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a room full of almost sixty frightened children,   Greg demanded that his cheating girlfriend and his son were brought to him, or he would start to kill the children. The demands had of course been refused, and the siege went on with nobody able to make a decision on what to do to end the stalemate.
    Marcus was certain the bomb threat was a bluff. He had interviews Greg’s girlfriend and she had painted a picture of a man who was far from violent. According to her, he had acted in the heat of the moment. Nevertheless, he had sent men out into the streets, checking litter bins, scouring every alleyway, every parked car for any sign of hidden explosives. All the while, Greg sat in the hall growing more and more afraid and desperate. Marcus had also suspected that as a father himself, Greg wouldn't be able to bring himself to harm any of the children despite the threats he had made. Against the heated objections of local law enforcement and his advisors, Marcus made the decision to send in a team to bring the siege to an end one way or the other. Objections were made. It was suggested that provoking Greg would lead to a bloodbath. But Marcus was sure, confident he had made the right call.
    He recalled watching the operation from the very meeting room he was about to go into on the bank of monitors  across the back wall showing both TV coverage and the individual video feeds from the helmets of his team as they prepared to make their entry into the school. Marcus felt all eyes on him as he prepared to give the order to go in, knowing that each and every one of them would gladly throw him under the bus if things went wrong in any way. The orders were simple. Take the gunman alive if possible and kill him if they had to. Not Greg. Not a man anymore. Just a thing. An obstacle.
    Just a gunman.
    As soon as the team breached the school, breaking down the main doors and filing inside, Marcus realised although he trusted his judgement almost unconditionally, in this instance he had been horribly wrong. He could hear the sound of gunfire over the video feeds long before his team were anywhere near the hall. It was then as all eyes in the control room burned into him, Marcus realised he had made a gross misjudgement. The expected compassion he had been so sure Greg would feel towards children who were a similar age as his own son was lost behind fury and desperation at being forced into a situation he saw no way out of. Fear, it seemed had taken away any rational thought process. Backed into a corner, Greg did the only thing he felt able to do, which was to carry out his threat.
    He started to fire.
    It took the SWAT team six minutes to break into the hall, which was more than long enough. Forty-two of the sixty children were already dead, a further twelve were seriously injured. When he knew the end was near, Greg turned the gun on himself and blasted his brains all over the wall, making sure the six and seven-year-olds who were fortunate enough to survive would have a lifetime of horrific memories which they would never be able to rid themselves of.  Vivid images of the carnage as they were fed in real time from the SWAT team's helmet cameras were burned into Marcus's brain, images nobody should ever have to see. They came to him now, as clear six years later as they were the day it happened, each of them driving home the fact that not only had he been wrong, but that he actually had feelings for what he had always seen as the expendable casualties of his operation.
    Afterwards, there was a full investigation into what went wrong, but the government knew how valuable an asset Marcus was, and as someone with his natural instinct for making the right call nine times out of ten would go on to be forgiven even if that tenth time was a complete clusterfuck. Even so, Marcus never actually won. Not really. The images of those children took longer to banish into the dark recesses of his brain and needed a good few nights of heavy drinking to