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

to hear better – force of habit. He heard the noise of the waves and the coughing throb of the engine and he strained to hear that other sound which was the murmur of a drone flying high above him. Where he had come from, the drone and the threat it carried – the missiles slung from its wings. If it were American then it would be flown by a pilot in the far west of the United States, and if it were British then the pilot would be in a Portacabin at a Royal Air Force base in the east of England. The drones and their crews were the principal enemy . . . he heard them often in Syria or Iraq, now he heard only the thrash of the waves and the splutter of the engine, and little squeals of fear.

The Ordnance Survey maps of the west country, featuring the southern Devon coastline, had been folded away and were back in the bookcase. Jonas’s mug of cocoa was drunk. Vera would be standing at the kitchen door and the cat would be prowling around the garden perimeter, sniffing in the flower bed, too lazy to scale the fence and go further.

The radio was off now and his phone bleeped.

Jonas and Vera Merrick lived in a quiet corner of the outer London area: a place of peace, of harmony. The normality of the streets was a mood of calm. He doubted any of his neighbours, going to work in the morning, taking the kids to school, heading for the supermarket, working in education or employment or retired, felt a sense of threat: Jonas did. Was never free of it . . . He thought they came, the opposition, on a conveyor belt. Mostly sad and categorised as losers, and the majority of them could be cauterised. They could, the biggest number of them, be lifted as the target would have been that evening, but the belt would roll on and another found to step on to it. They were not the ones who currently intrigued Jonas, and who frightened him. He inhaled as if he needed to stiffen his sinews. Reached for his phone. Vera had the cat back inside and was opening a tin of food for it.

He gazed at the image that Tristram and Izzy had sent him. Could have been a river or a lagoon, not subject to fast tidal flows, or a lake in a swampland. He magnified the detail. Two minute crude circles were marked on his screen. He zoomed closer on each of them, and closer again. Inside one circle was a strip of softer silver, perhaps where sunlight penetrated the overhanging foliage, and there was a dark point in the centre of it. He eased his focus towards the second circle and the light here was blocked and the water was dark except for a single point where a jewel seemed to shine. He was shown a submerged crocodile’s single nostril and one eye.

The back door was now locked and the cat was eating. Vera would have seen the frown indenting his forehead as he took his mug to the sink, then swilled it, and she’d not interrupt him . . .

There were times when the pressure seemed to crush him, to be an intolerable burden, and there were times when he managed it. But, whatever its weight, Jonas was never free from what he saw as his responsibility. She would go up first and he would switch off the lights and follow her, and he doubted he would sleep well that night.

Chapter 4

Jonas lay on his back, his eyes fixed on the lampshade suspended from the centre of the ceiling, his head resting in his hands.

His role was to think beyond convention. Not to be particularly clever, almost the opposite. To use common sense and trust an instinct: had always done that. The difference in his life had come on a damp evening, funking an embarrassing retirement drink, and going walkabout by the river, a little down Millbank from Thames House, and the chance encounter with Winston Gunn. Beside him, Vera breathed quietly, did not disturb his thoughts. There was a street lamp outside their house and it would have taken blackout quality curtains to put the bedroom into complete darkness. Light filtered through, and he noticed a spider working its slow way across the ceiling towards the light fitting.

For years, as the Eternal Flame, Jonas Merrick had sat at his desk, always apart from the main circular table where the team worked. Had built his card index, a mini-library of biographies, had nurtured them with the same care that Vera lavished on her tomatoes in the greenhouse, and had written reports. It was all about risk assessment. He thought the spider took a chance in the survival stakes by staking out its territory up there on the ceiling. In the morning, if it were still there, Vera would take a duster to it, carry the spider to the bedroom window, and toss it outside . . . Jonas did risk assessment, and tried to work inside the priority choices. He watched the spider’s progress, upside down, across the ceiling.

Before divesting Winston Gunn of his suicide gear, Jonas had analysed the information crossing his desk, searched for predictions, submitted conclusions . . . had barely been noticed. He never challenged the seeming lack of interest in his submissions, did not demand an audience with senior staff when his name and contributions were airbrushed out by his colleagues at times of minor triumph. As with Irish targets, and then Cold War spies, he had identified those who seemed to mount a primary danger: did the same with the jihadis. Not that Jonas ever went to the colleges where the young boys supposedly studied, where the radicalisation was rife, nor did he hang around on the pavements outside the mosques where the teaching was fundamentalist. He talked on the phone, and he read. He was voracious in his consumption of information, and from it he made judgements.