The Crocodile Hunter

by Gerald Seymour

  Cammy struggled, wrenched himself up. Told the psychologist to switch off the torch, not to waste the battery. The cold was a bastard, not just for Cammy and not just for the kid, for all of them – could be a killer. The darkness was a wall around them.

  Tristram said, “Am I allowed to say this, but you’re not great company.”

  Izzy said, “Just that it’s like a cloud over us, what you said.”

  “About old Jonas?”

  “Because we did it with that picture, played silly buggers, played a trick on him.”

  “And all about his instincts, and him calling us back – and doubting himself.”

  They were the sole patrons of that corner of a wine bar; had gone halves on a bottle.

  “It would be a hell of something to carry round. Responsibility.”

  “Like his bits are cut off, losing his instinct.”

  There had been long silences, as if both were cowed. They had gone through the selection process, and had come out smiling, and most of what they’d reckoned to be the smart-arse crowd of potential recruits had been sidelined, sent home. All fun and all interesting, and all part of the big build-up to “doing something truly useful”, and having faith in the system they were now a part of. She had her phone out, checked the screen between their exchanges. He thought it a piss poor evening.

  “Know anything about crocodiles?”

  “No, Izzy, I don’t. Saw one in a zoo when I was a kid. My gran had a crocodile handbag, genuine. That’s all.”

  “Because of where we are, what we’re at, I looked them up. Useless facts. The biggest ever is called Gustave. Lives on the Ruzizi River that goes into Lake Tanganyika. He is twenty feet long and he weighs a ton, and he might be a hundred years old – I am not making this shit up – he has plenty of bullet holes, because guys with AKs have blasted at him. He is not too fast now so cannot get deer or antelope, but goes after a hippopotamus if it’s close. When he was last seen he was dragging a full-grown bull buffalo off for tea.”

  “Do I need to know?”

  “Only that he’s blessed with a good set of teeth. Where he is, people all know about him, are bloody careful, but he still gets them. He’s killed three hundred human beings. Just that they don’t see him. There but hiding, then the big splash, then it’s over.”

  Both rueful. Time to go home, another day tomorrow.

  Tristram said at the door, glasses not emptied but abandoned, “Don’t know, Izzy, if I’m up to this . . . Just have that picture in my head, up on Wobby’s wall, and what the man said, ‘You just have to find him.’ Have to.”

  They went in single file, left their emir behind them, reached the water’s bank. They had stayed close as they eased among the reeds that flanked the river. If they had come across a security patrol, watching in the darkness for deserters, they would have killed all of them, done it quietly and without gunfire, managed it at knife-point. As a group they were poor on the discipline demanded by the security for those fighting under the black flag. Stanislau led, Mikki behind him, and Cammy held his usual position in the centre of the line.

  An air strike was going on behind them. Cammy could see the navigation lights on the wing tips of the fast jets, and every few minutes a drone would come over and dump some flares to float down on parachutes. They might have hung around too long, might have gone earlier. Behind Cammy was Tomas, then Ulrike and Pieter, and Dwayne was back-marker. He felt nothing for those he left behind, men and women and tiny crazed children, cowering in shallow scrapes or in tunnels they had dug. Enough vehicles burned for the flares to be unnecessary but there would have been a paper-pusher back in some air-conditioned bunker who had decreed how many should be dropped that night, and dropped they would be – even if they lit a hell’s inferno. It did not matter what they left behind because they had each other, were brothers . . . and believed it, and had survived too many strata of Hades to worry about anything bar themselves. They were close together when they moved soundlessly through the reeds, and followed the markers left the previous evening. They were headed across the Euphrates – and afterwards?

  Not sure. Somewhere, and getting there sometime. Where there was a fight, and where the brothers stayed together. Almost, as if they now formed each other’s only meaningful family . . . except that Cammy had his mother, but a long time ago . . . What they had done in the reeds the night before was make a raft from a big builder’s pallet and they had carted two emptied oil drums through the reeds, and had lashed the sealed drums under the wood slats. It was big enough to take them all, and a couple of makeshift paddles from planks would give them propulsion. They would get clear of the river, then hunker down, and build a fire, and sit around it and Ulrike would cheer them and they’d talk about where they were headed. He now knew nothing else but fighting, had cleared his mind of “old days”, former times, and loved his brothers.

