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

goods outlet furnished him with a couple of pairs of khaki cargo pants, soft cotton shirts and a tough but lightweight jacket. A thirty-litre daypack, a water bottle, a first aid kit, a wide-brimmed bush hat and a pair of leather hiking boots rounded off the deal, delighting the salesgirl in the store who smiled broadly as she rang his items up on the till.

‘Going camping?’ she asked.

Gabriel nodded. ‘Hunting trip.’

‘Great! Hope you do OK.’

Gabriel smiled.

‘Oh, I’m sure I will.’

Now he was waiting in the Marriott’s reception, reclining in an armchair and waiting for Coetzee. Between his feet sat the daysack, stuffed with a spare outfit and some extra underwear and socks. The attaché case sat on his knees. He’d arranged to collect the rest of his luggage from the hotel on his return to Johannesburg.

He checked his watch: 7.55 a.m. The lobby was full of people, but then he saw Coetzee, sliding between knots of executives, tourists and hotel staff.

He smiled and held out his hand. Placing the attaché case beside him, Gabriel stood and they shook.

‘Ready to go, Alec?’ Coetzee asked.

‘Absolutely.’

Coetzee gestured at the case.

‘What’s in there?’

‘Paperwork.’

Coetzee snorted and rolled his eyes.

‘What are you, man, a bloody secretary?’ He laughed loudly. ‘Come on. It’s a fair drive out to the airstrip.’

Gabriel followed Coetzee out of the lobby. A white Range Rover was parked with its back end hard up against a flowering shrub, the purple blossoms it had shorn from the branches lying in a carpet around its base. Gabriel looked at the passenger-side front wing. It looked pristine. Not a dent or a scratch. He made a show of getting muddled about which side was the driver’s, then, as he rounded the front of the SUV, fumbled his daysack and dropped it by the front tyre.

As he bent to retrieve it, he looked closer at the trim protecting the corner of the wing. Also undented. But whereas the other trim piece was dusty, this one was gleaming. He could even see a strap of pale-blue protective film adhering to one of the edges. New, then. That’s interesting.

He grabbed the daypack and straightened and made a ‘silly me’ gesture to Coetzee, rolling his eyes and holding his free hand to his temple like a pistol.

‘We drive on the left here, man. Just like the old country,’ Coetzee said in a mocking tone.

44

Gabriel stowed his bags on the back seat then climbed in. He inhaled the smell of about three cows’ worth of soft leather, overlaid by the pungent stink of tobacco.

Coetzee climbed in and immediately shook a cigarette out from a packet. He lit up and sucked hard, then offered the pack to Gabriel as he released the lungful of smoke with a sigh.

Gabriel shook his head.

‘No thanks.’

‘No? Fair enough. Can’t get enough of them, myself,’ Coetzee said, as he selected drive and nosed out onto the access road leading to the street.

A black couple stepped off the kerb in front of him, wheeling their luggage to a waiting taxi.

‘Get out of the way, you fucking kaffirs!’ he said. Then he turned to Gabriel. ‘That’s one thing you won’t have to worry about where we’re going.’

Gabriel smiled. ‘Good.’ Steeled himself. ‘Fucking blacks. Think they own the place.’

‘Yah, well they practically do,’ Coetzee said, turning right and then pushing the Range Rover hard through the traffic. ‘It won’t be long before they’re stealing white-owned farms, just like Mugabe did in Zim. And that’s not a prediction, my friend. That’s just a statement of fact.’

Fighting down the urge to break the man’s nose with his elbow, and nausea at the language he was being forced to use, Gabriel managed to keep up his side of the race-baiting conversation as Coetzee drove northwest out of Johannesburg.

As the smart suburban streets gave way to longer and longer stretches of unpopulated countryside, Gabriel found himself relaxing. To their right a mountain clad in thick vegetation loomed over the otherwise flat landscape, which continued, uninterrupted, for hundreds of miles.

Tall pencil-shaped cypresses dotted the landscape, which, with its mix of grassland and wooded areas might just as easily have been England. England blown up to a thousand times its usual size, but still. Driving on the left reinforced the impression, which was only broken when he saw a woman with a basket balanced on her head walking by the side of the road.

Coetzee swerved over the white line towards her. Gabriel hissed out a breath and he saw her face contort with fear as Coetzee shot past her at sixty.

‘Ha! Gave her a nice little shock, didn’t I?’ Coetzee crowed as he regained the left-hand carriageway.

After another hour, Coetzee indicated left and pulled off the road onto a red-earth track. They sped along it, raising a tawny cloud that swirled in the SUV’s wake, before rolling to a stop on an expanse of graded earth that extended for half a mile in front of them.

‘Not exactly Heathrow, old boy, but it serves us fine, eh what?’ Coetzee said, in a terrible parody of an upper-class British accent.

Gabriel smiled and got out, wishing, for the thousandth time that he could put a couple of rounds into Coetzee’s skull, just to shut him up. He grabbed the attaché case and his daysack.

To their left, a small white plane waited beneath a tree with wide, spreading branches. In its shade, occupying a flimsy-looking camp chair, sat a big man in jeans, chambray shirt and a bush hat. His eyes were obscured by mirror-lensed aviator sunglasses.

Seeing Coetzee and Gabriel, he folded the paper he was reading and dropped it to the ground. He came towards them, smiling.

‘This the passenger?’ he asked Coetzee.

‘I didn’t bring him all the way out here to wash the Cessna, if that’s what you mean!’

This apparently passed for great wit, and the pilot guffawed, shaking his hand and then coming forward to grasp Gabriel’s right hand in an iron grip.

‘Name’s Brik Todd. Don’t get many Pommies out here,’ he said, pumping Gabriel’s hand and