Blackout - By Tom Barber Page 0,100

and making sure it was the weapon he had fired earlier in the day, then grabbed three clips of ammunition and ran to the roof, blinking blood out of his eyes.

Once the Eurocopter had touched down on the lawn and the other three officers had run to the house, Archer had taken off for the undergrowth on the east side of the Hall. He saw that all the curtains were still open and the lights were on. It didn’t seem like the Panthers were here yet.

But a few moments later he’d watched as all the lights went out.

He was wrong.

They were already here.

As he moved around the outside of the manor in the darkness, he had suddenly seen and heard the Black Panther sniper take the first shot from the shadows. He’d seen Fox go down in the main room from his viewpoint in the shadows. Although he was just under a hundred yards away and the undergrowth was dark, the muzzle flash from the rifle had told Archer exactly where the man was.

Archer had flanked the sniper, the rainfall dulling the sounds of his footsteps and once he’d got around the man’s shooting position and moved forward, he’d found the sniper lying there on the ground, focused and unsuspecting. He was prone and in close to his own rifle, concentrating on his target and not on what was behind him. The soldier hadn’t bothered with cover or a ghillie suit and he was just lying there on the grass and earth five feet from Archer, soaked by the rain. The hunter became the hunted.

His face and bandage around his head camouflaged and smeared with mud, Archer had lowered the PSG-1A1 and crept up behind the man. He’d grabbed a Glock from the gun-cage and tucked it into his thigh holster earlier, but he didn’t want to use a gun and alert anyone in the house. But Archer felt a coldness settle over him. His head throbbing, the front of his fatigues and t-shirt stained with blood, he was still enraged by the torture from earlier and watching Fox get hit. He wasn’t going to read this man his rights. This sniper was about to die.

The soldier had started as Archer started choking him. He tried everything to break his hold, bucking and thrashing. Archer knelt on the man's back and pushed his face down into the mud, his hand on the back of the man's head like a clamp, depriving him of any oxygen, ramming him down with considerable force, his fingers spread over the damp black hair on the back of the guy’s head. The man had fought and gargled as water and mud filled his nose and mouth, but Archer had kept him down, keeping the pressure on like he was trying to close a packed suitcase. Within thirty seconds of thrashing, the sniper had fallen unconscious as oxygen to his brain ran out and Archer continued to hold his face down until he died. Once he released the man’s head and checked that there was no pulse, Archer had pushed the sniper’s rifle into the undergrowth and rolled the dead body out of the way. Moving back and retrieving the PSGA1, he had set up in the exact same position where the sniper had been lying with his own rifle.

He’d looked down the scope and seen the hole in the main room window from where Fox had taken the bullet. Archer had fired this rifle earlier that day and already knew it was zeroed, but he’d had to wait and take long slow deep breaths, willing himself to calm down, the crosshairs of the scope dancing around all over the place as the rifle responded to his adrenaline-spiked heart rate. Killing a man with your bare hands wasn’t the best thing to do before sharp-shooting, but he willed himself to calm down, using the breathing exercises he'd memorised, long and slow, one after the other.

While he was steadying himself, he had watched the entire situation in the living room unfold. He’d seen Porter and Chalky enter, just after the two Panthers. When the soldiers had entered, Archer had been on the verge of firing, the crosshairs still rhythmically thumping off target by his heart-rate, but Porter’s arrival had seen the two men forced to turn and put their weapons on Cobb and his wife to cover themselves and get Porter and Chalky to drop their weapons.

He’d watched helplessly as the third Panther had entered behind Chalky.