  They launched. The current here was slack because it was a deep stretch. There were great orbs of light behind them. Talk was impossible. Communication was by pulling one of them close, mouthing words and being lip-read. The bombs falling on the Barghuz enclave were 500lb each and it seemed little effort was made to differentiate between “hostiles” and camp followers. Tomas was beside Cammy and was paddling.

  Tomas was short, fair-haired, always cheerful. Twenty-two years of age. His parents logged in the forest outside a place in Estonia none of them had heard of, Jarve, off the E20 highway running east towards St Petersburg. Tomas hated Russians with a frenzy: a grandfather had been carted off on a one-way ticket to Siberia and his own father had had a bad time before independence. After a few weeks’ basic army training as a conscript, Tomas had deserted. Had gone to Syria with no Islamic fervour, just a desire to take the chance offered to kill Russians. Tomas always stayed close to Cammy, a pace and a half behind him, his longing to be there showing in his eyes like a dog did: was always there except when the time came to blast with the 81mm mortar. They all carried his bombs for him, had enough for him to put three in the air and then they would run, as fast as wild hares, before the retaliation. Before the military, he had done a term and a half at Tartu University in engineering, then had dropped out. Just lived for his brothers, only cared about his brothers. Used to say, “Better to hang together, not separately” . . .

  His paddle might have hit a sunken tree trunk, or the drum under him had collided with any of the shit now submerged in the river from when a pontoon had gone under in an air strike. Tomas went over. Scrabbled for a grip on the pallet slats. Caught at Cammy and seemed to have a grip on him, except that he shifted his hands for a better hold, and was gone.

  Cammy dived after him, but they were moving fast in the current. They were in darkness other than from the drone flares, and the fires behind them. He could not use a torch. It was extraordinary, and ridiculous, but Cammy cannoned into him. Arms reached out, and the raft was nearer to toppling than it was to staying afloat. Tomas did not fight his rescuers, nor struggle, nor cry out. On the far side of the river they should have, immediately on landing, hiked away fast. But they did not. Ulrike started the resuscitation. Doing mouth to mouth and heaving Tomas’s chest, and losing. All of them trying, none of them succeeding. Must have worked on him for half an hour, until Ulrike pulled them off, until Dwayne, the eldest, announced the unthinkable: a brother down, a brother lost.

  Could not hang about, could not do a fancy job. Scratched a shallow grave, and put the Estonian boy into it. None of them said a prayer but they shared a cigarette by the freshly moved earth. Dogs, scavenging and starving, might have him up by the morning, but none of them said it.

  The death by drowning of Tomas was like a knife wound, was the first.

  “What do you think you saw?”

  “Too much rippling in the wave patterns – could have been debris, like an oil drum, or could have been . . .”

  “Could it have been an inflatable?”

  “Might have been, cannot say.”

  On the bridge of th
e container ship – some 380 metres in length, overall weight slightly north of 100,000 tonnes, sped through the Channel lane of 19 knots, registered in Panama, heading for Rotterdam – was a Norwegian skipper, a navigation pilot who had boarded from a west country harbour in the UK, two Filipino watchmen, and a Croatian engineering officer. All had seen something, none was certain what they had seen.

  The pilot said, “They’re mad enough, some of them, to try to cross in this weather.”

  The captain said, “I don’t think so, not possible. And if we want peace and quiet, we saw nothing.”

  The Croat officer said, “Broadcast a suspicion, and we are caught up in an inquest, because assuredly they will drown.”

  The first to have seen something was one of the Filipino watchmen. He said, softly, and made the sign of the cross on his chest, “It was a dinghy, men and women and children . . . I do not think they have long.”

  They could not have stopped even had they wished to, and there were more vessels behind them in a steady stream, and away to the port side were the lights of ships traversing the Channel in the other direction. It was the busiest set of sea lanes in the world, and not a place for a small craft even in the best of weather conditions.

