Blackout (Sam Archer 3) (9 page)

Beside him, Fox was finishing adjusting a throat mic around his neck whilst Archer and Chalky did the same in the back seats, all of the officers now dressed in navy blue combat overalls, black tactical vests with mobile phones tucked in slots, plasti-cuffs, tools and spare ammunition zipped up over their torso. Once secured, the black Velcro-bound strips on each man’s neck allowed the team to communicate on the ground, up to a radius of seven miles. Each man had a pressel switch on the front of his uniform and an earpiece tucked into his ear. If he wanted to communicate with the other men on the squad all he had to do was push the button and start talking.

As he finished adjusting his mic, Archer frowned. He'd caught a glimpse of something as they'd pulled out of the lot, something that had instantly struck him as odd.

Across the street, at they’d passed, he'd
noticed
two men
sitting
in a car. The North London area where the ARU headquarters
was
based was a business area, but these guys didn’t looked like businessmen. They looked tough and out of place. The windows to the Ford were blacked out, so they didn’t make eye contact with Archer, but he’d turned his head and glanced at them through the window as they pulled out of the lot and moved off down the street.

Beside him, Chalky finished with his mic and looked at the gas mask in his hands. It was an Avon C50 model, just about as comfortable a gas mask a police officer in this line of work could wear, an all-black ski mask and protective face seal combined with a solitary single filtration respirator that would stop any airborne toxin from entering an officer's lungs. In their training, every man on the team had become accustomed to wearing the mask on drills and exercises. The training had begun with all the officers huddled in a hut wearing the
gasmasks
. Then their instructor had unceremoniously tear-gassed the building. One by one, the recruits were ordered to remove the masks, to get an idea of what it felt like to suffer from exposure to the gas. Aside from
being shot, it was up there as
one
of the worst experiences of Chalky's life. He'd staggered out of the hut, choking, his eyes and nose clogged up, struggling to breathe, rendered temporarily useless and
totally
incapacitated from its effects. He hadn't been forced to use the mask
yet in the field, and looking down at it in the car was the first time he had held it since that training over two years ago. It was stirring up some unpleasant memories.

‘Question
- what use is this thing going to be against anthrax?’ he said.

‘A lot of use,’ Fox said, checking the safety of his MP5 sub-machine gun, as Porter turned the car to the right. ‘It’ll keep you alive.’

‘Yeah, but HAZMAT have full body suits. I get a gas-mask.’

‘Why don’t you stay in the car then?’ Fox replied.

‘You alright, Arch?’ Porter asked, noticing the blond man was unusually quiet, looking at him in the rear view mirror.

‘Yeah,’ the blond officer said,
distracted
, frowning. 'I think so.'

As Fox and Chalky continued their exchange, arguing about the benefits of the mask, Archer ignored them and made a quick decision. He pulled
his
mobile phone from a Velcro pocket on the left collarbone of his tactical vest.

He held down button 2, and the call went straight through to Nikki back at the ARU's HQ.

Sitting at her desk, her tech team working around and behind her, Nikki was just pulling up a map of the US Embassy and the possible contamination zone
,
when the phone on her desk rang. She grabbed it, not taking her eyes off the screen in front of her, still typing away.

‘Yep?’

‘Nikki, it’s Arch.’

‘What’s up?’

‘Do me a favour. Can you leave your desk for a moment?’

She looked at the schematics on the screen in front of her desk and at the busy tech team around her.

‘Not really. Is it urgent?’

‘Just do me a favour and go through to the briefing room.’

She shrugged, then rose and walked quickly through to the adjacent room.

The place was deserted,
littered with
half-drunk cups of
tea and
coffee, newspapers
abandoned
on seats. She looked left and right around her at the empty room.

‘OK. Now what?’

‘Go to the window.’

She did.

‘Look past the parking lot. Do you see two guys inside a car on the far side of the street? Black, license plate beginning FG6.’

Her eyes narrowed as she peered outside.

‘Yeah. It’s headed into the car park.’

As this exchange took place, the phone on Porter’s uniform started ringing. It was hooked up to a hands-free inside the car, so he pushed Answer, returning his hand to the wheel.

‘Porter,’ he said.

‘Sergeant, this is Dr Jim Keith from HAZMAT
,' a man's voice said, filling the car.
'I'm here at the Embassy examining the package.’

‘How's it looking, doc?’ Porter asked.

‘I have some news. My team took a sample from the package and tested it here at the scene,
' Keith said.
'The powder immediately showed up as just two ingredients mixed together. Hydrated magnesium silicate and sodium hydrogen carbonate.’

Pause.

‘Is that bad?’ Porter asked, the car speeding down the street.

‘
No, not at all,’
Keith said.
‘Quite the opposite 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
G
od,
’ 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, running forward and hammering at the glass with the butt of his rifle repeatedly, trying everything in his power to smash it, screaming and shouting in a foreign language. Meanwhile, his partner suddenly paused, raising his head, then ran into the briefing room and looked out of the window. He shouted something back to his friend and the other man joined him, both of them peering down into the car park. They both reloaded by reversing the clips in the AK, slapping the fresh mags into the weapons, and without hesitation the two of them opened fire out of the windows. Unlike Cobb’s office, the windows in the briefing room weren’t bulletproof, and the rounds shredded the glass to pieces, the lethal hail of bullets and glass smashing down at the three ARU cars pulling up outside the building down below.

‘Jesus Christ!’
Fox shouted, as a spray of bullets hit the front of their car, riddling the bonnet, smashing the front headlights. Porter pulled on the handbrake and turned to the side as the gunfire smashed into the 4x4 Ford, the vehicle skidding to a halt.

The moment Nikki had whispered in terror down the phone and Dr Keith's voice had told the car that the incident at the Embassy was a hoax, Archer had put two-and-two together and realised this whole thing was a set-up. He'd shouted at Porter to get back to HQ as fast as possible, that this was a decoy. Porter hadn’t needed to be told twice, pulling a U turn in the street and racing back to headquarters, the other two cars following closely as he gave the order over the radio. They had roared back into the parking lot to the sounds of gunfire coming from inside their own station, seeing two harsh muzzle-flashes on the upper level, and then were met by a brutal barrage of automatic rifle fire as they sped forwards towards the entrance.

Down below, Archer was first out of the car. He pushed open his door, rolling out and moving to the side of the 4x4, and went to shoot back with his MP5. However, one of the two gunmen above saw him and directed his relentless fire at the blond officer, pinning Archer down, the bullets smashing into the car, blowing out the tyres. They were like sitting ducks down here, in the worst position possible, taking fire from an enemy from a far superior vantage point. As he huddled behind the rear tyre, Chalky and Fox beside him, Archer realised that at least the car was stopping the bullets, which meant they weren't Teflon-coated
cop killers
as they were known on the street. If they had been, the officers would have been mere target practice, and the entire squad would have been mown down within thirty seconds.

The two gunmen had the height advantage, but the numbers advantage of the ARU squad allowed them to start to establish return fire. They were trained to make sure each bullet was accountable, but if they followed that ruling here they would be decimated. All rules had gone out the window. It was kill or be killed. The building was in the middle of a business area and the harsh sounds of the rifle fire hung in the air, echoing off the glass buildings around them, the two men above continuing their brutal onslaught.