The Crocodile Hunter by Gerald Seymour (english novels to improve english txt) 📗

be expected. The inside of the van was filled with the sheets of plate metal and it was Farouk’s responsibility to screw them into place when he reached his destination, where the van – newly protected – would crash through wire fencing. Once the van had broken past the initial defences and outstripped the first layer of security . . . what then? The man who was coming, who would shortly be on his way to meet Wolfboy, would have to run, and on his shoulder would be the weapon. A smile played broadly on Farouk’s face. The road ahead was empty. The vehicle whined and strained but kept up its speed.

Wolfboy felt a sense of joy. He had been chosen. Had been nervous, but no longer. Stayed cautious. It would be a mark of the trust placed in him that it was he who had been chosen to meet the martyr, shahid, and he had been told that this heroic man had been a great fighter for the cause, in defence of Allah’s will, in the time of the caliphate. He was honoured that he had been selected . . . and did not realise that those whom he had met – hurried conversations in moorland picnic areas, or among the trees of his city’s parks – had furnished him with no information as to their own identities. He did not understand that he was a “cut off” in the conspiracy, and imagined that men would come to greet him when he was back in his room or in the café and would praise him to his face. It had happened fast, had been put together in a race against shrinking time.

The weapon would arrive first, then the man would come . . . and Wolfboy would be back on his own territory, at work in the café, but would keep close to a radio. He thought it the high moment of his life and was flattered to be so valued.

Tristram said, “There was something on the stairs, I thought.”

Embarrassed, both of them, like a line had been crossed.

Izzy said, “There might have been, I couldn’t swear.”

From the darkened room they looked out through the window and down the length of the cul-de-sac, past a couple of parked cars and across the small square of derelict front garden and at a door with misted glass and behind that door a hall light burned.

“What shall we do, Izzy?”

“Nothing,” she answered him. “What’s on your phone?”

“The cavalry’s coming. Aggie Burns’s crowd.”

“Can’t be too soon . . . Is this how you’re going to spend the rest of your working life?”

No answer given.

He came down the stairs, had taken them slowly, no sudden movement.

Cammy thought it would have been hard for a watcher, covert in the Hunters’, to have identified him.

Time to move on. He went into the sitting-room.

It had seemed an age since he had been in his old bedroom. He had not needed a light, sufficient had come through the window, curtains opened, from the moon . . . A little owl had shrieked from the trees around the cemetery, had seemed to warn him. He could see what had been done to the room, its contents, and could feel and touch the wreckage. He did not have to be told by his mum why the room had not been touched. She did not blame those who had wrecked the room and smashed his possessions. He assumed there would have been a gang of them, boot-faced, if not hiding a grin while they worked. There would have been nothing in the room for them to feast off. A couple of days before he had flown out, he had cleared all the paper he had printed off from the web, locations and travel ideas and the basics of the black flag movement, and had gone into the graveyard and had burned the paper in the bonfire heap that the workmen used who tidied the place. He supposed it “gratuitous”, and knew about that word because it was what they had all of them, the brotherhood, used when talking of the violence inflicted by the men from the Amn al-Dakhili who did internal security in the towns and villages that had been overrun by the fighters. They came along behind, when it was safe and when the guns were quiet, and . . . He felt a cut on the tips of two of his fingers. A bedside clock. A present given him when he had gone to the college, Mum’s present. He had touched it and realised too late that the glass on the face was broken, a shard had lanced his fingertips.

“Do you want to know anything? Where I was? What I did? Anything?”

No answer given him.

“Who my brothers were? The guys I fought alongside?”

Silence.

“Is he still locked up, my loving brother? Do you still go to see him? Does he tell you how it was, is, how it will be? Do you talk? Do you make a judgement on what he did, does, will do when the gate shuts behind his arse and he comes back here, and he’ll start selling again? That all right, is it? I don’t have any shame for what I did. Understand that . . .?”

She was hunched in a chair, did not move. He heard her breathing but she didn’t speak.

“Are you going to do food for me? Do I have to do food for myself? I can cook, I cooked for my brothers. I can boil mutton, can grill goat meat. I can clean a chicken then put it on a wood spit over an open fire. Here, do I have to do that for myself?”

His voice had risen. He was still not answered.

“And money. I need money, and . . .”

Her hand was raised. He could make out the little roll held between her fingers. The length of a fag, and the thickness. He snatched it, could see the denomination.

“Is that all I get? Came home, came to see you . . . Never a day when I was there that I did not think of