The Crocodile Hunter

by Gerald Seymour

  About the Author

  Gerald Seymour spent fifteen years as an international television news reporter with ITN, covering Vietnam and the Middle East, and specialising in the subject of terrorism across the world. Seymour was on the streets of Londonderry on the afternoon of Bloody Sunday, and was a witness to the massacre of Israeli athletes at the Munich Olympics. Gerald Seymour exploded onto the literary scene with the massive bestseller Harry’s Game, that has since been picked by the Sunday Times as one of the 100 best thrillers written since 1945. He has been a full-time writer since 1978, and six of his novels have been filmed for television in the UK and US. The Crocodile Hunter is his thirty-seventh novel.

  Also by Gerald Seymour

  Harry’s Game

  The Glory Boys

  Kingfisher

  Red Fox

  The Contract

  Archangel

  In Honour Bound

  Field of Blood

  A Song in the Morning

  At Close Quarters

  Home Run

  Condition Black

  The Journeyman Tailor

  The Fighting Man

  The Heart of Danger

  Killing Ground

  The Waiting Time

  A Line in the Sand

  Holding the Zero

  The Untouchable

  Traitor’s Kiss

  The Unknown Soldier

  Rat Run

  The Walking Dead

  Timebomb

  The Collaborator

  The Dealer and the Dead

  A Deniable Death

  The Outsiders

  The Corporal’s Wife

  Vagabond

  No Mortal Thing

  Jericho’s War

  A Damned Serious Business

  Battle Sight Zero

  Beyond Recall

  The Crocodile Hunter

  Gerald Seymour

  www.hodder.co.uk

  First published in Great Britain in 2021 by Hodder & Stoughton

  An Hachette UK company

  Copyright © Gerald Seymour 2021

  The right of Gerald Seymour to be identified as the Author of the

  Work has been asserted by him in accordance with

  the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

  Cover image: David Curtis / Millennium.

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced,

  stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any

  means without the prior written permission of the publisher, nor be

  otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that

  in which it is published and without a similar condition being

  imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

  All characters in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance

  to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

  A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library

  eBook ISBN 978 1 529 38602 8

  Hardback ISBN 978 1 529 38601 1

  Trade Paperback ISBN 978 1 529 38603 5

  Hodder & Stoughton Ltd

  Carmelite House

  50 Victoria Embankment

  London EC4Y 0DZ

  www.hodder.co.uk

  For Harriet and Georgia and Alfie.

  Contents

  Prologue

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Prologue

  Many others were celebrating, but not Jonas Merrick. Yelling and shouting behind him were groups heading for the bars on Horseferry Road, and ahead was the cacophony of laughter and singing from the office parties on the booze boats navigating the Thames. It was, that damp evening, a hint of frost in the air, a date that Jonas could well have decided was worth celebrating: his birthday, his sixtieth. Not so . . . the least welcome, dreaded in fact. Retirement beckoned, and later that evening his identification for entry into Thames House would be wiped. He would be a creature from the past, unmissed and forgotten. They called him Eternal Flame in A Branch, not with love or respect, but with a sneer: he never went out, was desk-bound, an encyclopaedia of names and faces, and long redundant because computers did the same job.

  He had slipped away through the side door, had walked towards the floodlit face of the Houses of Parliament, had crossed the lawns, sparkling from the afternoon’s rain, and not cared that his shoes, always highly polished, would be muddied when he went back for the reception planned for him in the atrium. He felt the spit of drizzle on his cheeks, and the wind ruffled his sparse hair. The party, in name only, was a bare half-hour away. In the open-plan area used by the A4 Branch he had heard a woman complain, “God, do we have to go to that pillock’s goodbye?” and a young man had said, not caring to lower his voice, “Just so boring, and never achieves anything . . .” and another had murmured, “There’s a war out there, and he’s the only passenger in A4 who doesn’t know what the front line looks like or feels like – good riddance.” The Assistant Deputy Director General would make an appearance, stay ten minutes, mouth platitudes, and be on his way. A formality. He had escaped in order to kill time before he was expected for the humiliation and the chuckling, and the insincerity of it.

