Blackout

TWO

At the same moment that the old revolver fired, Officer Sam Archer of the Armed Response Unit also had his hands on a gun, twenty two miles across the city. He was snuggled in tight to the stock of a long sniper rifle, his breathing slow and smooth, his heart-rate as even as a slow-ticking clock. His left eye was shut and his right was looking down the scope, the fingers of his right hand curled around the brown pistol-grip of the weapon, his forefinger resting gently on the trigger.

A hundred and fifty five yards away his target was still, unmoving. The morning air was cool and clean, with no crosswind to worry about.

He was aiming the crosshairs of the scope on the man’s right eye.

The average length of a human head and torso is thirty six inches. The head alone is normally about ten. Archer had heard snipers talk about the fatal T, the region on a target’s head where any impact from a bullet would be an instant kill. From the chin to the nose and either side on each eye, any round that went through that area would instantly sever the brain stem and spinal cord. A target would be dead before he hit the ground, and nine times out of ten before he even heard the shot that killed him. With a moving target, a torso shot was more reliable, as the target area was larger and any hit to a vital organ was effectively a kill-shot regardless.

But the man on the wrong end of the scope that morning was stationary.

And he was about to get shot.

The rifle in Archer's hands was a Heckler and Koch PSG1A1. The abbreviated name came from the German word prazisionsschutzengewehr, or precision-shooter rifle in English. Heckler and Koch had been commissioned to create the weapon by German law-enforcement after the Black September Munich disaster at the 1972 Olympics, when the Israeli Olympic team were ambushed by armed terrorists in the Olympic Village.

The West German police had been unable to engage the armed gunmen with their short-range weapons and eleven hostages had died, to the shock and horror of millions watching around the world on television. The heads of the German police force had ordered a long-range shooting weapon be designed specifically for their police teams, and Heckler and Koch had consequently come up with, still to this day, one of the most accurate sniper rifles in the world.

The weapon was dark and sleek, supported at the front for stability by a tripod. It had a side-folding, adjustable, high-impact matte black plastic stock with a vertically-adjustable cheek-piece to accommodate the varying body-types, heights and builds of different shooters. Older versions used to have a Hensoldt scope, but this latest model had an improved Schmidt and Bender 3-12x 50 Police Marksman II tactical scope, mounted on 34 mm rings. It was new and more up to date, with increased accuracy and further range than the Hensoldt, effective in all elements, rain or shine. The sight showed four lines coming together then narrowing into thin cross-hairs which were at that moment in Archer’s hands, aimed on the iris of his target’s right eyeball.

The rifle held a five, ten or twenty round ammunition box or could be loaded manually bullet-by-bullet, but Archer had gone with the five. It didn't disrupt the weight and feel of the rifle too much, and gave him sufficient reserve ammunition without having to manually load each bullet or weigh the rifle down unnecessarily. Inside the magazine were five polished NATO 7.62 x51 mm rounds, devastating rifle ammunition. Each bullet was a 175 grain, fairly heavy, but was the perfect blend of stopping power and accuracy. At 1000 yards, the fired bullet would contain more kinetic energy than a .357 Magnum round fired point blank. Dirty Harry would have approved.

Once the trigger was pulled, a bullet would leave the rifle at over 2500 feet per second, just about twice the speed of sound, and rotated at about 200,000 revolutions per minute. With longer shots a sniper had to worry about spindrift, where the constant turning of the bullet would carry it off course, but the target wasn't far enough from Archer on this occasion for that to be a concern. Each bullet was a hollow-point, boat-tail cartridge, designed to mushroom upon impact and create irreparable damage. Through a human head, the bullet would enter the cranium and expand, destroying brain tissue and rupturing the spinal cord, resulting in instant death. With terminal ballistics, a rifleman always knew what both the crush and tear factor of each round he put into his rifle would leave. Basically, what the round would destroy in the body and the damage it would leave behind. And in both regards, the NATO round was the pick of the bunch. If there was a better common rifle ammunition out there, no one had discovered it yet or at least, had advertised it.

