Victor O'Reilly - Rules of The Hunt

McGonigal crouched behind the smashed metal detector. Jim Daid came up beside him and dropped into firing position. McGonigal glanced over his shoulder. Tim Pat was in position behind the twisted door frame of the first security door, and Dempsey was just coming up on the other side. All his force was unharmed and the fellow in the ambush position had been taken out.

McGonigal began to feel confident.

Up ahead, there were three rooms on his left and three on his right. Normal procedure would be to secure each room as he advanced with grenades and a few quick bursts of automatic fire.

But in this case, he wouldn’t bother. He had a target and knew exactly where it was. He and Dempsey would head straight for Room Number 4. A quick kick at the door or burst at the door lock, and in with the firepower.

It would be over in seconds. There had to be other Rangers waiting in the rooms, expecting them to clear them out as normal before heading for Fitzduane. Well, they could bloody well wait. If they opened the doors, he was confident the covering fire of Tim Pat and Dempsey could deal with them.

He made a quick hand signal to Jim Daid and readied himself to run forward. First, they both threw grenades forward. The corridor looked empty, but they could not see everything from behind cover.

The grenades exploded in two shattering blasts, blowing open the doors at either side of the end of the corridor.

Rooms 3 and 4 were now open to attack. This was an extra bonus as far as McGonigal was concerned. Both doorways seemed to stare at him blankly. Something was wrong. And then it came to him.

It was the middle of the bloody day and there was no light.

Sergeant Grady moved out of the linen cupboard and started down the stairs. One of the terrorists spotted the movement and turned, and as he did so, Grady fired a three-round burst.

Thirty-six steel darts sliced through the air and turned the wall behind the terrorist into a stipple of blood, bone, and flesh.

Tim Pat turned to see horror as the skin and tissue of Dempsey's body was flayed off him by the hail of metal.

The sight was terrible, and he was momentarily frozen as his friend's body disintegrated as if sliced by unseen blades.

He turned toward the angle of threat and started to fire. He could see a figure in black combat clothes and some sort of high-tech helmet with a microphone and strange goggles.

Grady fired a second longer burst.

The man in front of him seemed to come to pieces, as if his clothes and flesh were being blown off him by some terrible wind. For a split second he could see the man's bone structure, and then the half-man, half-skeleton was a heap on the floor.

Kilmara cut the lights and activated a switch.

There was a metallic roar as a specially installed folding partition fell from a box on the ceiling. It was similar in design to that used to protect shop windows while still keeping the display visible, but it was painted a matte black. The principle was practically as old as warfare itself: In case you lose your outer defenses, always have a strong point to which to retreat.

The end of the corridor hosing the last four of the six rooms was now sealed off.

It was now near total darkness as far as McGonigal and Jim Daid were concerned. About to rush forward, they hesitated at his unexpected development.

McGonigal fired a burst.

The muzzle flashes were blinding in the darkness, but he was just able to orient himself. He tried to fire again, but his magazine was empty. He changed in the darkness. It was an effortless maneuver practiced hundreds of times before.

He turned around, expecting to see some minimal light from the stairwell of the corridor behind him. There was almost nothing. Just a faint illumination from the safety panel of the fire door of the geriatric ward.

As he watched, that too vanished. It was now utterly dark. Too late, he remembered that the heavy curtains covering the windows of the stairwell had been drawn as they had ascended. It had been a gloomy day and the lights had been on, so he had thought nothing of it.

Rage gripped him. This was such a simple, foolish way to be defeated. It was the middle of the day. How could he have been expected to foresee darkness?

He reached out for Jim Daid, who gave a start as McGonigal gripped his arm.

"Relax, man," said McGonigal. "We'll follow the wall up. Fuck their tricks. We'll get the job done and be out of here in a moment."

He moved across to the corridor wall on the right, and with Jim Daid beside him began moving up slowly. Ahead were Rooms, 6, 5, and

He felt the door frame of Room 6 and briefly considered blasting his way in and opening the windows to get some light. Instead, he decided the darkness could work to his advantage also.

Grady and two other Rangers watched the two terrorists through their night-vision equipment. All had activated their laser sights. The thin beams were invisible except to those wearing the appropriate goggles. As it was, the Rangers could see each of the two terrorists fixed with pinpoints of imminent death. No one fired.

Kilmara studied the situation. Both men had removed their masks to see better in the darkness, and he could now identify them. He wanted a prisoner who knew something. This was a contract job, so probably neither of them would know much, but it was worth a try.

"Filters on," said Kilmara. He flicked a switch again and an immensely powerful light blazed from the end of the corridor, then went out again immediately.

McGongal and Daid blinked in the light and mentally marked its source. They would shoot it out when it came on again.

Suddenly it flashed on and off again at bewildering speed, like some disco strobe light gone berserk.

Both terrorists fired, but the strobe effect was disorienting. They concentrated and fired short aimed bursts straight at the light. They could hear rounds whining and ricocheting, and it occurred to McGonigal that the light must be covered with bulletproof glass or transparent ballistic plastic. He began to feel sick and disoriented; then he started to shake. His weapon slid from his hands and he collapsed to the floor in what looked like a seizure.

He was the victim of a device which had initially been developed for crowd control and which exploited the discovery that certain people were disoriented by strobe lights. The developers had increased the intensity and flashing frequency of the beam and the results had exceeded their expectations. Prolonged exposure, even for a few minutes, could turn the recipient into a permanent epileptic. The technology was cheap and effective and belonged in a category known as ‘non-lethal weapons.’ Having seen the results of some of these toys – sonic beams designed to deafen, laser beams designed to blind – Kilmara found the category something of a misnomer. Still, he had to admit the Megabeam was a more compassionate alternative to being shot very permanently dead.

Unfortunately, shielded behind McGonigal, Jim Daid was not equally affected. Disoriented though he was, he still managed a desperate rush at the door of Fitzduane's room, his automatic rifle blazing.

Bullets splintered the door already blasted half open by the grenade. Sick and nauseated, Daid stumbled in, firing.

His last glimpse of life was of a near-solid line of light emanating from the far side of the room and terminating in his upper body. Flesh was ripped, bones were smashed, blood spewed from a dozen holes. Lifeless, he was thrown backwards into the corridor beside the gibbering McGonigal.

An electric motor whirred and the partition rose. The Rangers moved forward. The entire action, from the time the terrorists had started climbing the fire escape to enter the hospital, had taken two minutes and twenty-three seconds.