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

no pilots on board. The personnel who had flown them over Syrian airspace that day and into the evening were some 2,600 miles away. Past them, on the centre of the runway which they had just vacated, a pair of F-22 Raptors gathered speed, went to flaming after-burn, were deafeningly loud . . . Not so the Reapers, which flew with a dulled murmur, a noise similar to that made by a household lawnmower not in the next road but the one beyond.

Their pilots, far away, brought them home for refuelling and maintenance, sometimes still carrying their weapons. The drones were now coming back more frequently carrying bombs and Hellfires, but at the peak of the war against the black flag jihadis they usually returned with empty pods. They had been a powerful weapon in the war – in fact a game changer. That evening, a Public Affairs Department officer, briefing a friendly hack said, “They are terrific, whether they’re ours or those the Brits have. The camera can give us a hawk-eye view of the ground – the street, individual cars and individual people. They can loiter for hours and give a continuous feed, and if they identify a target then we have the capability from the weapons platform to obliterate our enemy. And, important, they create fear. They cannot be seen – they are too high, the sound is minimal, and the target has no idea he is being watched, tracked, is about to be killed. It’s why we love them. They are lethal, which is why the other crowd hate them.”

Up in the Kirkstall part of the city, at a lock-up garage behind a terrace of weathered old brick houses, Farouk – in his mode as Wolfboy – knocked gently on a door.

He was asked to identify himself. Told them Wolfboy had come.

Heard nervous laughter, then the noise of bolts being drawn back. They were justified, those who worked there, late into the night, in being both cautious and anxious. The men inside all came originally from the Shah Zaman Road district of Quetta city in that part of Pakistan close to the remote tribal homeland; if they were arrested during this enterprise, they would spend decades in gaol. They were good at secrecy, trusted only a very few outside their inter-related family, and obeyed the instructions they received from those they regarded as of higher authority. It had been an interesting project that Wolfboy had delivered to them. The steel sheeting had been obtained from a scrapyard in Dewsbury and the vehicle the sheets would protect had come from an auction, cash only, in Barnsley. They had converted a van, the sort used by a small jobbing handyman, and for much of the journey from here to Lincolnshire, the plates would be carried out of sight. At some time in the late morning or early afternoon of the following day, the plates would be fastened to the sides of the vehicle and the driver given protection, and the tyres, and the engine. As an armoured vehicle it needed only to achieve surprise and then be proof against erratic small arms fire. It was rated as satisfactory, and also as secure, and they believed the trail to their garage was comprehensively disguised. The man who drove the van, who would burst through a perimeter fence and close on a complex of buildings, would not survive the attack: that they had been guaranteed. Wolfboy had promised it.

The closed area of the garage stank from the oxyacetylene cutters as the final adjustments were made. Wolfboy was hugged and his cheeks were kissed. The men in the garage would be huddled close to radio sets the following afternoon. They drank coffee, celebrated, and were ripped by excitement – and each agreed that prayers should be spoken for the success of the man who would drive the van into the fence and beyond.

Jonas whistled. Not a tune, not a cheerful serenade to the cul-de-sac, but a piercing whistle more like a sports referee’s . . . also like that of the dog walkers who took their animals out on the Civil Service recreation ground near where he and Vera lived. He looked around him as he walked.

The lead dangled from his hand. He would stop, turn a full revolution, would hesitate, let time pass, then would march forward again and whistle once more, and anyone seeing him would note his agitation.

Not Jonas Merrick from the third floor of Thames House, south aspect, and working in Room 12, but a rather stooped elderly man, dressed respectably but shabbily, and out in the rain when he should have been in his bed. His precious dog had gone walkabout, and needed to be found. He was unknown in the cul-de-sac, which mattered not at all. He was old, distressed. He looked in gardens and peered over fences. Those who had seen him might have said: “Poor old beggar, should be tucked up by now, but the dog’s gone and lost itself, he can’t do anything else . . .” He passed a smarter looking property, same structure as all the rest, but well looked after and the garden tended; saw an upstairs light on a landing, and a curtain flickered in the front. Below was the living-room and he noted, would have expected nothing else, that the room was dark and the curtains a little ajar, so he did another whistle, and moved on.

Jonas came to the end of the cul-de-sac. A cat came to greet him. He showed it his toecap, had no need of its attention. He was outside the house in which Cameron Jilkes had grown up, gone from choirboy to a jihadi fighter: had enlisted in the all-star cast of choirboys at the most prestigious religious building in the country and moved on to acquire a reputation, a dose of notoriety, as a member of the muhajireen, the most valued foreign fighters. The curtains were drawn, and no light burned inside. The grass at the front was