The Green Panthers E-Book

Tom Vater

• Herausgeber: Next Chapter
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2022

Beschreibung

Meet Clara Green, Emerald, Chartreuse, Olive, Hunter, Juniper and Forest. They are The Green Panthers: a privately sponsored, multi-national underground army, on a mission to hold corporate polluters to account.

During the attempted rescue of a snow leopard hunted by British tycoons in Siberia, the Green Panthers stumble onto Project SILEO, a millionaires’ plot to abandon an overpopulated, dying planet battered by climate change and pollution.

But SILEO is a lot more than it seems and the Panthers soon learn of an even greater threat to humanity. From Britain to Thailand and the privately-owned space station Stella Blue, the Panthers race against time to save the human race from a man known only as the Slow King. As riots and unrest take hold all over the world, can they stop the Slow King's apocalyptic ambitions?

An action-packed dystopian thriller, The Green Panthers explores systemic corruption, capitalism, space exploration and climate change, as well as the nature of friendship and courage in a future world where everything is for sale.

Leseprobe

THE GREEN PANTHERS

TOM VATER

CONTENTS

Praise For Tom Vate

Other Books by Tom Vater

The Green Panthers Manifesto

Prologue

Part 1

Part 2

Part 3

Acknowledgments

About the Author

Copyright (C) 2022 Tom Vater

Layout design and Copyright (C) 2022 by Next Chapter

Published 2022 by Next Chapter

Edited by Graham (Fading Street Services)

Cover art by CoverMint

This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without the author’s permission.

PRAISE FOR TOM VATE

“There’s a tremendous – and tremendously fresh – energy to Tom Vater’s writing.” - Ed Peters, The South China Morning Post

“The Cambodian Book of the Dead is an enigmatic, unsettling thriller that never lets you get your balance.” - CheffoJeffo

“Exuberant writing.” - Andrew Marshall, TIME Magazine

OTHER BOOKS BY TOM VATER

The Devil’s Road to Kathmandu

The Cambodian Book of the Dead (Detective Maier Mystery, Book 1)

The Man with the Golden Mind (Detective Maier Mystery, Book 2)

The Monsoon Ghost Image (Detective Maier Mystery, Book 3)

Kolkata Noir

Sacred Skin (with Aroon Thaewchatturat)

Burmese Light (with Hans Kemp)

Cambodia: Journey through the Land of the Khmer (with Kraig Lieb)

“If there is no struggle, there is no progress. Those who profess to favor freedom, and yet depreciate agitation, are men who want crops without plowing up the ground. They want rain without thunder and lightning. They want the ocean without the awful roar of its many waters. This struggle may be a moral one; or it may be a physical one; or it may be both moral and physical; but it must be a struggle. Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will.”

― Frederick Douglass

I open up my wallet

And it's full of blood

― Godspeed You! Black Emperor

To Pepe and Sonny.

The future is yours.

THE GREEN PANTHERS MANIFESTO

The Green Panthers fight against the degradation of Planet Earth by any means

The Green Panthers combat the fueling of climate change by any means

The Green Panthers safeguard global biodiversity by any means

The Green Panthers do not answer to governments

The Green Panthers cannot be hired, bought, or sold

The Green Panthers fight in secret

The Green Panthers change the world, step by step, day by day, by any means

If you are rich and are spoiling the planet, there’s a Green Panther nearby, watching you

ALTAI MOUNTAINS, SIBERIA, RUSSIA

5.30AM, MAY 4TH, 2029

She needed to kill.

And soon.

The pink snow leopard was hungry. She’d been moving along the high valleys and the wide, ragged ridges of the Altai Mountains, unaware that she was passing between Russia, China, Mongolia, and Kazakhstan on her search for sustenance. Nor did she know that she was traversing the Saylyugem National Park, established to protect her and her kind. Even as she had no fixed route in mind, her mission was clear.

This morning, as the pale, grey sun crept over ridges that revealed themselves one after another with majestic coyness, she sensed something in the rarified air. It drifted in from far away, from a spot deeper in the national park and lower down too. Not an area she’d ever choose to pass through. Too warm. Too much exposure. She didn’t know this, but the principal reason why some four thousand snow leopards remained alive in Asia was their extraordinary caution. Distant sisters of the tiger, the big cats were considered part of the Panthera genus. Theirs was a solitary, remote existence. Snow leopards spent their lives keeping a low profile, rarely meeting one another, and staying as far away from humans as circumstances allowed.