The PSG1A1 really only had one disadvantage. Once a shot was fired, the spent cartridge that had housed the fired bullet jumped out of the ejection port to the right, sometimes as far as ten metres away. In certain situations, retrieving the cartridge could be both a potential nightmare but a necessity for a sniper, especially if on a covert operation. However, for the police, that wasn’t a concern, and aside from that very minor issue the PSG1A1 had a solid reputation as the most accurate semi-automatic rifle in the world. It was an outstanding weapon and the sniper rifle of choice for many police and law enforcement groups around the world, including the Spanish police, the Mexican army and the FBI's Hostage Rescue Team. And the latest inclusion to that group was Archer’s London-based counter-terrorist team, the Armed Response Unit.

The young blond police officer held the sight on the target’s eye, his breathing barely noticeable. He was on the second of three final deep breaths. He inhaled slowly and exhaled for a third and final time, emptying all the air from his lungs. His heart-rate was slow and he felt calm, not a thought in his mind. He had already taken the slack out of the trigger, halfway towards the two and half pounds of pressure it would need before the rifle fired.

And he gently squeezed all the way.

The weapon kicked back into his shoulder as it fired. The bullet took less than a second to reach the target and it hit him straight through the nose, a half-inch to the left of where Archer had aimed, right through the centre of the T of the fatal T.

An instant kill.

Down the shooting range, a hole appeared in the paper target, the sheet billowing back just a tad from the impact of the bullet, and Archer smiled, racking the bolt on the rifle. He glanced back over his shoulder at his best friend Chalky and two other officers, Porter and Fox, who were standing watching him, each with a set of binoculars in their hands. Chalky had his face covered by his palm whilst the other two laughed.

Archer removed the magazine by pushing the release catch with his thumb, then did a dry click to make sure the weapon was unloaded. He re-racked the bolt and applied the safety catch, then rose, taking off his ear defenders and walking over to the trio of officers behind him. As he approached, Porter and Fox were still chuckling as Chalky shook his head, swearing under his breath. He had taken a shot with the rifle just prior to Archer, but he had only managed to clip the paper target’s left ear. A painful injury for sure, but not a kill. And that meant this morning Archer was now eleven to nil up in their contest.

‘I’ll take cash or cheque,’ Archer told Chalky, grinning at him and joining the trio. With his head still down, Chalky pulled a twenty pound note from his pocket and held it up. Archer took it with a wink and a smile.

The four men were an integral part of the ten-man task force of the Armed Response Unit, one of the two premier counter-terrorist squads in the city along with CO19. For the sake of operational ease the task-force was split into two sections, First and Second Team, and these four men comprised First Team, the quartet typically charged with the most important tasks in the field. Porter and Fox were both in their mid-thirties, experienced guys and as tough as they were professional, Porter solidly built and dark-featured whilst Fox had a more wiry build and sandy hair. Both men had been policemen for over a decade, and they were at that stage in their careers where they were in their physical and mental prime, experienced and seasoned officers.

Archer and Chalky were both still twenty seven, ten years younger than the other two but just as deserving of their spots. In the United States, an FBI agent could be as young as twenty six, and it was much the same in the UK for the counter-terrorist police force. They had both been with the Unit for over two years and in that short time had proved themselves to be invaluable members of the squad, quick-thinking, fit and decisive. They were similarly built, both six feet and about a hundred and eighty five pounds, but Chalky had dark features whereas Archer had blond hair and blue eyes. The two friends were pretty evenly matched with the pistol and sub-machine gun that the Unit used in the field, but the recent arrival of the sniper rifle had seen Archer take not only a considerable amount of Chalky's money, but serious bragging rights in their contests.

Just before Christmas last year, the head of the Unit, Director Tim Cobb, had ordered every officer in the squad take a sniper course with the newly- arrived PSG1A1, at this range. A siege and hostage situation at a townhouse in Tottenham earlier in the year had left Cobb with the realisation that the task force was only really equipped for close-quarter confrontations.

In the field, each officer was armed and proficient with an HK MP5 sub-machine gun and also a Glock 17 pistol, but Cobb had requested and been given official authorisation for the use of two PSG1A1 sniper rifles. In the army, snipers were the ultimate force-multiplier. One sniper could hold down an entire area for days at a time. In the U.S, their forces and statisticians had come up with the estimation that snipers in their army averaged 1.3 rounds per kill. But in the police, sharpshooters gave them the distance advantage. Any emergency that called for a sharpshooter normally meant the enemy was at a single location, usually a bank or a hostage situation, and meant the shooter could engage the enemy unawares from a distance, not coming in through the front door. The arrival of the rifles had taken a real weight off Cobb's mind. He didn't want to get caught short as the German Police had.

