The AOS officers who shot David Gray

David Gray. Photo / Supplied

The smoke grenades went in. Aramoana shooter David Gray came out. Four black-clad cops gunned him down. Ask them if they were scared and they will deny it. Ask them if they felt like heroes and they'll say they were just doing their job.

Ask them who pulled the triggers and - for the first time since November 13, 1990 - they will finally tell us.

Christchurch armed offenders squad and anti-terrorism squad officers Mike Kyne, Tim Ashton, Peter McCarthy and Rob Barlass were just metres away from Gray when he charged out of a bach, shooting his AK47 from the hip at them.

"I was one of the ones that shot him," Kyne told the Herald on Sunday this week. "Three of us fired at him. He had to be shot, he came out shooting. Two of us were standing right in the open when he fired, thank Christ he was a poor shot... we were only four metres away.

"We fired about 11 bullets and I think four or five hit him. We won, he lost."

Gray, who shot and killed 13 people, was hit in the eye, neck, chest and groin. Kyne says the four officers were never told whose bullet was the fatal one - nobody knows. The four men had identical weapons and ammunition.

"We ran to him and he was still struggling violently. He was yelling why don't you just f***ing kill me?' We handcuffed him but he managed to get his hands free... we secured him and called the medics in. He took about two minutes to die," Kyne says.

Ashton revealed to the Herald on Sunday that he also fired on Gray: "I've only ever shot one person. I went to shoot another one but my firearm didn't work and my hand got blown to pieces. I would have shot him," he says.

The officers called upon to face fire, and if necessary return it, are mums and dads, community members, friends and neighbours. It may be their day off. They may be spending time with their children. But that pager could go off at any moment, and they will drop everything.

The Armed Offenders Squad (AOS) was established in 1964 after four policemen were shot and killed on the job within a month in West Auckland and Lower Hutt. There are now 17 squads nationwide - the biggest are in Auckland and Christchurch - with about 330 members. While men make up the majority, women are also members. Every AOS member is a volunteer and works part-time. They are drawn from all areas of the police and operate on an on-call basis.

They attend between 500 and 600 call-outs a year. With increasing levels of drug use in society leading to more extreme violence, these are happening more often.

A new book, Line of Fire, chronicles the development of the AOS and Anti-Terrorism Squad (now the Special Tactics Group) and the introduction of police dogs and negotiators to armed incidents.

Over the years the squad's resources and equipment have changed - they now carry semi-automatic Glock 17 pistols and Bushmaster M4A3 carbine semi-automatic rifles - but their tactics have remained the same.

It's basic. Cordon. Contain. Appeal. And shoot only if absolutely necessary.

All officers have the police fire orders "drilled" into them, Ashton says. The orders (or F61 as they're known in cop code) state they can shoot "only if they fear death or grievous bodily harm to themselves or others".

Ashton says pulling the trigger was a last resort. "There has never been a policy to shoot to wound; we shoot to stop. If you shoot someone in the leg that won't stop them... you have to hit centre-mass," he said.

Officers were trained to "double tap" or shoot twice - just in case the first round misses. "If the offender dies as a result that's unfortunate but it's the only way to stop someone."

The majority of AOS call-outs do not end in shooting. Officers and police negotiators are usually able to talk the offender around.

Superintendent Bruce Dunstan, the national tactical group commander and the man who oversees the AOS nationally, says 99 per cent of call-outs are resolved peacefully.

If a call-out ends in a shooting, the officers involved are subject to several inquiries. Each death is treated as a homicide and investigated. The Independent Police Conduct Authority will also investigate and there will usually be a coronial inquiry.

Two AOS call-outs have ended fatally this year. In January in west Auckland, 17-year-old courier driver Halatau Naitoko was accidentally shot by police as they tried to capture Stephen McDonald, who had fired at police after an hour-long methamphetamine-fuelled chase.

The unnamed police officer who fired the shot that ricocheted and killed Naitoko was not charged and is said to be considering leaving the force.

Then, in May, Napier man Jan Molenaar died after a 48-hour siege during which he fatally shot senior constable Len Snee and seriously wounded two other officers and a civilian. Police said Molenaar died from a self-inflicted wound, despite officers firing at him.

Dunstan says AOS officers take the job very seriously: "It is a responsibility each member carries - to make that split second decision that will be reviewed to the nth degree. People don't recognise what these guys put them through. It's a burden and an enormous responsibility and at the end of the day someone has to do it."

Dunstan speaks from experience. He was a member of the AOS for 18 years. And while he has never shot anyone, he has been under fire and says he never fears the outcome of a job.

In fact, you'd be hard-pressed to find an officer who admits being scared on the job; an officer who says fear overwhelmed their training.

Most will tell you that in the nanosecond it takes to make the shoot/don't shoot decision, there is no time for fear - only focus. There is also an immense pressure to perform well.

