“Is that him?”
“Is that the target?”
“What’s around his mouth?”
They were answered, quietly, and both had to strain to hear. “That’s ice-cream. We went out and bought some ice-cream for the kids who came ashore this morning, the Iranians. The adults didn’t want to make an identification, but he’d saved one of the kids from drowning during the crossing, brave of him, and that kid did the business for us, kissed it and his mouth was full of ice-cream and a chocolate stick. Always go for the weakest link, the way to break a chain. Know what I mean?”
The voice had a chill to it, like there was no emotion. They looked at the picture until he switched off the torch, and replaced it in the file.
He said where they should go.
A car was already parked there.
They swore. Jonas, to himself, chuckled.
The car would have been left by Tristram and Izzy, Babs expertly manoeuvred their car into the remaining space. More grumbling from the front and he saw no benefit in disabusing them. No need to explain to them who else was on the plot and what their requirement was.
Jonas looked at his watch. “I think we are a little early. Should have picked up a flask, shouldn’t I? Just one thing I’d like you to find me, and . . .”
“All in due course, if you don’t mind, Mr Merrick. We still have loose threads,” Babs said.
“I think we spelled it out pretty clearly, Mr Merrick, but didn’t get an answer.”
“The guarantee, sir, and our primacy – and, full respect, you are elderly and may be confronting a motivated and dangerous individual and we’d not want you blundering into our line of sight.”
“Into our line of fire.”
Jonas said, “No risk of that. I think I understand what you want and I’m sure we’ll get along rather well.”
“So, that’s done and dusted.”
“Not a problem,” Jonas said.
“Would you mind stepping out, Mr Merrick.”
He did. He stood under the tree and let the rain fall, felt comfortable and at ease. Babs unfastened one of the boxes and Dominic started rummaging on its far side and then heaved out two vests. Jonas had never worn one. The surveillance people in 3/S/12 liked to show them off when they were on an arrest operation, and they’d come back into the building and come up the stairs for their debrief, still wearing them, then would dump them on the floor: he’d always thought it was similar to a peacock displaying, letting the corridor know they’d been at the sharp end. He was told they did not have one for him. He answered that it was unlikely he would need such equipment and that he had no intention of going anywhere close to where he might require one. They were satisfied.
Jonas could have trampled all over them, might have suggested that they had never, not ever, confronted a living terrorist who was armed and who represented a straightforward and unarguable risk to life: thought for a short moment of Winston Gunn and the quiver in the boy’s lower lip and the shake in his hands, and thought of the wires and the detonators and the sticks of commercial explosive – could have rubbished them and spoken of a private investiture and a gong now safe in his wife’s knicker drawer. Would not have dreamed of telling them of that faraway and irrelevant event. Nor would he have considered it fair comment to remark on the probably indisputable fact that neither had ever gone with their main armament, to the stage where they eased off the Safety and were ready to fire . . . Would never have fired, would never have known – whatever their training – how they would be if “Christ, it’s actually happening” . . . as a bodyguard had shouted when the President, “Rawhide”, was shot on a Washington DC pavement. Would have been churlish because they might do the business and might freeze – did not know. Vera had once tried to ask him what had been in his mind when he had started yanking clear the wires of the bomb young Gunn had been wearing, and he’d had no decent answer. They had the guns out and locked in the magazines, and armed the weapons, then did the same with the Glock pistols carried in holsters looped to their thighs. They made a harsh noise doing it, but the TVs indoors continued to play and the rain to fall and they attracted no attention.
Jonas watched, then said, “It’s what he’d want. His name is Cameron Jilkes and his home is at the bottom of the cul-de-sac that is second on the right of the road we’re in. That’s where his mother lives. My assumption is, he’ll visit tonight, then move on. I’ve an idea where he’s headed but not certainty. Put mildly, I’d be disappointed if you shot him.”
“Best place for him, from what you say.”
“Out of harm’s way.”
Jonas said, “What he’d want. The glory moment and the wipe-out of pain and angst. Not suitable for him. A cage is right for him . . . We might not get much sleep later on so another doze would be welcome.”
Babs said, “Earlier you told us that you’d like us to find you something, but didn’t say what it was that you wanted.”
“Well remembered. Thank you. Yes . . . Please go to the nearest house and ask if they can lend you a dog lead. Or the next house, or the one after. Of course, you’ll promise to bring it back. Yes, I’d like a dog lead.”
Might have stood there half an hour on the opposite side of the road, but Cammy now moved to the pavement in front of the house. Heard nothing saw nothing and the baby was quiet.
Not in years had he known himself so hesitant.
