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

a considerable organisation, and knew it: he believed the self-given name, Wolfboy, was well earned. He would do his full shift that evening, and the next day he might arrive an hour or two hours later than he was expected, but the internet café owner knew him as a good worker, loyal and conscientious, and would excuse him, would not quiz him as to where he had been. He expected to be there when the news broke. His assumption was that it would take an hour, minimum, for the full detail of the attack to be carried on news programmes, and by then – God willing – he would be back in Leeds and would be helping to make coffee, to serve cake, and to give guidance to anyone who found it difficult working with a computer.

He had put much of it in place. The schedule was prepared for the following morning. A ferry would have docked in the night, and the weapon would be brought by the couriers to Grantham in Lincolnshire. Also arriving there would be a young man, British, white-skinned and a veteran fighter . . . That man was the star of the Wolfboy firmament. Farouk could easily find kids who would not be fearful of martyrdom, who might have a great enough love of their religion to seek to paint their names in its legends. What he could not have summoned up in Leeds, in Dewsbury, in the terraced streets of Bradford, or even from Luton, was a fighter who had the skill necessary for the attack, who had the anger to carry it out.

He did not know the man’s name, nor had he seen a photograph of him.

The front area of the café, beyond the kitchen where he worked, heaved with the music of the near East, with voices raised in laughter and debate, and money filled the till. It was a good place for him to work, and strangers came and went each day and only a few of them had business with him. He thought the building was probably watched but it was swept regularly and he believed no bugs were planted, and no informers were among the regulars, and he trusted that his own communications were secure. He would see the man, watch him from a distance, would see him slip into the vehicle, and already the package – opened and readied – would be behind the driving seat. He would have liked the opportunity to grip the fighter’s hand, even hug him or brush-kiss his cheeks . . . that would not happen. He was assured the man was militarily able, and no longer had a love for life, and had chosen the target himself. More mugs and plates were brought to him.

Excitement gripped him. He thought himself privileged that a man of his reputation would be dependent on the quality of Farouk’s planning, might even thank him. A fierce and shivering excitement. Farouk was a believer but did not think he could ever match this man’s anger, as described to him . . . And in less than the span of a day it would be over and he would be back here, the sink filled, and the music playing.

As if he were still the child he had been, Cammy walked the length of the nave, and climbed steps, and peered at outer doors, and remembered.

There was the great chair, the cathedra, which had been used by archbishops for 800 years. Once he had parked his own butt on it and had heard a squeal of annoyance from an attendant, and had run. He gazed at the ancient worn Petworth marble.

At the Trinity Chapel he looked at the tomb of Archbishop Simon who had doubled as finance boss to the king of his day, and who the mob had captured, then hacked off his head; all of him buried here, except his head which was on the north side of the Thames estuary.

Paused at the resting place of the Black Prince, Edward, victor against superior numbers of French troops at Crécy, aged sixteen, and in the front line at the heaviest of the hand-to-hand combat, and ten years later at Poitiers, a hero, and dead in middle age and lying in splendour in a tomb topped by a carved likeness of him in full armour, his double-hand fighting sword on his hip. Against the odds, succeeding far from home, recognised and honoured.

Images, romanticised, of the mediaeval combat had stayed with Cammy. By the tomb were the prince’s coat of arms, among them the feathers and the message of Ich Dien, taken from the shield of John of Bohemia, totally blind, who had ridden, his knights around him, towards the English formation at Crécy, and had been killed.

Kings were here, and cardinals, and archbishops, and the dead were honoured . . . Cammy had passed the old wooden doors that led to the famed cloisters, through which four kinghts had stormed. Archbishop Thomas, expecting them and too proud to flee, had been at prayer. He paused, in front of the altar, stood on the stone slab on which the knights would have pirouetted before raising their swords and slashing the clergyman to death . . . The king had wanted it done, the king’s wish was executed, the king had not stood by his knights, had disowned them. Cammy imagined the shouting and the yelling, and the chaos of the moment, and slipped away, overwhelmed by the hugeness of the place where once he had owned a stake.

Plaques on the walls commemorated men fallen in combat in Zulu wars, in India and on the Western Front, in North Africa, and regiments raised from men recruited in Kent’s villages and small towns . . . This was where he had been as a boy and where a greater part of his character had been formed. Where the nobility of combat, his interpretation of it, was carved.

He still had time to lose . . . He thought no one had noticed him, no one watched him. He needed to be here to