The Crocodile Hunter

by Gerald Seymour

  Another night. Another day. Another stack of confirmation signals that the little corner by the river was doomed. Another hopeless hunt for food and water. Another clutch of hours waiting for the wounded to die and shut the fuck up.

  They would take all the ammunition they could carry . . . Might just move on into the Syrian desert and fight there alongside the clever boys who had ditched the women, the kids and the camp followers, and would start it again but in a lower key. Might . . . Ruhan had been specific on the route they should take out through the front line, and where the intelligence guys said the enemy were sparse.

  Edging through bunkers and foxholes and craters and keeping clear of the fires burning. Worse than anything before. The right time to go. That part of a dream lost.

  Cammy was in the centre of the line, and Mikki was in front of him and Ulrike was behind, and Pieter, Tomas led and Stanislau was back-marker. They followed a route given them by Ruhan, drifted forward in the darkness. Stepped around a child, silent and beseeching who was not yet dead but was disembowelled, and passed a woman who clung to a baby and both were dead but unmarked. An officer in the dying caliphate screamed at them to go to the left where the trenches needed shoring, and another cried for more ammunition to be taken forward. All ignored . . . they went where Ruhan had instructed them.

  And they came to him, recognised him.

  Ruhan had been quality at cruelty but had liked and trusted this gang of misfits. Years before he had cheated death on the scaffold at Abu Graib gaol because his beaten-up Peugeot had had a flat front tyre. He had fixed it at the side of a dirt track and then driven along an avenue of palms. The Black Hawk helicopters had been loading up, preparing for the lift, and he had caught a fleeting glimpse of the big man, the man he was supposed to protect. Another of the fugitive President’s bodyguards had been captured, had gone through harsh interrogation, had coughed up Saddam’s hiding place in the dirt. If the tyre had not emptied Ruhan would likely have been trapped in the net himself: he liked to tell that story. He had not cheated again.

  Once he had owned a powerful and impressive face, a jutting chin and strong bones and a trimmed beard and deep eyes. Always he carried the webbing slots that could take eight, even ten, loaded magazines for his rifle. The weapon and the ammunition had not helped him and his face was distorted because of what had been shoved into his mouth . . . His camouflage trousers were at his ankles and his grey underpants were at his knees and his groin was a mess of dried blood and already insects were feasting.

  Cammy said, a hoarse whisper and passed on ahead by Mikki and behind by Ulrike, “But he was not us. We go forward, we stay strong. We are together. We have each other.”

  They were a typical family living in the estate high on the hill above the village of Sturry, looking out over the Kent countryside, with a landmark view of the tower of Canterbury Cathedral. It was that time in the morning when they all headed for work or college. Dad was an accountant’s gofer, did the heavy lifting that the partners avoided. Mum did the cash till at a pet food outlet on the way into the city and had once been judged Employee of the Month. Bradley was their elder child and had a job on a building site while he waited to hear whether the Royal Navy would accept him and train him in weapons electronics, and their youngest was Karen, who was at sixth form college and wanted to be a dental nurse. They were out all day, came home knackered, but tried to manage a family event at the weekend. They were the Hunters, and financially ahead of the Just About Managing households in the brick semi-detached homes below them, going down the hill. Nothing to be complacent about but coping well with the difficult times.

  Trace would drive and drop Bradley at the builder’s yard where he learned about scaffolding then Karen at college, and last would be Dave, letting him off at the bus-stop on the main drag into the city, and then she would go to the pet food store’s parking lot. Always late, always a bit frantic – and Dave delaying them today because he couldn’t find his phone, and . . . then he was in the car, and Trace pulled out of the carport, but had to brake sharply because the neighbour over the road pulling her shopping basket behind her, didn’t see them. Trace braked. They all stared out. Sadie might have been a mile away, or might have been half asleep, or might have been . . . What Trace always said, in her youth Sadie must have been a great looking girl and had the relic of a lovely face but, God, time had not treated her well. What Dave always said, they should have made a bigger effort with Sadie because, years before, she had been the best and most popular and reliable childminder or babysitter they’d ever had.

