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

In the distance, he saw a small herd of elephants. Go and join them, he mentally urged her. Take little Dumbo there and get back to your friends. I didn’t come here to hurt you.

The baby bleated from beneath its mother’s downcurved belly. The meaning was as clear as the endless blue sky. Mum, I wanna go!

The mother raised her trunk and blared defiantly at Gabriel, then turned, reaching under her chest with her trunk to caress the top of her baby’s head. Then mother and baby lumbered off, back to the herd. And safety.

Gabriel breathed out, shaking his head. He bent to retrieve the 629 and stuck it in his waistband.

He began the walk back to the pickup truck: his ride out of the park.

Inside the bakkie’s cab, Gabriel pulled out his phone and made a call.

‘This is Major Modimo.’

‘Major, it’s Gabriel Wolfe.’

‘Gabriel! How are you?’

‘I’m good. If you get some men to the GPS coordinates I’m going to send you, you’ll find four dead Congolese poachers and a South African named Julius Witaarde. He was the leader of a Boer separatist movement called Boerevryheid an Regte and the poaching gang that murdered your men and the Paras.’

‘You are sure of this?’

‘One hundred per cent. He confessed to me.’

‘This is most welcome news. Thank you. Do you need help with extraction?’

‘No thanks, Major. I have transport here.’

As Gabriel approached the gatehouse entrance to the park, he rolled his shoulders and relaxed, pasting a smile on his face, ready to charm the guard into letting him through. He needn’t have bothered. The place was deserted. He cruised past the wooden hut at a nice, easy ten miles an hour and was back on the highway heading towards Gaborone five minutes later.

Ahead was a long drive. But the bakkie had water, he could buy food from a roadside vendor and, if necessary, sleep in the cab. Compared to some journeys he’d undertaken, in and out of uniform, that counted as luxury living.

He called Eli and discovered to his delight that she was back in Botswana and waiting for him to make contact.

‘I’m waiting for you at the Avani, Gabe,’ she said. ‘Drive carefully.’

A day later, as Gabriel was rolling into Gaborone and looking for somewhere to leave the bakkie, Major Modimo was speaking to TV cameras outside his office. Before him were laid out the corpses of the poachers beneath tarpaulins, the single white man among them at the front of the tableau.

‘These men sought to enrich themselves by slaughtering Botswana’s elephants and trading their ivory illegally.’

He paused and pointed dramatically with his pistol at the bodies before him. Cameras whirred. Journalists waited patiently to ask their questions.

‘Thanks to the efforts of my men, who found themselves under fire when trying to arrest them, these desperadoes have been brought to justice. Their leader was one Julius Witaarde, the leader of the Boerevryheid an Regte, a South African white rights movement. We suspect he was using the cash he gained to finance his operations.

‘We are in contact with the South African authorities to discuss further steps to ensure his organisation does not attempt to re-enter Botswana to murder our elephants. I will now take questions.’

Klara Witaarde stared at the screen of her laptop in disbelief. As the journalists squabbled over questioning rights like flamingos at a nesting site, a photo of her husband replaced the live feed. Beneath it, a crawl read:

JULIUS WITAARDE, LEADER OF BOEREVRYHEID AN REGTE , SHOT DEAD BY ANTI-POACHING TROOPS. CONFIRMED AS LEADER OF IVORY POACHING GANG

‘Julius!’ she screamed, slamming the laptop’s lid down. ‘What have they done to you?’

She didn’t cry. That would have to wait. Klara Witaarde regarded herself as a model of Boer womanhood. Grief was a luxury she couldn’t afford right now.

She and Julius had discussed what to do if he should ever be killed. They’d always imagined it would be the ANC or their contracted-out stooges who’d make the attempt. But now it turned out that bloody Englishman had tricked them both into letting him get too close to her beloved Julius. Who was he working for? It was obvious, to Klara at least.

Julius had been too wrapped up in the logistics of the ivory operation to revise who he was doing business with. And now that Commie bastard had sent a hitman to kill the one man she had ever loved. The one man who could rescue their people from Pretoria’s grip.

She went out back to the office with the safe key and a look of determination on her face.

They would pay for their crimes. All of them. But especially him.

56

ALDEBURGH

Gabriel and Eli flew back to England together. Don met them with a chauffeur-driven limo at Heathrow, courtesy of the mission’s banker. The following day, all three, plus Stella and her boss, were seated at the kitchen table. Cups of freshly-brewed coffee steamed between them. Wind rattled the ill-fitting windows in their wooden frames.

Patiently, and stopping to answer all their questions, Gabriel laid out his actions in Botswana and what Witaarde had told him. When he finished, the room was silent for several seconds.

Eli was looking at Don. He’d steepled his fingers under his nose. His deep frown had turned his eyes into slits beneath his greying eyebrows. Stella and Callie McDonald were open-mouthed. Gabriel distinctly heard two separate snaps as they caught each other’s eye and closed them.

‘Did anyone just hear me?’ Gabriel asked the group. ‘I said Joe Tammerlane, poster boy of the hard left and our newly elected prime minister, is complicit in the murders of four Paras and three Botswana soldiers, not to mention the illegal fucking ivory trade!’

‘We heard you, Old Sport,’ Don said. ‘It’s rather a question of what we do with what we know.’

Gabriel turned to Stella.

‘You could arrest Tammerlane, for a start.’

Callie spoke before Stella could respond.

‘It’s not that simple, I’m afraid. Tammerlane has surrounded himself with a private security force. We’ve effectively been sidelined.