them again, his morale lifted to do the last leg towards his target. He slipped between the dune grasses and heard the rumble of the sea as it spent itself against the sand; the strength of the wind grew.

He would not be expected, not in his home city and not where he would launch his attack; he would be unknown and unseen; was confident of that.

He heard the light rap on the far side of his partition, and saw the distorted outline. Jonas Merrick was shrugging on his raincoat, had his trilby on his head, and was about to buckle the fastening on his briefcase. It had been a quiet day.

A small hiss of annoyance, then he called for the young man to come past the corner that shielded his work area.

In his hand, Tristram held two large photographs. Behind him, the girl, Izzy, hovered. He thought she looked uncertain and hung back. The boy jutted his chin as if that might give him confidence.

It had been a quiet day because no sliver of intelligence had ended up in front of him. He had spent most of it tucked away, delving into the files that he kept locked in his cabinets and two of them were now inside the briefcase along with the emptied sandwich box and the thermos.

He was handed two photographs. Both colour, both showing an expanse of water.

It was the task of Jonas Merrick in his reincarnation at Thames House to sift through the jottings that came in and look for evidence of returning jihadis: an army of men and women coming home, with resentment at boiling pitch. He had taken his usual train and come into work on the mornings after the bomb and rifle and knife attacks in Manchester, in Paris, in London, in Brussels. He knew that shared sense of despair that gripped the building, every floor of it, from those on high to the guys who cleaned cars in the depths of the basement, and had seen men and women wilt under the weight of assault from the politicians and media when failure to intercept came calling . . . What was left of the fighters in Syria and Iraq tended now to be the hard-core of the black flag’s combat teams. They might be in Afghanistan or Libya or south of the Sahara and might be heading for the haven of the Philippine jungles to regroup, or they might be coming home . . .

He took the photographs. He thought he read on the young man’s face a brief nervous smirk. The girl, Izzy looked away and failed to meet Jonas’s eye, as if dissociating herself.

. . . or they might be dead. In the chaos of the last days of the caliphate there were strong possibilities that fighters had been carbonised by air strikes, ripped to unidentifiable shreds by shrapnel from the drones’ missiles, been cut down. Might be buried, might have a commemorative stone hastily placed at the edge of a mound, might have been taken and stripped by foxes and rats and vultures. No one hanging about on the sidelines of the dreg days of the struggle, fishing in a pocket for a notepad, taking a pencil from behind an ear, and wondering if the corpse carried a dog-tag: not a chance.

He glanced at the pictures. Once there had been a couple of hundred names on a list. These were the profiles of those who had gone away, renounced their allegiance to Britain and had fought or cut throats in the name of as false a God as Jonas and Vera Merrick could have conjured up . . . not talked of often, but agreed. In the holding camps, there were now squads of interrogators from the Sixers, from the office block on the other side of the Thames. The original list was locked in his safe and most of the names were now scratched out: some were KIA and some were captured and held by Kurds or Syrians, God help them, or by the Iraqis and had a fair chance of ending up on the trapdoor in a Baghdad gaol. The interrogators sifted those brought before them, and might have threatened and might have cajoled, and might have offered inducements – unlikely to be honoured – and tried to find out about those who were not yet accounted for. Had they been seen dead, had they gone in a cage, had they fled as the bombing had intensified? Those few names on the list were marked UAF: un-accounted-for. Those who were UAFs, and this was not just the intelligence of a Wise Old Bird, had the ability to be the cream of his potential opponents: those who had lasted longest after the military collapse of the cause were the most dangerous, the likely crocodiles in the swamp.

He had a train to catch. Always caught the same train.

The photographs were in colour and showed waters that were dark, impenetrable, with no ripples. He looked up into the face of the probationer and stared him out and the boy bit his lower lip, damn near hard enough to draw blood, and it might have seemed an amusing idea half an hour before, now was fraught with risk. He wondered if Tristram had been at the sort of school where japes and wheezes were regarded as amusing. The first picture, a quick scan of it, showed the place where the nostrils protruded, and the lens had caught the gleam of an eye. Hardly difficult – obvious. Jonas tossed it behind him so that it landed on his