But now she carried a secret. Soon she would no longer be solitary. Soon, Russia’s snow leopard population was going to expand significantly. She stuck her head into the warm wind that swept up the valley from where she’d sensed the promising scent. Too warm. Too much exposure at this time of year. But the last meal she’d had, a week earlier, a young, scrawny, injured ibex she’d chased into a ravine, was barely a memory. She sat for an hour or two, watching, listening, and sniffing for movement below. Vaguely satisfied that her senses failed to detect a threat lurking down-valley, she dropped off the ridge, through rocky boulders and fields of scree, in silence, barely visible. Had anyone been watching, she might have appeared momentarily as nothing more than a brilliant flash of the imagination. Instead, she was feeding a series of state-of-the-art camera traps that relayed her every move to the park’s headquarters and from there to two sets of plush offices in the City of London.

The world’s last pink Panthera uncia was about to become a celebrity. Of the very wrong kind.

WITNEY, OXFORD, UK

JUNE 17TH, 2029, 7PM

The lone, pale cat stared out of the screen at Clara Green. The image was almost sharp, though the snow leopard’s eyes did not recognize the technology that was to be part of its downfall. No, instead the animal looked straight at Clara.

The BBC anchor was halfway through the evening news’ final feelgood story. It wasn’t feelgood. And it wouldn’t be final. On Clara’s TV screen, Roger Pollard and Dickie Ransom, two of Britain’s wealthiest CEOs, announced that they were on their way to Siberia to shoot the world’s last pink snow leopard. Clara turned up the volume.

“Dickie and I have always been about connecting people. We’re all part of this great planet of ours. We all have a right to live. Our huge donation will enable thousands of animals to live in peace. We’ll pay poachers to become guardians of our world. In exchange for the privilege to shoot one big cat, we will donate six million pounds to the Siberian wildlife fund.”

Roger Pollard pushed in front of his partner in crime, filling the TV screen like a grease strain on a thousand-pound shirt. Bloated and stuck in a shiny, metallic double-breasted Dior suit, he tried to look tearful and sincere in front of the cameras. Prime Minister Lywood stood to the side in front of a phalanx of air purifiers. The PM knew what was good for him. Professionally excited rock stars, models, TV reality show winners and footballers mingled. A considerable number of riot police, shields and truncheons at the ready, had been ordered to protect the tycoons’ press conference at the Dorchester, fashionably located in Mayfair, to the east of Hyde Park. London didn’t get much more salubrious than this.

“We’ll make Britain proud,” Pollard shouted before the story shifted to the tycoons’ ignoble biographies. Following years of bitter conflict, countless court cases involving industrial espionage, workers’ exploitation, cocaine parties in the Gulf of Thailand and a wife-swapping story the tabloids were still fighting over, Pollard and Ransom, the two undisputed kings and longtime competitors of Britain’s information technology industry, had come together to do their bit to save the planet.

Ransom, who was skinny as a rake and ugly as a warthog, offered his support by flashing a gaudy-ringed V sign at the cameras, “I really hope the Beeb will report fairly on our bid to save the world and not cave in to the depressing views of radical animal rights anarchists. One cat for thousands of deer and otters and so forth is a great deal. Ask the scientists.”

Clara had followed Ransom around Kenya four years earlier where he’d been hunting giraffes. The photos she’d captured of the rich white man in safari shorts two sizes too large, posing with a huge gun in front a felled mother and her calf, had gone around the world.

The Green Panthers had been but a figment of her imagination then.

Now the haggard little man, sensing redemption in his grasp, appeared triumphant, flinging spittle in the direction of the cameras with each hurrah.

“Marvelous, a real bonus for everyone. Siberia, one of the most deprived and remote parts of our planet, will be eternally grateful to us Brits. Really, Roger and I feel like civil servants.”

Pollard cut in, “It’s great for both of us to step back from worrying about profits and spreadsheets and technology, and really go back to basics, to grassroots level.”

He raised a champagne glass, “To new concepts in conservation. Supporting Pollard and Ransom will cause your wife to have bigger breasts and increase your chances of owning a Roller Phantom, like me. Our Kickstarter campaign is up and running. Every penny you raise that we don’t have to spend will go straight to the ice-Russkies to keep their seals alive. New concepts in conservation.”