Over a week-long period during the Christmas holiday four months ago, the entire team had become accustomed with the weapon under the tutelage of three snipers from the SAS, the British Special Forces squad. Each officer had fired hundreds of rounds with the weapons and all had quickly improved, learning the intricacies and technicalities of precision marksmanship. Archer in particular had proven to be particularly proficient, despite being the youngest man on the team. He was a natural, having taken to sharpshooting as he had to the pistol and sub-machine gun work in previous years, and by the end of the week he was the stand-out shooter in the Unit. The three SAS guys training him had been impressed. He had even ended up outshooting one of them in a final challenge, much to the delight of his team-mates. However, the ARU’s First Team were typically the go-to squad in operations, the first guys through the door, so Archer needed to be there on the ground and not far away from the action and up high with a rifle. As a consequence, the two best shooters of the six-man Second Team were assigned sharp-shooting detail if it came to it, but Archer was always there as immediate back-up if they needed him.

Fox and Porter stepped forward to take their turns with the weapon whilst Archer and Chalky walked through to the back of the range, headed towards a drinks stand to their right where there were a couple of tables and some empty chairs. The range was about a twenty minute drive from their headquarters and was a second home to the Unit. North of the city up past Stratford, the range had separate areas for short-arms and long arms fire. The entire team were officially required to retest on handguns and MP5 sub-machine guns every three months here, so the guys were extremely familiar with the place. Cobb encouraged constant practice to mitigate against any disasters in the field, so First Team had taken to meeting here three times a week, if they weren’t on an operation, to work on their shooting. Soon after its arrival, one of the PSG1A1’s had become a consistent fifth member of the group. The challenge of being precise with the rifle inevitably created competition within the team, and although Chalky had improved he was still to beat Archer in their head-to-head, a score-line his best friend seldom let him forget.

Returning his binoculars to a rack on the wall, Chalky poured himself a coffee with milk and two sugars whilst Archer went for tea, black, nothing added. The two men took a seat and watched as Fox snuggled in against the stock of the rifle across the range, Porter lying beside him like a spotter, binoculars to his eyes, ear defenders in place on his head. They were the only ones here on the long-distance range, but they could all hear muffled bangs and weapons' reports coming from the doors across the stone walkway to their right.

Archer watched as Fox clicked off the safety and settled in behind the weapon, giving it a dry click. He then carefully slotted the magazine into place and pulled back the slide, loading a round into the chamber. A hundred and fifty five yards across the grass, the black paper target was mounted in front of a thick sand levee, the sun now shining down brightly. The morning April air was thin and clean, not a whisper of wind in the air, good weather considering the usual showers that time of year in the UK.

‘So how’s your girl?’ Chalky asked, blowing on his coffee to get it to cool. ‘The one in New York. What was her name- Katick?’

Archer looked at his tea.

‘Katic. And she’s not my girl.’

Chalky looked at him. ‘What happened?’

‘It didn’t work out.’ Pause. ‘She met someone else.'

'Oh shit. I'm sorry buddy.'

Archer shrugged.

'Guess it wasn't meant to be,’ he said. ‘Probably for the best anyway. She's a Supervisory Special Agent in the FBI. People like that don't have time for personal lives.'

Silence followed. Chalky took a premature pull from his coffee and winced as he burnt his tongue. It was still too hot.

‘You should go over there,’ he said. ‘Go and see her. Maybe she’ll change her mind.’

Archer looked at him and shook his head.

‘With what money?’ he said. ‘I’m even more broke than you, Chalk. And you know the way this job goes. I can’t just pack up and leave for a week.’

There was suddenly a loud bang as Fox fired the weapon. They looked down the range from their seats and could just make out a white hole in the black right shoulder of the target. A hit, but not a kill. Anything three inches left would have been a different story. The sandy-haired officer looked up and cursed, racking the bolt and clicking on the safety. He and Porter swapped places as the two other officers watched. Fox was six-five up against Porter, much closer in their head-to-head contest. But from the looks of things, it was about to become six-a-piece.

‘So what’s new with you?’ Archer asked, drinking his tea and eager to change the subject.

Chalky grinned.

‘I went on a date last night.’

‘Oh really? Who’s the girl?’

‘Her name was Elaine.'

'Where'd you meet her?'

'Dating website. She's a lawyer.'

Archer looked over at him. ‘You’re kidding?’

