The One With Javier Bardem

I'll keep this brief, because I'm just back from training and I have to get in the shower before I congeal:

The One With Javier Bardem

We scampered through the corridors like rats in a maze. The whitewashed Moroccan walls reflected the blazing sun in so the dust we scuffed up hung in the air and sparkled. On the other side of the compound (Monastery? Old hotel? Ancient palace? Not sure) we could hear doors being kicked open and boots pounding the packed earth floors.  Maybe thirty officers by the amount of noise they were making. Against two men and four women, we were running for our lives.

Finally barrelling into one room without an external door, the girls darted over to check the windows and saw only a four storey drop to the azure waters and the red rocks below. The chase had gone on long enough, we formed up to take a stand and heard the thin wooden door being tested from the other side.

(Like this. Only no Dash. And no lycra. And in a whitewashed room)

We held our communal breath.

But the door didn't splinter and fly open. Instead the air started to crackle and the walls bulged. With the dull rumble of heavy stone the outer two walls and ceiling of the corner room exploded outward revealing two helicopters. One of which held the now crumbling remains of the walls and the other one of which fired two bolus/lasso type affairs at my father and I. The helicopter sped away and the coils of slack line were rapidly removed.

In a well-rehearsed instant we linked arms and shins with Anne-Marie, Hannah, Chels and Emily, before the line went taut and the interlocked ball of us was yanked out of the room and hung from a helicopter speeding away over the Mediterranean. We held fast for a couple of minutes before the aircraft pulled up suddenly and cut the line, launching us in a parabolic ark toward a gaping hole in the roof of a huge warehouse on the docks of the mainland.

From blazing sun into darkened warehouse takes your eyes by surprise, but it didn't matter: We were falling and completely unable to do anything about our landing point even if we could have seen it. As it happened, the landing point was a steep, padded slope and we tumbled, painfully but without injury, to a concrete floor.

Immediately reforming into a fighting unit, backs to backs in a defensive circle, we lashed out at the crowd of thirty or so fighting men advancing on us. Diving from assailant to assailant, barely touching the floor in between, we held our ground. Elbows connected effectively with jaws, knees with abdomens and groins. If you could spring off a chest and connect with another man's throat you did so.

But we all noticed at the same time. Applause. One slow, approving clap. A man in a light brown suit, seated on a cheap folding chair. We looked around, none of the family were down. The assailants had been holding back. This Javier Bardem Bond Villain Person had obviously set them the task of testing us, before he had his part to play. We'd never been in danger for our lives.

Until now...