Ransom butted in and pointed at the cameras, “And don’t you make this out to be some greenwashing event. We’ve been putting time and effort into this to make a difference. Britain makes a difference.”

Both Ransom and Pollard had been knighted for their services to king and country. Clara’s country. Great Britain, where the beaches were toxic, and the rivers were dead. Where climate change had been debated for a generation or two. Or three. What she hated as much as nature’s steady decline at home, were British subjects sullying the rest of the planet. Clara loved her country, but she loved the world even more.

The egg was well-aimed and hit Pollard on his distinguished forehead. The Beeb’s cameraman never wavered and calmly cut from the astonished expression on the tycoon’s face to the cops. They were turning towards a small group of animal rights protesters who’d set up placards on the far side of Park Lane. The celebrities started getting restless, nervously tapping at their phones, or looking for their coats. Police drones gathered in the sky above Hyde Park. The cops marched towards the protestors as a solid wall of unpleasantness, truncheons, tasers, and teargas at the ready. Tomorrow, the tabloids would love them for having crushed a rebellion.

Clara lived and breathed to put a stop to Britain’s worst environmental excesses. As a teenager she’d campaigned with Greenpeace, Sea Shepherd, and Extinction Rebellion. All were entangled in libel cases, arrest warrants, and acts of sabotage by persons unknown. For the most part, they were impotent in the face of what money was doing to the world. But not Clara’s money. She was working on what she hoped would be a more efficient way to make a difference, quietly investing the millions that had been created by a slave-trading, opium-dealing great-grandfather who’d murdered two of his wives. Her family’s riches had then been managed by two generations of inbred aristocratic imbeciles more interested in unsound sexual practices than maintaining the family estate. Green Manor, what else, sat in a hectare of forest and garden near Witney, just a few miles shy of Oxford. The Greens hadn’t managed to squander it all. Clara Green, the sole heir to the Green fortune was forty-four years old, single, and angry.

She turned the sound down, shivering despite the stifling afterglow of another scorching day – the thermometer had rocketed up to forty-three degrees at noon and still hovered above thirty. The top news had nothing to do with the rising record temperatures. US president for life Ivanka Trump was congratulating Chinese president for life Xi Jinping, who had not been seen for six years, on the eradication of the poor in the People’s Republic. Clara wondered distractedly why the US president let herself go in front of the cameras. Trump was obviously blitzed on Uber-Crack. The Trump empire, which had eclipsed the US economy, held shares in the new, hip, recreational medication, which caused euphoria and optimism in most consumers. Some users fell into rage spasms, but there were no statistics available on just how many. Uber-Crack was free to Americans under sixteen. Poland and Hungary were also distributing the drug to children. Jealous tongues wagged of unspeakable laboratories in the American Midwest and claimed that Uber-Crack was derived from the stress glands of Asian elephants. This was vehemently and regularly denied by both the US president and India’s prime minister. American kids couldn’t get enough Uber-Crack and neither, apparently, could the president. On screen, the world’s most powerful if not compassionate woman stood in the center of a crack tasting session with a group of investors from HK2, the island once known as Taiwan. Prime Minister Lywood had been more careful promoting Uber-Crack, but His Majesty was said to be a fan. The UK slums and sink estates were awash with the drug. And this was just the entertainment.

In the real world, forests burned, typhoons, hurricanes and cyclones raged, coral reefs died, volcanoes erupted, and deserts swallowed entire cities while pandemics came and went and came again, killing hundreds of thousands as countless others took to the streets and denied the dead had ever lived. Inland seas disappeared and glaciers collapsed. It was hot almost everywhere. In the cities, air pollution had reached continuously toxic levels. Super models wore diamond studded masks on the cover of Vogue. No wonder so many people were out to lunch on government subsidized narcotics. The Roaring Twenties had come roaring indeed.

Clara’s father Rufus had not persisted into the world of Uber-Crack. Nor had he been in the same business as Pollard and Ransom, though he’d been the same kind of man. Every Englishman loves a lord, but no one loved Rufus. He’d left his dentures in the kitchen, in his study, even in his basement workshop where he pretended to research WW II history, but was instead watching four dimensional hardcore and bestiality, the family tradition that would keep him from resurfacing above ground for days. Clara could barely remember his face. She remembered his dentures. Her mother Allie, bless her, had changed her name, and whisked Clara away to a windy corner of coastal Cornwall, away from the money and the manor.

