The Crocodile Hunter

by Gerald Seymour

  Izzy stretched up, held the picture in place, tore off the necessary pieces of Sellotape, fastened it to the wall.

  He said, “A crocodile. Might be African, might be Australian, not important. If you were to see that beast in such a posture, out of the water and exposed, you’d identify its threat. I chose that image because I am aware of the scale of those teeth, successful weaponry, and if let loose among innocents – those we are paid to protect – then the results are catastrophic. It can summon up a killing zone. See the crocodile in that guise and the chances are that you can go and get a man with a rifle: end of problem. Or call up a chap who is adroit at dealing with it and he’ll know how to subdue it by subterfuge and then bind up that lethal jaw and negate the effects of those teeth . . . What does the crocodile do when annoyed?”

  Neither of them spoke. Jonas was new to mentoring, did not take kindly to the business of having probationer recruits dumped on his lap, but the upside was his own personal screened space and the opportunity to think, search for guidance in a crystal ball, be listened to, respected. Both might have imagined that they had entered an asylum. He was not interrupted.

  “There is space for another image. You will find it for me this afternoon. Quite a busy afternoon actually because I have an appointment arranged for you. The picture you will find will show an expanse of water. Somewhere hot and the water is stagnant and reflects undergrowth on a bank, drifting weed floating on a current. A deer might come to drink, or a wading bird flop down from a branch and look to spear a fish. The predator remains unseen, but the fact that he, or she, is not seen does not mean that the hunger or irritation has lessened: on the contrary, it has increased. Perhaps the sharp-eyed man, the crocodile hunter, will identify the killer. If he does not, then the deer or the bird, the innocent, will die – or the tourist swimmer, or the farmer. The predator has great patience, especially when an empty belly or irritation governs behaviour. It is submerged . . . a body that is ten feet long, or fifteen feet, could be twenty, is below the water. It will use all the natural aids available to stay concealed, it can employ the debris in the river. The water is dark, impenetrable, and no outline of its body is visible. So, it cannot be seen and therefore cannot be thwarted? No . . . not true.”

  No response, except that both gazed up at the picture and he thought they concentrated on the mouthful of heavy, sharp, white teeth and imagined their ability to take off a leg or an arm as surely as the shrapnel from any home-prepared explosive device.

  “It has to breathe. It needs air. It has lungs that are serviced by nostrils. It cannot breathe unless the nostrils are above the water-line, and, whatever the camouflage employed, the nostrils are visible. They can be seen if the hunter knows what he looks for. It must see. It has eyes set almost at the top of its scaled head that can be mistaken for a waterlogged dead tree, but sometimes there is light coming off an eye, a reflection, and that can be a giveaway of his presence. The nostrils and eyes could be a half-inch or an inch above the surface and you have to search hard to locate them . . . We have to. If we do not, then the innocents are slaughtered and we have failed. Do I make myself clear?”

  “I think so.”

  “Understood.”

  Jonas said, “I am not interested in those silly girls who flocked to Syria and spread their legs and now want to get back to the comfort and security of our country. They are irrelevant. Nor am I much interested in the boys who dropped out of college, took a crash course in Islamic studies, who might have chopped a few heads off, but then ran as fast as skinny feet would carry them when the real fighting started, surrendered, claim now they want a ‘fair trial’: tedious little creatures. I care about the crocodiles . . . There were British-born fighters who went to Syria, and they are not entangled with a girl and with brats. They will not surrender, but they are hungry for vengeance, they incubate hatred . . . They have been subject to retreat and failure, they have had their bums bombed from dawn till dusk, have been tracked by drones and by Special Forces military, and now they are coming back and they will have the intention of hurting us . . . We have to look for the nostrils and the eyes. Nearly through . . . Where they’ve gone this evening, that is not in the league I have been describing. I deal with those coming back, the returnees, the crocodiles we can barely see. Submerged until they strike. We look in what seem to be peaceful waters and have to see the nostrils or the eyes . . .”

