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

of powerful four-wheel drives were parked in the front. Dwayne said it was a life lived in “a culture of conformity”. If he had not left, had stayed with them, what else might he have done? He’d scratch his bum and deliberate and would talk of writing a book or a poem or the words of a song, and drink beer and fish for walleye – and boredom would have been lethal . . . Often enough, since they had welcomed Dwayne into their band, allowed him to be one of the brothers, Cammy had fussed around him like an irritated sheepdog, had rounded him up and bawled abuse because the Canadian was immersed in his thoughts in fields of wild flowers.

Pieter was shouting and pointing, then Cammy saw it: a grey shape against a hazy sky and streaking towards them.

He was the worst military guy amongst them, except that he had the innate skills of a tracker and a woodsman. He could move towards a roadblock position under the cover of growing maize and not a plant would be disturbed and even alert guards would have no warning as he approached. He might then have slit throats with the same detachment as he might earlier in life have cleaned out the innards of a fish. He was the best cook among them and most useful at that time when they were in flight and food was scarce. And he had a philosophy that seemed valuable. Like a vinyl record with a scratch so that it repeated. “Things are going to get a lot worse before they get worse”, and he said that was not original to him but came from one of the Marx guys. No fear ever shown . . . and unaware in the last seconds of his life. Not hearing and not seeing and probably with the scent of flowers in his nostrils, and in a state of grace.

The bomb careered away from the undercarriage of the aircraft and almost floated before it began to fall.

It would not have happened when they were going forward. Impossible to imagine that Cammy would have shown such dereliction of basic survival procedures. A military vehicle parked up in the open, a tall figure in black clothing easily visible among bright flowers, the rest of them away from their weapons, their clothing scattered. But the heart and the spirit were being torn from them, and their brothers were being taken, and they no longer advanced but tried to make sense of defeat and retreat, and a mistake delivered them into an enemy’s hands. No guns within reach, not that a heavy machine-gun could hope to hit a fixed-wing strike aircraft even as it pulled out from the level flight and veered away as its bomb came down. Would have been on a mission and with one bomb left and a target offering itself. They were shrieking at him, but even if he had heeded them and had flattened himself it would have been too late to save his life.

The bomb struck, extraordinary precision, hit the ground close to him and beside the empty vehicle, then the eruption, and the dirt and the dust and the deafening noise and the blast of the gale that it blew. Their cries died. They dressed themselves, which seemed important. Then gathered up their weapons, all except for the German woman, for Ulrike. She ran, wore only skimpy underpants and they hung low on her hips from the weight of the stream’s water and her body was white. Dwayne, the big man never swore in her presence, called her “Ma’am” and had liked nothing better than to sit cross-legged in darkness by a guttering fire while she told them stories: little more than nursery tales – witches and dragons and castles and princesses – and would calm them and then in the morning they would go again and fight, and Dwayne would be their point man because he had the best skill in crossing ground, in finding cover.

The aircraft soared to regain altitude and came over them, and Cammy saw the markings. The pilot and his navigator would be back in time for a cup of tea and a biscuit before the debrief on the mission and they’d tell the ground-based RAF officers who controlled them of a little bit of a bonus, taking down a black flag vehicle and at least one of the “bad boys”. Clear from the roundels painted on the fuselage that the aircraft was British and the pilot was Cammy’s enemy.

The vehicle was well fucked, was on its side, the chassis at a twisted angle, and in the field of flowers there was a single dark and messy crater. The debris had fallen, the smoke had cleared, the noise gone. Stanislau had brought along with him the clothes that Ulrike had worn before going into the river. She dressed. Nothing to say. Then they started to search, did it in silence. Pieter was the first to give up on something futile and he went to the toppled jeep and started to wrench free whatever could be retrieved and was not damaged. Some of the weapons and some of the ammunition and some of the food and the medical box, as much as they could carry – as Cammy and Ulrike and Pieter and Stanislau could carry. They found part of an arm. It was taken off at the elbow and Dwayne’s watch was still on the wrist and it had been given him by his father on his 21st birthday. They put it in the deepest part of the crater and then covered it with stone and earth.

Cammy looked at the skies. The aircraft was long gone. Its trail had disappeared. There was a hawk high in the sky, nothing else. He blamed himself for their carelessness, was right to. He gazed into the emptiness and cursed the man who had flown the plane, did it silently and with acute anger. And his prayer for Dwayne