Clara fell in love with the ocean. It gave her everything her father never had – curiosity, respect, and resolve. At thirteen, she’d led a rowdy campaign to save grey seals from getting caught in fishing gear, before going on to study marine biology and political science at Boston University. At thirty, she captained a Sea Shephard vessel, hunting shark poachers off Costa Rica.

She gazed absentmindedly at her most precious possession, a sketch of J.M.W. Turner’s The Shipwreck, which hung above the fireplace. She took it as an ever-present reminder that nothing except death was certain.

Clara’s father Rufus had died a year ago. Clara had inherited. Not just the Turner sketch.

Clara Green had not married and didn’t have children. She did have all the street smarts money could imagine. And now, Clara was rich beyond comprehension. Rufus’ world was hers. And she was making her moves, silently, unseen.

Well, almost unseen. Allie had entered the Green Mansion’s drawing room and stood next to her daughter, gazing at the Turner. The two women were about the same height. From the back they almost looked the same. Allie was a little heavier and her blonde hair was turning grey.

“It’s time,” Clara said, happy she’d convinced her mother of the soundness of her enterprise.

Allie smiled, a little absentmindedly, “Let’s blow your father’s money on something sensible, dear, like terrorism.”

“It’s you who taught me never to leave the room until I get what I want,” Clara responded to her mother’s gentle quip.

She unwrapped a burner phone, inserted a SIM card and typed a message. She brushed her ash blonde curls from her eyes and slipped on her reading glasses. Then she carefully added five numbers. She’d been waiting for this moment for a long time.

She pressed Send.

It was time to let the Green Panthers roam.

SPITBANK FORT, SOLENT, UK

JUNE 17TH, 2029, 6.30PM

The Slow King leaned back on his throne, his mind lapping up the crystals that were dissolving under his tongue. Emilie and Sying stepped out onto the fort’s upper deck to marvel at the toxic purple sunset that bloomed above the coastline stretching from Gosport to West Wittering. The vista was worthy of a Turner painting. The master painter might have called it The Last Sunset. The Slow King grinned, the best jokes were always the private ones, the ones one didn’t share with anyone.

Project Sileo was underway. Three years of preparations, some in front of the world’s cameras, some deep in the shadows only the very wealthy could enter, some alone on this godforsaken, miserable bunker off the south coast of England, were paying off. He rarely felt like a king. Tonight, he did. His mind was on fire with a thousand pieces of the puzzle that he had assembled, destroyed, and rebuilt so many times. All the players were exactly where he wanted them, doing what he expected they would do. He knew the clock was ticking. He could hear it, loud and clear. But he only needed five more weeks.

He watched Emilie take a selfie, her angelic face reflecting the sky’s unhealthy colors. She looked like his mother Charlotte, who had derisively called him the Slow King for as long as he could remember. Charlotte had always emphasized the slow. How right she’d been. He had taken his time. Rome hadn’t been built in a day. Naturally, even in her death throes, Charlotte had taken more than a day to fall. Despite the physical similarity, Emilie wasn’t anything like his mother. Emilie was pure gold.

Sying turned to him then and smiled, her porcelain face aglow in the dusk. He smiled right back, but his eyes continued to follow his daughter’s graceful movements.

Seeing the two people he loved most in the world play outside in all their innocence was too much. It felt like a huge deceit, no matter that they knew everything. He closed his eyes. The dark hearts of immense crystals flashed through his mind and floated in its centre like monoliths, sucking up all the light of the world through tiny fissures. He loved that feeling. Soon he would feel like this all the time. But as he focused on his daughter and partner outside in the evening sun, he knew he wasn’t ready. He pulled himself back into the here and now. The world wouldn’t be saved by dreamers. And there was the little matter of an obscure painting, a matter of pride, just before the end. Turner flashed through the Slow King’s mind again and his eyes settled on the toxic palette of colors fusing the clouds with his desire to save the world.