  He saw the chin of the young man wobble, quiver, like a sentence was planned but he hesitated as to whether to deliver it.

  “May I ask a question, Mr Merrick?”

  “You may, and I am usually Jonas.”

  “If it is not out of place – you have the QGM. Can I ask in what circumstances?”

  Jonas was dismissive. “They come round by rote, same as a lottery card win, a pin going into a list of names. And not gossiped about. We frown on gossip.”

  He repeated the image he wanted them to find, then print – nostrils and eyes – and told them where they should be and when. Perhaps they had social engagements but his glance withered them and neither spoke. They stumbled out, could not get away from him fast enough.

  It should not have been known, ought to have been an in-house secret. A mistake in the addressing of an envelope had let it out. Vera had the medal at the bottom of her knicker drawer. Had not been to the Palace in a hired suit, but had been invested, in a degree of privacy, at a Royal’s country home, no photographs taken. No announcement for internal consumption had been made, nor anything for the general public: the few who had whispered had been isolated, then bollocked, and warned of consequences . . . Nor had criminal charges been brought against Winston Gunn.

  He gazed a long time at the crocodile picture. Imagined the beast watching, waiting, drifting with the flow of water and moving closer to a target – clever and deadly.

  The tide had turned, the wind had freshened, and the wall of surf pushed closer. Cammy’s gaze alternated between the water and the white caps that chased the surf and the far horizon.

  He had been in Marseilles, had met a man in a housing estate, dismal towers on the hills above the airport, and the man was the contact that pushed him towards Bordeaux. The talk between them had been of the Channel. A shrug, a cough, a spit on to the pavement as they walked behind the barricades that made the complex defendable against police incursions. A crossing was “probably” possible in a small inflatable craft, the chance of success was “perhaps” likely. The man had known something of small boats, made his living from organising the shipments that came by sea from Morocco, good stuff and sold in the towers that they walked between. The man had said that poor weather was good, that fine weather was bad. The boats were not expected to come with their cargo when the sea’s swell ran, and when the authorities dropped their guard. Then there were the days and the nights when the wind stilled and the gales faded and a zephyr breeze left the sea surface calm, and then the patrols were out in force and their radar scans worked well, and it was easy for them to identify the craft that could carry half a ton of cannabis. Bad weather was good, but when the boats came with the stash of class C narcotics they were steered and guided by experienced seamen. From what he had heard, the man said, the people who loaded craft for the Channel crossing would go only a part of the way into the busiest shipping lanes in the world, then they would abandon their customers, transfer to a following boat, would wish them well, wave, turn away . . . He had looked at Cammy as if he gazed upon a felon already condemned, and had slapped his shoulder.

  And money? Was there money for Cammy? A little laugh, almost a snigger . . . and more advice given him in Bordeaux, and the phones, but again a gesture of helplessness when quizzed for money, and a suggestion. “The Iranians are best, go for the Iranians, they have money.” He had fought Iranians.

  Had fought Iranians and Hezbollah boys, Syrian troops and the paramilitary fighters in régime uniform, and Russians; and there were times when they had been in combat against Special Forces, might have bee
n British or might have been American. Cammy had fought against the world, was unconcerned about the politics of who he supported or who he opposed. All of them were the same. And good at what they did . . . a team of brothers. Stanislau, a rifleman, but devastating in movement when clearing a building or a bunker; Tomas, who understood the trajectory of the 81mm mortar bomb when it was launched, and the wind factors, and could have three in the air before the first landed; Mikki, who did explosives and could make crude pressure-plate booby traps and could defuse them; and Pieter who was the sniper and Dwayne who had twice expertly flown Russian-made drones captured from Syrian paratroopers and had put one into the broken window of a defended farmhouse and with a modification that dumped two activated hand grenades; and Ulrike, who was the mother to them, who patched wounds and fortified their morale and who fed a machine-gun belt. He, Kami al-Britani, would be on the big weapon, the 50-calibre with ferocious hitting power. They were all survivors. Had wounds and she stitched them, had foot rot and gut rot and she seemed able to rustle the necessary antidotes, had once sucked out a snake venom implanted in Tomas’s leg. Because she was one of them, she also was a brother. Their own emir, Ruhan, was jealous for them and rationed their deployment to other units. They hit hard, came back together, showed no fear, were in love with the danger, always close and supporting each other. Cammy had heard the phrase “one for all and all for one” and thought it made for them . . . Now he was alone.

