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

“No idea what you’re talking about.”

“Talking about Cameron Jilkes. Brother was a bad one, sister got pranged in a car accident. Cameron Jilkes went off to fight. Cops all over his pad, photo on the front of the paper. Was with those people who slit throats, revolting bastards . . . Are you not Cameron Jilkes? Isn’t that who you are?”

He’d always thought Joey Pickford a shit and a bully . . . Doubt was now clouding his face. Cammy saw the shabby trousers and the shirt with a drainage firm logo on the chest. Where he had come from and who he had once been, he would have had Joey Pickford down on his knees and jabbering for mercy and wetting himself and messing himself, but that was then . . . And he remembered Vicky. He showed no hint of recognition.

“Can’t help you. Never seen you before.”

“Not Cameron Jilkes? Not the guy dating Vicky Wilson, married now, Gavin Davies and a kid . . .? Not the guy who went out to fight, headlines, cop raids, not him?”

“No, excuse me.”

He did a sort of wintry smile and walked right through Joey Pickford, and the guy had to stumble aside or would have been knocked over, and confusion was on his face and uncertainty. Cammy kept walking and was through the gate and the wall and he’d have bet that Joey Pickford stared after him all the time he could see him, . . . and if he gossiped and told mates and the news of it went viral in the limited and dead-beat group that Pickford would have moved with, by then Cammy would be well gone, distanced, and would be facing his target. Pickford was forgettable, not Vicky. What he could recall of Gavin Davies was of a keen, neat and tidy lad who had ambitions to wear a tie at work.

Daft of him, but all the time he had been travelling, ever since the break-out and his decision to come home and deal out damage, he had not considered the consequences of his flight, and the reaction. Kept walking towards the entry gate.

Almost enough, but not quite enough.

The photograph taken from his file, JILKES, Cameron (Canterbury), was now on his wall, adjacent to the crocodile’s image, and the ice-cream was still visible over the mouth, had shown up well through the print process.

He dialled a number, overseas and on the secure net: always preferred to speak direct, to listen and then weigh information rather than follow the fashion of impersonal email contact. Had to have “enough”. The war against the jihadis, scaling down, was run out of the al-Sayliyah camp close to the Qatari capital, Doha, where the US had their CentCom operation, and allies sent assets to show the flag and pretended that influence could still be exercised. Some British personnel did it better than others.

He had talked to those girls four times in the last year. They were Sixers and had been relocated as if that were part of a penance and a re-education programme. A section of Six across the river had been closed down after accusations from on high of a cavalier approach. The stables were supposedly in the cleansing process. All a bit childish to Jonas Merrick. Flamboyant, childish and theatrical. He supposed the girls existed in this American hinterland on a diet of air-conditioning, baked beans and peanut butter.

A crisp voice answered. He remembered Alice. Pretty as a chocolate-box picture, might have been standing in front of an old stone wall where roses climbed. Gave the name and also spoke about a voice. Did he wish to hold or should she call back? He would hold. New Orleans jazz was played back to him. Jonas anticipated the answer.

The ice-cream ringing the mouth gave a small distortion but not enough to destroy the complexity of the face . . . He thought it one that he would have trusted, that of a man who would lead, one who would be followed. He could place himself in the minds and in the faith of an Iranian group who had started out on an odyssey, and who were within touching distance of a destination, but needed the spur of a single man’s courage to get them there. Deep eyes and an honesty in the chin . . . Jonas Merrick could read a face. Liked this one and was amused by the smear ringing the mouth. But the photograph was not contemporary. His files were packed with the images of those men and women who had returned from Syria, Iraq and any other of those wretched locations, and he knew their faces would have altered – lines indented where there had been smoothness, eyes dulled by what they had seen. All of them would carry the weight of a burden, and the final and undefined factor would be the anger bred from the scale of defeat. It was the anger, the hatred, that most concerned him.

The music stopped in the middle of a trumpet solo.

The voice of Alice. “You still there? Yes . . .? Good. We don’t know that name, but there was something marginally similar that we never seemed to get around to analysing. The name was Kami al-Britani, but no one did sufficient work on it. The man wasn’t a High Value Target, but had a ‘dead or alive’ bounty on him. Not a big one. We do have a footprint, something out of the ordinary.”

“I’d be grateful for that, the footprint.”

“You’d talked about a hymn singer.”

“I did. It’s what I am trying to identify – a man with knowledge of Christian hymns. Not a fundamentalist, but a young man familiar with the traditional church and its music.”

“There is only one footprint – we’d call it ‘aural’.”

“An aural footprint? Give it me, please.”

“It was picked up on a radio intercept. There was a squad opposite some of the US forces. Rated as high level, a bit kamikaze, but also survivors – if that fits. They were monitored. They were talking to their officer, an Iraqi national and a field commander and there was