Some people said the sunsets, multicolored by a permanent overload of toxic particles in the atmosphere, were better than those they’d seen in their childhoods, even as they had to wear masks to enjoy them. Emilie, refusing a mask, jumped to get a better look at the coast line. She had so much energy. She was so reckless. The possibilities made his heart race. He silently counted his heart beats, almost a hundred thumps a minute.

She would be the hardest to sacrifice.

PART 1

CHARTREUSE

ALTAI MOUNTAINS, SIBERIA, RUSSIA

JUNE 21ST, 2029, 8.30PM

“We’re in Russian airspace. We have ground visuals. Eight minutes to the LZ,” Chartreuse shouted into the Mil Mi-38 helicopter’s intercom, brushing her unruly fringe from her grey eyes. Those eyes that never quite settled on anything. Some men feared those eyes. Just as well, as Chartreuse didn’t think much of men. Most men.

In the dying evening light, forest and ice stretched into undulating arctic infinity. Chartreuse loved this kind of flying, low and dangerous. Way riskier than the runs she’d done for Greenpeace. The Green Panthers were about to prove that they were in another league altogether. The Panthers didn’t need donations. The Panthers didn’t need TV ads. The Panthers needed weapons, technology, and dedication. They had plenty. And now they had a mission.

Chartreuse, Olive, Hunter and Emerald were about to go active.

“Enough of the war games, all that theorizing, I mean, we been training for this for God knows how long. We can practically kill rich pendejos with our thoughts. Let’s get into this for real, let’s make some paella down there,” copilot Olive snarled, trying to look tough, a black Kashmir wool balaclava pulled halfway down her perfectly made-up, perfectly tanned face. Her full lips had seen lipstick within the hour.

Olive, who’d entered the world in Ronda, a postcard-pretty mountaintop city in Andalusia, had feline movie star looks. She was tall, lithe, and brought around a hundred and twenty pounds of trouble to the table. Ronda, Olive would tell anyone who’d listen, was home to traditional bullfighting, a town she had emphatically disowned and whose bullfighting stadium she had repeatedly vandalized. Some said her father had been a famed matador who’d lost one of his life to a legendary bull named Ernesto. Chartreuse had to admit, Olive was pretty tough for a pretty girl. She was reliable. She would show no mercy to bad guys. And she had a fine likeness of an attacking bull tattooed on her upper chest, its name in old English letters framing her breasts – Ern and Esto.

While Chartreuse’s gaze frightened men, Olive’s languid looks melted everyone, male or female. That, Chartreuse thought with some envy, was a pity, as Olive had no real interest in women. Life wasn’t fair. That’s why Chartreuse had joined the Green Panthers.

Olive had joined the Panthers to cause mayhem and to party. Olive was the most frivolous of the Panthers, not counting Hunter when drunk.

“Just wriggle your ass and it’ll all fall into place, puta,” Chartreuse reminded her.

“My ass is not for you, querida, it exists entirely to slow those bastards down. They stop, they stare, they dead. Works every time. And don’t call me a whore,” Olive shot back.

“Maybe dial down the riot-girl vibe a little. Pollard and Ransom will have brought some protection, their own and some local muscle. I want you to go in, film the hunt and get out. Use the drone, but don’t arm it. No shoot-outs. We want footage, not corpses. First mission, so let’s keep it civil,” Clara ordered from London.

Chartreuse killed the connection. The show was theirs.

Hunter groaned into the cans, his voice a good deal too masculine and paternalistic for her taste. Hunter, born, conditioned and disillusioned in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, had joined the military after living in the back of his car for two years, holding down two jobs, unable to make rent. He’d done two tours with US Special Forces in Iran, then decamped to the Foreign Legion and to Africa. Despite his brutish view of the world, he was as dedicated and angry as any of The Green Panthers. They’d all had enough of rich man’s shit destroying the planet.

“I’m just doing this for my kids, y’all.”

“You don’t have any kids, Hunter.”

“We can talk about that later, Chartreuse, when we’re on the beach for our R&R.”

She didn’t bother to answer. Hunter had a heart in there somewhere. That’s why she didn’t engage with his puerile asides.

Emerald, the fourth crew member, didn’t grace the conversation with his wisdom. The dapper Swiss never said anything much. He did know a thing or two about plants, animals, and radioactivity. Word on the street, on the Green Panthers’ street, was that he’d smuggled a grenade into one of his country’s reactors on a public visitors’ tour and then quietly blackmailed the government into passing legislation to phase out nuclear power. Or else. He hadn’t been back in Zürich in a while, and he never spoke about it.

