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

He saw the car. Granite-grey and unmarked, a BMW. The front passenger door opened and a light came on. They were uniformed. He imagined that this rather conventional looking vehicle would be equipped with a highly tuned performance engine and could reach speeds of near to 150 miles an hour. If they imagined they would be pushing those limits then they were due for disappointment.

The man stepped out of the car and the woman was behind the wheel. He reckoned they would regard him as rather under-dressed, might try to foist a bulletproof vest on him that he would decline to wear. The man had a weighed-down belt which carried more gear than would have fitted on a good sized Christmas tree, and he had a Glock in a holster strapped to his thigh. He had a swagger about him. Most of them did, in Jonas’s opinion. They carried the guns and the ammunition, and they were as highly trained as any of junior rank in the local police forces. He would have seen a shambling old guy walking towards him, coat open, tie a little askew, and a trilby on his head, not quite straight, and trousers that had lost their crease . . . His face fell. They would have been all excited to be involved in a Security Service operation, and a short elderly man approached them.

“Hello, I’m Jonas.”

Doubtful. “Pleased to meet you, sir. I’m Dominic.”

“Hope you haven’t been waiting too long.”

“Haven’t, sir. This is my colleague, Babs.”

He leaned inside and offered his hand. The rear door was opened for him. He squeezed in, there was a boxed area that separated the seats and a pile of wet weather gear and a couple of large black grips that took some shifting. He assumed they’d enough weapons on board to launch a limited-scale war: none of it would be necessary if his ideas panned out, and it finished well.

He said, “There’s an old and apt line for police and military and intelligence work. ‘Few plans survive contact with the enemy’, and it’s one that I like. If the plan works – always if – by the time you settle to your breakfast you will be able to walk quite tall . . . if . . . Sometimes the plan works and sometimes it does not but we have to give it a stab.”

He told them where they needed to be. Jonas settled back and closed his eyes.

Chapter 10

She drove carefully, correctly. Seemed to observe the speed limit and made the regulation number of mirror checks and did not push to overtake in the flow of cars and vans and lorries leaving the city at the end of the working day. Once or twice there was a sharp hiss of breath from her that meant she was displeased at the driving of another motorist. Jonas assumed they would make a virtue of abiding by every aspect of the laws of the road. He assumed they knew little of their mission, had been poorly briefed – their superiors would have qualified for the mushroom farm: “kept in the dark and fed on shit”; not pleasant but good practice.

A satnav system to guide them. He had been general as to where he wanted to be, a junction of roads. They would have regarded themselves, Jonas believed, as an élite. They’d see themselves as the best of the best, the most highly trained, the guys and girls who had the authority to carry a weapon into a live confrontation, to ignore or countermand the orders of a superior officer, practised each week of each month at the business of killing people . . . existed for that purpose and were paid well for it, little bonus rewards on the side. For the next few minutes, they would be prepared to let him snooze on the back seat but when he was delivered to the location he had requested, he expected a short sharp shock to be administered and a rule book read him, and their terms of reference. He let the smile play on his face – knew what to expect, and knew his response.

They headed up the main road to the seaside town of Margate. Two or three of the fellow members of their Caravan Club in Raynes Park had been to Margate for holidays, had booked into sites outside the town and said that the views over the Channel were impressive, but quite boring. They passed a retail park with the usual big brand names of electrical goods outlets, and he saw the floodlit perimeter fence of the city’s sewage treatment works, and there was a Park and Ride place, and a Mercedes dealership. Like anywhere else: new homes going up, crammed close to each other. Nothing exceptional. He had seen the cathedral tower, floodlit, from the station but they drove away from it. An unremarkable road, and a route towards what he assumed would be an unremarkable estate, and in the middle of it would be an unremarkable home. He appreciated being in places that could be accused of unremarkable boredom. It seemed appropriate.

Jonas Merrick, of course, had never been to Syria. But neither had he visited, in his counter-espionage days, the cities of Russia, and in the times of the Troubles it had never been thought necessary to fly him to Ireland. This evening marked something of a first for him, and the road out of Canterbury towards the village of Sturry was suitable, meshed with the traits of his character. Would have been wrong to have cornered a fighter, a man who acted out the part of a wounded, angry big cat, and allow him to get a foothold in that Valhalla place that he no doubt yearned for. Much better that it would be on ground chosen by Jonas Merrick, where there was nothing special – not a place where a doomed hero would have wanted to be. There would be no last stand, courage and bravery to the fore, in an irrigation