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

Farouk, or Wolfboy, went to clean himself up before going to work.

A man was coming. A man who would take delivery of a cargo.

A man would use what was given him, would hurt them hard, and he would have helped . . . Hurt them hard enough for them to scream.

Cloud was beginning to spread from the east. The wind had dropped, would die away. Or so the weather forecaster had claimed from the bedside radio. Jonas opened the kitchen door to let the cat out.

Most mornings he slept until the alarm began to beep, but he had been waking early since the matter of returning veterans had been dumped on 3/S/12. He stood on the step in his pyjamas and dressing-gown and on his feet were the slippers Vera had bought him four Christmases before, and the sun rested on his face, threw warmth on his cheeks, as he watched the cat.

It was the sort of start to a day that, if he let his imagination run riot, gave him most concern. Not a cloud in the skies, not yet. The cat patrolled the perimeter of the garden as if it were a Border Force unit. There was a clear blue sky and those days bothered him. Out of a clear blue sky, unwanted and unheralded, came the “incidents” that were the nightmare of his life. Could not call them “unexpected”, but they came without warning and without any preannounced target. It had been uneventful, free of atrocities, for several weeks and he fancied that the public would have lapsed towards complacency and that the warnings continually trumpeted on the London Underground and in railway stations were slipping from consciousness. The cat moved, large and menacing, around the flower beds. It was in the nature of any individual practised in the arts of counter-terrorism to loathe those sunshine-bathed days when the collective guard sagged. He whistled shrilly, competed with a robin’s call, and the cat turned and came back to him to be fed.

Almost always playing catch-up in the counter-terror trade, always late and seeking to mitigate disaster, rarely in the driving seat but chasing the moments of chaos and mayhem that came from the clear blue sky. He climbed the stairs. He saw that Vera was awake, and that she had left the duster on the window-ledge and there was no longer a spider on the ceiling which meant that the creature’s risk assessment had failed it.

He went to shower and shave, then dress . . . Always wore a clean shirt and a sober tie, and always wore his jacket of lightweight tweed and polished shoes, and always took the trouble to clean his spectacles . . . He would be off and out, keeping to the schedule that gave him enough time for the train.

He thought of the recruits he had been given. They’d have bitched. Would have been in the building long enough to have known of him, his reputation, and wondered why they were assigned to him for mentoring. Might have wondered aloud, either of them when posted, “What the fuck did I do wrong to deserve this?” Not much, and the thought of it was enough for a short-lived smile. He had asked for a pair who had “not yet been washed by the stereotypical thinking of Thames House”, and they were both ignorant enough to have retained an innocence, were not yet acclimatised to the system.

There had been a previous pair, nice youngsters, and they had complained to the AssDepDG, “with respect and all that, but he’s hardly modern, still pretty much in the steam age”, and the big man had given them a welcoming grin and had invited them to his own partitioned office and had unlocked a drawer in his desk – not gone to the computer screen – and had produced half a dozen blown-up photographs, and their monochrome texture had seemed to enhance their quality: a foyer in a concert hall, where kids had gathered, shattered glass and broken lives, body parts, contorted faces in the last moments before pain and life ended – good photographs for the AssDepDG to keep in his drawer because they were guaranteed to shock. He had said to them, “Prefer this?” Jonas had been told, and he had found them excellent learners, and one was now with the Service out-station in Bristol and the other was in Manchester, and he had been sorry to lose them. He thought the current pair might be good; they had not tricked him but had tested him. He had been found wanting – and was concerned.

He lived off his instinct, would be naked without it. The man, next in line, would come out of the clear blue sky and he did not know where, nor what trace would be left of him, nor when.

Dawn had broken. They were in thick mist. No sunshine and nothing visible ahead of them. What concerned Cammy was behind them.

The Iranians would have heard it too: the sound of the high-powered engine of a coastal patrol vessel. Easy to assume that the vessel tracked them but could not see them except as a blip on a screen; would not have wanted to get close because of the risk of capsizing the dinghy, but the engine noise had kept steady with their slow advance through the slackening waves.

The Iranians had not queried Cammy, had not second-guessed him. More gulls materialised out of the fog around them, shrieking and hovering above the dinghy. They were nearer to land: he had noticed weed that would have been dislodged during the overnight storm. They would have known that the authorities now shadowed them, would remember what the Chechen had told them: welcomed by naval personnel only too anxious to help, given care if needed, provided with a hot breakfast of porridge and scrambled eggs, and taken to a hostel that would have beds and satellite TV and then a fast