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

conscience involved. He did not approve of torture in any form – noise, sleep deprivation, pain, abuse – because he did not think it worked well enough or fast enough.

Jonas was not skilled at loading and sending photographs by electronic mail, but he managed it . . . was quite pleased with himself when they had been sent, and more so to learn they had been delivered . . . There would be a delay. The images would have to be printed and then one of his probationers would have to pop out and find an ice-cream booth. It would take a few minutes . . . He had eaten his sandwich and drunk a mug of coffee from the flask, now flicked crumbs from his work surface, closed his eyes, and hoped to doze. Believed that soon the opportunities for rest would be scarce.

He walked on a sward of rough cut grass that stretched away from the prison wall where the cranes had swung and the lorries manoeuvred and towards the immediate outskirts of the city. Cammy had rested, not slept because of the pains in his stomach and the dryness in his throat, but he could cope with that, and his mum would feed him.

Parkland and ruins marked the site of St Augustine’s Abbey, now with only a fraction of its walls still standing. It was a familiar place for him. Every school kid, from the posh end up on the hill or the college beside the cathedral park down to the overflowing state schools, was carted around the county’s monuments: they did Roman ruins and Saxon ruins and Norse ruins and Norman ruins. They all did ruins like it was a staple for breakfast, necessary for keeping the bowels moving – he had hated ruins. Ahead of him were three parties of tourists, their guides carrying multi-coloured umbrellas though the rain had stopped, and gathered among the sunken stones of an excavated chapel were schoolchildren in neat blazers and short trousers or gingham frocks. He kept moving, his chin tucked against his chest. The kids would have been regimented, same as the wannabe “martyrs” that had come to Syria and were then tucked away in special camps, separated from the living, breathing, laughing, smoking fighters. Cammy, as Kami al-Britani, had been a free spirit, and his brothers had been too, and they had all found friendship, and what they had believed to be “liberty” when they carried the assault rifles and big mortar tube and a sniper’s rifle, when he had balanced on his shoulder the weight of the heavy machine-gun. The kids had sheets of paper on clipboards and would be tested later on what they remembered of the dirge they had been told about these buildings, and the tour guides breathed enthusiasm and the tourists snapped photographs. He could go forward as covertly as a fox at dusk, all of his brothers could. And later that day, when the light fell, his abilities to move unnoticed would be used. For now he was an independent man, alone and isolated, and knew it.

So easy then, those long-ago days, to act outside the loop, and stake big survival cash on the unexpected. The time outside Deir Ezzor. He and the brothers moving in a defile towards a village believed to be deserted. The “empty” village was occupied by at least 100 of the Hezbollah force – hard, squint-eyed bastards from south Lebanon. The laconic Stanislau had been point man. A guy of few words because of his cleft palate; probably the only time in his life that he had prospered was when he’d caught up with Cammy. Came from Belarus, and grunted that when the war was over and no more fighting to be done he would be a poet. Something of a miracle but the shots fired at him had all missed, and their surprise factor was lost. They had been pinned down, multiple fire positions on them. Ulrike, flat on her stomach and surrounded by the mortar bombs she was supposed to be hauling, had started the chorus for them to back off, reverse down the defile, and Cammy had thought it the worst of options. His word counted. Up front, in an alley he had seen a waving radio aerial. An aerial was where the boss was, the top man. Not argued with. No dissension. He led, the brothers followed. Ulrike up close to him and sweating, grunting, under the weight of the bombs. They had charged together and had woven a path between doorways and rubble, any cover available, but had kept going. Dwayne had killed the top man, had done it with a knife: his handset had dropped and he had shrieked, and that was what his people would have heard: their leader in pain, in terror, his scream. And those around the top man had gone down . . . an attack where it was not expected and the pace had been frantic. The Hezbollah boys had done a runner . . . Pieter had said that if they had tried to extricate themselves, gone back and deeper into the defile, then they would have been cut to pieces. There had been a cursory celebration, nothing like “triumphalism”, and others had utilised the hole they had made in the line and come through it. Ruhan had told them that the execution of the attack was “brilliant”, but Ruhan was dead, and Tomas, and . . . He was alone and strode across the grass and looked neither right or left but kept the tower of the cathedral – the Bell Harry Tower, 250 feet high – in his gaze. Would not let it from his sight, and the afternoon wore on and the guides would soon be finishing their talk, and the kids were already late for the bus to get them back to school.

Here, Cammy thought himself to be near his home, the place where his life had been shaped, more so than in the semi-detached house on the estate above Sturry. He was drawn towards the