Tamsin Beech Ch. 06: Ayr

The Coalition fleet would have been an impressive sight even in pre-Thanatos times. But almost all the world's military might destroyed, having so many warships in one place was simply breathtaking.

As the ageing Kamov helicopter carrying General Volk flew low over the choppy grey waters of the Firth of Forth, he couldn't help but be in awe of what they'd achieved. The aircraft carrier Lenin anchored alongside its North Korean counterpart - the Baekdusan, both massive ships joined semi-permanently by flexible bridges. Container ships, tankers and cruise liners carrying their civilian populations - all guarded by twenty assorted frigates and destroyers spaced around them, creating an impenetrable defensive perimeter.

The coastal town of North Berwick had been renamed Novaya Moskva - New Moscow, and had been President Zakhvatchikov's beachhead when his forces had discarded the subterfuge of a covert operation and begun an open invasion just over ten years earlier. It, and the neighbouring settlements of Dunbar, Eyemouth and Haddington were all now Coalition colonies. Once the Reekie problem was solved it would only be a matter of time before Edinburgh, only a few miles away, was under their control too.

The Kamov touched down on the Lenin's 305 metre long flight deck with a slight bounce. Four gleaming Sukhoi Su-57s stood lined up ready to launch, just astern of the carrier's control tower. Volk knew there were at least twice that number below deck, but without pilots, parts and the specific engineering knowledge to get them airborne again, they were only useful for spares. Much of the time the Sukhois flew only as a show of force, without ordnance or even wing mounted weapon pods.

The carrier had once been the Admiral Kuznetsov, flagship of the Russian navy. Zakhvatchikov had changed the name as soon as he'd come to power - a subtle attempt at rekindling some of the Communist era's pride for a new generation. Two MTP clad soldiers from the president's bodyguard escorted Volk across the busy flight deck and into the control tower. Why the president chose to live onboard his flagship instead of having his choice of residences ashore the General had no idea.

Major Mudak, Zakhvatchikov's personal assistant was already waiting in the president's outer office, one deck below the bridge.

Since when had stiletto boots been part of the uniform? Ludmila Mudak took full advantage of the president's predilections as much as she could. Tailoring her appearance and job description in order to snare high ranking officers like himself. The benefits of getting fucked by a visiting general greatly outweighed the inconvenience. Better food, better accommodation ... it was all there for the taking if one was prepared to spread one's legs once in a while.

"General Volk, sir. What a pleasure to see you again," she purred, "how are things on your cosy little island?"

Mudak smiled from behind her desk, peeling back red painted lips from perfect white teeth, her deep brown eyes watching him from under her black fringe with an amused expression. The woman oozed sex appeal, but to date Volk had so far remained immune to her advances. The general didn't have time for her flirting.

He deliberately avoided catching so much as a glimpse of her toned thighs below the hem of her too short uniform skirt or her cleavage squeezed into a too small blouse with not enough buttons, "Well, thank you Major. Is ... the president available?"

Mudak looked slightly put out by his business like avoidance of her charms, "President Zakhvatchikov will ... see you now."

Volk nodded curtly and pushed through into the president's inner sanctum.

Vladimir Zakhvatchikov's biography stated that he was in his late sixties. Volk knew for a fact that he was seventy six, but he looked a decade younger. As the general entered, he looked up from behind his massive oaken desk, currently littered with colour 10 x 8s of reconnaissance photos. Dark eyes sparked with intelligence under a shock of white hair, but otherwise Zakhvatchikov had a thoroughly unremarkable face, "General. Thank you for coming."

Volk snapped off a salute, "Sir."

"At ease general. Help yourself to a drink," the president slumped back in his almost throne-like office chair and pinched the bridge of his nose. Instead of a smart dress uniform with medal ribbons like Volk had donned for their meeting, Zakhvatchikov looked comfortable in a t-shirt and baggy cargo pants.

"No thankyou sir," Volk replied. He noticed the king sized bed in one corner of the president's sumptuous quarters hadn't been made, the duvet spilled carelessly onto the red carpeted deck. A blue satin bra had been left coiled around a bedpost. Mudak's? Or some other junior officer who'd caught Zakhvatchikov's eye. Male or female the president had no preference when it came to bed partners.

"I'm looking back at the reconnaissance photos," Zakhvatchikov continued, "who would have thought the resistance were there in Birmingham all this time?"

"That's purely conjecture sir. We're just assuming they were."