  Jonas headed for a bench near the river wall, mostly in shadow. His wife, Vera, was not invited, security and all that. He skirted the sculpture, the Burghers of Calais, in the centre of the small park, reached the bench and sat down, felt the moisture seep into his trousers, uttered a mild oath, and became aware he was not alone. There was a slight movement in the gloom beside him. He apologised, was not acknowledged.

  He had been in A4 for 35 years, a dinosaur. Knew the targets and the addresses that the surveillance people tracked, just did not do the tracking himself, and his stomach bulged and he felt rheumatism in his knees and hips. He took little exercise, only the walk from home to the station, and from the London terminus to Thames House, and the daily reverse. He had no idea how his life, and Vera’s, would shape after the weekend, all those identities and locations no longer relevant . . . There would be a minimum number of prosecco bottles provided, or cava, and the AssDepDG would smile limply and thank him for loyal service. Beside Jonas, a crisp packet was crumpled and dropped, and it blew against his foot. Another wriggling movement, and an arm reached across him, and he saw the face of a young man, and the litter was picked up and there was a faint grated apology. Not to worry . . . those he worked with were that evening on a high because there had been a good eyeball on the target’s meeting with an additional Tango, and that seemed to link two surveillance targets, a big step forward, and it had been a difficult “follow” with both subjects employing intelligent tradecraft procedures. The team had thought themselves – he did not mind mild vulgarity – the “bee’s bollocks”. He had twenty minutes to kill. Beside him the crisp packet was pocketed and a wristwatch studied as if the boy with whom he shared the bench was also checking a schedule.

  None of them coming back into the work area after the successful eyeball, and photographs to go with it, had acknowledged Jonas’s part in the good outcome . . . The AssDepDG’s appearance would be token. His colleagues would be there a bare minimum of time. He was hurt, bruised . . . Did he make a difference? Not in anyone else’s eyes. Would he be missed? No. Was credit ever given him? No . .
.

  He had only seen the face of the boy beside him for a moment, but he had started to plumb deep into that mine of facial features and biographies that his memory carried. They had been Irish when he had started, then Cold War diplomats and couriers from eastern Europe, but now the operations of A4 were almost exclusively aimed at the jihadis.

  Originally it had been intended to give him a self-assembly greenhouse. But he’d heard a rumour that such a purchase would outstrip the budget available: he would be presented with a John Lewis voucher as reward for a lifetime at the Security Service.

  He knew the face, recognised him. Could put a name to it, and a mother’s address, and an age.

  “It’s Winston, yes?”

  He heard the suck of breath beside him, and a head that had been held low jerked up. The moment coincided with headlights U-turning in the traffic and catching the Burghers on their plinth, lingering on the boy’s face, then moving on. Quite an interesting moment for Jonas . . . Back where he worked, where just a few more minutes of employment existed, the sight of Winston Gunn – son of Ben Gunn, a Caucasian lorry driver, and Farida, Quetta born of solid Pakistani stock, and a very fractured family as a result of a pregnancy with a white-skinned Briton – would register interest. Dad was long gone. Mum had brought up the boy – listed as resentful, hostile to the world around him, excellent recruiting material. Jonas doubted that any of the other analysts in the work area would have identified the boy’s olive-coloured features without rifling through a laptop’s archive.

  “Bit off your beaten track, Winston?”