‘That she's a lawyer?’

‘No, that you're on those websites.’

‘What’s wrong with that?’

‘Chalk, you’re twenty seven. Why the hell are you online dating? Go to a bar.’

Chalky drank from his coffee and shook his head.

‘You should have seen her, Arch,’ he said. ‘She was a real beauty. Divorced, late-thirties. She saw police officer on my profile and said that’s what attracted her. Said she’d always liked a man in uniform, and was looking for a new one after her ex-husband left her for a younger woman.’

‘Am I going to meet her?’

‘No. Don’t think I’ll see her again. Didn't even get a chance to show her my scar.’

Archer smiled. Chalky had taken a bullet in the back a year and a half ago, and after he’d healed, he'd found much to his pleasure that the bullet-scar had a very positive effect on women. He had all sorts of wild stories for how he’d got it, including surviving a mob hit and Archer’s personal favourite that he took a bullet for the Prime Minister. Chalky had never realised that the true story how he got the scar was actually far more impressive than anything else he could come up with.

‘Why won’t you see her again?’ Archer asked.

‘My card got declined at dinner. She had to pay. Don’t think she was happy about it.’

‘You made her pay?’

‘I hadn’t checked my account in a while. But I’m skint. We don’t get paid for another couple of weeks, and you keep taking all my money with that stupid rifle.'

Archer laughed. 'Are you serious?'

‘That wasn’t just it,’ his friend continued. ‘She kept banging on about my name. You had to put your real name on the website, and she said she'd only call me Danny, or Daniel.’

‘Imagine that. That’s your name.’

He shook his head. ‘She said Chalky made it sound like I was a builder or plastered walls for a living. We’d only just met and she was already nagging me like we’d been married for ten years.’

Archer shook his head and laughed, his low mood evaporating, all thoughts of Katic and New York disappearing. His best friend’s real name was Danny White, but everyone apart from his mother called him Chalky, an ironic nickname given his dark features. He used to hate it, but had now got used to it, and he never used his first name anymore. He and Archer had met when they both joined the police at eighteen and had been inseparable ever since. They were a perfect foil for each other. Chalky's exuberant personality meant he often needed someone to keep him in line, which is where his best friend came in, but in return he had a knack for lifting Archer’s mood no matter how shitty he was feeling.

Across the range, there was another bang as Porter fired. This one went straight through the target’s torso, around where the liver would be, and the paper gently billowed from the impact of the bullet. A kill. Porter looked up and smiled as Fox swore, then racked the bolt and pulled the magazine from the weapon. As he inspected it and made sure it wasn’t loaded, Archer checked his watch.

‘Oh shit. We need to go, lads,’ he called. ‘It’s eight o’clock.’

Across the range, Porter finished inspecting the weapon, then applied the safety catch. He folded down the tripod and carried the weapon and the magazine carefully to a black equipment case, stowing them inside. He clicked it shut and lifting it, he and Fox walked over to join the other two men to return their binoculars and ear defenders to the racks.

Archer and Chalky rose, draining their drinks, and after tossing the foam cups in the bin, the four men headed to the exit, Fox pulling a ten pound note from his pocket with his free hand and passing it to Porter with a shake of his head as they walked.



Given the difference in time-zone, 8:00 am in London was 3:00 am in New York City. Although it was known as the city that never slept, it often dozed, and as it was the middle of the night on an early Thursday morning most of the city's eight million residents, spread out across the five boroughs, were fast asleep. Above the still-open bars and bodegas and shimmering lights that glowed all night down below, the high-rise apartment buildings of Manhattan housed the wealthier of those eight million people.

And one new member to this club was a dark-haired man in his early forties, a man who still couldn't believe that it had happened to him.

He worked as a bodyguard-for-hire, not normally a job that came with an impressive paypacket. Truth be told, it was typically shitty, thankless work which involved a lot of hanging around and unpaid overtime. But he was a solid professional, well-trained and good at what he did, and a year's worth of employment with an Arab oil Sheikh and a sequence of ever-increasing salary bumps had meant the man could finally move out of his old, beaten-down, two-roomed apartment in Brooklyn and take up residence in a Manhattan high-rise. He now lived in a comparatively luxurious place, on the twenty second floor of an East 41st apartment building overlooking the East River, Queens and his old neighbourhood in Brooklyn across the water. The apartment had two bedrooms, an en-suite bathroom, a lounge, kitchen and washroom. The building had a gym and a large roof-space available to all the residents, and he found himself living in the same building as lawyers, accountants and businessmen, a world away from his old neighbourhood in Brooklyn. Finally, after twenty years of toil and graft, the man felt like he’d made it.

