Blackout - By Tom Barber Page 0,3

letter and the two photographs. He took a lighter from another pocket and sparked a flame. He set the paper and photos on fire, watching them curl and burn away between his fingers, eventually dropping the smoking edges of what was left on the ground by his foot, twisted, black and destroyed.

He then reached into his pocket again and pulled out something else.

It was an old revolver, six bullets inside, the second item he had retrieved from the desk in his den.

He put it in his mouth and pulled back the hammer with his forefinger.

He took one last look at the city in front of him.

And he pulled the trigger.

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