She had said, “Never better, feeling good.”
He had reflected, “Because, if they nick us with it or, worse, if they get us after it’s been fired and with that payload, we’re for the high jump.”
“We’re doing all right, you old bugger – in fact, doing well.”
Clear water now between them and the quay. She kissed him on the cheek and grinned. It was not a long crossing and they would need to get on with it – as she said, and did, and he assumed that was why she had taken up the offer of a cabin. Used it well, and sweated in the heated cabin and not yet past the harbour groyne, and did not think of consequences. Out into the Channel and a fair swell shaking them – which seemed to add to the experience.
Dominic and Babs had changed places; Babs had stretched out and tilted back her seat so that Jonas’s knees compressed: he made no complaint, nor did the dog.
“Mr Merrick, can I ask you . . .?”
He shut down his phone. He had been living – as far as he could – the last days, hours, of the brotherhood. He believed his assessment had been reinforced. He had been into the loop of the 24/7 intelligence dispersal of facts, conjectures, analyses. Had enjoyed the company of the dog, and when he was home the next day he would tell Vera some of it.
“How near do you think we are?”
“The first eyeballs and footprints? An hour, two at the most.”
“So, why is this area not saturated? Why not a cordon?”
“To do what, Dominic?”
“Box him in, close him down, and . . .”
“Somebody coughs at the wrong moment, Dominic, somebody kicks over a rubbish bin, somebody steps on a piece of dried wood and it snaps, somebody is confronted by a dog as he slips through a back garden and the animal goes berserk; somebody has a radio that comes alive with a prattle of police patois. And what happens? Our target fades into the night and whatever plan has been in place is ditched. I prefer to stay quiet and have the pair of you.”
He stroked the dog’s head. The Norwegian Forest cat might have allowed such familiarity, and might not.
“Understood, but your way, Mr Merrick, you take the full weight of the responsibility. If you cock it up then they, the bosses, will hang you out to dry. They won’t stand by you. Ours wouldn’t. You’re on your own.”
“As I prefer it.”
“The chap you’re hunting, do you hate him?”
“Not really.”
“After what he’s done, where he’s been?”
“I’m not a crusader, Dominic. I’m a lowly functionary. In the benighted period of recent German history I would have been the sort of man who kept the trains running on time, made sure that the ones feeding Treblinka, Sobibor, Stutthof were on schedule and not subservient to Auschwitz-Birkenau. Just do the job and make sure, as best I can, that it all runs smoothly.”
“Not saving society.” The young man’s irony rang through.
“Doing a job, and doing it well, is satisfactory. Doing it poorly is disappointing. But there’s none of this Queen and country stuff. No, like I said, I’m the man who knows the railway timetable and keeps the programme running . . . I also like to watch for crocodiles, if you know what I mean.”
Cammy did not take the road that led to Sturry. He went through trees and along a track that kids had made over the years. He had been one of them. In those days, nights, he would have needed a torch to guide him, and he’d have been hurrying because he had missed the last bus home and was cold and probably wet.
Now, Cammy was skilled at travelling fast and in darkness. He would have led and the brothers would have followed and they would have crossed the supposed front lines held by the government troops, would have gone in and reached the point behind their bunkers and tent camps where they could create chaos among Syrians or Hezbollah or Iranian paramilitary troops, and then the main force with suiciders would have swarmed towards the enemy’s front. Had been the leader, and not known fear. The worm had turned, the worm was doubt, failure. In the wake of failure he had made promises . . . they would be honoured.
No moon because of the density of the low rain clouds. No light other than that little filtered from the street lamps, edging through the trees to his left.
It was good to have made those promises; it tightened his resolve. Would see his mum, would be welcomed – would be fed, given money. He would slip away in the night, well before dawn . . . be on the first train of the morning. Knew the route he would take . . . Would take the fight to them. It had been his promise.
Saw again his lowest point . . . near to the Egyptian border with Libya. Footsore, tired, hungry. Had crossed Jordanian territory and hitched a ride on a dhow that would take him from Aqaba and into the Sinai sands. Had hidden in a lorry that had traversed the Suez Canal north of Ismailia. Had used Bedouin travellers to guide him over the desert dunes. His goal was Libya and then a Mediterranean crossing and into Europe. Had reached the border, far from the main highway, and had slept in the dirt with a blanket wrapping him, and the promise sustaining him. Had woken with the first light of dawn, a little golden segment of sun rising behind him on a distant horizon, but a strong enough light to throw shadows. Two of those shadows had fallen across his body and he had registered the men and the weapons they aimed at him. Blinking as they looked into the sun were three others, all armed and all wary of him. Could they have known? Would have been smugglers bringing weapons and ammunition and narcotics and spare parts for Mercedes and BMW cars across the border – just a fallen strand of barbed wire – and feeding off refugees. Perhaps they had identified him as a straggler from the war in Syria, perhaps even had a slight respect for him. Could have shot him dead and the sound would have echoed into the distance and gone unnoticed. Perhaps they had not thought him worth the waste of a single bullet. If he died there, or was left maimed – and would be a carcase in a few hours under the force of the sun – he would not fulfil his promise. He had eased his hands away from his body as if that were a satisfactory gesture of surrender. One set of hands, gnarled and roughened and with bitten-down nails, had reached forward and had started to strip away his clothing. The barrels of five Kalashnikovs, weapon of choice, were aimed at him. His body was exposed and they would have seen the mark of the bullet’s entry, crudely healed, and seen also where Ulrike had stitched up the shrapnel wounds – no anaesthetic – cleaned them as best she could. No gratuitous violence shown him, but no charity. They had taken his pistol, and the spare magazines. A travel document and an ID card had been examined, then pocketed; he had bought both for cash, way over the odds, from a trader west of the Canal. A small knife was produced, was handed to the man who searched him, and the blade snaked down against his skin and might have been used to puncture his stomach wall, to disembowel him, but instead had carefully, precisely, been used to cut through the cotton straps of the money belt he wore knotted across his abdomen. All the wealth he possessed was inside the zipped flap. The belt was not examined, was thrown from one to another. It was a small gesture but one that emphasised the depths of his failure. The one who had searched him had taken the hem of Cammy’s blanket and had covered his nakedness. He was not jeered at and was not abused. Nothing said – like it was an everyday transaction, and he was an everyday unfortunate, a loser . . . If he had resisted them, he would not have had the chance to fulfil a promise.