“All right, ladies and germs, there’s a communication jam going down for fourteen minutes. Whoever’s out there won’t be able to talk a while,” Forest piped in. “Your comms and the drone are fine.”

None of the Green Panthers racing across the tundra had met Forest. All they knew was his golden-toothed smile, contagious as anything, on a phone screen thousands of miles away. Forest sat in Parchman, a supermax prison in the Mississippi delta. He was serving twenty years for filming a chemical company poison a river in his home town. He’d been in solitary for a decade, in an eight by twelve-foot cell that flooded every time the inmate next door lost his mind and blocked his toilet. Being alone all the time, he’d escaped the virus that had killed so many other inmates in the early ‘20s.

“And remember kids, power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will. If there’s no struggle, there’s no progress. A wise man said that two hundred years ago,” he added.

Forest viewed, consumed, devoured, and twisted the world through a collection of hi-end phones he’d had smuggled into the joint by the Parchman guards. The fact that the sprawling, decrepit jail had been built by black men who were to become its first inmates in 1901 wasn’t lost on Forest. Nor was he unaffected by the reality that the Mississippi government continued to execute a distressing number of (mostly) black men and women at Parchman. Some had been his friends. A few had been innocent. The rest hadn’t deserved to get killed by the state. But he didn’t get worked up about it. He couldn’t afford to. The Crossroads, where blues man Roger Johnson was said to have traded his soul to the devil for a fistful of songs was only a few miles away. Like Johnson, Forest was an expendable black man caught up in the maelstrom of American cruelties. Prison, he signed off his emails with, was just a state of mind, like hell. But unlike most of his fellow inmates, Forest had found a calling. He was into saving the planet by hacking right into it. He could get any file at the touch of a button, from a number plate to HD footage of a president’s secret debaucheries. He could stop trains and lower draw bridges from his tiny, damp concrete cell. He had made a fortune in crypto currencies and cashed out. Sometimes he felt he had enough coins to bribe the devil. Forest was unlikely to get parole any time soon and he was too fat to escape, but he knew what to do with his time.

The rest of the Green Panthers had met six months earlier. Six months of training and tuition around Green Manor. Six months away from their past lives, from whatever connections they’d had in the real world. Six months underground. Six months of Clara Green teaching them guerilla warfare theory. Six months of Hunter teaching them how to kill people and stay alive to tell the tale. Starting the training, Chartreuse thought, had been like entering a cave. Half a year later, they emerged stronger, keener, and better informed. Happier too, she mused as she set the machine down in a desolate clearing. In the storm the rotors kicked up, the fir trees around them bent like exhausted ghosts.

Olive, Emerald, and Hunter were out in the snow before Chartreuse had shut down the engine. Olive let her drone rise into the blackened sky a few seconds later. The two men fanned out around their transport, checking the clearing, before heading to the perimeter of trees.

The screen in the cockpit that relayed the drone footage from Olive’s phone blinked on. Barely a mile east, the tundra lay illuminated. The sight was incredible. From a distance it looked like a circus had set up shop on the corner of total desolation and freezing nothing. But as the drone zoomed in on its target, Chartreuse could see that this wasn’t a circus. Nor was it a hunt. Not in the sense the BBC had reported it. Not in the sense that Clara had briefed the team.

Chartreuse had studied their targets as long as the others. She identified Pollard and Ransom, despite the winter clothes they were wrapped in. Thin and thick, Laurel and Hardy with money to burn. Olive’s drone was outstanding. Its camera could read a prayer off a snowflake. The tycoons stood side by side at the center of the ring of lights. They were gesticulating at a long row of cages that had been set up in the snow. Two of the cages were the size of containers with reinforced metal roofs. Other men in matching black outfits wore automatic weapons and mercenary beards. These guys weren’t in Siberia to shoot a big cat. They were after something more substantial than an albino snow leopard.

Chartreuse chuckled to herself. In the old days when she’d worked for Greenpeace, this kind of information would have taken forever to come by. Now it took a few seconds, beamed down by a plastic toy hovering in the sky. One day, technology would make her redundant. Thanks to men like the two bastards in the snow a mile east of her location.

The drone descended onto the billionaire’s snow party. Pollard must have heard something because his head jerked abruptly to the night sky.

