Darby fired twice, hitting the woman in the stomach. The woman stumbled back against the wall and Darby fired two more shots.
Flynn was scrambling across the floor. Darby threw him down on his stomach, dug her knee into his spine and yanked his arms behind his back. She grabbed a pair of Flexicuffs from her tactical belt as the lights came back on.
Darby flipped up her night-vision goggles, blinking sweat away from her eyes.
'Goddamn,' the hostage said, staring at the dark red splotches on her white suit jacket. 'These paintballs really do sting.'
The man playing Chris Flynn groaned. 'Quit your bitching, Tina. I've been killed three times over the past two days.' He rolled on to his back. 'Christ, McCormick, I think you bruised my spine.'
A fireplug of a man with a brown crew cut and a worn sun-blasted face stepped into the hall – John Haug, the SWAT instructor for the Boston Police Department. He snapped his fingers and pointed to the doorway.
'McCormick, with me.'
2
Darby trailed a few inches behind Haug, as the adrenalin rush of the training exercise – the first part of her final SWAT exam – started to evaporate and give way to a bone-crushing exhaustion. For the past three days she had grabbed fistfuls of sleep while conducting round-the-clock surveillance on the warehouse.
The first week of her SWAT training, she had started each morning with a ten-mile run under a blistering August sun on Moon Island. There were eight other recruits. All men. For the rest of the morning she carried out close-quarter combat exercises and firearms training. Late afternoons were spent crawling through old sewer tunnels wearing blacked-out goggles to test the limits of her claustrophobia. She completed night-time diving exercises in Boston Harbor and abseiled from a Black Hawk helicopter. One recruit broke his foot. Two other men suffered physical injuries and dropped out. The five remaining members graduated to 'The Yellow Brick Road', a punishing gauntlet designed to crush the human body.