Jessamy Beech Ch. 15: Mull

"NO!" Ross Beech saw his son fall backwards off the wall amid a spray of bullets. And in the moment of stunned disbelief that followed was clubbed unconscious by a golf club wielding Reekie he hadn't even realised was there. The blue painted savages swarmed into the town, hooting and grunting excitedly to one another in their moment of victory.

...

"ONE MINUTE TWENTY FIVE SECONDS..." intoned Soteria's synthesized voice.

Jessamy raised the stolen handgun, "Sorry it's come to this Alison..."

CLICK!

Empty? No. Jessamy couldn't believe Alison would be amateurish enough to leave her weapon only half loaded. It must be jammed, she thought. She flung the HK at her opponent's head.

Alison Nethybridge sidestepped then fluidly used the momentum to swing at Jessamy. The sword blade struck sparks as it narrowly missed, scraping the stone wall.

"ONE MINUTE TWENTY SECONDS..."

Aubrey groaned, trying to pull himself upright. Jessamy very much doubted he'd be able to speak with a bullet in his neck so she guessed there'd be no danger of him aborting the satellites' firing sequence. She glanced down.

The blade of Aubrey's ceremonial naval sword glinted at her in the flickering lamplight from its scabbard. Jessamy flung herself to the floor as Alison's katana whistled through the air above her, snatched the captain's sword and sprang to her feet.

"Laura!" Alison called, "abort firing sequence. Override Nethybridge 43..."

CLANG!

Jessamy's blade clashed with Alison's, jarring her arm with the force of it. Then again, and again. Steel against steel, she drove the assassin back, away from the table, back across the room as outside the sound of shouts and running footsteps echoed through Duart Castle's ancient corridors.

Someone had heard the gunshots.

"ONE MINUTE FIFTEEN SECONDS..."

"They're coming for YOU Jessamy. There won't be any escape for you this time," Alison wove her sword in scintillating figures of eight, her good eye smouldering with rage as she stood her ground.

"I know," Jessamy replied calmly, "we're obsolete Alison. Once this is over, there won't be any need for people like us anymore. It's better if it all ends now."

Conflicting emotions contorted Alison's face, "Jess. Please. Let me abort the countdown. Let's start again, eh?"

Jessamy shook her head, "Not a chance."

The heavy oak door vibrated in its frame as someone pounded furiously on it from the other side, "EVERYTHING ALRIGHT IN THERE SKIPPER?"

...

Hamnavoe was pinned down. Bullets zinged past inches above his head as O'Brian stood in the street outside, spraying the old bakery with bursts from his MP5.

He'd been reckless. Hoping to take out all six of Aubrey's men and not expecting them to retaliate. And now Jessamy's daughter was going to pay the price for his arrogance.

"Angus? Wh-what are we gonna do?" Phoebe squeaked from the back corner of the room.

Angus. Not dad this time. Perhaps the girl realised how much he'd fucked up, and that because of him she was unlikely to see her mother again.

"DROP YOUR WEAPON! SHOW YOURSELF!" O'Brian shouted. Was it Hamnavoe's imagination or did the voice suddenly sound a lot closer?

The skittering sound of slate tiles sliding over one another supported that. Shit. O'Brian had crossed the road and was right outside the building, clambering over the collapsed roof that littered the pavement.

"Pheebs. Stay down. Whatever happens, stay down," Hamnavoe whispered. He would never forgive himself if Jessamy's daughter got killed in a firefight he'd instigated. Keeping low to the floor, he leaned around the top of the stairwell to peer cautiously down at the jagged rectangle of light where the bakery's door had once been.

TAKATAKATAK!

Bullets chewed chunks out of the door frame beside him as he ducked back, wildly returning fire.

BLAM-BLAM-BLAM!

Footsteps clumped quietly on the gritty floor below. O'Brian was entering the building. Hamnavoe's ammunition wasn't going to last forever. And with Phoebe to protect he was a sitting duck.

The bottom step creaked loudly as O'Brian began ascending the stairs...

...

"ONE MINUTE TEN SECONDS..."

Alison Nethybridge was beginning to look decidedly nervous as Soteria Lite's synthetic voice relayed the countdown, "If this countdown isn't stopped, your children are going to be without a mother. Is that really what you want Jess?"

As she drew Aubrey's naval sword back over her shoulder to swing, Jessamy's eyes flitted around the room. Her mind taking everything in, assessing, like a series of snapshots. From Aubrey himself, drowning in his own blood under the table... to the heavy oaken door, beginning to swing open as if in slow motion... to Alison Nethybridge - Nemesis, opening her mouth to have another attempt at aborting the firing sequence...

"Laura!" the scarred assassin shouted quickly, "abort firing sequence. Override Nethybridge 4326..."

