A thrilling story of the secret services, their enemies and the society they operate in, building with unrelenting suspense to a superb climax, The Crocodile Hunter is thriller writer Gerald Seymour, a former journalist, writing at his best.
In the office at MI5 where he works, they call Jonas Merrick 'the eternal flame'. This isn't a compliment. It's because he never goes out. He never goes undercover either, never does surveillance, nor goes with the teams that kick down the doors or seize the suspects off the street.
Merrick’s main task in his job of 35 years working for A4, a part of the British security services at MI5, is to track the paperwork for known terrorists. He never stays late after work and returns home each night on the same train. His wife and he love going on camping holidays. But Merrick has qualities the hot-shots fail to notice - a steely concentration, a ruthless ability to focus and find the enemy hiding in plain sight.
The book starts with Merrick, disappearing from his retirement party. He leaves his guests to enjoy the spread management have supplied while he, someone who has never worked in the field before, ventures out of his office, and finds a young boy with a bomb strapped to his chest. Merrick then talks the boy into allowing him to remove the bomb and throw it into the Thames.
Now, thanks to removing the bomb, he becomes the new head of a department. But still looking for terrorists, this time those returning from ISIS. There are youngsters joining the services who could learn a lot from him. However, Merrick is so boring and so set in his ways that they’d rather forget about a future in keeping the country safe and take their talents elsewhere.
He compares tracking and looking for this British Jihadi from Syria with murderous plans to tracking and killing a crocodile. Merrick becomes like a crocodile himself, almost submerged, just its eyes above water as it waits for unsuspecting prey to drink at the riverbank.
Coming ashore near Dover, Cameron Jilkes is a young man from a broken home and a failed education, trained in the harshest theatre of war, driven to rage by loss and pain. He plans to stay and live in Dover, keeping a low profile before unleashing a terrifying strike when the time comes. And this time, 'the eternal flame' must go out to hunt the crocodile himself. He needs to nap Jilkes before he could cause any damages or kill people.