  And back there, in that work area, if they knew, there would have been an organisational stampede at the presence of young Winston – supposedly drawn into the activist net while serving eighteen months’ imprisonment, theft with violence, in HMP Pentonville – within a stone’s throw, or a hand grenade’s, from the Palace of Westminster, Mother of Parliaments, the beating heart of democracy . . . all that crap. Ringed now with dragons’ teeth, and barricades of concrete and police clutching H&K machine pistols, the illuminated edifices represented the High Value Target of the nation’s government . . . No chance Winston’s presence was innocent. They’d be calling up additional firearms units, alerting the ambulance service, warning ministers, planning evacuations, and demanding the immediate presence of the psychology team and behavioural experts. How to proceed? It would be batted around, as the clock ticked. Jonas was not a policeman, nor a paramedic, nor an elected Secretary, nor a psychologist or psychiatrist; he was the little man with an ugly mole on his chin and pebble-lens spectacles who was now getting out from A4 Branch, surplus to requirements. Seemed pretty damned obvious. The team would have been gripped by a fear of “getting it wrong”: he could remember those days in the aftermath of an atrocity when it had been plain as a pikestaff that a jihadi who had reached a target and done his suicide had been fully signed up to a blip on the radar. They would be passing the parcel, hoping the decision – whatever it might be – would be made by someone else. Damned obvious, what to do, and he’d get on with it.

  “Don’t worry about me, Winston, I’m just the original nobody.”

  The boy wore a big anorak but, as Jonas remembered him from the surveillance snaps, he would have been spare built, no flesh on his bones. The jacket, black and with a couple of paint smears on it, seemed worn and ready for disposal – as was intended. But the boy shivered as if the cold wind off the river reached inside it and hugged him. His breath came in little spurts. No one there to hold his hand. Young and frightened, and the words of encouragement they’d have used would be draining fast from his head.

  “Did they volunteer you, Winston? Tell you that your name would be remembered year after year? That one day a plaque would go up on a wall for you, and crowds would say prayers on this day?”

  His calm matter-of-fact questions were not answered: he did not expect them to be and did not want them to be. Jonas thought it best to keep a drip-feed in the boy’s ear, to smother his resolve. He was intrigued that Winston had not reacted angrily, exasperated at the use of his old name. The file said he was now called Salah, had been since his recruitment. Pretty much everyone else who came into and went out of the A4 area had experienced being close to those they tracked, had the chance – sometimes for continuous hours – to watch their movements. Not Jonas. He had never made the time to slip out of Thames House, take a bus down to Ludgate Circus, wander into the public gallery at the Old Bailey and sit in on a trial: he maintained the letter of his job description. Now with new-found mischief he shed familiar manacles. His knowledge of Winston, and any of the rest of them, was from what he absorbed from his screen and then stored in the paper files he alone maintained. The breathing next to him accelerated and eyes flashed at him in the gloom, and twice more the wristwatch was checked. To be expected. Just a few minutes to seven o’clock, and the traffic around Westminster was near solid, and the boats were doing good noisy trade. Jonas should be in the atrium with the smattering of colleagues and standing smartly for the arrival of AssDepDG . . . Also on the hour the shift of armed police around Westminster changed. It had been learned from phone intercepts that the perceived jihadi wisdom was to attack a protected target just before the relief team showed up, and when the guards’ concentration was drifting.

  “I suppose you did a video, Winston. Usually takes several attempts to get it word-perfect. I suppose they wrote it for you? Treating you like a pack animal really. Just a donkey, there to carry the load. Did you wonder, Winston, when they were coaching you for the video, why their own kids and their own nephews never seemed to be asked to wear the vest? Look after their own, don’t they? Sometimes, they don’t think the donkey will go the whole mile, and might bug out, so then they sit a little distance away and watch and have their own electronic firing trigger. Unlikely they’ll have put real trust in you, Winston. Could be observing us now, could be about to . . . Don’t mind me.”