Zakhvatchikov shook his head slowly, "Not any more though eh? I don't suppose we'll ever know if my daughter was among the dead."

"No sir."

"Vapourised eh? Or my granddaughter for that matter. What was her name again?"

"Tamsin sir," Volk supplied. How could the man not even remember his granddaughter's name?

"Ah yes, Tamsin. Regrettable. Such a waste."

Three framed photos stood on Zakhvatchikov's desk. Tamsin, Merida, and a third beautiful redhead Volk assumed to be his dead wife Sorrel Watchcroft. Behind the president a huge oil painting of Bristol's Clifton Suspension Bridge filled much of the wall.

"I suppose you're wondering why I asked you here?"

"I assumed to discuss the way ahead now the resistance is no longer a concern."

"Two things. One ... apparently the papers the resistance stole from the archive in Lincoln related to the Soteria satellite network. You're familiar with it yes?"

"Yes sir."

"After much investigation we're still not certain what the papers were exactly. But we have the locations of the project's surviving bunkers, and I'd like each site guarded day and night from now on."

"I'll see to it sir. But don't the bunkers have to be opened by one of Soteria's key personnel? Retina and fingerprint scans, voiceprint identification? The bunker locations are useless to anyone else."

"They are. Nearly all the key personnel were accounted for. But I'm thinking there's a small chance the resistance have found a way of bypassing the security ..."

"Good thinking sir."

"Onto my second problem. You'll be aware that the missile coordinates were based on intel from the North Korean's commander in chief himself? I didn't expect the man to be so 'hands on.' But Kim Napp Gylan tracked the resistance most of the way back to their hidey hole single handed. He's currently hunting down any ... survivors. Now the Tamsin girl is dead we have an extremely pissed off North Korean leader on our hands. While he's out in the field doing what he does, I'd like him put under surveillance. They're our allies to be fair ... but, if Kim Napp Gylan does anything that suggests his heart isn't entirely with our alliance, I want him eliminated. Understood?"

"Yes sir."

Zakhvatchikov looked Volk in the eye, "Inconspicuously. Make it appear it was Reivers or Reekies. Because otherwise, we will in all likelihood ... have a war on our hands General. So, you ... were not here. This meeting did not take place."

CHAPTER SIX: AYR

Heysham on the coast of Lancashire, 2063.

PART ONE: GET THIS FUCKING BOAT MOVING!

"Argh!" Matthews screamed as a harpoon suddenly pinned his upper leg to the trawler's wheelhouse. Tamsin quickly ushered Cooper and her parents inside as she crouched to return fire. The Kalashnikov kicked violently as she unleashed a short burst.

TAKATAKATAK!

If she knew Reivers, Matthews would almost certainly lose the leg through infection. She guessed it would be a kindness to spare him the suffering but he'd have to wait until they were underway, "Conserve your ammunition! Make every shot count!"

Through the darkness and driving rain, Tamsin spotted at least fifty more Reivers gathering on the harbour's South Quay alongside. Their makeshift weapons and armour made from rubber tyres and farming machinery distorting their silhouettes into monsters. Arrows twanged off the metal bulkhead around her as she ducked instinctively. She spotted Robson's corpse on the quay disappear under a scrum of the bloodthirsty savages, desperate to get their hands on any weapons he might be carrying. Of Giddings there was already no sign.

"HOW'S IT GOING IN THERE?" she yelled. Through the grimy wheelhouse windows Leonid gave her a half hearted thumbs up. They'd worked on the boat for hours without any disturbance, until Robson and Giddings had decided to ransack a nearby chandlers and awoke the Reivers sleeping inside.

Then all hell had broken loose. It was as if every Reiver in the Morecambe and Heysham area were descending on the harbour in order to prevent their escape.

TAKATAKATAK!

"On your right!" McTavish's barked warning shout came almost too late. Tamsin raised her Kalashnikov, meeting the downward sweep of a Reiver axe with a metallic clang. A muscled brute of a man had leapt onto the trawler's stern and crept unnoticed to within striking distance.

The Reiver grinned at her with filed teeth in a tattooed bald head. Tamsin's fingers tingled from the jarring impact. She tensed, as if to slam the stock of her weapon into her opponent's face, then dropped to the deck and swept his legs out from under him with a savage kick instead.

"Bitch!" the Reiver spat as he landed on his back. Before he could rise to his feet, Tamsin swung her weapon down at his throat. Then as he gurgled his dying breath from a crushed trachea she rolled him over the crumbling gunwhale into the oily water.