  Dave had his window down. “Morning, Sadie, don’t seem to have seen much of you. You doing all right?”

  Trace leaned across him. “Bit hectic at the moment, Sadie, but when we straighten up you must come round for a coffee . . . Late, sorry – see you soon, Sadie.”

  They were rewarded with a distant smile that gave little away of her thoughts, and a bit of a shrug. Then they were accelerating and their neighbour was trudging the last steps to her front door, negotiating the long grass. They always called her Sadie. Did not know whether she was Mrs Jilkes or Miss Jilkes, did not know much more than her name, Sadie, and that her life was tough, tougher by a long mile than anything the Hunters had experienced. She always looked as if she had been put through a mangle, the colour gone from her face, and the flesh squeezed off her body, and a vacant stare in her eyes.

  “We should make a bigger effort,” Karen said.

  “One son banged up, her daughter gone on an overdose,” Bradley said. “I don’t know what we used to talk about . . . As for Cameron, well, he’s . . .”

  “We’ll try and be a bit more sociable – not a bed of roses, her life. That kid, what he’s done to her . . .” Dave said.

  The talk moved on and the view of Sadie Jilkes lugging her shopping bag up the road was pushed back, out of sight and out of mind. Plenty of everything else to talk about. Hadn’t been at the time, not when her youngest – Cameron – had brought the full apparatus of the Security Service and the Counter Terrorism Command crammed into their little road.

  “. . . as for that kid, little Cameron – excuse my language – bloody good riddance. What he did to his Ma, it was shameful.”

  Thames House, on the north side of the Thames, had been built 90 years ago, constructed of clean Portland stone and granite. Now, the lower windows have reinforced glass, proof against explosives and high-velocity gunfire, and are shuttered; higher windows have blinds through which dull light filters, but the faces of those inside are never visible. It is a building protected by Acts of Parliament and is heavily guarded. It is the workplace of those charged with being in the front line of the defence of the realm. Good days have been seen there and bad ones . . . There have been the numbing reactions when the “enemy” has won and bombers have attacked underground trains, concerts, buses, restaurants and bistros and the mayhem has been brutal and the inquests open and savage; and there have also been successes, of which few are trumpeted, when catastrophe has been averted. It is said among the psychologists who patrol the corridors and give counsel, welcome or not, that stress levels inside the fortress are as acute as those found in any military front line where direct combat is joined. The defenders have their own private army offering a separate layer of security around Thames House . . .

  Kev and Leroy had been newcomers to the police protection detail assigned to the headquarters building of the Security Service on a particular wintry evening three years before. Easy for them to remember it. Should have been an underwhelming leaver’s drink in the atrium with one glass of cheap Spanish or Italian bubbles, maximum two, and a parting gift handed over, and a speech of gracious thanks that would have been hustled through. Except that the leaver had not shown, and the press-ganged guests had gone on their way and the atrium had emptied; was silent, deserted, when the guy himself had turned up, a little tongue-tied by way of explanations, and had dumped a job on them. A miserable little wretch was sitting in a café aro
und the corner, and they were to get there soonest and take him into custody. They had watched him hawk-like and their index fingers had never been further than a centimetre off the triggers of their H&Ks. The guy had left the building and the would-be jihadi boy had covered his face with his handcuffed arms, might have wept, crumpled and defeated, and no explanation was given to Kev and Leroy, except that it was “all being sorted”. The guy had left through the internal gates, had fed in his access ID, and the red light had flashed and a buzzer had warbled – the sign that the card had been electronically destroyed – and he’d gone into the night. A duty officer had shown up, flustered, and that was hardly going to be forgotten. And – the guy’s ID had been cancelled, he had no access to the building, but he was back a few hours later, just before their shift ended, and . . . never an explanation. They had learned, Kev and Leroy, that they could set their watches by the time this guy came into work. Not long now, about fourteen minutes, rain or shine, never varied.

