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

ditch of a corn or maize field in Syria, and no “down to the last round but keeping one for suicide” in a military bunker, and no weaving between palm trees and attempting to avoid the heat-seeker cameras of a pursuing helicopter. Would be nothing of romance for Cameron Jilkes . . . he would not make it easy for the lad.

With his eyes closed and his breathing regular he would have shown no indication to the two officers in the front of the car that the events of that night and into the early morning would play out – in his opinion – in any extraordinary way. Not for them, Dominic and Babs, nor for Cameron Jilkes who would have been gulping down doses of vengeance – as they all did in their final hours, as they hoped. He would aim to make it, as best he could, a tedious finale, and unremarkable . . . Like a balloon when the air was allowed to leak from it, not with a dramatic hiss but a slow subsidence of emotion.

They were in the village, and she swung the wheel. It would be good to see Cameron Jilkes, see his face close-up and register the pain lingering there, and the anger. Would also be good to speak with him . . . it had been too long since the conversation he had enjoyed with Winston Gunn. Could recall the monosyllabic statements the boy had uttered, and Jilkes was unlikely to be very different.

No doubts in his mind. There had been stress points when he was alone in his work space, behind the partition. Also, magnified moments of anxiety when the heavy footfall of the AssDepDG had come down the corridor. Now, blissfully, Jonas seemed free of them, the stresses and the anxieties. Not a matter of arrogance, nor of conceit, but an assessment of his own abilities to read and predict an opponent.

He sat up, yawned, stretched. Jonas said, “Very smooth ride, thank you. Just need to check my phone, then we’ll get down to talking, and I’ll tell you how it will be . . . sorry, how I think it will be. But to be going on with, the target’s name is Cameron Jilkes, and . . .”

She said, “Sorry to interrupt. You call him a target?”

“I do. A serious target . . . an experienced fighter from Syria. Anyway, more of that in a minute . . . but, serious, dedicated, and dangerous.”

He had no business there.

The traffic breezed behind him, flowing fast on a main road.

He had come to see his mother, he owed it to her to come – and because he needed to be fed, and needed money – and then he would be moving on, starting out on his final journey. Where he stood now, away from the street lights and sheltered in shadow, was stupid, emotional: Cammy would have declared his contempt for both stupidity and emotion. Never once had any of them been guilty of such barefaced and cardinal sins. If any one of them was behaving like an idiot or being soft, they would have had a sharp kick in the arse and would have been on their way: even if it had been Ulrike on whom they depended, the punishment would have been the same . . . Stupidity and emotion weakened a fighting man and stripped him of focus: “focus” was staying alive, fulfilling a mission.

A car turned off the main road and its headlights caught him. The car slowed. Cammy turned on his heel and walked away briskly, enough to satisfy the driver that an unknown man in the side street no longer loitered. The car drove to the far end of The Avenue. By the time that Cammy had turned again, taking more care to hug the shadows, the driver was parking on a forecourt four doors away from the number given him by Cindy Piggot. He stared at the house, the windows and the lights behind poorly drawn curtains.

He saw her.

Did not actually see her face, saw her shadow as she passed the front room window, and the light was turned off. Lights coming on upstairs. He would have expected at this time of the evening that her husband, whatever he did, would be home from work, his car parked on the driveway but the space was empty. Faintly heard a baby yelling, listened to that for a while and the rain pattered on his shoulders and on his head, and his stomach groaned with hunger.

When he was with his brothers, he would never have felt the pain of loneliness. Would have read the riot act at them, any of them, for being soft.

The baby went quiet.

The front door opened. She came out. He saw Vicky . . . the first girl he had made a pitch for, first girl he had kissed properly, and first girl he had been on top of and him groping at his clothing and her wriggling with her own, and the first girl that he had walked away from without a kiss or an explanation . . . The only girl he had been with because he had never touched any of the scum kids who had come from Europe. She carried a plastic bag. The rubbish bin was at the pavement edge. She wore a blouse and a skirt and her hair was tied clumsily and the light caught it. She dumped the bag in the bin, then jogged back to the door, would have wanted to be out of the rain. The door shut. The light above the door lasted half a minute then went out . . . What little did Cammy know of married life: assumed that she would have left the front light on for her husband’s return.

He had no business to be there; it was idiocy and emotion that kept him motionless, standing in the gentle rain and in the shadows.

Tristram and Izzy stepped out. Would have seemed – and how they intended it to appear – like any young couple. The sounds around them were of subdued TVs playing behind drawn curtains. Cars were