Sacha Haskell, from Wellington, suffered the added pressure of being the first woman on a male-dominated AOS team.

"It was a competitive environment," she says in Line of Fire. "I put a lot of pressure on myself to do my best always. And because I was the first woman on the Wellington squad I felt some responsibility to the people that had given me the break.

"A few of the guys had a problem with a woman on the squad. It didn't bother me - I was just as qualified as everybody else... there were no concessions for me in the squad room. And I wouldn't have it any other way," she says.

Meanwhile, Murray Forbes, who was the officer in charge of the Wellington ATS, was always too busy to be scared: "You haven't got time to think. Some jobs scared the hell out of us. But it wasn't until you stopped to think about it that you thought holy hell...'."

Ashton and Kyne say the training kicks in as soon as their pagers go off. "Maybe later you think, maybe next time (I'll get shot)," Ashton says. Kyne says it wasn't a fear of getting shot that was in the back of his mind, it was a fear of shooting the wrong person or shooting at the wrong time.

Kyne recalls a non-AOS pursuit through Christchurch which ended when the offender stopped in a stolen car. "As he came out [of the car] I could see he had a rifle... that's when my backside started sucking in air. I took my revolver out."

He pauses.

"I put the first pressure on the trigger; all I saw was him and the rifle. Then he smiled at me as he brought the rifle to his shoulder and when I was a millisecond off firing a shot at him he put the rifle down and put his hands up in the air.

"He was 14 years old. I thought, holy hell, I could have killed a young boy. That was the scariest moment of my career."

Evan Billington, a Hamilton AOS officer, also had a "nearly" moment that made him think hard about his career. In 2002, a man took his ex-partner and one-month-old baby hostage in a vehicle at Miranda, near Auckland.

"I had my weapon aimed at him," he says in Line of Fire. "Two quick shots. One to break the window. One to incapacitate him. I had no doubt I was going to be forced to shoot. He'd been telling the police phone operator that he was going to kill the woman, kill the baby, kill himself, but for my own peace of mind I couldn't see the firearm and so I wasn't prepared to fire the shot."

Soon after, the man surrendered.

"After that incident I did a bit of soul searching. At the time I thought I'm going to have to shoot this person'. And, in my mind, I knew exactly how to do it. Clear as anything. But I didn't fire - and I wasn't sure if it was because I intuitively knew not to, or because I couldn't."

While the officers claim they can channel their fear into concentration and focus on the job, the same cannot be said for the people they leave at home.

AOS members' lives are ruled by their pagers, meaning personal sacrifice is inevitable, and accepted. The call-out comes second to none.

Forbes says the job made him "selfish". But it wasn't until he left his family to go to Aramoana that he got a "wake-up call".

"I didn't think much about my family... but two days after Aramoana I got home and my youngest son came into the kitchen the next morning. I was reading the paper and he was getting ready for school. He didn't look at me, but as he went to leave he stopped and said you could have been killed there - what about us?'

"I thought, shit. It really troubled me... I had never thought about that. That affected me for a while... I had never thought about being shot before."

Forbes' wife Margaret said she feared for him every time he left the house on a job. She "dreaded" the knock on the door; the news that he would not be coming home.

"The thought was always there," she says in Line of Fire. "Aramoana was terrible. The event was on TV ... my youngest son was watching it. I couldn't, I was really upset. He looked at me and said mum, dad will be OK, he knows what he's doing'. All our kids were like that. They just believed Murray would always come home. Quite scary really, to have that much faith. I certainly didn't have it."

Kyne says his family were also affected by Aramoana. "My first wife just accepted it but she didn't like it. It probably played on our marriage a bit. She probably worried about it more than she told me. But it was just a job - it's what I did."

While officers are dragged away from their families at the drop of a hat, they try to make up for it - and this may sound strange - by involving them with the AOS.

Kyne would take his sons (one of whom has followed his footsteps and is a police officer in Christchurch) to the squad room regularly. And Billington's wife Jan says in the book: "I went to open days, saw them kitted up. I fired a Glock pistol. I watched the guys carry out manoeuvres. Tear gas was let off, flash-bangs were detonated. Lots of smoke and noise. They were fun days."

To most people the AOS are men and women in black who charge in, save the day and go home. They hit the headlines when things don't go to plan, but most call-outs go unseen.

Dunstan said it was important for the squad to have a human face: "To a huge extent they do what they do for self-satisfaction rather than the desire for recognition," he says.

Lawyer Dr Robert Moodie, a former police inspector and Police Association secretary, says in the book that the officer is there on behalf of the public. "And the responsibility for a police shooting has to be shared by the beneficiaries - the public at large," he says. "He did not pull the trigger himself. He pulled it on behalf of society... It's a terrible burden, you can't just place it on one person's shoulders."

* Line of Fire, the television series, first screens on TV One tomorrow. The book, by John Lockyer, is $40 from Penguin.