  An unremarkable guy, hardly a bag of laughs. About once a week they had a smile off him. Had never heard his name, and had never seen anyone greet him – with the one exception of that first morning after the ID cancellation, then Deidre on Reception had picked up a phone as soon as he was through the outer door and buzzed upstairs, and one of the officer toffs from an upper floor had come scrambling out of a lift to greet him, and had done a big charm bit – and the guy had seemed barely grateful. Not easily forgotten but they still knew nothing of him, nor what section he worked in. Kev had been a corporal in the Parachute Regiment, and Leroy had risen to sergeant in a fusilier battalion, and both had done Afghanistan tours and each reckoned himself a good judge of a man: neither could make head nor tail of this fellow . . .

  He was always in early, beat the main rush: if he was late then that would have been the fault of the signals or the points on the track. And another thing that distinguished him was the attachment on his right wrist and the chain to his briefcase that played bloody havoc with the metal detector arch. Always good to see that rather familiar face, though neither had any idea of what he did inside the building.

  That day, the points were good and the signals worked, and the train was on time. Jonas Merrick was swept out of the carriage, and planted on the platform and needed to walk briskly or he would have been knocked flat in the crush to get clear of Waterloo. No one gave him a glance. He hurried, keeping a tight hold on the fraying handle of his briefcase, and the chain hung sleek inside his shirtsleeve.

  The same route was taken every working day. If the pavements had not been made of weathered concrete, and the roads he crossed not of hammered down tarmacadam, there would have been a pattern of his footprints . . . down the steps of the main entrance to the station, past the place where the train robber once ran a flower stall, down Lambeth Palace Road, head down and with purpose, too concerned with his thoughts to glance at the A&E structures of St Thomas’ hospital. He did not concern himself with health matters, seemed to be lasting well, and Vera had no problems that she’d bothered to broach with him. By the time he was in sight of Lambeth Palace he could smell the river, unique and pungent, then over Lambeth Bridge.

  The wind cut across him. There was rain in the air and it stung his cheeks. With his free hand he held his trilby, had no wish to see it cartwheel from his head and be swallowed by the river or fall onto a barge’s deck. He was thinking of his day and was oblivious to the presence of those around him who also headed for Thames House: Jonas knew very few of them. He kept to himself. The building was ahead of him; his desk was on the third floor, next to a masked window.

  If it had not been for the events of that night, he would have been consigned to retirement and this trek from the station would have been part of his past. Not that Jonas would have attended any of those Christmas lunches for retired staff where the Director General gave a résumé of the problems faced by the Service in the previous year. Nothing classified, of course.

  His memory was powerful with clear recall of that night. He had gone home. Had sat on the train, later than usual. Had walked up his street, past the Derbyshires’ house from which a TV blared, had unlocked his own door. Had gone inside. Had faced his wife.

  How had it gone? Jonas had shrugged.

  Was there a good turnout? He’d grimaced.

  A decent speech from the big man? Gave a gesture that meant he could not answer directly.

  Were the right things said? Just a lift of the eyebrows.

  What had they given him? Thirty-five years’ work, what was the present? He had muttered that he didn’t know what the retirement gift was, had not been there when it should have been presented, then had turned away from her as if the interrogation irritated him.

