THIRTY
Across the room, Wulf smiled. Bird had got the jump on the cocky cop. Reaching 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 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 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 later 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.
His face and bandage around his head camouflaged and smeared with mud, Archer had lowered the PSG-1A1 and crept up behind the man. He’d grabbed a Glock from the gun-cage and tucked it into his thigh holster earlier, but he didn’t want to use a gun and alert anyone in the house. But Archer felt a coldness settle over him. His head throbbing, the front of his fatigues and t-shirt stained with blood, he was still enraged by the torture from earlier and watching Fox get hit. He wasn’t going to read this man his rights. This sniper was about to die.
The soldier had started as Archer started choking him. He tried everything to break his hold, bucking and thrashing. Archer knelt on the man's back and pushed his face down into the mud, his hand on the back of the man's head like a clamp, depriving him of any oxygen, ramming him down with considerable force, his fingers spread over the damp black hair on the back of the guy’s head. The man had fought and gargled as water and mud filled his nose and mouth, but Archer had kept him down, keeping the pressure on like he was trying to close a packed suitcase. Within thirty seconds of thrashing, the sniper had fallen unconscious as oxygen to his brain ran out and Archer continued to hold his face down until he died. Once he released the man’s head and checked that there was no pulse, Archer had pushed the sniper’s rifle into the undergrowth and rolled the dead body out of the way. Moving back and retrieving the PSGA1, he had set up in the exact same position where the sniper had been lying with his own rifle.
He’d looked down the scope and seen the hole in the main room window from where Fox had taken the bullet. Archer had fired this rifle earlier that day and already knew it was zeroed, but he’d had to wait and take long slow deep breaths, willing himself to calm down, the crosshairs of the scope dancing around all over the place as the rifle responded to his adrenaline-spiked heart rate. Killing a man with your bare hands wasn’t the best thing to do before sharp-shooting, but he willed himself to calm down, using the breathing exercises he'd memorised, long and slow, one after the other.
While he was steadying himself, he had watched the entire situation in the living room unfold. He’d seen Porter and Chalky enter, just after the two Panthers. When the soldiers had entered, Archer had been on the verge of firing, the crosshairs still rhythmically thumping off target by his heart-rate, but Porter’s arrival had seen the two men forced to turn and put their weapons on Cobb and his wife to cover themselves and get Porter and Chalky to drop their weapons.
He’d watched helplessly as the third Panther had entered behind Chalky. For a horrible moment, he thought the guy was going to pull the trigger straight away, but they had disarmed Chalky and Porter instead and pushed them across the room to join Cobb and his helpless, defenceless family. Watched them get blindsided and disarmed. He saw the last three Panthers take up staggered positions, facing Porter, Chalky, Cobb and his family, three sub-machine guns in their hands. The crosshairs of the scope were no longer jumping around. Archer’s breathing was smooth. His view down the scope was still.
Aiming at the smallest of the three Panthers, Archer had gently taken his left hand and pushed the pressel on his tac vest, looking down the scope into the room. The radios had a radius of seven miles transmission, so his voice spoke into the earpieces in Porter and Chalky’s earpieces like he was right there in the room with them.
‘I’m right here,’ he’d whispered. ‘The moment I shoot, go for your weapons.’
The way that everyone was positioned couldn't have been better. The three soldiers were stood there like targets on the range. All that practice and time on the range came down to this. He’d taken aim on the smallest soldier, the one to the left and put the crosshairs on the side of his head. He’d emptied all the air from his lungs, just as he saw Wulf lower his weapon slightly and say something to Chalky.
And he squeezed the trigger.
The moment after he fired, he’d already moved onto the man in the middle. He fired again, calm, just like range practice and hit him in the head too.
As he swept the rifle to the third man, Wulf, he’d seen the giant soldier turn front on and look straight at him. His face was smeared black with camo paint, but Archer had seen the surprise in his eyes. He had centred the scope on the bridge of the man’s nose.
And he’d fired.
He'd snatched the second shot slightly. But they were three shots, three headshots.
Three kills.
He reckoned Chalk owed him another twenty quid.
Looking down the scope, he saw Chalky rise and reappear and motioned at him through the windows to come over fast. Climbing up in the muddy earth, Archer scooped up both the PSGA1 and the Panther’s rifle and ran towards the house through the rain.
Behind him, the dead sniper lay there on the sodden earth on his back, looking sightlessly up at the dark sky, raindrops falling onto his face and body.
He and his team-mates had set out to murder ten men today.
They had taken out nine.
But all the Black Panthers were now dead.
And Cobb and his family were safe.