The Crocodile Hunter

by Gerald Seymour

  Cammy saw a fist thrown. Heard the hit and the wheeze of breath that followed and a swallowed cry, but no retaliation. And saw a boot go in. No response.

  Cammy knew it would get harder for the boys, and one – the boy who wore eye-shadow – was covering his groin and his head and another punch was swung at him. The boy ducked and twisted and he would have seen his assailants, seen the hatred and contempt on their faces, and would have seen all the people scurrying past and looking away and . . . The boy’s eyes found Cammy’s, locked on them. Might have thought that a man who lingered would intervene. Would have seen that he was dressed in a sports jacket and a check shirt and wore a tie and had an anorak against the weather, and was weighing up the situation. Was not too proud . . . implored his help, pleaded for aid, and fists came more frequently, and boots and more abuse. The boy, in silence, cried out for his help.

  A long way back . . . two years ago.

  A suburb of Raqqa. A stinking heat, the middle of the day, and stuck in a traffic queue. Dwayne driving the pick-up and a heavy machine-gun mounted behind Cammy’s front seat, and Tomas beside him. In the open back were Mikki and Pieter, and Ulrike wearing camouflage and with a keffiyeh scarf wrapped around her face: a combat unit and untouchable, almost. The street was blocked and the men in front wore black and had the long beards of the security police. They had brought a guy out of a house, and a woman was shrieking and kids were bawling. The woman was reaching to touch her man and a rifle smacked into her face and she reeled away. He was struggling, and there was a moment when his glance found Cammy. Might have believed he saw a fighting man, and might have believed that a fighting man was different stock to the political police unit whose principal job was to root out spies. If they weren’t busy they went after kids who played on the internet, or guys who were shagging the girl next door, and they went after the homosexuals too; but top of their list was hunting spies. Spies would have been recruited by the middlemen who worked for US or UK intelligence agencies, or for the Saudis and the Jordanians and the Gulf rulers. Their main job was locating High Value Targets. HVTs would then be hunted down with air strikes and drone strikes, or even justified the insertion of a Special Forces team for capture. The HVT would come to see his wife, and might want to see his kids, and the bug would be slapped under the vehicle and he could be tracked, then hit from the air. If he was seen but no vehicle identified, then the enemy would put up a drone and fly high over that quarter of the city and their analysts would feast on the feed pictures and dissect that area of the city. Unlikely that a target would hear the approach of a fast jet with a 500lb bomb laser-guided to a matter of inches’ accuracy, or the drone above. Spies were feared and detested by the régime. The fate of a spy? Might be tortured to extract information, then crucified. Might be tortured then taken out and filmed as his throat was cut. Might be tortured, then have a breeze-block roped to his ankle and be tossed off a bridge into the Euphrates. A man did not know if he had made it sufficiently high on the pecking order to be targeted. No way that Kami al-Britani would know if he might have been betrayed. Leaders, emirs, might assume they were named and that the drones flew slow circles unseen in the sky and that the geeks searched the screens. Not a matter that had then concerned him, nor worried any of the brothers . . .

  He did not know why this man fastened his gaze on him, beseeched him. Might have seen something different in his face, thought he might find help. The woman wailed on the threshold and the kids howled and clung to her. Why would he help him? If he had stepped in, caught the guy by the scruff of his neck and hoisted him into the pick-up, Cammy would have brought down on his own neck many layers of Hell. He saw the fear before the guy was heaved into the waiting vehicle. The street was left with the reek of diesel fumes. The woman gone back inside and closed her door. No neighbours would come to her home with food, with flowers, would stay with the children if she went to the authorities to try to discover the fate of her man. She was abandoned. Cammy remembered his face for many days, and the appeal in his eyes.

  The two boys were having a bad time. Cammy could have intervened. Could have pushed through, used his presence and the authority in his voice, and the threat he carried when controlled aggression was painted on him. He did nothing. The boy no longer looked for him, would have given up on him. More shoving, more fists and more boots: it would have been close to the time, both boys down, when one kick hit an unprotected head and jolted it hard enough to affect the brain tissue . . .

