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

open and everything loaded in it that had not gone back into the armoury, and her phone had gone and she’d read her text.

“This is just bloody unreasonable,” he murmured.

“God! Do they not think we have the right to a life?” she snapped.

They walked towards each other.

“I was going to a movie.”

“We have a birthday next week and I’m due to make the cake.”

“It will be overtime, won’t it?”

“Bet your life it will be.”

Different ways, and different types, but both were wedded to the job. He had a new girlfriend who worked in a solicitor’s office and who was sorely tried by the hours he kept and his devotion to the work, and who just about hung in there, and would get a call in the next five minutes telling her to find a friend to take to the Cineworld. She had a husband, father of their kid, and he joked, pretended to, about being second in place, or third, even fourth, to her job; he’d get a call telling him to shove off down to the Co-op, and buy a cake and make sure he checked the “Use Before” date.

Rain was beating down on the tarmac, and on their kit, and starting to soak them. The call had not come as a surprise. They should have been released hours before but had been asked to hang around, something was in the wind. They were to get up to Canterbury . . . Why them? They were not entitled to see the duty roster, or to know where the armed response vehicles were tasked that evening. They were to get up to Canterbury, were to check in at the station there. Would be contacted by a Mr Merrick.

Dominic rang through to his sergeant. “Are we part of a big team?”

“Don’t think so, Dom. They’ve asked for a bit of muscle for the ride, and we’re sending you and Babs, and you take all your artillery. You might be wondering about Merrick? He’s the Box. He’s a spook. Merrick says that it will all be over by the morning. Part of it is that we are thin as a fag paper, and part of it is that you were on the beach this morning and were in there at the start. Anything more will expose my ignorance . . . Enjoy.”

He said to Babs, “I don’t want to go rash, like jump off the end of the pier, but this might just be interesting . . .”

Together they went back inside and drew out their firearms and their ammunition and their grenades again. Had enough stuff, the armourer observed, to start a small-scale war.

She said, “Could be a lot better than interesting if it’s that guy on the beach. Serious and interesting.”

The busker had a traditional guitar and strummed vigorously and sang without amplification. The rain was soaking into his woollen hat and into his sweater and he seemed not to notice. In front of him was a plastic plate with a rim to it that would protect the coins thrown into it. Cammy was his sole audience. Recognised him.

Thought the sweater was the same, and the beanie, but his beard was longer and the flecks of grey more pronounced. Sitting in the same place with his back to a war memorial, topped by a small Celtic cross. He had been there the day Cammy had gone, taken the flight that would lift him into fighting alongside the black flags. He had walked past the war memorial on his way to the bank on the main drag and the busker had been playing. Perhaps he noticed the guy with the weird face and the clothes that did not match his age, and might have wondered whether the attention shown him meant that he was going to get a generous pocketful of loose change. “Out of luck, friend.”

He stayed and listened and wondered . . . Cammy had been in Raqqa and in Deir Ezzor and in Kobane and in Barghuz, and plenty of other places that barely figured on most maps. The busker had been here with his guitar; Cammy went on to have his assault rifle and the use of the 81mm mortar tube, and the RPG-7 launcher and had the support of his brothers. The busker still played alone. Cammy had been with the people he loved: and now, he, too, was alone. The busker would be playing through that week, and Cammy would be gone. Their eyes met, a brief exchange . . . The guy finished and realised that he’d get no coins off the man who watched him. Shook his head and flicked the rain off his beanie, and put the guitar into its case. Cammy watched as he started to walk away.

He said to the man’s back, “I don’t know your name. You don’t know mine, but you will tomorrow.”

He had been given the number of a psychologist, employed by the military until retirement four months before. Jonas explained why he called, what he needed to know.

“Kami al-Britani. We knew him quite well, able to form a decent profile of him.”

He did not interrupt, had no need to. Jonas gazed at the photograph on his wall.

“You’ve told me about the confrontation with an experienced NCO, a sergeant in SBS. Implied that some sense of nobility, or patriotic sentiment, saved the sergeant’s life. You indicated that this young Briton declined to kill a fellow countryman . . . Mr Merrick, from what I hear of you, you are unlikely to be gullible. I would lay odds – my shirt, my vest, my underpants, perhaps even my Marylebone tie – that the weapon jammed. This is not some Robin Hood figure who patrols the desert and seeks to right the wrongs inflicted by the Assad regime, or the Iranians and Hezbollah, or the UK and the Americans, by the rest of the known world. We can assume him and his coterie are in love with the business and pursuit of warfare. Some people play golf, some stand on the end of a platform