  A monstrous shape went past them, throwing out a crisp bow wave. The lights, seemingly suspended high above them, did not waver. They could hear the thrash of its engines and the turbulence of the propellers and the impact of its front end on the water ahead. Cammy clung to the outboard’s arm.

  He had not the knowledge of the sea or of boats to know where he should steer, whether to try to divert away from it, even turn and head back towards the French shore where there were now only occasional pinpricks of light. Closer than the engine noise and the roar of the weather, and the slapping of the bottom of the dinghy each time they came down in a trough, was the sound of frantic screaming. Cammy wondered whether any of them, the teacher and the psychologist and their women and the two children, had entertained the slightest idea of how it would be to take an open boat, under-powered, and try to navigate a path across the Channel, whether any of them had an inkling of an idea what it would be like to have a vast cargo vessel sweep past them, whether any of them would still want – not even halfway across – to commit to a journey towards the new Heaven which was Cammy’s country.

  The bow wave hit them.

  He thought they were traumatised. They clung to each other. Shrieks and sobs, and a woman and one of the kids was sick but they could not lean over the side to vomit or they would have been carried away. The sickness was over their clothing and between their legs and sloshed with the rising level of seawater now covering their feet.

  He needed to take control, knew it.

  Would have been simple enough if he had been with his brothers, all of them together, and the yells would have been of the black gallows humour vintage, what they cracked when times were bad: if they were in the artillery coordinates, or if the air strikes were coming in, or if they were pinned down by a Yank or Brit sniper. Always good then to have a joke, and chat funeral plans.

  The bow wave was brutal and came on them with a thunder and the white cresting line of it slapped against them. They were spinning. A different motion to anything before. Pushed sideways, twisting like a dancer’s steps. Going through a total revolution, and then the trough deeper than any before. They held on to each other . . . He saw the lights of the back end of the bridge of the container ship, and the foam bristled from the screws. It ploughed on, but there would be another because the dinghy now straddled the traffic lanes going north and east. They had taken on too much water and he had concentrated too hard on progress and not enough on the ability of the dinghy to stay afloat.

  He yelled instructions. Should cup their hands, and sweep away the water that threatened to swamp them. His fault for not seeing before that they must be involved, were not merely his passengers . . . Without them he would not have been able to cross; if he did not have them shivering and crying and puking around him then his journey would be wasted. A moment’s thought: what if he went into the sea himself? Forget them . . . What if it were Cameron Jilkes, once part of a community on a hill and near enough to the cathedral at Canterbury, what if he went into the water and the cold had him and the water filled his lungs and the will to fight had gone, and losing strength . . . and all for fuck all of nothing. He needed them to bale and fast. They started slowly, and he reckoned more water came in than they were managing to get out, and they were listless and the struggle seemed too great, and . . .

  He sang.

  There had been another favourite psalm, not as treasured as the “snares”, but loved and always done with gusto.

  Cammy led them. Cast Me Not Away. Samuel Sebastian Wesley. The creation of a man who had died nearly 150 years ago, and the words had lived in Cammy’s mind since they were placed there by a choirmaster.

  Cast me not away from thy presence, and take not thy holy spirit from me.

  He sang into the night, confronted the drenching spray, let his voice rip, could not hear himself against the chaos of sound around him.

  Restore unto me the joy of thy salvation; and uphold me with thy free spirit.

  Had exchanged the peace, the aching quiet, of the cathedral with the battle storm of the Channel, the weather and the surge of the container ship. They joined him. Little voices at first.

  The sacrifices of God are a broken spirit: a broken and a contrite heart, O God, thou wilt not despise.

  Bellowed it at the night, and a gull came, a big bastard, its wings tucked to deflect the wind, and hovered for a moment, then maintained a station above them, and might have wondered what in Hell’s name was below its webbed talons when suddenly it was lifted away. Their voices had started small but grew. He assumed that the women had picked up on the first line but by the third they were all with him, were his chorus. Like it was a battle statement . . . like with his brothers, a moment of hugging and of heads together and the shared belief in survival, then all moving . . . machine-gun, and mortars, and Ulrike spotting for them, and the crack of the sniper rifle . . . Cammy had needed no other brothers, but they were all gone, and now he needed these refugees – not fighters, not in love with combat – to be with him.