  He had not gone there, travelled over the frontiers, for a cause. Had been purely selfish, had looked for the gratification of fighting, chewing on danger, and feeling the pump of big weapons at his shoulder. And while it had been good, he had loved it. Had saved the child in the Channel crossing because otherwise the Iranians, in their panic, would have capsized the dinghy. He had no need to save these particular victims. Close enough to see that one more kick to the groin would do life changing damage to his organs. Cammy walked away.

  Not his business; he felt no shame, too preoccupied. He heard the sirens. A cop car was coming close and the lights were brilliant blue on the West Gate tower. The gang scattered, fled. He turned and saw the two boys helping each other to stand. Not his fight. Had he intervened he would have destroyed the knot of youths, put them to flight, but he had not.

  “Boss, I just need to slip out . . . be an hour, not more. That all right, boss?”

  It was not all right, and the hour ahead would be busy, but Farouk’s employer – the owner of the café – knew him well enough, would not have considered him unreliable, and there was a distant relationship through marriage . . . but only an hour. Plenty came through the café at that time in the evening and the weather made no difference. Farouk asked if he could take the scooter out the back. Would get it back in the hour.

  The keys were thrown to him. The café boss might have realised that this employee had attracted interest from the counter-terror people, might have heard that he was hassled by them, was under sporadic surveillance. Might have . . . But his work ethic was not to be faulted. He would not ask where Farouk wished to go in mid-shift, why he needed to be gone, no prior warning, what business was so important.

  The journey was to the northern outskirts of the city, the Kirkstall area, west of the allotments and sandwiched between the Aire river and the railway tracks. Streets of terraced homes, and the one where he headed had a lock-up garage at its rear. The cinder track was not overlooked. It was probably illegal but the council had better things to do than worry about a cottage industry doing vehicle repairs. Farouk set off. Rode with confidence, heading for the garage, and wearing a crash helmet with a tinted visor.

  He felt good, thought himself blessed with power. It was close to a year since he had been granted a meeting, in a car park in the moorlands towards the Pennine hills, and had been allowed to talk with a man of authority, and had explained his idea, and had talked of the qualities of the individual needed if a plan were to become an action. A month before, he had been summoned again, had been told that such an individual had been identified, was on his way; the work had started and he imagined the pace of it was now frantic. A week before he had been told the day it would happen . . . tomorrow. He rode fast on the wet roads and at times was showered in spray, and rejoiced.

  “Hello, Mum.”

  “Hello, darling.”

  “You sound good.”

  “Not too bad, darling. Nothing to complain about.”

  “Where are you, Mum?”

  “In an accountant’s, but there are solicitors on the next two floors. Doing the lavatories. You don’t want to know.”

  “Isn’t there other work you could be doing? I worry about you, Mum.”

  “Staggering actually, that the women’s are worse than the men’s, how they’re left. I manage . . . Anyway, what’s your news?”

  A pleasure for Sadie Jilkes was getting a call from the Category A wing where her elder son was held. His news? Not much actually. Was doing shifts
in the gaol laundry, which took him out of his cell. Was enrolled in a reading group and that was positive and meant more time off his landing. They’d had an attempted suicide on the landing the week before last but the guy had screwed it, had failed, seemed cheerier now . . . They chatted a bit. She always wanted to hear from him but there was so little to say because she could not share his life and he had no part of hers. The conversation, as usual, petered out. She didn’t visit anymore, saw little point in it and the journey to where he was held now was awful, and expensive, and there would have been even less to say if she was back in an interview room and across a glass screen. He was not a child, was damn near middle-aged, and she dreaded him coming home in a couple of years, feet up on the sofa, dirty plates on every table and leftover pizza, and . . .

  “Anyway, good to hear you, darling, but I have to get on.”

  “Love to you, Mum.”

