satisfaction in blasting the girl who’d shot him moments earlier. She fell over backwards, and James pumped her twice in the back from minimum range.
The twist of fortune had taken seconds. Now the twin girls were writhing on the ground with James, Dana and Bethany pointing guns at them.
‘Let’s have those guns over here,’ James said. ‘No sudden moves.’
It took a while, because both girls were hurt. As soon as they’d pushed the guns out of reach, James ran in and grabbed them. He unclipped the magazines, before flipping back the operating handles and pocketing the driving springs. Without this small component, the rifles were useless.
‘Give us your backpacks,’ James ordered, menacing the girls with his rifle.
The searing pain in his chest and the fear of getting shot again had left James running on his most basic survival instincts. He didn’t give a damn about the feelings of the two girls squirming at his feet.
‘You can’t shoot us from this close,’ one girl said desperately, as he closed back in to grab their backpacks.
‘Sue me,’ James snarled, jabbing the girl with his gun as he ripped the pack off her shoulder. ‘Why don’t you write a letter to the United Nations?’
James threw one pack backwards towards Bethany and unzipped the other one himself. He threw down the polystyrene egg box and smashed it under the heel of his boot. Bethany did the same. It was a good feeling, destroying one third of team A’s eggs less than twenty minutes into the twelve-hour exercise.
‘What can we do with them?’ Bethany asked, as she contemptuously wiped her eggy boot on to her victim’s suit. ‘They know our position and we’re not allowed to take hostages; we’ll have to move out of here.’
As Bethany spoke, James noticed a lump of plastic rolling from beneath one of the cars at the kerbside. He instantly knew it was a stun grenade, but didn’t get a chance to take cover before its powder-blue flash erupted. He stumbled backwards, half blind, as the bitter taste of smoke hit the back of his mouth.
He recognised Kyle’s voice. ‘How’d you like that little toy, Adams?’
Another stun grenade erupted. This one had been lobbed through the back window of the food stand. Lauren screamed as she stumbled blindly out of the aluminium door with Jake close behind her.
Kyle howled in pain as Dana shot him from up high. She’d picked out a perfect shot through the smoke, hitting Kyle in the scantly protected area where the helmet met the padded overall. James only got a second to gloat before he felt an excruciating pain in his lower back. He caught sight of the blue paint spattered on his sleeves and looked over his shoulder to find all five members of Kerry’s team closing on his position in a V-formation.
James had already taken three painful shots and he couldn’t face getting hit more as Kerry and Kyle’s teams closed from opposing directions. He lost all thoughts of leadership as he scrambled to his feet, cut down a side street and ran away as fast as he could.
He ran a few hundred metres through the streets, almost to the opposite side of the training compound. He found a house and fired a couple of rounds inside. When nobody fired back, he jumped through the glassless window and dropped to the concrete floor.
There were blue flashes from stun grenades and the constant rat-tat of simulated ammunition as the three-way battle raged on in the distance. The sky was turning amber, meaning it would be dark inside half an hour.
James had taken three hits. The first shot had ricocheted harmlessly off his helmet, there was a dull ache in his stomach from the second, but the shot to his lower back was the killer. An agonising spasm fired down his leg as he slumped on to the floor. He felt relieved at getting away from the action as he caught his breath, but he quickly realised that as the senior agent, he had to go back and try to reunite his team before darkness fell.
Before standing back up, he broke the rules by turning towards the wall, flipping up his visor and wiping away the sweat streaking down his face.
When James looked up, he noticed a grey box in the corner. He scuttled across and was delighted to find a dozen ammo clips. Everyone had started with two twenty-eight-round clips for their rifle. James had nearly used a full clip already and he realised