Blackout - By Tom Barber Page 0,95

men's wet boots slapped on the stone floor as they ran into the old house.

'What the hell’s going on?' Cobb asked, as Fox shut and locked the door behind him quickly. 'You're meant to be back at the station.'

‘They’re coming for you, sir,’ Porter said. ‘They know you’re here.’

‘What?’ Cobb said.

‘We need to secure the house.’

Cobb looked at them for a moment as realisation dawned, then nodded.

‘This way.’

He led the trio into the Drawing Room to their left. Cobb’s wife was standing waiting there with the two sleepy boys, looking worried.

‘What’s happening, Dad?’ the eldest boy asked, seeing the tension on his father’s face.

‘Is there a cellar?’ Fox asked. 'We need to get you all out of sight.'

‘Yes,' Cobb's wife said. 'But the-'

Before she could finish the sentence, all the lights went off.

The house was plunged into darkness, the only light from the moon shining in through the open windows.

Both Chalky and Fox swore simultaneously, their MP5s in their hands.

‘It’s OK,’ Cobb’s wife said. ‘The power has been cutting in and out recently. Old houses. Nothing to be worried about.’

'No,' Chalky said. ‘They’re here.’

He was right.

The Black Panthers were already in the house.

Rather than use the main drive and alert whoever was inside that they were coming, Spider and Bird had turned left once inside the gate and parked a hundred yards from the house in the woods, hiding the vehicles amongst the trees. The team had collected their kit and moved on to their target in the gathering darkness, the same routine they had carried out so many times in the past. None of them spoke, but all of them felt that same thrill that they had all those years ago, the squad out in the field again, hunting an enemy. They had stalked their way around the left side of the estate in the shadows, using the shrubbery as cover. Second in the line behind Bird, who was on point, Wulf saw that the curtains to the Hall had been left open and some lights were on. In the moonlight, he could make out fresh tyre tracks on the driveway outside, slowly being washed away by the rain.

Cobb was here.

Under normal circumstances, the team would have liked to have infiltrated from above, through a roof light, but given how wet and slippery the walls were, scaling was impossible. They would have to go in from the ground. Start one side and sweep their way along.

The lock on the west door was old and big and easily picked by Bug, but as he worked on it, they had heard a helicopter approaching. Taking cover in the shadows, they had seen the chopper arrive and fly over the house, ARU printed on the side. Looking up at the vessel in the rain, Wulf silently cursed the fact he didn’t have an RPG. He could have taken the chopper out there and then. But it seemed some of these policemen couldn’t keep away.

They hadn't learnt their lesson from the police station.

Once Bug got the door open and the men moved inside the house, after a brief search Bird had located the big fuse-box in the cellar. He pulled the main switch and the entire Hall plunged into darkness. On cue, the men pulled down the visors of their night-vision goggles, their view of the house now tinged with green but clear as crystal through the lenses. They had also discarded the big and brash AK-47s for quieter weapons. Each man had a silenced MP5 SD3, the same weapon as the police officers, only with an integrated suppressor on the end of each to hide muzzle flash effectively and make the weapon ideal for night-time operations. Although relatively heavy, weighing in at seven pounds alone without ammunition, the silenced sub-machine guns each held a 30-round magazine full of polished 9mm Parabellum bullets, two more clips on each man’s fatigues. The weapons guy down at the Docklands had outdone himself. Considering the weapons were illegal in the UK after a Firearms act banning all sub-machine guns, six of the MP5 SD3s with sufficient ammunition for four thousand pounds had been a very good deal. Given each man's training and experience, in the darkness the Panthers were damn good.

But with the night-vision goggles and such high-quality weapons, they were close to invincible.

Bird climbed the stairs from the cellar to join the others, pulling the door shut gently behind him. Wulf turned to his men, motioning a sequence of silent orders with his hands. They