  What had happened? Where had he been? Was there a “difficulty”? Raincoat off and on the hook, and the wrist bracelet unlocked and the briefcase, empty but for his sandwich box, stowed away under the hall table, and his hat slotted above his coat. No explanation offered. Except that he was rather tired, and needed a lie down, and a cup of tea would be welcome. Halfway up the stairs he had stopped. He had not turned to face her but had spoken from the side of his mouth. “It was a funny old evening, dear. An unpredictable one, and sort of made a bit of a nonsense of the timetable. What was planned didn’t happen. I’ll tell you what occurred, but that’ll be ‘one day’, not tomorrow. Think the best place for me is bed.” She had not pestered him. He’d undressed, put on his pyjamas, had brushed his teeth, and flopped on the bed, had stared at the ceiling, had reflected on the evening and his contact with Winston Gunn. The events had played in his mind and he’d remembered each of the heartbeats in his chest when he’d taken the vest and lobbed it over the retaining wall and heard it plummet into the water. Still awake when Vera had come up, he’d seen her shadow movements as she laid her clothes on the chair and put on her usual long nightdress, and she’d slipped into bed and had turned away and had seemed to sleep, or try to. No conversation, nothing said.

  There was a clock in a church over to the west from the centre of Raynes Park that struck the hour. Her pretence at sleep was poor . . . she was a good wife for a man working in the Service, did not expect to be briefed on the classified work he carried out at Thames House. Trouble was that he was wider awake than he had been when getting into bed, and the latest worry was whether the alarm had been switched off. He did not have to be up at ten minutes to six the next morning, and Vera would not need to be in the kitchen, making his sandwiches and filling his flask . . . A car crawled along the road. He thought it stopped outside the Derbyshires’, then nudged forward, then dawdled. He heard a door open and a murmur of voices. He was good at recognising speech. He switched on the bedside light, told Vera to stay upstairs, went down and unlocked and opened the front door. The Assistant Deputy Director General was coming up his path. It was past four. Jonas felt foul, limp, and without energy. He had always reckoned that the AssDepDG rather despised him, might have been the originator of the Eternal Flame jibe, and the speech in the atrium would have been short, the minimum that courtesy demanded.

  On the doormat, he was told, “You have my very sincere congratulations, Jonas. You are something of an example to us all, we are in your debt. What is particularly impressive is that you made a device safe when normal procedure would have called for a mass evacuation of Westminster, Parliament, all those jokers who mill about there. And on top of that would have been a lockdown while little Master Gunn would have been surrounded by marksmen and have the chance to go to God like any good martyr. Instead he is alive and singing with a canary’s full vocal strength . . . Would there be any chance of a cup of tea for me and Harry? I’ve underestimated you, Jonas, and I feel ashamed to admit it. You showed tonight an instinct of how to react that very few in that great heap of a building could have matched. I’m making a rather humble request, Jonas. These are stark times, as you know damn well – I want you there. Want you back at your desk. Sorry, too valuable to be retired . . . Put it another way
: if that little beggar had detonated, then the reputation of the Service would have been shredded, credibility gone. A generation of officers would have been damaged. Back at your desk, Jonas – please. Sorry to ask again, but a cup of tea if that’s possible for Harry and me.” It was then that Jonas had realised that Vera was at the bottom of the stairs, and she’d said something about him being rude in not inviting his guests inside.

  They’d sat around the kitchen table. Vera had made tea and put some biscuits on a plate. Harry was a pool driver and had stayed silent, and Vera had only queried whether milk and sugar went with the tea, and Jonas had bitten his lower lip, and remembered sneers and mocking insults, but – of course – had accepted.

  Jonas had said later, “They want me to go back, to cancel retirement. It’s because of something that happened tonight. They want me to keep working.”

  Vera had said, “Thank God for that.”

  They were still talking and the cat had come in through the flap, and the alarm had gone off upstairs. He had showered and shaved, and dressed, and Vera had done toast and cereal for them all, and Jonas had talked about his filing system, its value, and what he looked for . . . At that time in the morning it was a fast run into London, and it was comfortable in the car and smooth with Harry at the wheel. But Jonas Merrick, true to form, had played contrary and allowed them to take him only as far as the station. Had travelled to Waterloo in his own style and in his own time, with his briefcase and with a filled sandwich box. Inside the building, at the outer desk, a fresh ID card awaited him.