A cat came to see him. A decent looking beast, with long hair plastered down by the rain. Took a liking to Cammy and rubbed against his ankle. It was a madness that intoxicated him. But he did not take the step forward . . .
Remembered when he had not hesitated, not stopped to consider. Their little unit of foreign fighters had been pushed in to plug a gap in the line, and a main force of Syrians was probing for weakness and had brought up three tanks – mean bastards, Russian built T-72s, each with a combat weight of 40 tonnes. They were like the guys out of a comic book, Cammy and Mikki and Pieter, just had one RPG-7 with them, and grenades, and a single sniper rifle. They had done a weaving run forward, having broken clear of their brothers, and then had put themselves into a warren of damaged buildings and all the time had heard the growing clanking thunder of the tanks’ tracks. No hesitation. The tanks were in file. They had been level with them, would have had enemy infantry within a handful of yards, and Cammy had called the plan. Took as big a risk as at any time he was in Syria and fighting. An RPG round into the tracks, side-on shot and breaking them apart and halting it, and Pieter’s sniper shot taking down the commander in the second one as he stood and gazed out of the turret, and Mikki going like a mad kid in an adventure playground and swarming up the side of the third one and crouching a moment to prise a grenade into the hatch window used by the forward observation guy. Had moved fast. More explosions behind them but the armour was stalled. The line had held . . . If any of them had hesitated it would not have happened.
He stood in front of the door and the rain fell on him and the cat now gave him best friend status. Still could not take the next step forward.
No tanks here, no line to be held and no white heat from fire, and no brothers with him . . . Stood in a residential street and shivered. Easy when there had been tanks and brothers and a front line. Wanted her, and had not wanted her at this same pitch, at any time that she had been available, easy. The cat gave up on him. He was alone.
The wild flowers grew to the height of Dwayne’s knees.
He loved flowers, would always wander away from the group when he saw them growing but would never pick them, not even to make a posy for Ulrike. The flowers that seemed to grow well on river banks entranced him. There were red petals and yellows and blues, and it must have been that week when a mass of them came into bloom at the same time.
They heard the aircraft.
The rest of them had gone to a small sand spit where the stream bent sharply and had stripped and all of them were naked except for their privates and there was a pool where they had knelt and scru
bbed themselves and had washed their clothing. The stream at that point was little more than 100 yards from the track they had driven down. The vehicle was a luxury. A military type of jeep, with spare filled fuel tanks and small arms weapons, and had been abandoned. The likely scenario was that government troops had dumped it, and probably their uniforms too, and had then hightailed across country and had a dream of getting back to their villages. The jeep was on the track and Dwayne was close to it, his head down as he moved in a state of bliss through the flowers.
At a distance, a strike aircraft, coming low on an attack run was always near impossible to hear as it approached, coming at perhaps 500 klicks.
He came from a ribbon development on the outskirts of the big park of Algonquin, north of Toronto. He’d told them often enough about where he had been raised. To the rest of them the stories of Dwayne’s life had seemed almost idyllic and many times they puzzled why anyone should want to walk away from his family and his home and exchange them for fighting in Syria and Iraq, now from running in Syria and Iraq. His father was a retired corporate accountant, and his mother soldiered on as a school teacher: conventional and God-fearing but unhappy to debate politics or morals with their only child; argument upset them. They had a Labrador dog and a Maine Coon cat and the porch from spring to autumn was full of rods and tackle; a couple of powerful four-wheel drives were parked in the front. Dwayne said it was a life lived in “a culture of conformity”. If he had not left, had stayed with them, what else might he have done? He’d scratch his bum and deliberate and would talk of writing a book or a poem or the words of a song, and drink beer and fish for walleye – and boredom would have been lethal . . . Often enough, since they had welcomed Dwayne into their band, allowed him to be one of the brothers, Cammy had fussed around him like an irritated sheepdog, had rounded him up and bawled abuse because the Canadian was immersed in his thoughts in fields of wild flowers.
Pieter was shouting and pointing, then Cammy saw it: a grey shape against a hazy sky and streaking towards them.
He was the worst military guy amongst them, except that he had the innate skills of a tracker and a woodsman. He could move towards a roadblock position under the cover of growing maize and not a plant would be disturbed and even alert guards would have no warning as he approached. He might then have slit throats with the same detachment as he might earlier in life have cleaned out the innards of a fish. He was the best cook among them and most useful at that time when they were in flight and food was scarce. And he had a philosophy that seemed valuable. Like a vinyl record with a scratch so that it repeated. “Things are going to get a lot worse before they get worse”, and he said that was not original to him but came from one of the Marx guys. No fear ever shown . . . and unaware in the last seconds of his life. Not hearing and not seeing and probably with the scent of flowers in his nostrils, and in a state of grace.
