Flood

14

Lily and Piers had to wait for a chopper to take them from Shoeburyness to Greenwich. The hydrometropole’s limited landing facilities were clogged by craft whisking parties off to their “disaster vacations.” This was a kind of insurance policy offered by Nathan’s AxysCorp, where in the event of a calamity like a flood you were just taken away to a luxury hotel, somewhere safe, to ride it out, and let somebody else deal with the mess. Lily was bemused to see how accustomed the world had become to disaster. Some of these fleeing plutocrats didn’t even pause in their drinking as they were escorted smoothly from party venue to vacation transport.

At last Lily and Piers got their chopper, and lifted. The wind was rising all the time, and even this pilot’s consummate skill couldn’t save the bird from shuddering as it rose, the hull groaning, the engine roaring as the rotors bit into the turbulent air.

The delay hadn’t been long, but enough that by the time they flew over greater London, heading west, the flooding was already extensive. The river had breached the flood defenses on both banks, and buildings and lamp posts and trees protruded from the water like toys in puddles. Evacuations continued frantically all along the line of the rising water, the roads crammed with chains of slow-moving cars, trucks, buses, fire engines and ambulances, their lights gleaming like jewels, and with a denser, porridgelike mass that had to be people fleeing on foot, too many of them and too far away to distinguish, human beings reduced to particles.

Piers looked down at the inundation, his gaze frank and intelligent, listening in to the police feeds. A situation like this should bring out the best in him, Lily thought, his training and instinct for command. But he was pale, and he had lost weight like the rest of the hostages. Their captivity was only six days past, and they all had finite reserves. But the world evidently wasn’t going to wait for their recovery.

When they passed over the Thames Barrier the pilot dipped to give them a view. The Barrier, a line that cut across the river, was overtopped all along its length, and a kind of waterfall thundered down on the upstream side, throwing up spray and churning up the river water.

“That,” Piers murmured, “is a sight to tell your grandchildren about. A once in a thousand years event, supposedly. Actually the Barrier is itself now the subject of a rescue operation. Chaps trapped in the control towers, and in some kind of connecting tunnel under the river. The city’s defenders now need defending themselves. Well.” He turned away.

The chopper dipped and surged onward again, heading steadily west.

At last they swept over Greenwich. The pilot stayed high, keeping out of the way of the rescue operations already underway.

Here the river described a fat S-shape in a great double meander, creating two peninsulas, one dangling from the north bank and the other from the south, from Lily’s vantage pressed up against each other like yin and yang twins. The fatter, pendulous peninsula on the left was the Isle of Dogs, a tongue of lowland incised by dock developments, some centuries old; to the north, at its neck, the huge new office developments around Canary Wharf sprawled, acres of glass glistening. The slimmer peninsular to the right, pushing up from the south, was Greenwich. Lily could clearly see at its tip the spiky dirty-gray disc that was the Dome-once the Millennium Dome, now called “The O2.” Somewhere down there were her sister and the kids.

All this was only a few kilometers west of the breached Barrier. And already the waters were breaking over the land to north and south, drowning wharves and jetties and flooding jammed roads, and choppers hovered over the landscape, angels of despair.

“Unbelievable, you know,” Piers Michaelmas said. “Thirty years ago, forty, hardly any of this was here. Just the docks, the old housing stock. Derelict, basically. Now look at it. The police are saying there are somewhere over half a million people down there right now, in the office blocks and the leisure developments. It’s a blister, a huge concentration of people.”

“All on the flood plain.”

“Hindsight is a marvelous thing.” He listened again. “I know you want to get to the Dome and find your sister, yes? But I’m being called to the Isle of Dogs, Millwall, a major evacuation there.”

“We’ll split up, then.”

“Yes.” He leaned forward. “Pilot, did you get that?”

The pilot nodded, distracted, listening to his own feed. “My computer’s asking for clearance. Having to talk to two different Silver Command stations… I can take you to Millwall first, sir. Put you down in Mudchute Park, they’ve given me clearance for that. Then I’ll hop over to Greenwich with Captain Brooke.”

