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

In a drab upper-floor corridor of a block of King’s College, where the Department of War Studies was located, Tristram and Izzy had looked for the door’s number. Most of the students had left for the day and only a few staff remained as the evening settled on London.

“You’re not the first he’s sent to me, and won’t be the last. There’s a reason . . . Jonas would say that your gang are unlikely to think out of the loop, prefer to stay in a comfort zone. What that means is that the kids who are hiking home were recruited as foreign fighters after getting a dose of Islam from a local mosque preacher, and bought big into the religion. Wanted to be martyrs, stop off in the orchards where the virgins waited – too trite and too convenient – and the ones who fit that bill, the majority, are not those who concern us.

“The kids with religion dripping out of their minds are going to make a noise and might be responsible for occasional atrocities, but they are not clever and rarely have the motivation to push far forward. The ones who frighten me, and I suspect are top of the blips on whatever radar Jonas uses, are those who are shorn of religion and have a different motivation . . . Let me put a thought to you. While we had the war in Afghanistan bubbling along, and regular processions of hearses through Wootton Bassett, and TV programmes about all the maimed soldiers trying to get their lives back after being blown up by IEDs, the recruitment figures for the army drifted nicely along. Then we pulled out of Afghanistan and recruitment nosedived. I’m saying that the young men worth worrying about are those who joined without an idea of the Muslim faith’s core principles. They went for the fight. Got me?”

They had knocked, heard a distant call to enter. Opened the door and seen a backside and part of a torso hanging out of a window, then a billow of smoke. A face had materialised, and a half-finished fag was stubbed out on the window-sill. This was Doug.

“Some would have gone for the sheer excitement of getting their hands on a Barrett 50 calibre sniper’s rifle which kills at a range of well over two klicks – it could be a machine-gun, could be an ability, latent before this, to lob mortars. With that excitement comes camaraderie. We’re talking about fish in a river that gravitate towards the same species. Like school, like college. Similar minds and similar motives . . . Musketeers or any desperado gang. Each man in such a group, fighting in the front line of the katibas – those are the battalions of foreign recruits – is now élite rated, valued, and thinks himself a bit above the level of bee’s bollocks. He is a star . . . I doubt he slits throats and doubt too that he helps to chuck homosexuals off rooftops, and I reckon it unlikely he’ll be hammering in the nails for the crucifixion of an alleged informer. As a fighter, in my opinion, he is a street length more expert than those who just went along and mostly were in the way of the Kurd troops on the other side. I rate him, and I fear him.”

Younger than Izzy, the same sort of age as Tristram, and oozing confidence. Had found a way to beat the anti-smoking technology in the ceiling. A small room with loaded shelves and a desk covered in papers that circled his keyboard and screen. He hadn’t shaved and his shirt seemed worn . . . He’d waved them to two hard chairs, but first they had to dump more paper on the floor. No apologies, no coffee, no biscuits, and the water in the bottle looked rancid.

“This man is alone. He’s faced some rejection – family, emotional, academic. Sees the world against him, but in Syria had found – amongst all the shit there – something he values. He has his own team, and believes them to be invincible. That’s good. He’s not jacking it in while the team holds together, but he’s moving on. They will be motley, disparate, but they will sustain each other. That’s how it will be, contained as far as we are concerned, until the roof falls in . . . or I can put it another way. A man comes and pumps poison into a wasps’ nest. Massacres them. You pay him and reckon it’s safe to have the picnic and the jam sandwiches. Except that one wasp was late getting back to the nest, and is powerfully annoyed and, sure as night, will sting and not give two fucks, excuse me, about the consequences. All good until the roof falls in.”

No questions, no interruptions.

“Excitement and drama sustain a restless man in a boring world, and he has his mates around him, and then his world collapses. Don’t ask me how. The luck runs out, it always does. The group scatters, is bombed, is droned, doesn’t matter why or how. Everything that has held them together has gone out of the window, finished. Where to go?”

Doug paused, rolled his eyes, gestured with his hands. Neither of them needed to answer. Beyond the window, still open to disperse the dregs of the smoke, were the cheerful shouts of pedestrians, and vehicle horns, and the roar of accelerating engines and the scream of wheels braking, and Izzy would have thought it all so normal, and Tristram’s phone – on mute – wriggled on his lap.

“We think, for his last hosanna, he wants to come home. He is now outside the comfort zone of his section. No friends, no best buddies, and angry enough to want people – you, me, and the great unwashed – to suffer. Wants to be the hard man, the guy without fear. Which is his contempt for and hatred of the rest of us. Wants to go with a bang so that he will be remembered.