Ivory Nation, Andy Maslen [e manga reader .txt] 📗

he said, standing slowly. ‘You’ve killed two, which is bad enough. But they’ll pay a ransom for me.’

The man in khaki frowned. Stevo could see him making the calculation. Money always won with these people. It’s why they did it. Selling ivory, collecting ransom cash from the British government, it was all the same to them. He’d have to endure a few days’ captivity, maybe even a few weeks. Then he’d be home free and could return with more men to wipe these scum—

‘Nah, man. I don’t think so.’

The burst took Stevo in his mid-section. His last sight, as he folded forwards over his ruined belly, was of his guts spilling onto his boots.

Five hundred yards to the northwest, Eustace rolled onto his back. Above him, high in a sky the cobalt blue of Mama Botswana’s eyes, three vultures circled. He raised a shaky hand to his right cheek. He winced as his fingertips encountered gashed skin and the mushy feeling of torn flesh and congealing blood.

The shot had clipped his cheekbone and he’d spun into the scrub, landing unconscious in a pile of elephant dung. He’d come to as the poachers, for he was sure that was who had attacked him, had driven off, laughing.

‘He’s dead!’ a white man had shouted. ‘Leave it.’

So they’d searched for his body and missed it. Good. Thank you, Heavenly Father for saving me.

Gingerly, he climbed to his feet, reeling as the blood temporarily left his brain. The Land Rover. He needed to reach it. He offered another prayer, this time of supplication rather than thanksgiving.

Father, help me reach the Land Rover. Let the poachers not have commandeered it or smashed the radio. Amen.

He did not bother with a prayer of intercession. He knew that the others were all dead. But if he could survive this, he could bring back help for their bodies and souls.

It was 5.45 p.m. by the time he reached the Land Rover. Not much light left. He clambered aboard and checked the radio. To his intense relief, it fired up as soon as he flicked the power switch.

Within a few seconds he was speaking to APU Control in Gaborone. With GPS coordinates relayed, and a promise of help secured, he climbed out of the cab and crawled under the chassis. Stevo had the ignition keys, so it was only good as shelter.

2

ENGLAND

In the comfortably furnished drawing room of a seventeenth-century cottage deep in the Buckinghamshire countryside, two men and two women sat watching the latest royal wedding.

Gabriel Wolfe and his girlfriend Eli Schochat occupied a well-worn buttoned leather Chesterfield sofa. On a second, their boss at The Department, Don Webster, sat beside Christine, his wife of forty-five years.

A bottle of Pol Roger sat in a battered aluminium ice bucket beaded with condensation up to the halfway mark.

Don had just refilled everyone’s glasses. He pointed at the screen.

‘You see that, Old Sport?’ he said to Gabriel. ‘Sign of the times. Whatever anyone says about this country and its institutions, it’s something to be proud of.’

‘Because Carty’s black?’

‘Exactly. Those of a Republican persuasion love to carp on that the monarchy’s out of touch, unrepresentative. But what do they have to offer in its stead?’

Christine put her glass down on the coffee table.

‘Don’s about to deliver his “President Tammerlane” speech again.’

Don laughed.

‘Absolutely not. Not after the telling off I got last time.’ He turned to Eli and Gabriel for support. ‘All I’m saying is, Joe Tammerlane is out of touch with the people of this country. We don’t want a revolution. And do you know why?’

‘Why?’ Eli asked.

‘Because we’ve already had one.’

She frowned.

‘Really? When?’

‘Let’s say 30th January 1649. That’s when Oliver Cromwell had Charles the First’s head cut off,’ Don said, adopting a scholarly tone Gabriel had rarely heard. ‘We ended up with Cromwell as Lord Protector, which was a fancy term for a military dictator.’

Eli grinned.

‘And there was I thinking you were just an old warhorse! Now I see you missed your vocation. You should have been a historian.’

‘Huh. With a general election coming up, I’ll probably end up having to apply for a job as a window cleaner if Tammerlane gets in.’

Christine tutted and laid an affectionate hand on Don’s shoulder.

‘Don’t be silly, darling. Britain doesn’t go in for revolutionaries, like you said. That dreadful Tammerlane’s so far to the left he’ll meet himself coming the other way.’

She smiled as she said this, but Gabriel noticed the way his boss’s face darkened. Did the old man know more than he was letting on? The election was in two weeks and nothing was as it had been for decades.

The Labour party had self-destructed earlier in the year after the ‘liberal elite’ and ‘blue collar’ factions had engaged in civil war. And although all the political commentators were predicting a slender Conservative majority, he’d watched with interest, and no small measure of alarm, the rapid rise of Joe Tammerlane’s Freedom and Fairness party.

Following the model of insurgent populist parties of both right and left persuasions across Europe, Freedom and Fairness had risen from nowhere to become the second most powerful party in the UK.

Its charismatic thirty-five-year-old leader looked like a movie star. His boyish good looks – ice-blue eyes and dark, stylishly ruffled hair – and engaging smile had netted him several million Instagram followers. His tweets were read, re-tweeted, commented on in what remained of the mainstream media and argued about in pubs and around dinner tables across the country.

That he was somewhere to the left of Karl Marx bothered nobody, so readily digestible were his promises of homes for the young and jobs for the woke, urgent action on climate change and a diversion of Government spending from armaments to the NHS.

The black-clad man at the front of the briefing room eyed each member of his squad in turn. Grim-faced, the men’s cheeks blued by stubble, they stared back, caressing their weapons as if they were alive. He waited until he had their full