  He strained to see better. A shower came in from the south, from above Dunkirk and it would reach where he sat within half an hour. When the shower came, visibility would be lost.

  For a few minutes more the sunshine played on the water and caught the brilliance of the white foam and he spotted a tanker on its way north, the light revealing the enormity of its superstructure. But he did not look at the water nor at the shipping, but concentrated on the horizon and was unsure what he saw.

  There might have been, between the sealine and the darkening clouds, a smear of shadow. There would not have been white cliffs, but a part of the coast where the sea met shingle beaches, where he had been on school trips.

  Might have been just a shadow to show him where the gulls had come to lift cold chips from polystyrene trays, where ice-creams had been sold, and where pretty beach huts lined an esplanade, and where there were bus-stops that displayed the timetables of the service to Canterbury . . . He was unsure if he could see the shadow and it hurt his eyes to gaze into the distance with that intensity. He had flown over where he thought the shadow was, and had finally reached Vienna. From Vienna there had been the road link to Istanbul, and then buses and hitch-hiking, and a man in a café had gone with him under cover of darkness and shown him where he could lift a fence and get down on his hands and knees and crawl under it and pull his rucksack after him. Had not looked back, not at any stage. Had not considered whether he left indifference or hurt behind him.

  The wind had altered, came in a surge from the north and the sand flew up and worked its way between the grass stems and blistered against his eyes. He thought, then, that he saw the shadow of land in the long distance. Might have and might not, but wanted to believe he had seen the pencil-thin strip, but his eyes hurt too much for him to look again. The wind’s change altered the pitch of the waves and he thought the white caps wider and more persistent.

  He pushed himself up, then took the plastic bag with the bread and the cheese and the milk, and started back to the parking area where the Iranians would be . . .

  He would be welcomed when he came home, hugs and kisses and probably tears, and would stay a pocketful of time before moving on. He had made the contact and would be met at the final stage of his journey. Good hugs and good kisses and talk of love that would sustain him when he slipped clear of them again, his morale lifted to do the last leg towards his target. He slipped between the dune grasses and heard the rumble of the sea as it spent itself against the sand; the strength of the wind grew.

  He would not be expected, not in his home city and not where he would launch his attack; he would be unknown and unseen; was confident of that.

  He heard the light rap on the far side of his partition, and saw the distorted outline. Jonas Merrick was shrugging on his raincoat, had his trilby on his head, and was about to buckle the fastening on his briefcase. It had been a quiet day.

  A small hiss of annoyance, then he called for the young man to come past the corner that shielded his work area.

  In his hand, Tristram held two large photographs. Behind him, the girl, Izzy, hovered. He thought she looked uncertain and hung back. The boy jutted his chin as if that might give him confidence.

  It had been a quiet day because no sliver of intelligence had ended up in front of him. He had spent most of it tucked away, delving into the files that he kept locked in his cabinets and two of them were now inside the briefcase along with the emptied sandwich box and the thermos.

  He was handed two photographs. Both colour, both showing an expanse of water.

  It was the task of Jonas Merrick in his reincarnation at Thames House to sift through the jottings that came in and look for evidence of returning jihadis: an army of men and women coming home, with resentment at boiling pitch. He had taken his usual train and come into work on the mornings after the bomb and rifle and knife attacks in Manchester, in Paris, in London, in Brussels. He knew that shared sense of despair that gripped the building, every floor of it, from those on high to the guys who cleaned cars in the depths of the basement, and had seen men and women wilt under the weight of assault from the politicians and media when failure to intercept came calling . . . What was left of the fighters in Syria and Iraq tended now to be the hard-core of the black flag’s combat teams. They might be in Afghanistan or Libya or south of the Sahara and might be heading for the haven of the Philippine jungles to regroup, or they might be coming home . . .

