Blackout - By Tom Barber Page 0,99

moved forward, keeping his sub-machine gun on the other officer, the sergeant. He removed the man’s Glock from his thigh holster, then suddenly swept forward and hit him in the gut. The guy wasn’t expecting it and it winded him, bending him double and dropping him to the ground in the blood beside his unconscious fellow officer.

‘Against the wall. All of you,’ Wulf ordered, pointing his weapon at the officer on the floor.

The two men had no choice. As Bug released the woman and moved forward to join Wulf and Bird, the entire group ended up in a line against the wall. The officers ended up side-by-side with Cobb and his family, his wife hugging her boys close protectively. Wulf holstered his pistol and swung his sub-machine gun around from a strap over his shoulder. The three soldiers had taken up staggered positions in front of them, their MP5 SD3s in their hands, and all three had lifted the visors on their night-vision goggles. The trio of soldiers stood there for a moment just staring at them, their dark faces emphasising the whites of their hate-filled eyes.

Wulf’s burned into Cobb and the two men made eye contact.

‘This is for my family,’ he said, looking into defenceless man’s eyes. ‘You son of a bitch.’

‘Please, don’t do this,’ Cobb's wife said, crying, holding her two boys tight.

‘You should have stayed away from here,’ Wulf said to her. He pointed at Cobb. ‘We would have let you all live apart from him. But you didn’t. You came into our world.’

He raised his weapon to his shoulder, aimed at Cobb’s chin. On cue, the other two men did the same.

‘And here, heroes don’t exist.’

But before Wulf shot, he noticed something.

The two police officers in the line-up didn’t look worried.

Quite the opposite.

The smaller one who claimed he’d killed Spider was actually smiling.

Wulf lowered his MP5 SD3 a hair, looking at the man, genuinely baffled.

‘Something funny?’ he asked.

The man grinned at him.

‘Yes.’

'You seem very calm for a man who is about to die,' Wulf said.

The man nodded.

'So do you.'

What came next happened in a flash. It happened so fast it took everyone but Porter and Chalky by surprise.

There was a smash of glass and a thump and the small Panther with scarring on his face fell back, shot in the head. He fell to the carpet, his weapon falling out of his hands.

A second later, the same happened to the second Panther, the one in the middle.

He fell back, shot in the head, dropping to the ground.

Wulf froze for a millisecond in disbelief.

Then he turned and looked out of the long window of the room to his right, human instinct, trying to locate the danger.

And a hundred and sixty yards across the lawn, Archer shot him between the eyes with the PSG1A1 sniper rifle.

Just after he pulled the trigger, Archer watched the bullet smash through the glass window and hit the huge soldier right on target. There was a burst of red behind him as the rear of his head exploded, and he dropped out of sight, an instant kill, one the SAS instructors would have approved of. Archer kept his eye to the scope of the rifle for a moment longer, watching Cobb gather his family into a frantic and strong hug, Porter and Chalky dropping to the ground and tending to Fox, who was lying there, hopefully still alive.

Beside Archer, out there in the rain, the Black Panther sniper was dead.

When they had got back to the ARU’s headquarters earlier, the team had rushed off in different directions. Nikki had taken Kate Adams and her boy inside, the three of them severely shaken up but safe. Fox had raced up to the roof to fire up the Eurocopter with Porter and Chalky, as Archer ran down the damaged corridor of the lower level, rushing past clean-up crews and stepping on spent cartridges and bloodstains. Officers from Second Team saw him and were asking if he was OK, seeing the blood on his face and t-shirt, but he didn’t have time to stop and explain.

He’d grabbed a new tac vest from the locker room, replacing the one he’d had taken off him by the Panthers and destroyed in the explosion. He had gone to the gun cage and grabbed an empty MP5, then reached for a magazine. But he’d stopped. He’d found himself staring at the two PSG1A1 rifles. He’d placed the MP5 back on the rack, grabbed the PSG1A1 after checking the serial number