It was now or never. In the split second Alison's eyes flicked towards the Soteria Lite set-up, Jessamy swung her arm down and loosed the sword.

THUNK!

Thirty one inches of cold steel plunged deep into Alison Nethybridge's chest, a hand's breadth under her withered breast. Her sightless eye widened with shock despite the hard ridges of scar tissue squeezing around it. Her katana clattered to the stone floor as she stumbled backwards, mortally wounded.

"FREEZE!" the first of O'Brian's black clad thugs yelled from the corridor outside, as he kicked the door wide.

"ONE MINUTE FIVE SECONDS..."

"Fuck this," Jessamy muttered and turned towards the window. Raising her arms to shield her face she dived at the ancient leaded glass as bullets smacked into it from behind her.

KER-ASSH!

Something punched the back of her arm.

Then she was falling...

Amid broken shards of grit flecked two hundred year old glass and pieces of window leading, she plummeted down the castle's outer wall.

Glimpses of ancient stonework, darkening sky, the grey painted bulkhead of HMS Poseidon moored only yards away flashed across her vision in the couple of seconds it took Jessamy to complete her descent.

She bounced. An excruciating impact that drove the breath from her lungs as she slammed into the cliff face, feeling ribs crack from the force of it. Then...

SPLASH!

The icy waters of the sound enveloped her, flooding Jessamy's lungs as she gasped from the shock of it. Blindly clutching at her bruised chest she sank, submerged amid fronds of kelp and spreading clouds of her own blood...

...

"ONE MINUTE..."

...

In Tobermory's Main Street bakery, Hamnavoe could hear O'Brian's footsteps on the stairs just the other side of the wall. Every creak, every crunch of grit as Aubrey's second in command cautiously ascended.

"Throw down your weapon and make it easier on yourself," O'Brian no longer had to shout, he was that close. But Hamnavoe could now hear the intent in his voice. The cold ruthlessness of a born killer.

Hamnavoe glanced over his shoulder at Phoebe. She huddled behind a ransacked chest of drawers, a rotting piece of chipboard furniture that would offer no protection whatsoever from stray bullets. She looked just like her mother. Jessamy's hair colour, the same startling blue eyes, shy but with a hint of defiance. He simply couldn't risk giving O'Brian the excuse to strafe the room with his MP5. Hamnavoe realised their situation was hopeless. But perhaps Aubrey's thug would let Phoebe live afterwards. Perhaps she'd even get another opportunity to escape. After all, O'Brian was alone.

"Sorry Pheebs," Hamnavoe whispered, "there's no other way," he tossed his handgun out into the stairwell, "don't shoot. We're comin' out."

...

"THIRTY SECONDS..."

...

Swim Jessamy.

Damn you girl.

Swim.

Jessamy Beech could no longer tell up from down as she sank deeper into the cold waters of the Sound of Mull. Weed tangled around her, brushed against her face, masking her view, blinding her, adding to her disorientation.

She had to get away. She had to at least attempt to escape. Not only for Phoebe and Ada's sake, but for Hamnavoe. Dear, sweet Angus Hamnavoe. And all the others who had died or suffered to get her to this pivotal moment in time. To give up now would be to dishonour each and every last one of them. Her parents, Snook, Calgary, Ross, Mpenzi, Jiff and so many other good and decent people she'd encountered down the years.

Jessamy picked a direction at random, trying to ignore her aching limbs, the burning in her lungs, the excruciating pain in her ribs and arm... and swam.

She had to at least try...

...

"FIFTEEN SECONDS..."

Alison Nethybridge forced her head around to look at Jack Aubrey for what she realised would probably be the last time, willing him to open his mouth and abort the countdown. O'Brian's men filled the room, leaning out of the smashed window through which Jessamy Beech had made her escape, staring with puzzled expressions at the Soteria Lite apparatus, perhaps wondering what the countdown signified.

But it appeared that Captain Jack Aubrey, formerly known as one Derek Skinner... was already dead.

Alison opened her mouth to try to speak, but was finding it increasingly difficult to even draw a breath, let alone utter the relevant security code.

"TEN SECONDS..."

...

Phoebe Beech reached inside her tattered goretex jacket. It seemed that petrol containers hadn't been all she'd discovered while tidying onboard Gorbachev's Millennium Falcon, "Take this..."

Hamnavoe's eyes lit up. How Phoebe had managed to keep her prize a secret all this time he had no idea. He reached across the room and gratefully accepted Gorbachev's stumpy little sawn off shotgun. O'Brian would assume he was unarmed, so all Hamnavoe needed now was an opportunity to make use of it.

...

"FIVE SECONDS... FOUR..."

...