Working for the Sheikh was a dream come true. The bodyguard still couldn’t believe his good fortune at landing it. He had been referred to the Arab through a businessman he’d worked for during a conference in New York in 2010, and when the offer of steady employment had been put on the table he had jumped at the opportunity. At that point, he’d been out of work for almost two months, living on canned food, and was watching his meagre savings slowly dwindle away. And so far, the job had been everything he had hoped for and more.

He had been on numerous trips to the Middle East, basically paid vacations, flying First Class alongside the Sheikh every time. His boss liked to stay at expensive western hotels on the coastline, so the ample sun, sea and exotic women on view didn’t hurt. And the cheques he received each month were ten times what he had ever earned before, despite being mere drops of water in an ocean to a man as wealthy as his employer. The bodyguard had always been diligent in what he did, never afraid of a hard day’s work, but now he couldn't help but feel that life was finally starting to pay him back.

The Sheikh was staying across town at the Trump International Hotel, by Columbus Circle, and his protector would be back over there at six a.m. sharp, ready and waiting to do what he was paid for and protect his boss when he went out and about. After all, he couldn’t afford to get sloppy or careless. A man as wealthy and powerful as his employer would always have enemies, and if the bodyguard let his guard down all this could be over. He worked five days on, two off, and he'd hit the sack around midnight, early for him, wanting to get a good night's sleep and start his upcoming five day shift, rested and alert.

The man was flat-out in the wide double bed in the main bedroom, fast asleep, snoring gently, the open curtains of the high-rise apartment showing just a solitary tugboat moving slowly up the East River outside in the darkness far below. He had no wife or girlfriend or even a dog and was all alone, his hard and scarred body stretched out on the soft and accommodating Egyptian-cotton sheets. The silence was rhythmically broken by gentle snoring from the man in the bed, the only sound in the apartment. The place was dark and still.

The door to the apartment had no latch, only a lock on the handle.

It was silently picked with ease.

The door was pushed back smoothly and slowly, and a large figure in black moved silently into the apartment, shutting the door noiselessly behind him. The intruder was wearing dark gloves and medical wraps on his feet, and carried a stubby silenced pistol in his hands, a round in the chamber, the safety catch off, his finger on the trigger.

The door to the main bedroom was open and the intruder crept forward slowly, feet silent on the carpet. As the stranger approached the door, he heard the man’s rhythmic breathing increase slightly in volume. The newcomer slid into the room through the crack in the door, coming to a halt at the foot of the bed and stared down at the sleeping man. He was flat out on his back, like a guy who had just got in from a hard night's drinking, dead to the world.

The stranger in black raised the pistol double-handed, centred on the guy’s face.

‘Hey,’ he said, quietly, almost a whisper.

The bodyguard in the bed stirred.

He opened his eyes and looked down the bed, lifting his head up, like one of those red and white bulls-eye targets at the fair.

He frowned as his jumbled brain tried to make sense of what he was seeing.

There was someone standing there.

He blinked, confused, wondering if this was a dream.

It wasn’t.

The intruder shot him between the eyes. The weapon was silenced but there was a loud thump as the hollow-nosed bullet smacked into the sleeping man’s forehead, instantly blowing the back of his head apart. There was a spray of blood, bone and brains and another white thump of feathers in the air as the bullet passed through the pillow and buried itself in the bed-frame behind. The guy in the bed snapped back and was still, feathers floating down to rest on his forehead and the blood-stained pillow case, his eyes open and staring at the bathroom across the room as his head lolled to the left.

And the room was silent.

The figure in black took a confirming look at the dead man. He flicked on the safety catch to the silenced-pistol, opening his jacket and sliding it inside, then zipped up the coat. He turned and walked out of the apartment as silently as he had arrived, pulling the door shut silently behind him, the wraps on his feet and the gloves on his hands shielding any prints and any evidence that he was ever here. Fifteen minutes later, the gloves, wraps and pistol were on their way to the bottom of the East River and the man was in a taxi on his way to John F Kennedy International Airport.

His direct, six hour flight to London would take off in the next couple of hours.