“That’ll do,” Michaelmas said.

The chopper slid north over the river and dipped down toward the Isle of Dogs. Detail coalesced, housing, a park, streets already running with filthy water, and Lily made out the line of the DLR, the Docklands Light Railway, striding on its elevated track toward the north. A group of police and military trucks had been drawn up in the park, evidently some kind of field command post. The water lapped around the vehicles’ wheels.

The pilot set down gently on sodden grass. The door slid open, allowing in a buffeting wind and a spray of cold rain.

Piers pulled up his hood, grabbed an emergency pack, released his harness and clambered out of his bucket seat. He twisted back and grabbed Lily’s hand. “Good luck,” he yelled.

“You too. Now piss off and close the ruddy door.”

He grinned and stepped out. The door slid closed, and the chopper lifted immediately. Piers watched the bird rise, his hand sheltering his eyes from the rain.

Piers made his way straight to the field command center in the park.

His rank, and recognition by some of the officers, got him into a meeting in a briefing room full of laptops, TV screens and whiteboards, into the center of things. Here the local chief constable hosted a rolling conference with representatives of the ambulance and fire services, the local authority, the utilities, the Environment Agency, transport, health, and the media, a couple of local reporters. The British system was to have the police at the heart of the management of civil emergencies. Most of the attendees here had mobiles clamped to their heads. Piers knew the mobile networks had been co-opted for the emergency services’ use, a shutout that would be giving civilians problems by now, even if the power hadn’t failed to the phone masts.

Piers listened for a while. The centerpiece of the planning seemed to be the evacuation of the most flood-prone areas, which was in fact most of Millwall. With the roads already clogged, the plan was to get the public out using the Docklands Light Railway, north and to the mainland. It was only a few kilometers; nowhere in London was far from anywhere else, geographically. The DLR ran on an elevated rail, above the anticipated flooding, and even when the power went it could conceivably be used as a walkway.

Of course what would become of the refugees after that was anybody’s guess. City Airport was flooded. Traffic was clogged all over London, and there was a solid jam on the M25 rippling back from the flooding at the Dartford Crossing. And there were other problems. Aside from the pressure on the mobile networks, Docklands hosted some major internet service providers and international landline telephone exchanges; communications were fritzing all over the place as the area was flooded, building by building.

Piers knew about the wider disaster management strategy. The efforts of dozens of groups like this across London would be fed up to a “Gold Coordinating Group” chaired by a senior police officer, which would in turn report to the Cabinet’s crisis committee. And even beyond that, he was sure, given an emergency on such a scale there would be contacts among the international community. He had already seen Chinooks over the river, the Americans putting military assets into play from their bases in the UK, and the Europeans must be planning recovery and support packages. There was huge tension in the room, a clamor of voices, phones ringing constantly, heavy lines scrawled across maps and then scrawled again, as the group tried to handle the many facets of this multiple, unfolding disaster. Piers imagined being drawn into these frantic discussions, his advice sought, a new role defined, new responsibilities assigned. He was trained for command-level roles; in theory there was much he could contribute here.

But he felt oddly brittle, his head somehow full. He began to avoid eye contact, as if he could not bear to be engaged. He had an odd flashback to the cellars under Barcelona, the times the guards would maliciously whip away his towels or blindfolds and try to catch him with his eyes open, to break through to his soul.

He needed to get out of here, he realized suddenly. He slipped out and back into the storm, pulling his hood over his head, and walked off into the streets.

Car Park Four was on the far side of the square. All the car parks had been full when Amanda and the kids had arrived this morning, but now most of the cars had already gone or were packing the exits, their tail lights crowding red, leaving behind a surface of pale pink gravel slick with water.

Benj pointed to the left, toward the river side.“I think that’s our point over there.” Amanda saw a huddle of fifty or so adults and children, one of a number of such groups gathered under signposts all across the plain of car parks. Benj’s eyes were sharper than hers, and he was good at remembering instructions; she was sure he was right.

