Blackout - By Tom Barber Page 0,101

For a horrible moment, he thought the guy was going to pull the trigger straight away, but they had disarmed Chalky and Porter instead and pushed them across the room to join Cobb and his helpless, defenceless family. Watched them get blindsided and disarmed. He saw the last three Panthers take up staggered positions, facing Porter, Chalky, Cobb and his family, three sub-machine guns in their hands. The crosshairs of the scope were no longer jumping around. Archer’s breathing was smooth. His view down the scope was still.

Aiming at the smallest of the three Panthers, Archer had gently taken his left hand and pushed the pressel on his tac vest, looking down the scope into the room. The radios had a radius of seven miles transmission, so his voice spoke into the earpieces in Porter and Chalky’s earpieces like he was right there in the room with them.

‘I’m right here,’ he’d whispered. ‘The moment I shoot, go for your weapons.’

The way that everyone was positioned couldn't have been better. The three soldiers were stood there like targets on the range. All that practice and time on the range came down to this. He’d taken aim on the smallest soldier, the one to the left and put the crosshairs on the side of his head. He’d emptied all the air from his lungs, just as he saw Wulf lower his weapon slightly and say something to Chalky.

And he squeezed the trigger.

The moment after he fired, he’d already moved onto the man in the middle. He fired again, calm, just like range practice and hit him in the head too.

As he swept the rifle to the third man, Wulf, he’d seen the giant soldier turn front on and look straight at him. His face was smeared black with camo paint, but Archer had seen the surprise in his eyes. He had centred the scope on the bridge of the man’s nose.

And he’d fired.

He'd snatched the second shot slightly. But they were three shots, three headshots.

Three kills.

He reckoned Chalk owed him another twenty quid.

Looking down the scope, he saw Chalky rise and reappear and motioned at him through the windows to come over fast. Climbing up in the muddy earth, Archer scooped up both the PSGA1 and the Panther’s rifle and ran towards the house through the rain.

Behind him, the dead sniper lay there on the sodden earth on his back, looking sightlessly up at the dark sky, raindrops falling onto his face and body.

He and his team-mates had set out to murder ten men today.

They had taken out nine.

But all the Black Panthers were now dead.

And Cobb and his family were safe.

THIRTY ONE

Six weeks later, on a bright and sunny May morning, Archer stepped out from a black taxi outside the Armed Response Unit’s headquarters. Dressed in a simple white-t-shirt and blue jeans, his blond hair hung down over a white rectangular plaster on the upper left of his forehead, the strap of a black holdall bag looped over his shoulder. He paid the fare and thanked the driver, then turned and looked up at the newly refurbished building in front of him as the taxi moved off towards the exit behind him. From where he was standing, it looked like all the repair work was almost complete.

Since that day of chaos, funerals for all ten men who had died that day had taken place on both sides of the Atlantic. The entire Unit had gone to Clark's service at a church not far away, and Cobb had flown to Virginia the next morning to attend the service for Ryan Jackson. Porter went with him and insisted on paying out of his own pocket for the flight. Jackson had died in the line of duty, so there was an anonymous small star now on the wall for him inside the CIA's headquarters. Porter had told the rest of the team of Jackson's revelation as he died, that he was Jason Carver's cousin and of the immense guilt he had felt at what his cousin had done. It explained his behaviour and the look on his face Archer had noticed when Fletcher had told them what happened that night. As he lay dying, apparently he’d told Porter and Fox that he’d spent his whole life trying to make up for what his cousin did that night in Kosovo.

The star on the wall inside the CIA’s headquarters was forever proof that he had.

The medical team who had arrived at Hawkings Hall that night were