Rush

Tactical Response witness the assassination of the state’s Police Minister. This unprecendented event prompts the creation of Taskforce Cicero – with Kerry as its leader. Pushed into a new political realm, Kerry is instructed to appoint a new leader to TR, Senior Sergeant Charlie Lewis. Lawson is unhappy at being sidelined and the entire team is shocked when Charlie fires Michael. It’s a new world order, underscored by the assassin’s ominous warning to Lawson that a shitstorm is coming.

The man who shot the police minister cuts a deal so he can see his pregnant girlfriend. In exchange he’ll reveal the location of the murder weapon. Tactical Response is assigned to bring the separated lovers together, a task made difficult when the girlfriend, Lexi, refuses to cooperate. Shannon, reeling from her own trauma, projects her anger onto the innocent woman and forces her to cooperate. A decision she’ll come to regret when the woman’s vulnerability puts her at even more risk.

The team scrambles to track down the woman that Shannon allowed to escape. As they try to comprehend Shannon’s reasons, Lawson and Kerry disagree on the best approach to helping her. At Kerry’s insistence, Shannon is forced to attend a counselling session where she must confront a buried pain that could push her away from Lawson forever.

Conflicting agendas in the team bring simmering tensions to the boil. Lawson and Josh shake things up with a provocative assault on one of the Marauder bikies, only to have it come back to bite them when the same bikies become persons of interest in an ongoing case. Meanwhile, Charlie and Stella are embroiled in the investigation of a journalist whose intel puts her life in danger. Lawson and Charlie’s lack of communication threatens to undo their respective quests unless they can find a way of working together to bring down the culprits.

After Kerry receives a death threat, Tactical Response takes charge of her protection. Kerry is dismissive of her own safety but when the threats are redirected to her son, her anger at its perpetrators can’t be contained. Stella gets personally involved in a murder investigation, risking her job to track down the suspect. The two cases converge when it becomes clear that one man is behind both threats. Kerry is determined to catch him, but her actions threaten the life of one of the team.

Michael emerges from a clandestine operation with the Raineys to seek help from Josh. But when Josh questions if the undercover job is worth it, Michael is spurred to go back in, risking his life to do so. Shannon confronts the man who brutally assaulted her and is finally faced with the chance to get her revenge.

After the failed buy-bust, the team tries desperately to track down Michael’s whereabouts. Liam Rainey plays a game of cat-and-mouse with Kerry, demanding that she find his daughter and bring her to him before he’ll help them get Michael back. He also wants a signed letter of immunity from the police minister. When Anna refuses to do it, Charlie holds their former relationship over her to get her help. As Michael is rushed to hospital with a gunshot wound, we are drawn into a world of fevered imaginings – could these be his last thoughts?

With Michael clinging to life, Tactical Response endeavour to nail the people they hold responsible for his shooting. The Rainey family is square in their sights, until an unexpected discovery shifts their focus to Cleo – Stella’s girlfriend. At the hospital, events spiral out of control when Col Rainey is shot dead by a Russian criminal. In his escape, he abandons a sickly accomplice, who is suffering radiation poisoning, leaving the team to wonder what the hell the Raineys are messing with that involves Russians and radiation…

Michael’s death is still raw for the team as they are thrown into the pursuit of a truck filled with stolen explosives. When a link to the Raineys is discovered, Lawson challenges the old man, Doug Rainey, to help them. The most he’ll do is reveal that his son is being held by the Russians, forcing him to use his men to steal the explosives. Tactical Response find Liam Rainey tied up in a warehouse and Stella is close to getting her revenge on him for Michael’s death when Lawson stops her. Matters are made worse when the team realise that Josh is missing and find his phone at the site of a radioactive bombmaking lab. But it’s the discovery of his burnt-out car with a body inside that will push the team beyond their limits.

Lawson’s world is crumbling – after Michael’s death, now Josh is missing, also presumed dead. To make matters worse, his grief causes him to make a serious judgement error that could destroy the one good thing left in his life: his relationship with Shannon. The team pull out all the stops in their pursuit of the man they believe is responsible for Michael’s death and Josh’s disappearance. But the closer they get to him, the quicker he slips away from them, leaving it to Lawson to cross the line in order to catch him.

Tactical Response find themselves up against a carefully planned maneouvre when Lawson and others are taken hostage by the Cuckoo as part of an escape attempt from a military courtroom. As part of the team negotiates for Lawson’s freedom, Josh and Stella follow their own investigation: searching for a bomb.

As the bomb squad work to defuse a dirty bomb threatening the heart of Melbourne, Lawson, Shannon and Christian are tasked to fly to Fiji to extradite South Korean national Kenta Tomi back to Australia. Leader of the Shining Cloud doomsday cult, Tomi is also the only man who knows how to defuse the bomb. But when he doesn’t willingly hand over the code, Lawson may need to take desperate measures to get it from him. In the midst of this catastrophic threat, the team also contends with the emotional fallout of Josh’s disappearance and Michael’s death.