Sultans Of SWAT

"The Poles backed out," he said, "the Norwegians got deployed and I don't know were the [bleep] Cleveland is."

But all was not lost. Twelve SWAT teams had come, including one from Washington's Metropolitan Police Department, which agreed to become a last-minute fill-in. And a Canadian team had arrived, so O'Connor could still call this a World SWAT Challenge.

Meanwhile, Maxim magazine was covering the challenge. So were TV crews from Germany and Sweden and Japan, attracted to the event because it was taking place on the 6,000-acre, northeastern North Carolina training facility of Blackwater USA, the mysterious private security company that became famous when four of its contractors were killed in Fallujah in March, their bodies torn apart by an angry Iraqi mob.

"This will be, without question, the world's best SWAT competition ever," O'Connor promised. "These guys are the best of the best. And it's all live fire -- real bullets -- so don't stand in front of them."

At the opening ceremonies Friday morning, the 12 teams and a few dozen fans gathered around Blackwater's flagpole and bowed their heads while D.R. Staton, chaplain of the Virginia Beach Police Department, delivered a benediction. Dressed in a police uniform accessorized with a clerical collar, Staton asked for the protection of God, whom he addressed as "my commander in chief."

After that, Blackwater President Gary Jackson uttered the Olympic battle cry: "Let the games begin!"

The first game was the Sniper Surprise, which required each six-man team to fire at targets from behind a car door, then race to a six-foot steel wall, climb it, run to a firing line and shoot at more targets. Meanwhile, each team's designated sniper was scaling a roof and firing at a balloon bobbing in the breeze 100 yards down range. And each had to do it all while wearing combat boots and a bulletproof vest and lugging a pistol and a rifle across swampland stewing in a 90-degree swelter.

The first heat went off without incident, with the team from Brunswick County, N.C., beating the team from Marietta, Ga. Then, while the range wardens were setting up the course for the second heat, a shot rang out.

The crowd gasped.

"Who shot that?" O'Connor yelled. "Who shot that?"

The shooter was a cop from Charleston, S.C. Waiting to compete in the second heat, he decided to do a little practice firing, apparently forgetting that his gun was loaded. Fortunately he hit a steel target, not a range warden.

"That's a major safety violation!" O'Connor yelled. "He's out! Get a new man! He's out! Disqualified! He's out!"

The crowd stood in stunned silence. But after a few minutes, folks started telling stories about accidental discharges at other SWAT competitions, like the time somebody from the notoriously inept Kuwaiti SWAT team accidentally fired off a round in the parking lot of the SWAT Roundup in Orlando. Oops! Fortunately, nobody was hurt there, either.

Soon, the mood was lightened with SWAT-style gallows humor.