  Make me to hear joy and gladness, that the bones which thou hast broken may rejoice.

  They sang together. And the psalm, number 51, was repeated. Shrill voices from the kids, soft from the women and deeper from the men, and when Cammy’s own voice died on him they kept singing, and he thought the moon had broken thinly through. They were all baling hard, using their hands and a cap and plastic plates.

  He thought the wind eased.

  No judgement, only luck, and thought that they had a run between the oncoming ships in the reverse traffic lane. Thought the force of the wind softened though the dinghy shook and rocked and swayed, still rose and pitched, and took them back to Be thou my guardian and my guide, and kept them singing, in their innocence.

  Thought that he could see, very faint, a haze of light ahead, and if he blinked and wiped his eyes might have noted a coastal light, a navigation buoy. Thought it, but said nothing.

  “You have no right to be here. It is harassment, simple harassment.”

  He liked to be called Wolfboy by his closer friends and associates and by his “brothers”, but the man and the woman on his doorstep this morning – not yet five o’clock and hardly any natural light filtering into the street – called him Farouk. Upstairs the baby had started to cry, not his baby.

  “I can report you, I can get a lawyer to chase you off. You have no right to do this.”

  The man and the woman were members, so his “brothers” said, of the Security Service, and they referred to the pair and the organisation behind them as “the Box”. The man wore jeans and a T-shirt, trainers loosely knotted, and a leather jacket that was a size too small. She wore a shortish skirt that was at the edge of causing offence to Farouk, and a blouse that was unbuttoned one
or two holes too many, and her hair fell lazily over her face: he thought she had probably undone those buttons when she came to his doorstep. The proposition was made each time they came and pressed the bell by the front door that rang out in the house where he lodged.

  “I will not do as you ask. You want me as an informer, want me to tout, I will not do that – anyway I do not know anyone who engages in criminal acts. You ask me to help you, be an agent for you, I will not. You offer me money, I don’t want your money. It is harassment, pure and simple.”

  What annoyed him at these encounters, always in the hour before dawn and while the street was quiet, before first prayers, was that they would give the invitation and then would decline to argue with him. He was left to shout at them. Most of that part of the street would now know that the anti-terror people had hooks in him. He worked in an internet café and sometimes helped those with no idea of the intricacies of the web, but also made coffees, served soft drinks, washed up, sold skunk to regulars, and the pay was pitiful and this man and the woman offered him the huge sum of £500 every month to inform. He was three years out of prison, HMP Wealstun, north of his home city of Leeds, and had been on B wing, all Category C prisoners, most of them harmless – but he had witnessed at close quarters what was done to two prisoners who had touted: the shit beaten out of them and their faces cut. He would not inform . . . and almost enjoyed the moment.

  “Go on, lose yourselves. You have nothing on me. I’ll get the lawyers on you. It is bullying and it is harassment.”

  He stepped back and into the hallway, and the baby’s crying was more pitiful. It was a cousin’s house. He stared back at the two, and neither argued or tried to persuade. He thought he had bested them, which pleased him. He shut the door. Through the spy hole he could see that both were still on the pavement, in no hurry, and had lit cigarettes, and talked in murmurs . . . He supposed that was all part of the intimidation. They knew nothing. He would not have been allowed to stay in the room of his cousin’s home if they had known anything of who he was and what was planned, and which role he had been given . . . He went upstairs and saw through the landing window the man and the woman walk away. The baby had stopped crying. He had no baby of his own, no women who could have been the mother of his baby, no fiancée. Had once; but no longer. He did not know whether it was that man and that woman, or others from their organisation, who had been to his fiancée’s family home and had bad-mouthed him, had called him a Subject of Interest, had warned them. The relationship was broken, she refused to see him again. He would hurt them, they would suffer.