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

must be ashamed of you, her son. Bastard, weren’t you? One-night stand and she ended up with you.”

At the first camp, where the foreign fighters were housed, they had been taught self-defence, unarmed combat stuff, all the moves that would show the emirs which of the newcomers were worth spending time on, and which could be dumped into administration or could just be fed into the front line, human wave and all that crap. Cammy could have taken two steps up the stairs, could have deflected the swing of the chair, pushing it aside. He could have chopped at the husband’s throat with the heel of his hand and seen him drop dead on the carpet. Or put two fingers into his eyes which would have blinded him. Cracked his forehead against the man’s nose and he’d go down sobbing at the pain. Could have put a knee into the man’s groin and done it hard enough so that the will to fight would leave him and he would be lying on the floor, moaning – and the chance of a sibling for the baby would be out the window. He did not do any of them, just finished dressing and took the blows.

“You think your Ma will welcome you? Well, you’re wrong. Nobody wants you. You’re on your own. Was it like that where you were? Filling in time between wrecking places, wrecking people? You’re a freak, that’s all you are.”

Because he did not flinch, nor duck his head away, but rode the blows and let the cuts bleed on his face, he could see Vicky. She had retrieved the robe, not that it hid much of her, and he saw the dull death in her eyes, and she could not silence her own crying nor her baby’s. Cammy could have stopped the attack on him at any moment but didn’t. He picked up his jacket and anorak and was tying his shoe laces. And said nothing.

“Just get out.”

He opened the front door. Thought the rain was slackening. Turned to face the guy at the bottom of the stairs . . . and Cammy feinted, as if to go forward, as if to retaliate. Gavin stumbled back and slipped, caught himself in the chair, and went over, and Cammy smiled softly at him; had let him know what might have been and he’d carry that to his grave, the memory of that moment . . . No room for fear in the last few hours available to Cammy.

He went out, leaving the door to swing in the wind, walked down the path to the pavement. Could have killed him . . . felt the blood on his face . . . Could have killed him and thought as little of it as if Vicky’s husband had been a Syrian, an Iranian, a Russian. Could have closed him down. She would read about him, would see his picture in the paper, on the TV. Would know he had shown no fear. And it was time to get up the hill above Sturry village and find his mum.

Her voice was strident in the night. “They were here. Same people as when you went, the Security Service. They’re expecting you, waiting for you. Did you think you could slink back and not be noticed? They’re looking for you. Tracking you. I hope you’re cowering in a ditch, pissing yourself, when they get you. Fuck you for coming here.”

They walked in a small phalanx into the Officers’ Mess. It was a traditional RAF Station building: a wide hallway, walls covered with paintings – some good, some less so – of the aircraft that, over the years, had flown from the long runway on the east side of the village. They were in the flat lands of Lincolnshire, in the heart of the East Midlands surrounded by prosperous farms. They need not have stayed so late in the prefabricated buildings in which, at least four days a week, they went to war. Well before their weapons platforms had landed at a Turkish-administered airfield, the two Reapers had been handed over to local ground control for the process of bringing them in and lining them up and dropping them down. But a bond existed between the mainstream crews that operated the unmanned machines, and the guys stayed in their padded seats, watching, almost as friends, until they had landed.

Now they came to the Mess for a late-night drink. They had families scattered on the base who might have been waiting up for them, wanting to talk about bills, or school reports . . . a host of matters that had nothing to do with the testing, taxing business of flying the platforms – burdened by bombs and lethal missiles – over the war zone. They went for a last drink in the Mess, still wearing their flying kit overalls with rank insignia on the shoulders and with the bright colours of the Union flag sewn on to the upper arms. It was necessary for these modern-day warriors, whose craft sneaked silently and unseen over a distant battlefield, to wind down after a day in the comfort of their ergonomic chairs. Truth was, the strains on their minds of this “removed” form of warfare had the potential to play merry hell with their family lives. They had all spent the day, the pilot and the sensor operator and the mission intelligence goon assigned to each Reaper, watching the sectors awarded them: one had had a wadi and the other a village community, and they had overflown both sites and had looked for the High Value Targets that the intelligence fed them, and for individual vehicles. Twice that day, one had gone to the state of readiness before releasing a Hellfire, then had backed off from firing, and the other had done great figure of eight patterns in the high skies and had not prepared to shoot. The crews would never have admitted that spending those hours in the negative state – no explosion to watch on the screen, no plume