A fear of dark water

Chapter Four

Kreysig recognised the fluttering in his chest as a rush of adrenalin and felt guilty about it. This was a catastrophe: buildings had been damaged, people had been injured, perhaps some had even lost their lives. Kreysig’s home city had been assaulted; violently, relentlessly, without mercy.

But as he stood there, surrounded by tumult and clamour, Lars Kreysig felt a thrill. This was what he had been made for.

The night was filled with the roar of heavy equipment and machines, of mobile generators, the piercing, insistent bleeping of reversing fire trucks and the relentless churning of the water pumps: man-made thunder competing against Nature’s tempest of wind and rain. Everything was glossed wet and sparkled under the arc lamps and the red, blue and orange flashing lights of the firetrucks, emergency vehicles and heavy caterpillar-tracked bulldozers. The worst of the storm had passed, and the ebb had begun, but a contemptuous Nature still wind-tugged at Kreysig’s yellow protective suit and angrily drummed pellets of rain on his hard hat.

Like the neck of some improbable nocturnal dinosaur, the massive arm of a Liebherr LTM 1130-5.2 lattice-boom truck swung overhead, heavy cable and chains swinging and clashing. A team of firemen fastened the chains around a tangle of wood and metal that had been swept up onto the wide expanse of flooded ground beside the Fischmarkt. The lattice boom hoisted the debris up and clear of the flood area, lowering it onto the back of a flatbed. A second, smaller crane lowered a section of armoured evacuation pipe into place and the same fire team rushed forward and snapped shut the camlock couplings to connect it to the rest of the pipe. As soon as the connection was made, Kreysig shouted into his radio and another two pumps came on line.

And still Kreysig felt the thrill of battle. This was Man against Nature. And he was the man.

Kreysig had known well in advance that the storm had been coming. It had wrought devastation across France and England; the North German Climate Bureau and the German Weather Service had tracked its progress. They had also tracked another cluster forming in the North Sea, one hundred and eighty kilometres south-west of Jutland. It was like two armies gathering before attacking at once, combining their strengths before the onslaught on the Netherlands, Denmark and Northern Germany. Kreysig had seen Hamburg devastated by flood before. The 1953 flood had been before he was born, and he had been a baby when the ’62 storm had hit and killed more than three hundred and left sixty thousand homeless in the city; but he remembered ’76 and had been a senior fire and rescue officer in 2007. Each time the water had hit higher, but each time Hamburg had been that little bit readier, that little bit more protected.

And this time, before the flood hit, millions of euros’ worth of flood barriers had paid for themselves in a single deployment: blocking and channelling the storm surge. But some flooding was inevitable, and they had known where to be ready, where the battle lines would be drawn, including here, at the Fischmarkt, where St Pauli met the city centre.

Tramberger, Kreysig’s deputy, came across to him and leaned his weather-beaten face in close, shouting to be heard above the combined clamour of storm and machine.

‘That’s all the electric submersibles and all the diesels on line. We’ve got an ebb and the water level is dropping. We’re down to plus three metres.’

Kreysig grinned and slapped his deputy on the shoulder. They were winning. He looked around at the teams he had deployed; all were still working full tilt: hard, muscle-tearing work against a far stronger opponent, but no one showed any sign of the fatigue that must, by now, be adding lead to every movement. It was a good team. A bloody good team. He had put it together himself, picking the best from the Hamburg Fire Service, from the Hamburg Harbour Police, from the Hamburg City and State Engineering Department.

He checked in with his other crews, further to the west on Klopstockstrasse and Konigstrasse. Same news. He checked his watch: it was nearly five a.m. They had been fighting the flood for twelve hours. Looking up at the still-dark sky, Kreysig saw the heavy clouds scud malevolently over the city. It was like watching a fleet of bombers pass overhead, laden with potential destruction. But these clouds, he knew, would wreak havoc elsewhere. Hamburg’s turn was over. For now.

It was then that he noticed one of the teams had stopped working. The firemen stood in a circle looking down at something on the newly exposed tarmac of Elbestrasse. The team leader looked across to Kreysig and Tramberger and beckoned, urgently, for them to come over.

Something, Kreysig could tell, was wrong.