  He took the photographs. He thought he read on the young man’s face a brief nervous smirk. The girl, Izzy looked away and failed to meet Jonas’s eye, as if dissociating herself.

  . . . or they might be dead. In the chaos of the last days of the caliphate there were strong possibilities that fighters had been carbonised by air strikes, ripped to unidentifiable shreds by shrapnel from the drones’ missiles, been cut down. Might be buried, might have a commemorative stone hastily placed at the edge of a mound, might have been taken and stripped by foxes and rats and vultures. No one hanging about on the sidelines of the dreg days of the struggle, fishing in a pocket for a notepad, taking a pencil from behind an ear, and wondering if the corpse carried a dog-tag: not a chance.

  He glanced at the pictures. Once there had been a couple of hundred names on a list. These were the profiles of those who had gone away, renounced their allegiance to Britain and had fought or cut throats in the name of as false a God as Jonas and Vera Merrick could have conjured up . . . not talked of often, but agreed. In the holding camps, there were now squads of interrogators from the Sixers, from the office block on the other side of the Thames. The original list was locked in his safe and most of the names were now scratched out: some were KIA and some were captured and held by Kurds or Syrians, God help them, or by the Iraqis and had a fair chance of ending up on the trapdoor in a Baghdad gaol. The interrogators sifted those brought before them, and might have threatened and might have cajoled, and might have offered inducements – unlikely to be honoured – and tried to find out about those who were not yet accounted for. Had they been seen dead, had they gone in a cage, had they fled as the bombing had intensified? Those few names on the list were marked UAF: un-accounted-for. Those who were UAFs, and this was not just the intelligence of a Wise Old Bird, had the ability to be the cream of his potential opponents: those who had lasted longest after the military collapse of the cause were the most dangerous, the likely crocodiles in the swamp.

  He had a train to catch. Always caught the same train.

  The photographs were in colour and showed waters that were dark, impenetra
ble, with no ripples. He looked up into the face of the probationer and stared him out and the boy bit his lower lip, damn near hard enough to draw blood, and it might have seemed an amusing idea half an hour before, now was fraught with risk. He wondered if Tristram had been at the sort of school where japes and wheezes were regarded as amusing. The first picture, a quick scan of it, showed the place where the nostrils protruded, and the lens had caught the gleam of an eye. Hardly difficult – obvious. Jonas tossed it behind him so that it landed on his desk and he’d not have time to clear it away, but the following morning it would go on the wall alongside the beast’s head and shoulders, and below the map of Dorset camping sites. The study of the second picture was momentary.

  Jonas rarely used profane language; did not say, “And don’t waste my fucking time again, you little shit face”. Did not need to. The picture showed an expanse of water, could have been from the Amazon forests, or from a wildlife park in the Australian north. A pretty picture, with a multi-coloured butterfly floating on a strand of reed. No nostril and no eye . . . A cheap trick; would have raised a laugh among the team when they were in the gardens behind Thames House for a fag break, a taking down of the Wise Old Bird, of Wobby. He tore the picture in half, then tore the halves into more pieces, and then dropped the segments so that they fluttered down to the floor beside Tristram’s shoes. The flush was crimson on the boy’s cheeks and his wretched spot was highlighted. Jonas accepted unpopularity: was uncertain whether he actively courted it, or whether his character, his demeanour, his limited communication skills, gave him that image.

  “Enjoy your evening,” he said. Allowed himself a wintry smile at both of them, and was gone. Always took the 5.49 from Waterloo, and would reach Raynes Park 26 minutes later, and then the brisk walk along his street, and home for tea. As he crossed the atrium, he fastened the attachment to his wrist, tugged at the chain to make certain the link was strong, and carried his briefcase out of the building.