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

have been the anger and the loss that wet his cheeks. He threw down the cigarette. There had been himself and his six friends, and there had been the emir who was their nominal commander but gave them free rein. He had gone first in the break-out after it was clear that the battle was lost.

The six of them, and Cammy, were due to go on the next evening, but their emir was off and away by dusk.

He was Ruhan, an Iraqi, sophisticated and worldly, he had taken this flotsam group under his wing.

There was talk now, among the foreign fighters, of a last stand. An Alamo sited on the west bank of the great Euphrates river, or a bit of Custer. Men boasted of how they would fall in combat and their black-cloaked women egged them on with declarations of the glory of dying in the name of the cause and, between the incessant air strikes, the children ran wild, and screamed in fear or in hunger. Common to all of them in the group was an adoration of the thrill of combat, a delight in their new freedom, a brotherhood, and a belief set in hard, old stone that it was only “others” who would be hurt.

They were Tomas and Pieter and Mikki and Dwayne and Stanislau and Ulrike – and the unspoken first among equals was Cammy. They had drifted away from homes as far away from each other as Canada’s Algonquin lakes and the northern extremities of Estonia, had come to fight under the black flag. At first it had been a series of victories, almost in the realms of amusement, then had come the serious fighting which had tested each of them, then the defeats and the retreats. Like an alarm on a wristwatch, it seemed the right time to find another corner in which to fight . . . leave the zealots and the bigots to martyrdom or the shame of surrender. Ruhan moved amongst them and there were kisses and hugs and slapped backs, and talk of a reunion but not where. Yemen, Afghanistan, Libya? Anywhere that brothers were welcome.

The tide had turned. The aircraft came again and again, went back to a carrier or an airstrip to refuel and rearm, and came again. There was no food in the enclave, and no medical capability, and the wounded screamed and cried in the night . . . Time to move on. They would be together, could depend on each other, were brothers.

They regarded Ruhan as the ultimate fighter, trusted and believed in him. He was older than they were, had taught Cammy everything he knew of small unit warfare, and of security, and staying safe from both the bombers and the internal security bastards who patrolled to prevent desertion but were never in the front line. Ruhan said, that “sometime” there would be a meet-up in a bar, “someplace”, and it could be in the Gulf, a five-star joint with Chivas Regal or old malt . . . He had been a hard man in his time. Now, he was only interested in winning and had no time for being herded into the enclave by the river. Tells others to fight on, tells his young brothers to ship out. Himself, he would be going home, back to the town in Anbar to his wife and his kids. He was indestructible, since winning a place on Saddam Hussein’s protection detail, had once been a colonel in air force intelligence. Had been an emir with control of a battalion of foreign fighters. He told them where they should go the next evening, how it was safe in that sector of the perimeter. How he loved them, told them also that they were shit and without him would not have known how to wipe their arses, and Ulrike laughed as much as the boys, and big bombs lasered down, and the bombardment of artillery was constant. They watched him go.

Another night. Another day. Another stack of confirmation signals that the little corner by the river was doomed. Another hopeless hunt for food and water.  Another clutch of hours waiting for the wounded to die and shut the fuck up.

They would take all the ammunition they could carry . . . Might just move on into the Syrian desert and fight there alongside the clever boys who had ditched the women, the kids and the camp followers, and would start it again but in a lower key. Might . . . Ruhan had been specific on the route they should take out through the front line, and where the intelligence guys said the enemy were sparse.

Edging through bunkers and foxholes and craters and keeping clear of the fires burning. Worse than anything before. The right time to go. That part of a dream lost.

Cammy was in the centre of the line, and Mikki was in front of him and Ulrike was behind, and Pieter, Tomas led and Stanislau was back-marker. They followed a route given them by Ruhan, drifted forward in the darkness. Stepped around a child, silent and beseeching who was not yet dead but was disembowelled, and passed a woman who clung to a baby and both were dead but unmarked. An officer in the dying caliphate screamed at them to go to the left where the trenches needed shoring, and another cried for more ammunition to be taken forward. All ignored . . . they went where Ruhan had instructed them.

And they came to him, recognised him.

Ruhan had been quality at cruelty but had liked and trusted this gang of misfits. Years before he had cheated death on the scaffold at Abu Graib gaol because his beaten-up Peugeot had had a flat front tyre. He had fixed it at the side of a dirt track and then driven along an avenue of palms. The Black Hawk helicopters had been loading up, preparing for the lift, and he had caught a fleeting glimpse of the big man, the man he was supposed to protect. Another of the fugitive President’s bodyguards had been