  The call was cut. She went back to work. It was a bad night outside and the last few evenings the late buses had been erratic. Worse things had afflicted Sadie Jilkes’ life than cleaning toilets and waiting for delayed buses, and she tried not to think of them . . . First time the older boy had gone down, custodial. The night her girl had been in the accident, and the funeral. Cameron leaving that school, and Cameron making a mess of the next place, and Cameron gone and her reporting him missing, and Cameron found and the “filth” – what the older boy called them – crawling over her home. Tried to get rid of the thoughts but it was hard. She flushed a toilet. Her supervisor said she was the most conscientious of all the women on the shift. Was satisfied it was clean. She went out of the cubicle. She stood in front of a mirror, saw her untidy grey hair, no make-up and no jewellery, and tiredness was evident and she could not remember when she had last laughed.

  Looked at herself in the mirror and heard herself say, “Of course, no phone call from you. No call. Not even a card. Too busy were you, full-time job killing people – to write or phone? Damn you.”

  She started to wash down the basins.

  The car turned in from the main road and hurried to do so in the face of oncoming traffic, and went through a big puddle by the kerb, drenching him further. He had been about to cross the top of The Avenue, and its significance had not been in his thoughts – more obsessed with his lack of money, lack of food, lack of sleep . . . but then remembered she used to sneak out of her home, slink up the pavement, using the shrubs in a couple of front gardens for cover: Vicky.

  The nearside wheels went through the water and the rising wave hit his trousers up to his waist, and splattered his anorak. Cammy glowered at the car, gave a finger, cursed . . . recognised the driver. No change of hairstyle. Same spectacles on the bridge of her nose. Vicky’s mother. He stood on the pavement, the water dripping off him and the car moved on, then stopped, and began to reverse into a parking space. Cammy checked his watch. Still too early if he were going to walk to Sturry and then go along the Margate road and take the turn-off, and expect his mum to be home . . . assumed that nothing changed. The cathedral had not, nor the choir – a hymn’s music and words played in his mind – Jesus came when the doors were shut. No change in the High Street and none on St Peter’s Street except that the Poundland store was now boarded up, and nothing different at the Miller’s where he and Vicky drank, her usually paying, and nothing seemed to have changed at the Leisure Centre he had been past, or the gardens where the daffodils were in late bloom and the last of the crocuses. The car’s lights were killed, but the security system had kicked in. He had one good view of Vicky’s mother as she paused by her front door to rummage for the key. Opened the door, went in, closed it. And Cammy felt the aloneness. Felt it bad . . . these were the last hours of his life and he reckoned he did not deserve to be alone.

  He turned into The Avenue.

  Would go to Cindy Piggot’s house, two doors down from Vicky’s mother. She used to have a small dog and Vicky would mind it if she was out for the day and if he was not at work they would use her place. He went to the door and rang Cindy Piggot’s bell. He saw movement behind the opaque glass. He straightened his tie, she’d check him through the spy hole. The door was opened, but was on a chain. Eyes peered at him. He’d manage an educated voice, a believable and trustworthy one . . .

  Could do as great a deceit as the time they had, him and the brothers, dressed in uniforms filched off the battlefield dead, and gone in the night to a storage depot behind the lines and had conned a couple of sentries at the gate, then had deceived the sergeant in the guardhouse who was watching streamed football from Europe, had taken the talk. They had seemed to be Hezbollah and in need of supplies, and . . . they had loaded two pick-ups with mortar bombs, and the rest of Mikki’s devices would not have started to detonate until they were a clear mile out of the arsenal and away across the open sand. They had laughed fit to bust, but they had been together . . .

  He explained that he had been to Victoria’s old home but her mother was out. It was about renewing a savings policy. Always lied well.

  “So sorry to trouble you. We heard she was getting married but the paperwork must have gone astray. Don’t have the new address. It’s the computers, wouldn’t have happened in the old days.”

  Might be the last time in his life that he was required to lie . . . Vicky lived in the next street, the one beyond The Avenue, The Close. Cindy Piggot gave him the number. He thanked her warmly, and walked away, retreated into the darkness.

