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

– was a Norwegian skipper, a navigation pilot who had boarded from a west country harbour in the UK, two Filipino watchmen, and a Croatian engineering officer. All had seen something, none was certain what they had seen.

The pilot said, “They’re mad enough, some of them, to try to cross in this weather.”

The captain said, “I don’t think so, not possible. And if we want peace and quiet, we saw nothing.”

The Croat officer said, “Broadcast a suspicion, and we are caught up in an inquest, because assuredly they will drown.”

The first to have seen something was one of the Filipino watchmen. He said, softly, and made the sign of the cross on his chest, “It was a dinghy, men and women and children . . . I do not think they have long.”

They could not have stopped even had they wished to, and there were more vessels behind them in a steady stream, and away to the port side were the lights of ships traversing the Channel in the other direction. It was the busiest set of sea lanes in the world, and not a place for a small craft even in the best of weather conditions.

A monstrous shape went past them, throwing out a crisp bow wave. The lights, seemingly suspended high above them, did not waver. They could hear the thrash of its engines and the turbulence of the propellers and the impact of its front end on the water ahead. Cammy clung to the outboard’s arm.

He had not the knowledge of the sea or of boats to know where he should steer, whether to try to divert away from it, even turn and head back towards the French shore where there were now only occasional pinpricks of light. Closer than the engine noise and the roar of the weather, and the slapping of the bottom of the dinghy each time they came down in a trough, was the sound of frantic screaming. Cammy wondered whether any of them, the teacher and the psychologist and their women and the two children, had entertained the slightest idea of how it would be to take an open boat, under-powered, and try to navigate a path across the Channel, whether any of them had an inkling of an idea what it would be like to have a vast cargo vessel sweep past them, whether any of them would still want – not even halfway across – to commit to a journey towards the new Heaven which was Cammy’s country.

The bow wave hit them.

He thought they were traumatised. They clung to each other. Shrieks and sobs, and a woman and one of the kids was sick but they could not lean over the side to vomit or they would have been carried away. The sickness was over their clothing and between their legs and sloshed with the rising level of seawater now covering their feet.

He needed to take control, knew it.

Would have been simple enough if he had been with his brothers, all of them together, and the yells would have been of the black gallows humour vintage, what they cracked when times were bad: if they were in the artillery coordinates, or if the air strikes were coming in, or if they were pinned down by a Yank or Brit sniper. Always good then to have a joke, and chat funeral plans.

The bow wave was brutal and came on them with a thunder and the white cresting line of it slapped against them. They were spinning. A different motion to anything before. Pushed sideways, twisting like a dancer’s steps. Going through a total revolution, and then the trough deeper than any before. They held on to each other . . . He saw the lights of the back end of the bridge of the container ship, and the foam bristled from the screws. It ploughed on, but there would be another because the dinghy now straddled the traffic lanes going north and east. They had taken on too much water and he had concentrated too hard on progress and not enough on the ability of the dinghy to stay afloat.

He yelled instructions. Should cup their hands, and sweep away the water that threatened to swamp them. His fault for not seeing before that they must be involved, were not merely his passengers . . . Without them he would not have been able to cross; if he did not have them shivering and crying and puking around him then his journey would be wasted. A moment’s thought: what if he went into the sea himself? Forget them . . . What if it were Cameron Jilkes, once part of a community on a hill and near enough to the cathedral at Canterbury, what if he went into the water and the cold had him and the water filled his lungs and the will to fight had gone, and losing strength . . . and all for fuck all of nothing. He needed them to bale and fast. They started slowly, and he reckoned more water came in than they were managing to get out, and they were listless and the struggle seemed too great, and . . .

He sang.

There had been another favourite psalm, not as treasured as the “snares”, but loved and always done with gusto.

Cammy led them. Cast Me Not Away. Samuel Sebastian Wesley. The creation of a man who had died nearly 150 years ago, and the words had lived in Cammy’s mind since they were placed there by a choirmaster.

Cast me not away from thy presence, and take not thy holy spirit from me.

He sang into the night, confronted the drenching spray, let his voice rip, could not hear himself against the chaos of sound around him.

Restore unto me the joy of thy salvation; and uphold me with thy free spirit.

Had exchanged the peace, the aching quiet, of the cathedral with the battle storm of the Channel, the weather and the surge of the container ship. They joined him. Little voices at first.

The sacrifices of God are a broken spirit: a broken and a