Jessamy wondered how it would feel to be caught in the blast radius when the Soteria satellites opened fire. Would the sea boil around her? Or would the water and everything in it simply vapourise in an instant? She gulped down a lungful of air as her head and shoulders finally broke the surface.

How far had she come? Was it far enough?

"THERE SHE IS!" shouted a voice. Barely fifty yards away, Aubrey's crew on the Poseidon's foredeck scrabbled to bring their weapons to bear...

...

"THREE... TWO... ONE..."

...

O'Brian stepped out of the bakery's stairwell and into the room, sighting down the barrel of his MP5, "FREEZE!"

The darkening sky outside suddenly brightened. A blinding, searing brightness that surpassed the sunniest summer's day Mull had ever known. Moments later an almighty thud like a single peal of thunder shook the walls and was abruptly cut off, as on the eastern side of the island, millions of cubic metres of atmosphere were displaced. It could mean only one thing...

O'Brian's head whipped around to face back the way he'd come, "What the fu..."

Giving Hamnavoe the precious fraction of a second he needed to raise and fire Gorbachev's shotgun.

BLAM!

O'Brian jerked backwards and tumbled, limbs flailing, down the stairwell, leaving nothing but a vivid red smear on the wall as a reminder of how close Hamnavoe and Phoebe had come to disaster.

"What WAS that dad?" Phoebe crawled out from her hiding place to hug Hamnavoe as he peered out through the grimy window.

Dad again. All was well.

"That, Pheebs... was the sound of yer amazin' mother savin' the world again," he turned away from the girl as stinging tears gathered in the corners of his eyes. He was only too aware of what else the sound might signify. Berwick Upon Tweed was saved. But what of Phoebe's mother? What of his wife?

What of Jessamy Beech?

EPILOGUE

Duart Castle had ceased to exist. Like the aftermath of the attack on Penzance, the entire area had been scoured clean. Replaced with a wide, shallow bowl into which the sea eagerly flooded. Hamnavoe could only assume that Aubrey's HMS Poseidon had met the same fate. At least he hoped so. He peered cautiously around as he guided the stolen Royal Navy RIB along the new coastline, searching for he knew not what.

Phoebe pressed close, an arm around his waist for security as the boat jounced over the waves. She'd seen terrible things over the last few hours and Hamnavoe felt it was the least he do to offer her some comfort.

"Ye should be proud o' yer mother lassie," he began. After forty five minutes of searching they'd found nothing. All Hamnavoe could think of was how to make his reassurance that he'd take care of Phoebe not sound like Jessamy's epitaph.

Phoebe's arm shot out, pointing urgently at a small area of flat rock protruding out from the island, "There! What's that?"

Hamnavoe stared as he swung the RIB onto a new heading that would take them in close. It was dusk, and with the air still filled with skirling clouds of ash and steam from the gradually cooling blast zone, visibility was down to practically zero, "Ye've better eyes than me lassie."

An object lay on the rocks. A discarded piece of flotsam the size of a person, but one curled into a tight foetal ball. Hamnavoe would have missed it, thinking it no more than a moss covered boulder. But as Phoebe aimed their one dying torch at the rocks, Hamnavoe caught glimpses of pale skin, of close cropped blonde hair...

"Shit," Hamnavoe clenched his teeth, "it's her."

Hamnavoe wondered which would be worse as he slowed the RIB, bumping the bow up against the rocks. Never finding Jessamy's body and living with the hope that she may have somehow survived, or finding the corpse of his beautiful wife and having to face the finality of it.

It was Jessamy alright. No doubt about it. Wearing black Craghoppers and a scuffed green goretex jacket as she'd been when O'Brian had bundled her off to face Aubrey earlier. Soaking wet, congealed blood from a bullet wound stained one arm, her lips were a worrying shade of blue and her face as pale as the moon slowly rising above the island's only Munro, Ben More.

"Is she alive?" Phoebe croaked as Hamnavoe stepped out of the RIB and crouched down. Jessamy Beech. At various points in her lifetime she'd been a slave, gladiator, soldier, bounty hunter... and a mother. All that mattered to Angus Hamnavoe in that moment was that this incredible woman was also his wife.

"Jess? JB?" Hamnavoe called softly as he touched the clammy coldness of her skin.

Too cold.

They were too late.

"Please... Angus, tell me. Is she alive?"

Hamnavoe glanced down. Averting his eyes while he thought how best to tell Phoebe that she no longer had a mother...

... and saw something so miraculous that he swore he would remember that instant until the day he died. Jessamy Beech was shivering.

"Pheebs! Throw me the foil blanket from the first aid kit. Do it now!" he shrugged off his own coat and laid it over Jessamy, tenderly cradling her head, "we've got ye now JB. Ye're gonnae be fine lass."

...

