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

and without gunfire, managed it at knife-point. As a group they were poor on the discipline demanded by the security for those fighting under the black flag. Stanislau led, Mikki behind him, and Cammy held his usual position in the centre of the line.

An air strike was going on behind them. Cammy could see the navigation lights on the wing tips of the fast jets, and every few minutes a drone would come over and dump some flares to float down on parachutes. They might have hung around too long, might have gone earlier. Behind Cammy was Tomas, then Ulrike and Pieter, and Dwayne was back-marker. He felt nothing for those he left behind, men and women and tiny crazed children, cowering in shallow scrapes or in tunnels they had dug. Enough vehicles burned for the flares to be unnecessary but there would have been a paper-pusher back in some air-conditioned bunker who had decreed how many should be dropped that night, and dropped they would be – even if they lit a hell’s inferno. It did not matter what they left behind because they had each other, were brothers . . . and believed it, and had survived too many strata of Hades to worry about anything bar themselves. They were close together when they moved soundlessly through the reeds, and followed the markers left the previous evening. They were headed across the Euphrates – and afterwards?

Not sure. Somewhere, and getting there sometime. Where there was a fight, and where the brothers stayed together. Almost, as if they now formed each other’s only meaningful family . . . except that Cammy had his mother, but a long time ago . . . What they had done in the reeds the night before was make a raft from a big builder’s pallet and they had carted two emptied oil drums through the reeds, and had lashed the sealed drums under the wood slats. It was big enough to take them all, and a couple of makeshift paddles from planks would give them propulsion. They would get clear of the river, then hunker down, and build a fire, and sit around it and Ulrike would cheer them and they’d talk about where they were headed. He now knew nothing else but fighting, had cleared his mind of “old days”, former times, and loved his brothers.

They launched. The current here was slack because it was a deep stretch. There were great orbs of light behind them. Talk was impossible. Communication was by pulling one of them close, mouthing words and being lip-read. The bombs falling on the Barghuz enclave were 500lb each and it seemed little effort was made to differentiate between “hostiles” and camp followers. Tomas was beside Cammy and was paddling.

Tomas was short, fair-haired, always cheerful. Twenty-two years of age. His parents logged in the forest outside a place in Estonia none of them had heard of, Jarve, off the E20 highway running east towards St Petersburg. Tomas hated Russians with a frenzy: a grandfather had been carted off on a one-way ticket to Siberia and his own father had had a bad time before independence. After a few weeks’ basic army training as a conscript, Tomas had deserted. Had gone to Syria with no Islamic fervour, just a desire to take the chance offered to kill Russians. Tomas always stayed close to Cammy, a pace and a half behind him, his longing to be there showing in his eyes like a dog did: was always there except when the time came to blast with the 81mm mortar. They all carried his bombs for him, had enough for him to put three in the air and then they would run, as fast as wild hares, before the retaliation. Before the military, he had done a term and a half at Tartu University in engineering, then had dropped out. Just lived for his brothers, only cared about his brothers. Used to say, “Better to hang together, not separately” . . .

His paddle might have hit a sunken tree trunk, or the drum under him had collided with any of the shit now submerged in the river from when a pontoon had gone under in an air strike. Tomas went over. Scrabbled for a grip on the pallet slats. Caught at Cammy and seemed to have a grip on him, except that he shifted his hands for a better hold, and was gone.

Cammy dived after him, but they were moving fast in the current. They were in darkness other than from the drone flares, and the fires behind them. He could not use a torch. It was extraordinary, and ridiculous, but Cammy cannoned into him. Arms reached out, and the raft was nearer to toppling than it was to staying afloat. Tomas did not fight his rescuers, nor struggle, nor cry out. On the far side of the river they should have, immediately on landing, hiked away fast. But they did not. Ulrike started the resuscitation. Doing mouth to mouth and heaving Tomas’s chest, and losing. All of them trying, none of them succeeding. Must have worked on him for half an hour, until Ulrike pulled them off, until Dwayne, the eldest, announced the unthinkable: a brother down, a brother lost.

Could not hang about, could not do a fancy job. Scratched a shallow grave, and put the Estonian boy into it. None of them said a prayer but they shared a cigarette by the freshly moved earth. Dogs, scavenging and starving, might have him up by the morning, but none of them said it.

The death by drowning of Tomas was like a knife wound, was the first.

“What do you think you saw?”

“Too much rippling in the wave patterns – could have been debris, like an oil drum, or could have been . . .”

“Could it have been an inflatable?”

“Might have been, cannot say.”

On the bridge of the container ship – some 380 metres in length, overall weight slightly north of 100,000 tonnes, sped through the Channel lane of 19 knots, registered in Panama, heading for Rotterdam