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

Into the marital bedroom and the robe dropped and the nightdress over her shoulders.

As good as he had remembered her, and then the gasp.

“Are those wounds? Is that what happened to you? How many holes? How did you live through . . .”

And he kissed her harder, covered her mouth, and they fell together and the bed heaved.

“What do you want?” the man had asked and had stood suspicious and defiant on the mat in the hall.

“Very sorry to disturb you,” Izzy had said.

“Could we please come in?” Tristram had asked.

No outside porch to give them shelter. They’d have looked half drowned, her hair would have been flattened on her head and the rain would have been running off his nose. They were probationers, trying to make their way in the covert and complicated world of the Security Service. And they had been scared and had walked along the cul-de-sac and had identified the house where Jonas Merrick had told them to be . . . Didn’t know whether their target – Jilkes, Cameron – was already at the location, didn’t know whether he was armed. Nor did they know how this family home, chosen by Merrick, would react. The curtains drawn, no lights on in the room and there would have been a view of the end of the road, the top, where it widened to make a better turning space, and where the semi-detached brick-built home stood, dark and lifeless.

“Who are you?”

“We are actually a government agency and . . .”

“Don’t piss about, Tris – we are from the Security Service. May we please come in. If you didn’t know it, sir, it’s raining out here.”

One thing to be scared and coming up a road, not knowing where a jihadi might be, and no weapon to hand, and they were a boy and a girl, and they had held hands, and had arrived on a neighbour’s doorstep. Needed to produce identification. She had to open her shoulder bag, dig inside and produce the wallet, and flash the card embedded under a cellophane cover. He had to take his plastic card from the zipped internal jacket pocket where he thought it was safe. Both needed spare hands, and they were held, and she might have blushed scarlet and might have groaned, and the man saw it. Cards produced, and shown and him peering at them and wanting to take them and move away to the light and neither permitting him to handle them. And then a woman in a dressing-gown at the top of the stairs and demanding to know who visited them, that time of night. Then two kids behind their mother, and them wanting to know too.

The man had said, “Any conman could rig up that card. No thank you, on your way and . . .”

Tristram had had his foot in the door, could take the weight of it. “This is a matter of importance. We are not here without reason.”

Izzy had her weight against Tristram’s back so he’d not shift. They should have been smiling and oiling their way forward, and giving all the shit about “national security”, then been honoured guests. “I think if we could just come in and explain, we’d . . .”

The man had said, “I think not. I am not obligated to open my house up, no warning and no clarification and no verification. Just get on your way.”

“Not a helpful attitude.”

“Not intended as a threat but failure to cooperate could rebound severely against you.”

The man was pushing harder and it was the fiasco moment, and Tristram had the flash thought in his mind that he’d be phoning up old Jonas, the crocodile hunter, and saying they’d failed to get past the lowest level of base camp, and it was the boy at the top of the stairs who saved the day.

“Steady, Dad. Of course it’s genuine. Think about it, Dad, where we are. Opposite Sadie. We can see her front door. It’ll be about that bastard . . . Let them in, Dad, it’ll be about Sadie’s bastard. Do it, Dad.”

And they had been let inside, had been economic with the facts, but the boy had smoothed their path. They sat in the Hunters’ front room and watched, sat close to each other . . . aware that it was comfortable when they held each other’s hands. Sat watching the front door of the house where Jonas Merrick was certain the target would show. And, the house into which they had intruded was quiet, no creaking boards above them, no movement. And they watched.

He said, “I keep seeing that picture, the one Merrick stuck on his wall. The still water, looks calm, looks safe, but that bloody thing is there. Can’t see him, but you can sense him. If he shows, a little ripple, tiny . . . but what we’re looking for – if it does, what do we do?”

She said, “Not a fucking idea, not one. Know nothing except that he’ll have decent sized teeth if he cares to use them.”

Two aircraft landed, a minute between them, and both touching down smoothly on the runway. They needed a fraction of the space required for the fast jets with which they shared USAF-administered space on a Turkish military airfield.

Both had flown a few minutes short of eleven hours, so landed well within the safety limits that permitted them to be airborne when carrying the maximum armament of two 500lb GBU-12 laser-guided bombs along with four AGM-114 Hellfire missiles. In darkness, identifiable only by navigation lights, the aircraft taxied.

On a busy airstrip, which this was, and one used principally by the strike aircraft, the sight of these drones still raised an eyebrow. Impossible that they would not. They were designated as MQ-9A Reapers, built by the American company General Atomics Aeronautical Systems. They had a wingspan of 70 feet, a length of only 36 feet, a flying ceiling of 30,000 feet. They always aroused interest from the technicians at the base because the Reapers, moving carefully at slow speed across the aprons towards the hangers where their maintenance team waited, had