Two days later, Jessamy Beech regained consciousness. Wrapped in as many blankets as Angus and Phoebe could plunder in what had once been Tobermory, they'd made her as comfortable as possible on an old camp bed in one of the least draughty corners of the old distillery.

Her chest had been tightly bound to hold her cracked ribs in place, her bullet wound washed and dressed, and the myriad other cuts and abrasions stitched or covered over. The stolen RIB's first aid kit had proven invaluable.

Jessamy immediately recognised her surroundings. The musty smell. The morning sunshine through the distillery's open gates illuminating a forest of spiders' webs high above her head under the eaves, the sound of waders picking their way along the shoreline just outside. How could she not recognise the place she'd called home for ten years?

But how the hell had she gotten here?

"Ye're awake then," Angus walked up to the bed, smiling. He stooped and kissed her forehead, "ye scared the shite out o' me JB. I really thought I'd fuckin' lost ye. Ye've been out of it fer two days."

"W-wa... ter?" Jessamy croaked.

"Water? Oh yeah. Of course," Angus helped her sip from a metal canteen while he explained what he and Phoebe had found when they'd gone to look for her at Duart Castle.

"A-all gone?" Jessamy asked, wincing with a trembling hand to her chest.

Angus nodded, "All gone. You can relax JB. Ye've saved the world yet again. Berwick Upon Tweed's safe. Though I'm no' sure how we're gonnae get back there. I had to kind of... blow up our boat. The RIB's no' gonnae get us all that way an' I'm certainly no' takin' two lassies across all o' Scotland with all the fuckin' Reivers..."

"Ph-phoebe? Where?"

"Dinnae fash. She's out on the pier fishin' for our lunch. Yer dad and Mpenzi taught her some pretty useful skills. When ye've found yer voice I'll call her in. She's missed ye like nobody's business JB."

Jessamy smirked, "A-and you? You... miss me?"

Angus wiped the corner of his eye, "Aye lass. I missed you. More than you can ever know. Now, is there anything I can get you?"

Jessamy pointed to the farthest corner of the room, "C-corner. Where c-cement... lighter. Take... out st-stone..."

Angus frowned, "Ye want me to take a stone outtae the wall JB? What is it? Buried treasure?"

Jessamy smiled.

Angus decided to humour her and do as he was asked, using an old and rusty hunting knife to scrape out an area where the cement indeed looked lighter. With nothing holding it in place, one of the stones wobbled loose and with a little encouragement popped out. He delved into the hollow space behind, "Ye were right JB. There's a space here."

With Angus's attention elsewhere, Jessamy had swung her bare legs out of the bed and gingerly sat up. She felt groggy, weak and light-headed. But she'd been pampered and mollycoddled for long enough. It was time to get dressed and try to figure out how they'd get back to Berwick, "Wh-where are my... tr-trousers Angus?"

"What the fuck are ye doin' lass? Ye're injured! Get back on the fuckin' bed."

Jessamy ignored him, "D-did you find... anything?"

Angus held up a small bundle wrapped in filthy sackcloth and carefully unrolled it. To reveal the unopened bottle of Tobermory Scotch whisky that Jessamy, Snook and Calgary had hidden the best part of thirty years earlier. Sunlight gleamed on the emerald green glass, "Fuck me Jess. How did ye know this'd be there?"

Jessamy tapped the side of her nose, "W-was... saving it. For... sp-special occasion. Think th-this counts... don't you?"

Angus knelt and wrapped his arms around her, careful not to put any pressure on her ribs, "Aye lass. It counts."

...

That lunchtime they ate bowls of thin but tasty Cullen Skunk. Made from fish freshly caught by Phoebe that morning and a few potatoes and wild garlic that Angus had managed to dig up. Phoebe had been understandably overjoyed to see her mother awake and wasted no time in telling Jessamy how Angus had protected her as she helped her dress.

Fresh buds were appearing on the trees alongside the main road out of the village Jessamy noticed, as she limped stiffly outside through the broken distillery gates with her daughter's help. Spring was on the way. Almost thirty years late, but nevertheless on the way.

After eating, Angus perched in the warm afternoon sunshine on a cast iron mooring cleat and waved the whisky bottle, "Fancy a wee dram? Sorry we've no poncey wee dram glasses."

Jessamy nodded, "Y-yes. Yes I do," she glanced at Phoebe, "and before you even suggest it young lady... no, you can't."

She gratefully accepted the bottle and took a swig, feeling the whisky's sting like liquid fire as she swallowed. Jessamy raised the bottle, before handing it back to Angus, "To old friends... and new beginnings."

A sound... like wind howling through cables on a stormy night echoed faintly off the surrounding hills, growing louder by the second. Angus stood, peering intently around at the sky as Jessamy carefully set the whisky bottle down.