Blackout - By Tom Barber Page 0,25
in fact, Sergeant. It's talcum powder and baking soda. This isn’t anthrax. It’s a hoax.’
In the ARU’s briefing room, Nikki watched the black car suddenly speed forward through the parking lot and pull up outside the front of the building. The front doors opened and two men stepped out, dressed in black, balaclavas over their heads, black and brown AK-47 Kalashnikov rifles in their hands.
They slammed the doors shut and ran forward towards the entrance of the building below, each man pulling back the cocking handle on each, chambering a bullet.
‘Oh my God,’ she whispered, still on the phone to Archer. 'Arch, help!'
EIGHT
At the front desk downstairs, Clark had his head down reading something so he didn’t see the two men coming.
He looked up just as the front doors were barged open, and was momentarily frozen as the two intruders stormed inside the building. Before he could move, one of the two gunmen raised his Kalashnikov and immediately pulled the trigger, three bullets thumping into Clark's chest, the spent cartridges flying out of the side of the automatic rifle. The force of the gunfire threw him back off his chair and the policeman collapsed back in a heap to the floor, blood and pieces of his torso spattered all over the reception area.
Upstairs, everyone stopped when they heard the gunfire.
Cobb was inside his office, still thinking about the Charlie Adams puzzle, but he froze when he heard the three gunshots. Unlike his tech team, who were sitting motionless at their desks and unsure how to react, he had no such doubts.
He leapt up from his seat, ran across his office and pulled open the door just as Nikki ran back into the operations area from the briefing room, a look of sheer terror on her face.
‘Everybody get out!’ she screamed.
The tech team saw and heard her and panic instantly set in, flooding the room. None of the armed task force officers were there. These were all analysts, unused to combat or any confrontational situations. They started to rise from their seats and scatter as they heard the slapping steps of boots racing up the stairwell, but Cobb took charge instantly, thinking clearly.
‘No! Everybody, in my office! Now!’ he bellowed, quickly pushing back the door to his office. ‘Now!’
The entire team responded to the order, running over into the glass-walled room, uncertain and frightened. Once the last person ran inside, Cobb dragged the door shut and quickly entered a six-digit code on a keypad on the wall, each button beeping as he pushed it. There was a click as the door locked.
Seconds later, two men in balaclavas ran into view dressed all in black, fearsome assault rifles in their gloved hands. They quickly scanned the level and saw the tech team huddled together inside the office through the glass. One of the armed men ran forward and grabbed the handle to the office, pulling on it as hard as he could repeatedly and violently, locking eyes filled with hatred with Cobb through the glass. But the door wouldn’t budge. It was locked tight. The man shouted something in a foreign language and stepped back to join the other man, both of them raising their AK-47s.
‘Take cover!’ Cobb said, pushing his team down behind his desk.
And the two men opened fire.
When the ARU headquarters had been built, Cobb’s office had been made of standard, toughened safety glass. Not enough to stop a bullet but perfectly adequate for the walls of an office. However, after an unexpected incident a year and a half ago when a terrorist had confronted someone from the building outside in the parking lot, Cobb had ordered the glass be refitted with bulletproof panes instead.
And at that moment, that decision saved every one of his tech team's lives, as well as his own.
The two AK-47s were on fully automatic. The bullets hammered into the glass, the savage echoing of close automatic gunfire and chipping glass filling the air, the bright muzzle flash from each rifle blinding and terrifying the tech team cowering inside. But the bulletproof glass did its job. Each bullet left a blurred white splodge and sharp jagged ripple around it on the reinforced windows as the glass withstood the onslaught. If it had been normal safety glass, everyone inside would have been torn apart by the gunfire in seconds. Cobb's intuition and sense of caution had saved every one of them from certain death.
Outside, each gunman's magazine clicked dry and one of them screamed a curse,