Flash Flood

Chapter Twenty-nine

‘One of our submarines is on red alert because it has missed its routine all-clear signal. We are dealing with the situation — there’s a Nimrod jet on its way out there — but we thought you needed to be informed.’

The Chief Commissioner and General Chambers watched the faces on the screen digest the news. They had called a meeting of all the senior personnel in the bunker. Civil servants from the Ministry of Defence were crowded into the briefing room, along with Sidney Cadogan and Clive Brooks from the Department of the Environment. The Foreign Secretary was there, and that noisy woman Bel Kelland was still there too.

Madeleine Harwood was the first to speak. She was furious. This had been the worst day of her life as a politician, ever. First she’d had to authorize the shutting down of Rebro, then give the go-ahead to the military to use whatever force necessary — including firearms — to deal with looters, and now it looked like she was having to deal with a potentially very serious international incident. As Foreign Secretary, however, this was clearly within her portfolio and she felt on firmer ground responding. ‘It’s ridiculous that in this day and age this sort of thing can happen,’ she snapped. ‘We have safeguards and protocols.’

General Chambers had expected something like this. That was why he and the Chief had set up their end of the link in a private office, away from the emergency control room.

‘We do have protocols, ma’am,’ he replied. ‘They were set by Whitehall.’

Madeleine Harwood rounded on a woman sitting next to her with blue-rimmed glasses and a severe suit. ‘I want an internal inquiry.’

‘So do I,’ snapped the woman. ‘But until it makes its report, I don’t think you should be pointing the finger of blame.’

The General tried to bring the meeting back to the subject in hand. They could bicker all they wanted once he’d said what he needed to say, but if they did it now they were wasting precious satellite time.

The Chief Commissioner sat behind him, his arms folded, his head down. This meeting wasn’t his territory; he was just an impartial observer.

‘The situation is a cause for concern,’ said General Chambers, ‘but as long as the submarine follows its standing orders, it will get the message to stand down.’

Bel had been listening, her sharp chin resting on a folded arm. Now she sat up. ‘So if one transistor fails somewhere — in the satellite or in the sub or at your end — we’ve got an international crisis. That’s great.’

‘Dr Kelland,’ said the woman in the severe suit, ‘there are a million failsafes in our systems. And I’d like to remind you this is classified information and—’

Bel shook her head, her pale blue eyes narrowed as she interrupted her. ‘Don’t you get it? One day it will fail. This flood has caused a million tiny bits of chaos today. Only one of them has to get out of control and who knows what might happen?’

General Chambers stood up and cut the video link. The screen went blank. ‘We’ve done our bit. I think we can just leave them to it,’ he told the Chief Commissioner.

Dorek took the Puma down low. Meena, resting her head against the window, saw fields rush up towards her, then a small town, its buildings and streets completely dark. Traffic crept along its roads like ants. Dorek took them in a quick circle, the Puma tilting at forty-five degrees, then rose nearly vertically.

Meena held onto her stomach. ‘Dorek, do we have to do this? You’re flying like a demented bee.’

‘It’s a search pattern,’ he told her.

Meena leaned her head against the window again. Headphones snaked out from under her green helmet. Her mobile had a radio and she had found a programme that wasn’t sending out emergency broadcasts. It was a phone-in programme in French, which she spoke fluently. It made peculiar listening.

The host was cajoling listeners to call in with their views on the topic of the day — which was the disaster in London. It seemed like the French public were letting their imaginations run riot.

‘What will happen to the stock market? New York and Tokyo won’t have been able to do anything — the world economy will collapse. We should all be very worried about our pensions.’

‘The stock market will be moved out of London to Paris,’ said another caller confidently.

Phil’s voice on the headset inside the helmet drowned out the French scaremongering for a moment. ‘Dorek, what’s that down there? Circle around that traffic jam at eleven o’clock.’

Dorek nudged the stick and the Puma dropped its nose and swooped down like a bird. Meena felt queasy as the ground loomed up fast again.

Down below, a group of cars was clustered around a junction, vying for who would move first. Some people had got out and were having an argument. Wherever you went, it seemed people always had time for road rage.

‘Just another set of broken lights,’ said Meena. Dorek swung upwards again, leaving them behind.

In her headphones, the French listeners were exploring another rich seam of woe. ‘London has squandered our artistic heritage. It built its art galleries and museums too close to the river. Thousands of Europe’s treasures will have been ruined. It’s like New Orleans. When that flooded, the water was raw sewage. So all those ruined paintings can’t be cleaned. They will have to be burned.’

Meena was starting to find this irritating. This French programme seemed to be enjoying these terrible events. ‘If this can happen to London,’ said a deep Gallic voice, ‘what about the Netherlands? The Netherlands should be thinking about evacuating its people. For some countries this could be the end of civilization as they know it.’

They sped away from the traffic jam and out over open fields. Then Meena saw barbed wire fences, green military vehicles and low buildings, with people in khaki uniforms moving between them. A military base. Parked on the asphalt at the front was a helicopter.

‘That looks like our chap,’ said Phil.

The helicopter’s wings were hanging down, at rest. A figure wearing khaki plus-fours was standing beside it, under a striped golf umbrella, chatting to a couple of soldiers.

Dorek circled the Puma around in a movement that nearly had Meena depositing her breakfast out of the window. He stopped and hovered.

The figure in plus-fours tilted the umbrella back and looked up. Meena recognized him immediately: it was the Prime Minister. Beside him, getting rather wet, was his security guard; a tall, thickset guy in a suit with a bulge like a holster under his arm.

The PM gave the Puma a cheery wave.

‘England is certainly finished,’ said the merry people of France in Meena’s headphones.

No we’re not, she thought, and pulled the cables out of her ears. She put her phone onto video mode. There was just enough battery for a few exclusive shots of the PM, safe and well and about to receive his first briefing on the rescue operation.