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

and jot down the numbers on the sides of locomotives, some want to have a loaded weapon in their hands. He led a group. It was a talisman to other units. They were believed to be invincible. They attacked against ludicrously uneven odds and seemed to come through unscathed. That bit is important.”

Jonas seldom took notes, relied on his memory.

“They were survivors, winners. We might have imagined that they had, collectively, no great sense of the burning injustice of the day. Nor would they have concerned themselves with the hideous atrocities that were the daily practice of the black flag movement. They proceeded with the combat, with the killing, and they soaked up the praise. Had a sense of enduring excitement rather than anger . . . But it started to go wrong. Where I started out, Mr Merrick, we go back to a wall. Go back to the bricks that have been removed. The wall is now unstable, its strength is unpredictable. It will create mayhem when it falls. The bricks are the people involved in that group. I was privileged to sit in on security assessments. They were intact when they left the enclave at Barghuz. A coherent unit, but a small one. Keep thinking of the bricks, Mr Merrick.”

He thought of them but continued to stare at the mouth of the crocodile, its jaws and its teeth.

“They were multi-national. All significant misfits in the society they came from. Cameron Jilkes – I did not have that name, only that of Kami al-Britani. British. There was a German woman and we had identified a young Estonian boy, and a white South African, a Ukrainian, a Canadian and a Belarus man. They had stayed untouched, were celebrities. Like the fighter aces over the trenches in the First World War. A peculiar irony, but once they quit the main war theatre and were looking to drift away, go to ground, they began to take casualties. What we learned, the Estonian was first. He was followed by the Ukrainian, and more. I suppose that only one is still active . . . From your interest I assume that the one we call Kami al-Britani survived, has returned. He has lost the stability that came from his colleagues. He will be alone. People may seek to use his combat skills but he has no friend to take on the burden of decision making. His mind-set will dictate just one ambition. Maximum havoc and revenge. What he knew has been destroyed, and bloodily. That makes a powerful anger . . . He will want to find a target that he can equate to the value of his colleagues. His weakness? He will need to get his hands on a weapon that can deliver the Valhalla moment, a decent bang for the buck . . .”

Jonas arched an eyebrow. “Meaning . . .?”

“Military explosive, a heavy machine-gun, an 81mm mortar, or an armour-piercing grenade projectile from an RPG . . .”

“He could use that?”

“Of course, yes. Has been at war in a savage theatre for more than two years. This is heavy lifting, continous fighting. He can use anything. An RPG would be difficult to get his hands on but would be an ideal weapon . . . My conclusions, Mr Merrick? Very capable, physically brave, determined to hurt, to avenge those colleagues. If he can find the weapon, then he’ll go out with drama. They are one-dimensional people and with a quite colossal sense of grievance. But you know that, Mr Merrick . . . My final observation. You do not get to Valhalla by holding up a handkerchief, waving it at the guns and having your hands high above your head. Much worse than death is the idea of imprisonment. A lifetime in a cell, behind bars, unheard and unknown and uncared for, is a true torture for such people. Hope I have been of help. Good luck.”

It was always a matter of having the skill to join the dots, Jonas believed . . . A vehicle had been lost while apparently heading for a ferry port from which regular sailings went to the UK. And the cargo was believed to be a Ruchnoy Protivotankoviy Granatomyot weapon, doubtless serviceable.

He cleared his desk, locked everything away other than the file on Cameron Jilkes which he slid into his bag. He left it neat, looked a last time at the crocodile, and a last time at the photograph of a young man, smiling and with a ring of ice-cream smeared around his mouth.

Chapter 9

He felt he was going to war, not with bands playing and crowds cheering, but in stealth and unheralded. The building seemed deserted as Jonas Merrick locked the outer door of 3/S/12 and set off down the corridor towards the bank of lifts.

He went by rooms that showed no light under their doors, and along silent corridors, passed the coffee machines that did no trade at that time of the evening. The ceiling lights were dimmed because that was the new edict in support of a Save the Climate campaign. He carried his bag, pitifully light because it contained so little . . . and just the one file, the name of “JILKES, Cameron” scrawled across the cardboard in his painful handwriting. In his pocket was that awkward-shaped and necessary item of equipment that he had, last minute, decided he should bring with him.

Jonas reckoned that it was neither family holidays or sickness that had emptied the floors of Thames House. He thought the quiet and the ghostly still of the place was because of the stretch factor. No way around it, and “all hands to the pump” as they would have said in former times. Stretched to snapping point, and any man or woman working there who had even half of the necessary ability was sitting in an unmarked car, loitering in a shop doorway, travelling on a bus or train. Those who were not press-ganged into being on the ground were probably huddled over a desk top, staring at screens and trying to find patterns of behaviour without which the Service might as well accept it was blindfolded.

It had