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

Bellowed it at the night, and a gull came, a big bastard, its wings tucked to deflect the wind, and hovered for a moment, then maintained a station above them, and might have wondered what in Hell’s name was below its webbed talons when suddenly it was lifted away. Their voices had started small but grew. He assumed that the women had picked up on the first line but by the third they were all with him, were his chorus. Like it was a battle statement . . . like with his brothers, a moment of hugging and of heads together and the shared belief in survival, then all moving . . . machine-gun, and mortars, and Ulrike spotting for them, and the crack of the sniper rifle . . . Cammy had needed no other brothers,  but they were all gone, and now he needed these refugees – not fighters, not in love with combat – to be with him.

Make me to hear joy and gladness, that the bones which thou hast broken may rejoice.

They sang together. And the psalm, number 51, was repeated. Shrill voices from the kids, soft from the women and deeper from the men, and when Cammy’s own voice died on him they kept singing, and he thought the moon had broken thinly through. They were all baling hard, using their hands and a cap and plastic plates.

He thought the wind eased.

No judgement, only luck, and thought that they had a run between the oncoming ships in the reverse traffic lane. Thought the force of the wind softened though the dinghy shook and rocked and swayed, still rose and pitched, and took them back to Be thou my guardian and my guide, and kept them singing, in their innocence.

Thought that he could see, very faint, a haze of light ahead, and if he blinked and wiped his eyes might have noted a coastal light, a navigation buoy. Thought it, but said nothing.

“You have no right to be here. It is harassment, simple harassment.”

He liked to be called Wolfboy by his closer friends and associates and by his “brothers”, but the man and the woman on his doorstep this morning – not yet five o’clock and hardly any natural light filtering into the street – called him Farouk. Upstairs the baby had started to cry, not his baby.

“I can report you, I can get a lawyer to chase you off. You have no right to do this.”

The man and the woman were members, so his “brothers” said, of the Security Service, and they referred to the pair and the organisation behind them as “the Box”. The man wore jeans and a T-shirt, trainers loosely knotted, and a leather jacket that was a size too small. She wore a shortish skirt that was at the edge of causing offence to Farouk, and a blouse that was unbuttoned one or two holes too many, and her hair fell lazily over her face: he thought she had probably undone those buttons when she came to his doorstep. The proposition was made each time they came and pressed the bell by the front door that rang out in the house where he lodged.

“I will not do as you ask. You want me as an informer, want me to tout, I will not do that – anyway I do not know anyone who engages in criminal acts. You ask me to help you, be an agent for you, I will not. You offer me money, I don’t want your money. It is harassment, pure and simple.”

What annoyed him at these encounters, always in the hour before dawn and while the street was quiet, before first prayers, was that they would give the invitation and then would decline to argue with him. He was left to shout at them. Most of that part of the street would now know that the anti-terror people had hooks in him. He worked in an internet café and sometimes helped those with no idea of the intricacies of the web, but also made coffees, served soft drinks, washed up, sold skunk to regulars, and the pay was pitiful and this man and the woman offered him the huge sum of £500 every month to inform. He was three years out of prison, HMP Wealstun, north of his home city of Leeds, and had been on B wing, all Category C prisoners, most of them harmless – but he had witnessed at close quarters what was done to two prisoners who had touted: the shit beaten out of them and their faces cut. He would not inform . . . and almost enjoyed the moment.

“Go on, lose yourselves. You have nothing on me. I’ll get the lawyers on you. It is bullying and it is harassment.”

He stepped back and into the hallway, and the baby’s crying was more pitiful. It was a cousin’s house. He stared back at the two, and neither argued or tried to persuade. He thought he had bested them, which pleased him. He shut the door. Through the spy hole he could see that both were still on the pavement, in no hurry, and had lit cigarettes, and talked in murmurs . . . He supposed that was all part of the intimidation. They knew nothing. He would not have been allowed to stay in the room of his cousin’s home if they had known anything of who he was and what was planned, and which role he had been given . . . He went upstairs and saw through the landing window the man and the woman walk away. The baby had stopped crying. He had no baby of his own, no women who could have been the mother of his baby, no fiancée. Had once; but no longer. He did not know whether it was that man and that woman, or others from their organisation, who had been to his fiancée’s family home and had bad-mouthed him, had called him a Subject of Interest, had warned them. The relationship was broken,