Ivory Nation Andy Maslen (best short novels of all time TXT) 📖

the office of prime minister in three years? And with such a large majority?

JT: Well, I’d hardly call working in my father’s business nowhere [laughs] but I see what you mean. The answer, Dawn, is I feel incredibly humbled that the British people have given me the chance to lead them into a bright new future.

DB: Your critics have labelled you a wolf in sheep’s clothing. An ultra-left ideologue merely echoing the sentiments of the woke generation that swept you to power. How do you respond to them?

JT: I think I know who you mean. But the politicians who broke this country by clinging onto outdated notions of class war and privilege – from the right and the left – have had their chance and, quite frankly, they blew it.

I fought the election promising a revolutionary way of governing and they tried everything to smear me. They tried to paint Freedom and Fairness as some sort of Trojan horse. But I have to say to you, Dawn, and if they’re watching [turns to camera and waves] – Hi, Guys! – them, too, they put their policies to the people and the people said no.

Freedom and Fairness put ours and the people said yes. Now, I’m a democrat. I believe in implementing the will of the people. I think it’s clear what the people’s will is.

Forgive, me but there is much work to do and I start tonight. [Checks watch and smiles] That is to say, this morning. Thank you.

DB: Thank you, Prime Minister.

9

WHITEHALL

In London, two weeks after his depressing discovery, Nick Acheson waited in an anteroom at the Ministry of Defence. He glanced up at the wall clock.

The meeting with the brand-new secretary of state had been scheduled for 10.00 a.m. It was now five past. He frowned and picked up the Times, which lay neatly folded on the glass-topped coffee table in front of him. He read the main headline and sighed.

PM Signals Radical Shift In Defence Priorities

The talk in the mess had been of little else since a leak from inside No. 10 had warned the chief of the defence staff about ‘something big coming down the line’.

The previous morning, the prime minister had made a televised address to the nation in which he’d unveiled the first in what he called ‘planks in a bridge leading to a different sort of future for this great country’.

The plank in question was ominous in its implications. Tammerlane had announced that the impending Defence Spending Review would be postponed while, ‘we explore new strategic options and opportunities for global partnerships’.

Acheson had a growing sense of unease. Discussions with colleagues in the three armed services that stretched late into the night had only served to amplify them as they compared notes, swapped theories and forecast difficult times ahead.

A young woman in a smart black suit and a severe haircut that accentuated her large dark eyes and oddly pixie-like ears crossed the sparkling granite floor to him, her heels clicking on its polished surface.

‘Colonel Acheson? The secretary of state will see you now.’

Acheson got to his feet, refolding the Times and placing it on the tabletop, squared up to the corner and precisely five centimetres from each of the bevelled edges.

The office of the Secretary of State for Defence reeked of power and a defiant military outlook that stretched back through history to the Peninsular Wars and beyond. Dark mahogany panelling stretched from floor to ceiling, and gilt-framed oil paintings depicted the men who had fought Britain’s enemies down the centuries, from Nelson and Wellington to Field Marshall Montgomery and Winston Churchill. An old fashioned globe sat in a polished brass-and-mahogany stand.

The woman sitting behind the desk looked barely older than Acheson’s daughter, Sophie, who had recently graduated from Cambridge with a First in Ancient and Modern History. In an olive-green silk jacket with a Nehru collar encircling a slender neck, she might have been twenty-five, twenty-six at a pinch.

Though he didn’t know her age, he knew her name. Tracy Barnett-Short. A Freedom and Fairness ‘diversity champion’ who had campaigned vigorously and skilfully in the election, painting the incumbent cabinet as ‘over-privileged, under-qualified and unfit to lead’.

She looked up from a paper she was reading and offered the briefest of smiles. With her coffee-coloured skin, glossy dark hair swept up into a style he believed his wife would call a chignon and almond eyes, she was rather attractive he had to admit. He frowned, imagining Sophie’s eye-rolling entreaty for her dad to ‘stop perving over girls young enough to be your daughter’.

‘Thank you for seeing me, Madam Secretary,’ he said.

‘Least I could do, Colonel. And let’s dispense with the formalities, shall we? You call me Tracy and I’ll call you Nick, how about that?’

‘As you wish, M— Tracy.’

‘You’re here about your missing men,’ she said.

‘Yes. As I said in my email, we lost three paratroopers in Botswana a few weeks ago. A massacre. Poachers according to the Botswanans. I want their deaths investigated and the perpetrators brought to justice.’

She frowned.

‘What did the Botswanans have to say about it?’

‘They did their best but, to be frank, they’re not up to it. They simply don’t have the resources we do. Nor the motivation. And they were our men, not theirs.’

‘The anti-poaching soldiers killed were their men, I believe,’ she said, softly.

Realising he’d been caught in a trap, Acheson tried to backtrack.

‘Yes, of course. But I am the colonel of the Paratroop regiment. These were my men. Brothers in arms.’

She sighed. A gesture Acheson clocked as mere theatrics.

‘It seems to me that you need to check your privilege. A white man flying halfway round the world in a plane full of Special Forces soldiers dropping in unannounced to a sovereign country – a sovereign black African country – and then claiming they’re not skilled or resourced enough to investigate some killings on their own doorstep. You can see how that might look, surely?’

‘Minister, please—’

‘Tracy.’

‘Tracy,’ he said, trying to keep his temper under control, ‘with