The Crocodile Hunter Gerald Seymour (best ereader for pdf TXT) 📖

clung to the sides of the dinghy. A universal cry for the misery to finish, the same note struck in Syria and Iraq, and in Iran.

The dinghy engine raced and howled when out of the water and then chugged noisily against the din of the breaking waves, but it was moving them. He thought they might have gone a mile, thought that the minimum crossing distance would be 30 miles, and he wondered why these people wanted to come to his, Cammy’s, country. They could have walked into Germany, could have stayed in France, could have reached Belgium or Holland. Why were they prepared to put themselves through this terror for a dream of the country that Cammy was now heading back to himself? As the engine thrashed and the dinghy pitched, his mind drifted, and then there was a higher wave and a deeper trough. A shattering impact when the dinghy landed back on the water and it was spun a half-turn. The keening became a scream.

A child had gone over.

The dinghy lurched as one of the women crabbed across the narrow width of the craft. Cammy thought they were about to capsize. Waves hit them and they fell, then rose, and the spray came like an avalanche over them, and if the dinghy was overturned, none of them would get to their promised land. He grabbed her, caught her clothing, felt the seawater wrung out of it from the tightness of his grip. Used his authority, pushed her down. The psychologist had switched on his torch . . . Cammy saw the kid; the one who had taken the pistol from the Chechen’s belt, had thrown it high and far into the dune grass.

Cammy slipped over the side.

The water entered his nose and his mouth, and swilled in his ears, and he felt the weight of his clothes and trainers dragging him down. He saw the kid, barely heard the screaming behind him, but saw the kid and maybe there was a small amount of air trapped below his anorak that kept him afloat. The distance between them grew, widening with each wave. He used the old discipline, the crawl stroke that he had learned in the Leisure Centre, and Vicky there, and powered away from the dinghy – and caught the kid.

He had once pulled a girl out from the pool at Kingsmead; she had panicked and gone under, he had grabbed her and her costume had torn and exposed her, and her mother had seemed more concerned at the girl’s loss of modesty than if she’d drowned. This kid’s mouth had been wide open with fear but he must have seen Cammy go into the water and then had shown a strange calm, which was trust. He brought the kid to the side. The motion of the dinghy made it hard to clamber in. The kid was too cold to help himself. Hands came down, caught him, tugged him back over the side.

Cammy struggled, wrenched himself up. Told the psychologist to switch off the torch, not to waste the battery. The cold was a bastard, not just for Cammy and not just for the kid, for all of them – could be a killer. The darkness was a wall around them.

Tristram said, “Am I allowed to say this, but you’re not great company.”

Izzy said, “Just that it’s like a cloud over us, what you said.”

“About old Jonas?”

“Because we did it with that picture, played silly buggers, played a trick on him.”

“And all about his instincts, and him calling us back – and doubting himself.”

They were the sole patrons of that corner of a wine bar; had gone halves on a bottle.

“It would be a hell of something to carry round. Responsibility.”

“Like his bits are cut off, losing his instinct.”

There had been long silences, as if both were cowed. They had gone through the selection process, and had come out smiling, and most of what they’d reckoned to be the smart-arse crowd of potential recruits had been sidelined, sent home. All fun and all interesting, and all part of the big build-up to “doing something truly useful”, and having faith in the system they were now a part of. She had her phone out, checked the screen between their exchanges. He thought it a piss poor evening.

“Know anything about crocodiles?”

“No, Izzy, I don’t. Saw one in a zoo when I was a kid. My gran had a crocodile handbag, genuine. That’s all.”

“Because of where we are, what we’re at, I looked them up. Useless facts. The biggest ever is called Gustave. Lives on the Ruzizi River that goes into Lake Tanganyika. He is twenty feet long and he weighs a ton, and he might be a hundred years old – I am not making this shit up – he has plenty of bullet holes, because guys with AKs have blasted at him. He is not too fast now so cannot get deer or antelope, but goes after a hippopotamus if it’s close. When he was last seen he was dragging a full-grown bull buffalo off for tea.”

“Do I need to know?”

“Only that he’s blessed with a good set of teeth. Where he is, people all know about him, are bloody careful, but he still gets them. He’s killed three hundred human beings. Just that they don’t see him. There but hiding, then the big splash, then it’s over.”

Both rueful. Time to go home, another day tomorrow.

Tristram said at the door, glasses not emptied but abandoned, “Don’t know, Izzy, if I’m up to this . . . Just have that picture in my head, up on Wobby’s wall, and what the man said, ‘You just have to find him.’ Have to.”

They went in single file, left their emir behind them, reached the water’s bank. They had stayed close as they eased among the reeds that flanked the river. If they had come across a security patrol, watching in the darkness for deserters, they would have killed all of them, done it quietly