As she nodded her thanks to McTavish, the tartan clad Reekie dispatched another Reiver with a crossbow bolt through the neck and with his cleaver swung at another - this time a scrawny woman, who'd leapt screeching across onto their boat.

Tamsin aimed her AK at the advancing horde. Perhaps a few more casualties in quick succession would make them think twice ...

CLICK!

"Fuck!" Jammed. The Reiver's axe had hit harder than she'd thought. Tamsin ejected the valuable half full magazine onto the deck and hurled the damaged gun at the enemy. Then as more bullets and arrows plinked and clanged off the bulkhead around her she snatched up the dead Reiver's axe and threw that too. It thunked satisfyingly into the tattooed bare chest of a bronzed ogre-like individual.

"LEONID! GET THIS FUCKING BOAT MOVING! WE CAN'T HOLD THEM OFF MUCH LONGER!" she snatched up her bow and nocked an arrow as finally a cloud of oily black smoke belched from the trawler's funnel.

"Yes!" Tamsin murmured as she loosed the arrow into the ravening horde and drew another.

"Get the bow line!" Cooper hollered from the wheelhouse.

Bowline? Shit. The fishing boat was still tied to the quay.

"McTavish! Keep them off my back!" Tamsin yelled. Yet another Reiver landed with a thud on the peeling deck beside her, snarling as he raised a vicious looking scythe.

She whacked him hard across the head with her bow, sending him sprawling into the harbour, then scuttled on to the slippery foredeck as another thrown axe shattered one of the wheelhouse windows above her.

On the roof above her, the Reekie scout was out of crossbow bolts. Swearing under his breath, he slung an ageing police issue SG550 from his back and began firing measured bursts into the closest ranks of Reivers.

TAKATAKATAK!

Reivers jerked as McTavish's shots found their mark. Tamsin grabbed the loop of oily frayed rope securing their boat like a noose to the quayside and hoisted it over the side, "LEONID! GO!"

With a thrum of power, the deck lurched beneath her feet as the boat accelerated out into the middle of Heysham's harbour, quickly moving out of range of the Reiver's weapons. A final parting shot of a javelin and harpoon clanged off the beam trawler's stern as it rounded the half sunken wreck of an Isle of Man ferry. On the wheelhouse roof McTavish lifted his filthy threadbare kilt and waggled his bare arse at the Reivers left cursing back on the quayside ...

. . .

It had been six months since Novaya Nadezhda and the resistance movement had been wiped out by a North Korean nuclear missile. Their pitifully small band of survivors had been on the run since. 'King' Ross and 'Queen' Merida - the senior members of the resistance council. Tamsin, their daughter and her second in command, the Coalition traitor Leonid Denisovich. The Reekie scout McTavish and their explosives expert Cooper. And the four man bodyguard who'd sworn to keep the resistance leaders safe, and now except for Matthews, all lay dead at the hands of the Reivers.

"C-can't you pull it out?" Matthews whimpered. The harpoon had passed straight through the thigh muscle but miraculously missed any major blood vessels. Nevertheless blood soaked his trouser leg and pooled on the deck.

Ross Beech glanced at his daughter. They'd left Heysham behind and were heading north along Lancashire's devastated coast as in the east the leaden sky brightened almost imperceptibly towards first light.

Tamsin knew what the look meant. Her father had lost his right arm after sustaining a fairly minor gunshot wound from a Reiver attack. The cannibalistic savages that had swept south from the lowlands of Scotland habitually coated their weapons and ammunition in shit to deliberately increase the chance of infection. Carrying and caring for wounded would be guaranteed to slow an enemy down and in a world where antibiotics were no longer readily available, even a minor wound could kill.

"I'm so sorry," said Tamsin, "I don't think there's anything we can do."

Matthews paled, "Please. Not like this."

McTavish shouldered his way past Ross, gripping a huge hunting knife, "I'll do it."

"NO!" shouted Tamsin, "he deserves better than just having his fucking throat cut," she drew the Grach handgun that had been with her since Scarborough.

"McTavish is right Tamz," her father told her solemnly, "we can't spare the ammunition."

She'd retrieved the magazine ejected from her Kalashnikov. What she assumed to be around fifteen rounds left had turned out to be only nine. One more encounter with Reivers and they'd be fighting hand to hand.

Matthews grabbed her shoulder, his eyes pleading, "Please Miss Beech. Just take the harpoon out and I ..."

BLAM!