  Jonas held tight to his bag as he came off the train. He had talked to his probationers, quiet and guarded, and had repeated what he wanted of them. They had told him of another crocodile, Brutus. Did he need to know? Tristram said that Izzy had found it on the internet. Izzy said that Brutus was over sixteen feet long and weighed two tonnes, lived in Australia, and ate sharks. Tristram said that Brutus hated sharks because one had bitten off the front of his left leg, and he was a big attraction for tourists and . . . He crossed the bridge at the station and was carried along in the flow of passengers ending their journey. He passed the tourist posters outside the toilets and the coffee shop and went through the barriers. The rain had eased. He thought it might turn into a reasonable night . . . Was quite certain in his own mind that, by the time those commuters who had shared the carriage with him were back at the station for their morning train into London, the matter would have been resolved. Was confident also that he would not need to call on “the cavalry” to come cantering on to the scene with reinforcements. He walked out into the forecourt. The rheumatism in his right knee was aggravated by the hour in the train, a longer trip than his usual journey, and he winced but then put it out of his mind.

  He saw the car. Granite-grey and unmarked, a BMW. The front passenger door opened and a light came on. They were uniformed. He imagined that this rather conventional looking vehicle would be equipped with a highly tuned performance engine and could reach speeds of near to 150 miles an hour. If they imagined they would be pushing those limits then they were due for disappointment.

  The man stepped out of the car and the woman was behind the wheel. He reckoned they would regard him as rather under-dressed, might try to foist a bulletproof vest on him that he would decline to wear. The man had a weighed-down belt which carried more gear than would have fitted on a good sized Christmas tree, and he had a Glock in a holster strapped to his thigh. He had a swagger about him. Most of them did, in Jonas’s opinion. They carried the guns and the ammunition, and they were as highly trained as any of junior rank in the local police forces. He would have seen a shambling old guy walking towards him, coat open, tie a little askew, and a trilby on his head, not quite straight, and trousers that had lost their crease . . . His face fell. They would have been all excited to be involved in a Security Service operation, and a short elderly man approached them.

  “Hello, I’m Jonas.”

  Doubtful. “Pleased to meet you, sir. I’m Dominic.”

  “Hope you haven’t been waiting too long.”

  “Haven’
t, sir. This is my colleague, Babs.”

  He leaned inside and offered his hand. The rear door was opened for him. He squeezed in, there was a boxed area that separated the seats and a pile of wet weather gear and a couple of large black grips that took some shifting. He assumed they’d enough weapons on board to launch a limited-scale war: none of it would be necessary if his ideas panned out, and it finished well.

  He said, “There’s an old and apt line for police and military and intelligence work. ‘Few plans survive contact with the enemy’, and it’s one that I like. If the plan works – always if – by the time you settle to your breakfast you will be able to walk quite tall . . . if . . . Sometimes the plan works and sometimes it does not but we have to give it a stab.”

  He told them where they needed to be. Jonas settled back and closed his eyes.

  Chapter 10

  She drove carefully, correctly. Seemed to observe the speed limit and made the regulation number of mirror checks and did not push to overtake in the flow of cars and vans and lorries leaving the city at the end of the working day. Once or twice there was a sharp hiss of breath from her that meant she was displeased at the driving of another motorist. Jonas assumed they would make a virtue of abiding by every aspect of the laws of the road. He assumed they knew little of their mission, had been poorly briefed – their superiors would have qualified for the mushroom farm: “kept in the dark and fed on shit”; not pleasant but good practice.

  A satnav system to guide them. He had been general as to where he wanted to be, a junction of roads. They would have regarded themselves, Jonas believed, as an élite. They’d see themselves as the best of the best, the most highly trained, the guys and girls who had the authority to carry a weapon into a live confrontation, to ignore or countermand the orders of a superior officer, practised each week of each month at the business of killing people . . . existed for that purpose and were paid well for it, little bonus rewards on the side. For the next few minutes, they would be prepared to let him snooze on the back seat but when he was delivered to the location he had requested, he expected a short sharp shock to be administered and a rule book read him, and their terms of reference. He let the smile play on his face – knew what to expect, and knew his response.