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

track through refugee status by emphasising persecution back in their homeland, then a decent flat and job opportunities. The teacher had questioned Cammy as first light had come. Cammy had told him that the promises were rubbish.

One moment they were wrapped in a mist blanket, then they were out of it. Nothing to see, then everything.

A woman in a tracksuit threw a ball for a dog to chase.

A man, wrapped against the wind, ran on the sand.

He could see the beach huts, prettily painted in pastel colours, and could see vehicles speeding on an open road behind them, and saw a pensioner couple, each with a stick.

Cammy said, “You never saw me. I was never with you.”

His little group were huddled down. They gawped at him, then looked ahead and would have seen the waves rising and falling and heaving; and the crisp white crests and then the broken, foamy water running helplessly up a dark sand incline, and falling back because the power of the storm was past, and the gales had fled. The younger child, probably near unconscious from the cold and the experience in the sea, squealed. Would have seen the people and the huts, and the road and the cars and, away to the south of the shoreline, the dull height of the cliffs. He could not have done it on his own; had brought them to their promised land; had gained strength from the camaraderie of singing the hymn and the psalm. Like it had been a deal between two parties, and both satisfied with the outcome, and nothing much more to be said, except . . .

“Good luck. Don’t look back. I was never with you.”

A last glance, and everything in front of him was so normal. He thought that in a moment the patrol boat would emerge from the mist. The runner had stopped. The dog ignored the ball and had begun to bark. The older man hooked his stick on his elbow and took out his mobile phone. The dinghy shook as the teacher and the psychologist and their women and their children waved frantically. Cammy cut the engine. He reckoned the fuel tank must have been just about empty. They would drift the rest, be taken by the waves, but not with him.

A last deep, lung-filling breath. He rolled over the side, went into the water with barely a splash. He went under . . . would have been frightened if he were not a swimmer, terrified if he had not done – years before but not forgotten – the lifeguard training. Under the water and flailing with his feet and making distance . . . If they had looked for him they might have seen a dark shape that became fainter, and might have seen a flick of the top of his head and might have seen an arm break the surface, then disappear beneath the water.

He needed to separate himself from them. No more thoughts of homeland, nor of childhood and his mother and all that had once been familiar. Fleetingly, Cammy saw the land and the beach and where the road petered out beyond the huts. He swallowed and he spat. He could not see the place on the beach where the dinghy would ground but imagined that the runner and the dog walker and the pensioners, and all the others who were on their way to work or were out for early exercise, would have been scrambling down the steps from the esplanade. Imagined it, and thought also that the Iranians would wait until the dinghy was stuck and then would begin to climb out and step down into the slight surf. The men would be first, and then the women, and the kids might push past and jump clear.

His knees grazed a rock protruding from the sand. He kept swimming. It would be fully light soon but for the moment he was helped by the unbroken ceiling of cloud. It was the best that he could have hoped for. He swam parallel to the shore, only in four or five feet of water but that was enough. Suddenly the sand shelved steeply. He used his hands and his knees to propel himself forward. His head was out of the water and he was ringed by the surf rolling back and he pulled his shoulders clear, and his hips, then his legs, and the weight of his sodden clothing dragged him down. He lay on the sand and gasped for breath and seawater ran off him and made a puddle around him. Cammy knew where he was . . . There was a small fishing boat beached high on the sand in front of him and below its hull was a shadowed, sheltered place. He was exhausted, had barely the strength to breathe. He had come home.

“Did you hear that?”

“No. Should I have done?”

Babs and Dominic were constables in the Kent police force, Tactical Firearms Unit.

“You know what it was like last night, a hell of a gale. It’s a miracle they got across,” she said.

“A foul night. Reckoned our roof might come off,” he said.

He stood back. Had his H&K in his hands, routinely ready and finger alongside the trigger guard, armed and with the Safety on, and watched them closely . . . A rum little group barely believable that they had made it across. She had the same weapon, and both also sported Glocks in holsters flapping against their upper thighs, and they had all the gear for Tasering, and sprays and gas and cuffs, and their belts sagged under the weight of it all. They were always called out when migrants made it across and up on to a beach.

“Say they’re Christians, that God and a love of Jesus kept them safe.”

“I believe anything after seeing what they came in, knowing what they came through. Probably believe that pigs were flying overhead.”

“They were singing hymns.”

“Had good cause to – a wise shout.”

They had come with sirens and blue lights from the station at Dover. A member of