The bomb careered away from the undercarriage of the aircraft and almost floated before it began to fall.
It would not have happened when they were going forward. Impossible to imagine that Cammy would have shown such dereliction of basic survival procedures. A military vehicle parked up in the open, a tall figure in black clothing easily visible among bright flowers, the rest of them away from their weapons, their clothing scattered. But the heart and the spirit were being torn from them, and their brothers were being taken, and they no longer advanced but tried to make sense of defeat and retreat, and a mistake delivered them into an enemy’s hands. No guns within reach, not that a heavy machine-gun could hope to hit a fixed-wing strike aircraft even as it pulled out from the level flight and veered away as its bomb came down. Would have been on a mission and with one bomb left and a target offering itself. They were shrieking at him, but even if he had heeded them and had flattened himself it would have been too late to save his life.
The bomb struck, extraordinary precision, hit the ground close to him and beside the empty vehicle, then the eruption, and the dirt and the dust and the deafening noise and the blast of the gale that it blew. Their cries died. They dressed themselves, which seemed important. Then gathered up their weapons, all except for the German woman, for Ulrike. She ran, wore only skimpy underpants and they hung low on her hips from the weight of the stream’s water and her body was white. Dwayne, the big man never swore in her presence, called her “Ma’am” and had liked nothing better than to sit cross-legged in darkness by a guttering fire while she told them stories: little more than nursery tales – witches and dragons and castles and princesses – and would calm them and then in the morning they would go again and fight, and Dwayne would be their point man because he had the best skill in crossing ground, in finding cover.
The aircraft soared to regain altitude and came over them, and Cammy saw the markings. The pilot and his navigator would be back in time for a cup of tea and a biscuit before the debrief on the mission and they’d tell the ground-based RAF officers who controlled them of a little bit of a bonus, taking down a black flag vehicle and at least one of the “bad boys”. Clear from the roundels painted on the fuselage that the aircraft was British and the pilot was Cammy’s enemy.
The vehicle was well fucked, was on its side, the chassis at a twisted angle, and in the field of flowers there was a single dark and messy crater. The debris had fallen, the smoke had cleared, the noise gone. Stanislau had brought along with him the clothes that Ulrike had worn before going into the river. She dressed. Nothing to say. Then they started to search, did it in silence. Pieter was the first to give up on something futile and he went to the toppled jeep and started to wrench free whatever could be retrieved and was not damaged. Some of the weapons and some of the ammunition and some of the food and the medical box, as much as they could carry – as Cammy and Ulrike and Pieter and Stanislau could carry. They found part of an arm. It was taken off at the elbow and Dwayne’s watch was still on the wrist and it had been given him by his father on his 21st birthday. They put it in the deepest part of the crater and then covered it with stone and earth.
Cammy looked at the skies. The aircraft was long gone. Its trail had disappeared. There was a hawk high in the sky, nothing else. He blamed himself for their carelessness, was right to. He gazed into the emptiness and cursed the man who had flown the plane, did it silently and with acute anger. And his prayer for Dwayne was of revenge. A promise repeated, and strengthened. Loaded with the kit, they turned their backs on the stream and the crater and the broken jeep, and the flowers.
It was Cammy’s style, his defiance, that after they had gone perhaps a mile he started quietly to sing. Something from Henry Francis Lyte. Gave them Praise my soul, the King of Heaven; To his feet thy tribute bring. They trudged away.
All the lights on the ground floor were off.
The baby slept. Cammy saw Vicky’s shadow go up the stairs.
A light came on above, peeked between the drawn curtains. The rain fell remorseless and heavy on him.
His mum could by now have been home from work – if it were the same work, same hours, same journey home on the same bus schedule.
He had no doubt as to how it would be when Vicky saw him, when he stood on the step and Vicky faced him from the open doorway.
Where he would go in the morning, alone, it would be as if she came with him, ran by his side, matching him step by step. The light upstairs went off.
Down the street, a porch light lit a forecourt and he imagined that in a moment a door would open and a dog would be pushed out or be coaxed on to grass . . . He had not seen the cat again. There were no tanks here.
He stepped forward, his finger found the button. He felt the shiver in his hand. He pressed the bell.
Jonas had wedged himself again on the back seat, was hard up against the now emptied weapons box. Slept or dozed or dreamed, eyes closed.
“Didn’t answer us, did he? Never gave us an answer.”
“Did not, Dominic. And what was all that about a cage?”
“Not a clue. You’d have
thought that Five could have done better than him.”
“A bit pathetic, but I’ll not have him getting in our way.”
The Crocodile Hunter Page 24
