Ivory Nation by Andy Maslen (free children's ebooks online txt) 📕

of the lounges and kept their heads down inside its cocooned, sound-deadening confines, drinking gin and tonics and eating salty plantain chips until their flight was called.

A TV was playing a rolling 24-hour news channel in the corner. The crawl caught Eli’s eye. She rose from the leather armchair and wandered closer to read the yellow-on-red text.

Murder and mayhem in Old Naredi… Local businessman and four other men brutally attacked at Oasis Lounge, three slain…police searching for four Afrikaaners…

She nodded. Good boy, you earned your extra fifty.

35

DUBAI

With the rental Jeep Wrangler’s air con blowing icy air into the cabin, Gabriel pulled out from the Hertz parking lane at Dubai airport. His taciturn companion grunted out directions at each intersection.

In total, Gabriel reckoned the man, who hadn’t given his name, had spoken no more than twenty words. Even when they’d stopped at a roadside grill to get breakfast, he’d merely pointed to a sandwich and drink and handed over his money to the cook in silence.

Gabriel named him Jiàntán – ‘chatty’.

The drive took an hour and five minutes, including ten for the breakfast stop. The E88’s tarmac was glassy-smooth, and Gabriel relaxed, steering with a single finger resting lightly on the bottom of the wheel.

To each side, the flat, sandy landscape extended to the horizon, punctuated here and there by scrubby bushes low to the ground and the sun-bleached skeletons of long-felled trees. Gigantic red wooden spools lay in groups every five miles or so. What were they? Electrical? Left over from when the highway was cabled for streetlight?

Jiàntán jerked a stubby forefinger at the windscreen.

‘Left.’

Gabriel nodded and turned off the highway onto a dirt road that curved lazily eastwards. He smiled to himself. Twenty-one.

Even off-road, the Jeep’s suspension and four-wheel drive had little work to do. After half a mile, the track began breaking up, before disappearing altogether. Now the stocky 4x4 could dig in and prove its worth. Gabriel let the wheels slide over the sand, enjoying the sensation of the four-wheel drive system finding-losing-finding grip and powering ahead all the while, its turbodiesel engine making light work of the terrain.

A snaking line on the horizon resolved into a ridge of rock and sand. Beyond its crumbling edge, Gabriel saw a dried-out riverbed – a wadi – as he crossed a short stretch of metalled roadway that spanned it. He glanced left and followed the ancient watercourse until it disappeared beyond a distant dune.

The sandy track replaced the Tarmac and he searched the way ahead for a building or some other sign they might be nearing the factory.

The track split in a soft, curving Y and Jiàntán indicated the right-hand fork. After five hundred yards he pointed to the right. A long, low concrete building, painted the same colour as the greyish sand it stood amidst, squatted behind a row of low-growing trees.

‘That’s it?’ Gabriel asked.

Jiàntán nodded and unclipped his seatbelt. Within seconds a warning chime bonged inside the cabin. Gabriel ignored it and swung into an access road leading from the track to the factory’s front gate.

No guard came out to question them. Gabriel saw no dogs prowling on the other side of the chain-link fence, then mentally slapped his forehead. Idiot! It’s fifty Celsius out there. A dog would fry from the inside out.

A metal squawk box mounted on a wooden post seemed the likeliest method of gaining admittance.

Gabriel turned in his seat.

‘Shall I go?’

Jiàntán grunted. Stayed put. Gabriel climbed out, grinning, and flinched as the wall of bone-dry heat smacked him in the face.

Feeling runnels of sweat dripping from his armpits and the space between his shoulder blades, he thumbed the button beneath the speaker grille.

He looked round while he waited for someone to answer. Even through his sunglasses the sun was blinding, bouncing off the sand, the white-painted building beyond the wire, the Jeep’s white paintwork.

‘Tahduth.’ Speak.

‘Aismi hu Gabriel Wolfe. Yusuf yatawaqaeni.’ My name is Gabriel Wolfe. Yusuf is expecting me.

He heard a harsh buzz from the speaker, then the latch to his right clunked. Sand must have entered the hinge mechanism: the gates screeched as they juddered apart.

Gabriel climbed back into the Jeep’s chilly interior, pushed the gear sector into drive and eased between the gates and on towards the white-painted, windowless building housing the Four-Point Star’s ivory-processing operation.

The front of the building was as bland as the side of a refrigerator – an unbroken expanse of white-rendered concrete that stretched for a hundred yards end to end. A single door interrupted its minimalist surface. Gabriel parked the Jeep in front of it. To each side, white cars and 4x4s were lined up in a straggling row. No need for accurate parking when there was this much space to play with.

If Gabriel had been expecting a reception area, he was soon set straight. The whole of the inside of the building was an open rectangle of floor space. It had been crudely subdivided into workstations comprising cheap-looking desks, swivel chairs from some bargain-basement office supplier and rudimentary, belt-driven drills. Power came via overhead cables slung from the suspended ceiling.

At each of the workstations, of which there must have been fifty, a masked operator sat, head bent to the task of transforming elephant tusks into purchasable objects.

A couple of the blue-masked workers glanced up as he and Jiàntán entered the factory, but they soon returned to their work. From his right, Gabriel heard footsteps above the multiplied thrum of the drills.

He turned to meet their host.

The man bustling towards him was in his late fifties and wearing traditional Arab dress. His belly interrupted the smooth fall of his white robe. Thawb, Gabriel translated mentally. Beneath the hem, his feet were shod in brown leather open-toed sandals. His red-and-white checked headscarf – ghutrah – was held in place with a black rope – agal.

Behind gold-rimmed square glasses, Yusuf’s brown eyes gleamed and he was smiling broadly. He held out his right hand and took Gabriel’s.

‘As-salaam ’alaykum, Gabriel,’ he said, pumping Gabriel’s hand vigorously.

‘Wa alaykum