Return Fire (Sam Archer ) by Tom Barber

one lying on the floor could hear the sirens.
    Most were unconscious.
    And no one was moving.
    Having been punched into the far wall, hitting it with incredible force before landing on the floor, Chalky opened his eyes and gasped for air. Beckett and Shepherd were both lying beside him in limp heaps. Coughing and trying to breathe through the smoke, he crawled over and checked Beckett; he saw a thick shard of bulletproof glass buried in her back, blood already staining her sweat-stained white shirt.
    Coughing again and unable to hear anything, Chalky looked around and saw no one else was moving in the smoky silence, hot blood stinging his eyes as it streamed down from a cut to his head and dripped onto the floor in front of him.
    Cobb, Shepherd and all the analysts were down.
    And the entire 1 st floor of the ARU building had been destroyed.

 
    FOURTEEN
    Less than ten minutes later, Archer joined Marquez, Fox and Josh outside the house in Hendon, stepping back through the gap where the front door used to be and walking onto a small patch of grass to the right of the entrance.
    ‘Everyone OK?’ Archer asked as he joined the other three. They nodded; each had been nicked and cut by pieces of smashed glass from the car windows, their clothes dirtied by diving to the ground.
    A ll of them were well aware how close they’d come to being killed. They’d stayed down behind cover for five minutes or so until SC019 cleared the two residences where the sniper fire had come from. The officers had found two abandoned rifles, two open back doors, four dead colleagues and not a trace of either shooter. The scene had now been restored to a semblance of calm, the sudden assault on the police teams having taken everyone off guard, but the remaining SCO19 officers looked pretty grim as they guarded the street, a back-up team clearing every house in the immediate vicinity. Three ambulances had arrived earlier and Archer saw one of them suddenly take off, siren blaring as it carried Brookins to hospital; however, the other two hadn’t left yet.
    One of them was being loaded up one by one with the four dead officers before taking them to the morgue.
    ‘Jesus, Arch, I owe you a beer,’ Josh said to Archer quietly, watching the ambulance crews work.
    ‘Make it two,’ Fox added.
    Archer didn’t reply, looking at the scene around him. ‘How’s Brookins?’
    ‘Stable,’ Fox said. ‘Different story from the other four guys.’
    A short silence fell, the group watching the medical team and feeling exposed standing there in the garden.
    ‘Two shooters,’ Archer said. ‘What kind of rifles did they use?’
    ‘M40A5s; bolt action and bipod, with laser-sights. They’re already on the way to the lab for prints, but tracing the weapons will be hard. The serial number on each has been burnt off with acid.’
    ‘And they just ditched them?’ Archer said.
    Fox nodded.
    ‘What about witnesses when the snipers escaped?’
    ‘None. Street camera CCTV from around back is being checked, but the four SCO19 guys who were guarding the back entrances were all shot in the head and dumped in the kitchen of each house, keeping them out of sight.’
    ‘We didn’t hear any rifle reports before we were attacked?’
    ‘The foursome were all hit with a silenced .22 handgun; each took a single round to the head. It’s no wonder we didn’t hear anything; someone could fire a weapon like that in the same room as you and you wouldn’t hear the report.’
    Archer looked at him and thought back to the sequence.
    ‘One of the officers called in an update moments before Swan blew the front door; they must have been killed less than a minute before the attack. The two snipers moved in fast and timed it to the second.’
    ‘And the homeowners were already evacuated,’ Marquez said. ‘They killed the four officers, breached the back doors of both houses, moved up to their firing points and set up, all in the space of sixty seconds or so.’
    She