  He reached across the shadow shape, slipped a fist inside the Velcro fastening of the anorak, felt the boy squirm away from him. It was a moment of maximum risk. The boy would have had his hand on a button deep in his pocket. Might press it, might not. Jonas’s fingers found a mess of wires and his grip closed on them. It would not have been part of the boy’s induction to martyrdom to receive a lesson in defusing the beast. The back of Jonas’s hand brushed against metal builders’ nails, ball-bearings and assorted junk for shrapnel wounds, and worse. The boy did not resist, not yet . . . If Jonas had not chosen that bench Winston would now be walking, like a trance had trapped him, towards an entrance to the Palace of Westminster where the public milled and officials and politicians would be leaving and the armed police were stationed. But he had unwittingly chosen that bench. The boy did not fight him, did not detonate, did not flash a blade at him, just wriggled, his breath coming faster. Jonas had not an idea in his head as to the detail of the potential wiring, and whether it would blow when he tugged.

  “I’m thinking how it was, Winston, when they dropped you off. Driven you up from Peckham or wherever they had you in the countdown. A few words of encouragement, but not many. A little slap on the back and a bit of a lecture on the evils of the Crusaders. The door opened for you and you step out, and it slams behind you, and you might just have seen the tail-lights disappearing . . . But one of them might still be watching – getting agitated now because you’re running late. Except the scattering of your body parts here, and mine, is hardly a big deal. But a bit of a waste after all the time and resources invested in you, Winston.”

  He had a tension on the wires, and gulped. Jonas had never attempted anything that ticked the box marked Danger, had never considered an action labelled as Extreme Danger, and the last time he had witnessed a fight outside Waterloo station he had not thought of intervening but had crossed the road, looked the other way . . . They would be, by now, in the atrium. The prosecco would be uncorked, nibbles laid out, and the chorus would have started, and the AssDepDG would be comin
g down in the elevator carrying an envelope with the voucher in it, and a piece of paper with something anodyne written on it . . . A blur of conversations and impatience. “Little sod, he’s buggered off home . . . I’m not hanging about, not kicking my heels here . . . A waste of space, no idea of the reality of keeping the streets safe . . . Just a cursor pusher . . . We had a result today, brilliant eyeball . . . you might have noticed there was nothing from him, sitting at his bloody desk – no praise, no cojones, nothing – how rude can a guy get?” His fault that he had no friend there? Their fault that he was outside the loop? But, whatever Vera said, past caring.

  “I’m wondering, Winston, if you had the chance to call your mum, or didn’t they allow that? An opportunity for a little cuddle before you went off to Paradise and all those virgins waiting for you. I think your mum would have been properly upset when the police came to break down her front door, tell her what you’d done, show her the video. Better this way, lad. What I always say, rather be safe than sorry. So we don’t have an accident.”

  Believe that? Not really . . . He pulled. His mouth sagged open. Nothing happened except that the motion dragged the boy half across his lap. The wires came away, and a small household battery with them. His hands shook and the boy gasped, and there was no flash and no thunder roar and no spiralling up of body parts. Horns trumpeted in the traffic and a party on a boat was raucous.

  “Just lift your arms up, Winston, please. Don’t think of bolting back where you came from, because they won’t love you. They’ll speak badly of you. Yes, arms up.”

  Docile, obedient. It was how, long ago out on the Surrey hills on a sunny Sunday, he might have worked a cardigan from Vera’s shoulders – without much hope of action to follow. The boy raised his arms and Jonas eased off his anorak. The rain had come on harder and the air was chilled and the boy’s shiver was worse. A length of knotted string tied the vest around the boy’s chest. Took a bit of fiddling to loosen it. Then Jonas lifted clear the vest, and heard the nails rattle and the ball-bearings tinkle, and he smelled the explosive and choked on it. Because he had never been out in a siege or stand-off he did not know the weight of a bulletproof vest loaded with Kevlar plates. Unthinking, a natural gesture, he tapped the boy’s frail shoulder, as if he were a pupil who had done well. He stood and walked towards the low embankment wall. He trembled, thought he might faint, raised it, chucked it. He heard the splash, peered over the parapet and saw the disturbed water.