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

suck in the strength he would require for his final attack; he thought he would be talked of here, and remembered.

“Jonas Merrick?”

He confirmed it.

“How is it in London?”

He said it was raining in London.

“You called my office. They took some time finding me. They reached me on the beach. I’m calling you from the beach. You want to know where my beach is?”

Did not give a toss where the beach was. Where this American army officer, attached to intelligence gathering, was probably drinking beer with his mates and likely had some nurses with them. He said he would be fascinated to learn where the beach was.

“It is the Al-Farkiah beach, Mr Merrick. We have a section of it to ourselves, and I reckon it Qatar’s best. It’s dark here now but we have a bit of a fire going and the barbecue is stoking up nicely, and . . . I’m told you want to know about an ‘aural footprint’, that right?”

He had bided his time, had not hurried the man. An aural footprint on a hymn singer was his point of interest.

The officer said, in a laconic voice, “We could always fuck them with our technology, Mr Merrick. The gadgets that we could put into the field against them made it, sort of, an unequal contest. That’s good, because these are bad bastards and we had no sympathy for them. The purpose was to get locations on them from tapping into mobiles and radios – I’m talking about front line – and then we could better hit them from the air, get the air force in with heavy ordnance or blast them with the Hellfires from drones. You remember one of our pilots described hitting retreating Iraqi transport, ‘like a turkey shoot’? Well, nothing much has changed. Kind of unequal. Anyway . . . the material you’re talking about was close to two years ago, could be longer. Our gear was a long way forward, and we reckoned we had struck lucky. There was an officer we were tracking – one of the old Saddam boys and a capable man – and he was right for taking down, but a cunning guy and making plenty of effort to stay alive. He and his people had a tactic that we had not cottoned on to at the beginning. They would only do radio and mobile communications just before they moved. You got me, sir?”

He sat in his partitioned area and felt as if he had been transported far from the river and from Thames House; imagined himself in a desert, or beside a fetid waterway, or among arid concrete buildings or in an alley stinking of mules and goats. Felt the place, and smelt it.

“The Iraqi guy was called Ruhan, a major. He was interesting to us because he seemed to operate primarily with units of foreign fighters. Other times the team I was with was aiming to get inside the security procedures of their paper-pushers running the finance side of the war, and their real bad guys, the ones with knives. This stretch in time we were going after effective fighting teams. He was one we chased a fair amount, but had no positive result. Had a favourite gang . . . what I mean is that when there was a job that needed doing, beyond the general run of the mill troopers, they’d send for this officer and he would bring up his people. Seemed to get things done. They had come off a message and the operator at their end of the radio, the Iraqi, had left the set powered up for a few seconds at the end of the transmission. Brief, tantalising, but clear. With me?”

Jonas said he was.

“Sir I don’t know my religious anthems. If my grandparents, up in north Wisconsin, had heard the tracks they would have known the title, the verse, and the writer’s name. There was no doubt, though, that it was a hymn that was being sung. One guy with a good voice. I reckon we had three or four lines. Called others in to hear it because it was just extraordinary what we were hearing . . . I mean, in downtown Raqqa, a guy would have been in serious trouble – know what I mean by ‘serious’? – for that sort of music. We reckoned these people – this voice in particular – were of the highest quality as fighters and that they believed themselves to be untouchable. Can I add something?”

He could. Jonas listened. He rarely interrupted source material, allowed a story to be told in its own way, in its own time.

“I said, ‘the highest quality as fighters’. Most of what they get in are just fodder for our fire-power, but a few of them are dedicated and professional. Fortunately, sir, only a few. The Iraqi officer had an overview of their operations, but on the ground they were led by an English boy. Kami al-Britani, that seemed to be a name that came through. We didn’t get him . . . Truth to tell, Mr Merrick, he was not the biggest target for us because he hadn’t sliced the throats of any aid workers, not that we knew of. Now, I’ve lost touch with the state of ground operations in Syria. I don’t know whether this guy, the one with the choir voice – must have been taught to sing that heavy stuff – was taken down in an air strike, or went into the cages. You know what happened to him, sir?”

Jonas told the American that it was believed this individual was on his way home, might already be back on his home territory. The line went quiet. He heard voices in the background, and light laughter, and then a hiss for them to be quiet.

The American said, “That sort of guy, sir, if he’s headed back to where he started out from will be nursing a powerful anger. We made sure they did not have an easy ride. They were hit every way we could pummel them: bombs,