Blackout (Sam Archer 3) (33 page)

The painters weren’t here. The place was quiet and still, the only sound the constant drumming of raindrops on the shielded windows.

He saw a closed door across the room and stepped forward softly towards it.

Then he heard a
click
.

Suddenly, the room was filled with blinding light. It seared into his retinas through the goggles, and he fell back, tearing them off, his eyes burning with pain.

Across the room, Chalky took his hand off the g
enerator button for the lights.
He moved fast round from behind the desk and shot
the big soldier
through the head.

The man
dropped like a marionette with the strings sliced, his weapon clattering to the floor, blood and bits of skull sprayed all over the floor, splinters flying from the wall as the bullet buried itself in the old wood behind him as it exited the back of his head.

The gunshot echoed around the house, faded and then was gone.

Chalky clicked the switch on the generator, the lights turned off again, and he waited, aiming at the far doorway, willing another of the Panthers to walk inside into his crosshairs.

But no one came.

He moved forward silently, keeping his weapon trained on the doorway, then stepped to the side, pushing the door shut with the softest of clicks. He looked down at the dead soldier at his feet.

Kneeling by the body, Chalky pushed the pressel on his uniform, the only other sound the constant rain hitting the window behind him .

‘This is Chalk,’ he whispered. ‘One down.’

Ripping the night goggles from the man’s head, he quickly wiped off the blood and brains that were on the back leather strap.

Then he pulled them over his own eyes, and raising his weapon, his vision now clear as if it was daylight, he moved on into the dark mansion.

A hundred and sixty yards outside the front of the house, Flea lay motionless on the earth, his Dragunov rifle in his shoulder, his breathing long and slow and smooth.

When they'd arrived, pulling off the main road and parking in the forestry, the rest of the team had headed off to the house whilst Flea moved right, taking up a position facing the giant Hall just beyond the main lawn.

The rain was falling hard
er
now, drenching him, droplets of water flicking onto the scope. But he remained still and focused. He was pissed at himself that he'd snatched at the shot of the cop in the main room, but then again he was unfamiliar with this rifle and the guy had moved just as he fired. He'd only hit the man in the thigh. However, hopefully he may have hit an artery, or even if he hadn't, the guy would need urgent medical attention or he would bleed to death there inside the house.

Then he would be another kill to Flea's name. 323. Another step closer to Hayha's record.

But he'd just heard a faint gunshot from somewhere inside the house. Good. It meant another of the policemen would be dead. It was inconceivable to him that any of them could kill one of the Panthers. They were cops, not soldiers. They were hopelessly out of their league, and had sealed their own fates by coming here to defend Cobb when they should have left him to die.

At that moment, through one of the large ground floor windows, he saw another of the officers from the police unit creeping along a corridor on the lower level. He moved ahead, tracing the man's path, predicting where he would move, leading the target. He had a feeling for the rifle now, and adjusted his aim accordingly.

This time he wouldn't miss.

He lay as still as if he was dead, his pupil looking down the scope, ignoring the heavy rain obscuring the moonlight and falling on him from above.

He saw the man had stripes on the shoulder of his uniform.

A sergeant.

Flea smiled as the reticule moved just ahead of the man.

And his finger tightened on the trigger.

Moving silently down the main corridor, Porter glanced out of the window to his right, looking out into the dark and wet night. He kept walking slowly, checking behind him, making his way to the drawing room.

The door was slightly open.

Taking a deep breath, he ducked in, then froze.

The big man they had held captive, Wulf, was in there, looking straight at him. He was wearing a set of night-vision goggles, the visor pushed up, his face smeared black.

And he had a gun to Cobb’s head. Beside him, a smaller man with scarring all over the side of his face and neck had a silenced MP5 against the temple of Cobb’s wife, the two kids standing beside them, terrified and helpless. He saw Fox lying on the ground, unconscious, bleeding from a wound to his leg, blood all over the floor. Porter knew from the amount of blood on the ground that he’d need medical attention soon if he was going to survive.

‘Drop your weapon,’ Wulf said, in English, only the whites of his eyes visible to Porter. ‘Or they die.’

‘If I drop it, they’ll die anyway,’ Porter said, his MP5 trained on the man.

‘You don’t have a choice. You’re alone. No one is coming to help you.’

'Yes, they are,' another voice said, from the left.

Porter glanced to his left and saw Chalky had entered the room, his MP5 aimed at the two men. He had a pair of night-vision goggles over his head which he ripped off with his left hand and tossed across the room to the carpet.

'I just killed your friend,' Chalky said. 'So much for the Black Panthers. You guys are like pussies.'

They stood there, in a stand-off. Through the sights of his MP5, Porter saw Wulf's eyes narrow at the insult. Chalky moved and Wulf and the other soldier tensed, but all he did was move to his right, towards Porter, keeping his hair-trigger on the smaller man beside Wulf.

‘If you kill them, I’ll kill you,’ Chalky said, speaking along the stock of his MP5.

‘So what. We have nothing left to live for. Our work here is almost complete.’

Pause.

‘Let him go. He didn’t know what those men did until today.’

‘But he saved them,’ Wulf said, pushing the gun harder into Cobb’s temple.

He pulled back the hammer.

‘Don’t do it,’ Chalky said, his MP5 tight, the trigger aimed at Wulf’s eye. 'Or you die.'

Wulf didn’t respond.

He smiled, victory in his eyes.

And Chalky felt something cold and metallic touch his neck.

It was the barrel of a gun.

‘Drop it,’ a voice said.

Chalky glanced over at Porter,
defeat
in his eyes.

'Drop the guns,' the voice said again.

Porter looked at Chalky. They were beaten.

And together, the two men dropped their MP5s, the sub-machine guns clattering to the carpet, as a third Panther held a pistol to Chalky’s neck.

THIRTY

Across the room, Wulf smiled. Bird had g
ot the jump on the cocky cop. R
eaching to the cop’s thigh, keeping the muzzle of his pistol jammed in the kid’s neck, Bird pulled out what looked like a Glock pistol from a holster and tossed it to the rug.  He then pushed the cop over towards the group huddled by the far wall. Wulf released Cobb and 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 s
houlder, 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 ac
ross the lawn, Archer
shot hi
m between the eyes with the PSG
1A1 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 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 late
r
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.