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

weak as babies and that he could carry more. His great fists had thwacked together and the discussion was ended.

He could have been a wrestler in a booth, touring with circuses travelling through Belarus. Now, as they flopped under the camouflage awning, smoked and talked in low voices about where they were and where they hoped to be, Stanislau wandered away, saying he wanted a better view of the sunset. “I want to snatch the sunset and hold it.” They never laughed when he tried. They would see him standing motionless in a field or beside a track and his hand, soup plate size, would be stretched out. Then, it would lunge forward, the speed of a snake strike, and would clamp. They never teased him or mocked him, never queried whether his fingers really had closed on a sunset.

From the capital of Belarus, from Minsk, he had been rejected for army conscription for alleged flat feet. With the group, he was without fear, would be watching Cammy’s back, and following him as faithfully as a dog. The sun was near to setting and it had been a good tramp, but there had been no opportunity to steal a pick-up and ride with wheels. They were in an empty wilderness of territory where few herdsmen sought forage for their goats, but the stones made a useful bivouac. All of them kept an eye on Stanislau, as if all of them prayed that one day he would achieve the snatch. He was with them because of an incident three years before in a bar on the north side of Minsk. Drink taken, probably excessive drink taken. As he told it, it would have been vodka made with cranberries, and he was starting to wreck the bar because most of his drinking had been on tab, and now they were closing and he had no money, and an argument started. Stanislau hit a priggy little bastard hard enough to require a rewiring of the jaw in the Minsk Regional Clinical Hospital. The kid was admitted there because of his father – a Russian embassy official . . . a price to pay for the punch. Stanislau was worked over for many minutes when the city police located and arrested him. He hated Russians, as much as Mikki, fought them and killed them.

They lounged under the camouflage canopy and watched him. The low sunlight threw great shadows from the rocks where they sheltered.

They saw him move. Saw his right arm jerk up and all of them at that moment thought he had achieved it, had snatched the sunset, and the tired faces of Pieter and Ulrike and Cammy were wreathed in a smile of pleasure. Then realised he was collapsing, then heard the crack.

A single shot. A sniper.

A head shot. Expert work. Stanislau went down on to his knees and his right arm sagged beside him, then he fell. Pieter said that, from the sound of the bullet’s carry, he thought the marksman was about a thousand yards from his target. The man would have seen them trudging along open ground on the track, would have watched them reach the bivouac. Would have seen Stanislau set off to find the open space where he could better see the sunset. Would have tracked him with the magnification of the telescopic lens, and would have picked his moment. It was a good shot, admitted.

When it was darker, Cammy left Pieter and Ulrike. Both would scan the ground from which it was estimated the bullet had come. Cammy took with him the one entrenching tool they had salvaged from the last pick-up. He worked till his muscles seized and his throat was parched and his guts ground in pain, then worked some more. When he deemed the pit deep enough, the limit of what he could achieve, he rolled Stanislau’s body with the broken head into it. He stood for a moment, at the very last moment of light, and remembered the first lines of Jesus Came when the Doors were Shut and for a few seconds his voice would have carried over the grit and sand.

They were gone, the survivors, before dawn, and in all of them a greater anger burned. And his promise was given, again in silence – given to Tomas and Mikki and to Dwayne, given to Stanislau – given to them all.

Bradley said, “I’ve thought about it, thought about it some more. Have to say, whatever he was looking for, wherever he went, I never experienced anything vicious in Cameron.”

They were gathered in their hallway, huddled under the central ceiling light, and faced the closed door of their sitting-room.

Dave said, “What gets me in the throat, bloody near chokes me, is that we’re permitting people to spy on Sadie, use our home as a viewing gallery. Didn’t see anything that wrong with Cameron.”

They stood in their nightclothes and the heating was off and their teeth chattered and they hugged their dressing-gowns around their bodies.

Karen said, “After all that Sadie has been through, we are sort of piling it on, aren’t we? We’re part of the deceit. She deserves better from us.”

And none of the family knew what they should do, and their voices became louder and more confused.

Trace said, “We did what we could, didn’t we? Phoned her . . . What about now? Very soon, she’ll be in that house. There’s probably a cordon of police around us, and guns. They’re going to go in there after him and . . .”

The door to their living-room opened. The woman faced them and the guy was close behind her.

The woman hissed, “Just switch that fucking light out, and go back to your fucking beds, and leave us to do our job.”

The guy snarled, “You know bugger all of what happens in this world, the real one. Don’t come to us now, bleeding your consciences off your sleeves . . . If we lose him, don’t for a moment think that you will not be paraded at the inquests. There will be inquests,