That had been the lowest point. Cammy believed the promise had sustained him.
Brambles and thorny branches caught his clothing, and scratched his face, bruised from the beating with the chair and still bleeding from the cuts. All unimportant because his promise had been given.
That day, Stanislau had carried more than his share.
Was always the way with him. He had the big machine-gun on one shoulder and swathes of ammunition for it, and had the mortar tube and half a dozen bombs.
They had stopped at dusk. Pieter and Cammy had made the camouflaged bivouac and they were sheltered between great rounded stones that had been scattered i
n some earthquake millennia before, and Ulrike was checking what food they could eat later, how to ration it. Cammy ought to have been ruthless and downsized the kit they took with them. They had talked among themselves about abandoning gear – weapons and ammunition – but always Stanislau had waved dismissively, and muttered though his misshapen mouth that the rest of them were 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, which means fatalities, if we lose him. Get upstairs and get into your bloody beds.”
A bit pathetic, no fight left in them. Switched off the light and groped their way back up the stairs.
Tristram closed the door behind him, and said, “I have never in my short life felt so inadequate, said anything so pitifully pompous. They hate us.”
“We were asleep. Which was dereliction, first degree.”
“I feel inadequate, total.”
“Me too. Inadequate and incompetent.”
Izzy took his hand, held it loosely, could make out the shape of his long, almost delicate fingers. They shared an armchair, had a clear view of the front door of the house they were charged to watch. The house was darkened. “At least, small mercies, we didn’t miss her return . . .”
He kissed her gently on the lips. Thought that both of them would still be asleep, nestled against each other, had it not been for the family’s voices behind the door. They watched the shadows, waited, and somewhere in the house a clock ticked.
He went by the old and trusted route.
Cammy had been the chorister kid. His half-brother had been out on a day/night release scheme, and wearing an electronic ankle bracelet. He would take him down to the city and would sit him outside the pub, would give him shandy and roll-ups. He’d thought the shandy foul and the cigarettes made him cough, but he’d sat there. There was a way up from the centre of Sturry that went north which was the direction of home. Mum would have been at work and his half-brother, on pain of death, was supposed to mind him . . . except that he had learned in HMP Maidstone how to hack into the system of the ankle tags and wipe them out. This was the route by which his half-brother had taken him out and had brought him home. And a few months earlier, when the filth had come sniffing, it was the way that his half-brother had done a runner and been at liberty for four days before being hauled out of a girl’s bed. Anyway . . . it was the way that Cammy approached his home.
Out up the road towards the estuary and Herne Bay. Hugging darkness, and making sure that his back turned when rare headlights lit him. Going fast and tiredness settling in his legs and his chest hurting. And off the main road short of Broad Oak and crossing the fields and skirting the farm, then taking the dog walkers’ track in woodland, doing three sides of the square, the long way around, and every fe
w minutes he would stop and listen. There would be traffic behind him, and sometimes birds would clatter out of a tree and owls would screech. Cammy had no fear of the dark, regarded it as a friend . . . Went around the school’s football pitch and could see a near perfect wall of lights ahead of him, and they led all the way down to the outskirts of Canterbury, except for one gap, like a missing tooth, and it was that section of darkness that he headed for. Would have taken him an extra hour, and would have pushed hard at the limits of his endurance, but he was pulled there. He took a risk but could not escape it. He stopped more often now, listened harder.
When he reached that section, black in the depths of the night and the rain still falling, he would be close to his mum – would not fulfil the promise made to his brothers until he had seen her, taken strength from her love . . . Would be good to see her, have her smile break on her face. Each day that he had been away, in Syria and on his journey back, he had taken a moment, like it was a prayer, to be alone and to fish her photograph out of his money belt, and speak softly to her: the photograph had gone when the smuggler gang had taken his belt, his pistol, his cash and his papers.
Ears pricked, the dog stiffened as it lay on Jonas Merrick’s lap, and a low growl came from somewhere deep in its throat.
The windscreen wipers cleared the view ahead, but not from the side windows or behind them. Jonas had a hand on the dog and was restraining it from leaping at the window. They heard slow steps, seemed to slap reluctantly on the wet pavement. They came up the hill, paused for a moment at the bend. A woman paused, leaned for a moment on the street sign then seemed to suck air into her lungs and straighten her back, and set off again.
Babs whispered, “Is that her?”
Jonas waited until the woman approached a street light. With his sleeve he rubbed a small section of his window. She wore flat shoes, her ankles were wet from the rain – she would have been splashed by passing vehicles as she had trudged up the hill from the bus-stop. She wore an old-fashioned raincoat that reached below her knees, and a headscarf, and on her arm was a shopping bag. He did not think she noticed their car.
The Crocodile Hunter Page 28