“This is it, Team Panther. We have enough footage to withdraw,” Chartreuse called out.

Mission accomplished. They were done. Clara Green would decide on how to proceed.

A bullet smashed into the windscreen. Chartreuse killed the drone screen and the cockpit lights and opened her seat belt in one instinctive move. Barely two seconds later she pushed the door open and dropped into the ice-cold night, her gun at the ready. No gloves.

She saw and heard no one. The wind had picked up. Siberia was living up to its reputation. It was cold as frozen shit. It was so dark she could only guess at the trees around her. But she could hear them, their trunks bending in the gale, occasionally cracking like gunshots. She crawled away from her bird into deeper snow. Her hands hurt like hell. Ten meters out, she lay still to get her bearings. Inhaling, exhaling, calming her breath. She’d been in worse pickles. She was about to sit up, cocked and loaded, when she heard voices. They were very close.

“Car Crash, the bird’s empty. They must be searching for their fucking drone,” a man shouted into the night to her left.

A second man stood a few feet to her right. She lay between them. Chartreuse crawled deeper into the fresh snow. If they saw her lying there, she was finished.

“Let’s secure the bird and fly it to Kliyuchi, as agreed. Whoever they are, they’ll freeze to death.”

The two men spoke English. They were native speakers, one probably from greater London, the other from the west of England. Mid-thirties. They sounded relaxed, too relaxed, Chartreuse thought. No matter how well a job was going, one should never relax. She’d once seen a fellow Greenpeace activist tumble from a nuclear cooling tower because she’d been too relaxed. Shit happened in the real world.

“We could wait and catch us a couple, Dogfood. Have some fun.”

“You’re sick. Too bloody cold to have fun out here.”

Chartreuse tightened her finger around the trigger of her gun. It was so cold she wasn’t sure it would fire. Definitely too cold for fun. A Shan rebel who’d been fighting a China-backed dam project in Burma had bequeathed the weapon to her. And now, lying in deep snow and deep shit, the woman’s face, handsome, sad and funny, flashed through her mind. She couldn’t see which way the men were moving. The snow fell in thick, wet drops, its silence drowning the two men’s footsteps. She lay perfectly still, hardly believing her luck, her eyes to the cloudy sky, watching the snow descend out of nowhere. There was not a star in sight.

A shadow loomed above her, darker than the dark Siberian night. A searing pain shot through her right calf. Someone had stepped onto her leg. Someone huge. She dropped her gun into the snow, untangled her flick knife from her coat pocket and pushed it into the man’s groin. Twice.

He fell right on top of her, heavy as a polar bear, with a pained mumble accompanied by bad breath soaking through his ski mask. She managed to raise her right hand and slashed across his throat. She felt his blood soaking her coat through to her black thermal shirt. Not good. But she was alive, and he was dead. No one could have heard him going down. The blood would dry and be a pain to wash out. Olive would throw a fit.

Her earpiece started vibrating.

“Chartreuse, are you there? I can’t see you in the cockpit.”

Emerald’s voice, calm, cool and collected, was reassuring. She loved his voice, perhaps because she heard it so rarely. Because she had to listen to Hunter’s ass jokes and Olive’s rage all the time. Perhaps because they’d spent a night together, at the start of their training.

“I went for a walk when the bullets started flying. The helicopter got hit. I stabbed a big bad man who stepped on me,” she whispered.

“You ok?”

“Will be when I get this fat sack off me and am on my dainty feet again,” she coughed under her breath, as she wriggled free of the corpse.

“There are two guys trying to get into the bird now. I will take care of them.”

Emerald clicked off before she had a chance to ask him to leave one of them alive.

Chartreuse, shaking like a leaf, searched the man she’d just killed for information while she explored the four corners of her mind for trauma and remorse. He didn’t carry ID, but he did have a phone. She took off his gloves and pulled them on. His hands were tattooed, crude black drawings of girls that didn’t exist. A couple of swastikas framed by Cyrillic script graced his wrists. A charming local. She pocketed the phone and pushed snow onto the corpse. She decided that she didn’t have any feelings about what she’d done, one way or the other. He was the first man she’d killed. He’d almost broken her leg, but now he lay there in the snow, and she was going to fly home in a few minutes and munch on quinoa salad.