The soldier's body fell awkwardly sideways, still pinned to the wheelhouse door, with a bullet hole through his head. Leonid lowered his handgun, "Pokoysya s mirom moy tovarishch."

Tamsin was speechless.

"It was necessary Tamsin," Leonid reholstered his weapon, "he was going to die anyway. See to your parents and I'll dispose of the body."

Tamsin punched the bulkhead, "WHAT'S HAPPENING TO US? Six months ago we were trying to put a stop to this kind of thing. Now we're starving, we're scrabbling around after every last bullet and we're shooting our fucking wounded. We're turning more and more into the enemy every day Leo."

"Tamz ..." Ross warned.

Tamsin ignored him, glaring at both Leonid and McTavish, "And you! You're a fucking animal! You were going to slit his throat like a pig's. If we've stooped to this level we might as well quit now. Give ourselves up to Volk and my grandfather and tell them they've fucking won!"

McTavish bared his teeth in warning, but said nothing. Leonid grabbed her by the shoulders, "I showed mercy! Which is something the Coalition never does. Shooting our comrade ... a man we've fought next to for the last six months proves that we are better Tamsin. His name was Jim. He had a family in Novaya Nadezhda. So believe me ... this, is the most merciful thing I could have done!"

He turned and stormed back into the wheelhouse.

Tamsin slowly counted to ten then stamped her foot, "Shit!"

"You okay now?" asked Ross.

"No. Because he's right. McTavish ... I-I'm sorry. That was unfair. You're not an animal. You're more of a man than most of the spineless thugs following President Zakhvatchikov. Now ... go get some rest and I'll deal with Matthews' ... Jim's, body."

Ross touched her sleeve, "No Tamz, we'll ALL deal with Jim's body."

. . .

Six months of running. Staying just one step ahead of General Volk, Kim Napp Gylan and the Coalition. Never staying in the same place for longer than a day or two. They'd suffered their first fatality in Carlisle when they thought they'd managed to get through Reiver occupied Cumbria unscathed. One moment Griffin had been laughing away at their campfire, the next he'd fallen head first into the flames with an axe in his spine.

That had been their first encounter with Reivers. They'd escaped by the skin of their teeth after a running battle through the rubble choked streets of the ancient town. And it was then they'd realised they were never going to be able to travel up through Scotland on foot.

They'd headed west towards Cumbria's coast, following the moss covered cairns of human skulls. Surely somewhere there had to be a seaworthy boat that had survived the passage of time. If Tamsin's Aunt Jessamy had found one in Cornwall years before, then surely the nine of them could.

Maryport had been destroyed by meteorite strikes, the stone harbour walls blasted apart like a Lego model by a hand grenade. Further south along the coast, Workington and Whitehaven turned out to be Reiver strongholds - engaged in a power struggle between two warring clans. Starving and desperately outgunned, they'd moved quickly on. A massive earthquake near Ulverston at some point in the last thirty odd years had rendered Barrow In Furness and its peninsula an island.

So it wasn't until Heysham, just a few miles outside Lancaster that they'd finally discovered what they'd been looking for. A beam trawler that appeared to be ready for the breaker's yard.

It had been used recently but had been poorly maintained. Leonid had immediately scrambled below decks and announced that the engine could possibly be repaired to its former glory. 'Un-fucked' as he'd put it. Enough diesel was gathered to get them at least a couple of hundred miles before they'd need to make landfall again. But it was then Robson and Giddings had made their last fateful mistake ...

. . .

"How is she?" Merida asked Ross as he walked back into the wheelhouse.

"Strung out," he grunted, "like the rest of us. None of us have eaten for a few days. We've not had time to mourn Novaya Nadezhda. We've not had time to take stock and decide what to do next Meri. It's all been about running and hiding and ... just trying to fucking stay alive."

He slumped down next to her on a wide bench along the rear wall. Cooper had the controls. Steering the trawler roughly north west but keeping the coastline just in view. Without navigational aids it would be all too easy to become utterly lost, "Where's Leonid?"

"Engine room. We're lucky his Spetsnaz training covered marine engines as well as shooting people in the head. We could have done with your sister here to navigate though."

"Who, Jess?"

"How many sisters do you have?"

"Jess then. I wish I knew what the fuck happened to her. She sailed off with Hamnavoe and Pheebs and that was it."

"But they succeeded. They stopped Aubrey."

"I assume so. The ten o'clock news isn't as reliable at reporting as it once was."

They both looked up as Tamsin entered and marched angrily past them towards the engine room without so much as a sideways glance.