They hurried that way, through the rain, splashing through puddles. They had to make their way through barriers of blue railings, and she could hear the rain hammering down on the double roof of the Beck-ham football academy. They were nearly run over by a big four-by-four that came bearing down on them out of nowhere, screeching across the parking spaces, driven by a frightened-looking young woman with a tiny scrap of a toddler strapped into a car seat behind her.

Benj was alert, and he looked around curiously. For once the world was more interesting than his Angel. “Look at that boat, Mum. It looks awful high.” It was one of the fancy high-speed Thames Clippers, tied up at the spindly, modernistic Queen Elizabeth Pier. The boat was riding up in the water and heaving as waves passed. The river must be high, then.

They reached the group. A policewoman stood with them, hands behind her back, smiling, an image of calm competence. Looking around, Amanda saw more police scattered through the crowds, gathering groups together.

But she couldn’t see Kristie. Benj went off to try to find her. Amanda waited, hanging back from the group. Everybody else seemed calm, everyone but her. She felt embarrassed to have turned up in such a panic, without one of her kids, in such an incompetent mess.

Benj came hurrying back. His hair was plastered down by the rain. “Mum, she isn’t here.”

She couldn’t take it in. “What do you mean? Then where is she?”

“I don’t know,” he said, his voice small.

She stood there staring, almost angry at him for coming back with the wrong answer. Kristie had to be here. She glanced around at the calm policewoman speaking into her radio, the children subdued but not frightened, the dismal, soggy car park, the Dome with its crown of spiky pylons thrusting into the air. Racked by fear and inadequacy, she longed not to be here, to be safe in her office in Hammersmith, surrounded by her files and her laptop and with a phone that worked, safe in a world she knew and could handle. Not this rainy desolation.

The policewoman stood on a low wall and clapped her hands. “Can I have your attention?” The kids’ chatter fell silent. “I’ve had fresh instructions. Look, you can see how things are. The tube is out because it’s flooded. The buses are all full up, and have mostly gone anyhow. I’m afraid we’re going to have to walk out.” There was a groan, but the policewoman smiled brightly. “Don’t worry, this is the standard evacuation plan and it’s been rehearsed. It’s not far.” She pointed south. “We’ll go that way, following East Parkside, and then along the southern approach to the Blackwall Tunnel. It’s a flyover, so you’ll be safe from the flooding.” What flooding? “Now, the roads are already clogged up with cars, but we’ve kept the hard shoulder open and we’re looking to open up another lane too, so it should be easy enough. There’ll be lots of other people walking too. It’s only”-she hesitated, looking at the younger children-“let’s say half an hour to the stations, Westcombe Park or Charlton, and they’ll be laying on special trains to take you off.” Off where? Amanda wondered. How do we get home? “That’s all. If you’d like to form up into a column, I’ll follow at the rear…”

As the people gathered obediently into a crocodile, Amanda pushed her way through to the policewoman. “My daughter. Kristie Caistor. She’s got lost.”

“I’ll put a call out,” the policewoman said.“We’ve a contact system in place, Mrs. Caistor. I’m sure-”

“I’ll wait,” Amanda said desperately. “She might come here. She’s bound to be frightened.”

“It’s much better if you move on. We have to get the whole site cleared.”

Amanda snarled, “That’s what they’ve been saying to me since I was kicked out of that stupid arena by a fucking kid.”

The WPC blanched, wet, tense. She fingered the radio button at her lapel.

Benj plucked at Amanda’s sleeve, horribly embarrassed.“Mum, please.”

Somebody screamed, one of the kids. “My feet are wet!”

And suddenly Amanda was aware that her feet were colder, too, and her ankles, her shins. She glanced down. Water, cold and full of muck, was washing over her shoes. She looked to her left, toward the pier. Water gushed over the retaining wall, a steady stream of it, pouring out over the flat surface of the car park. For a heartbeat or two, the people just watched the water rising around their shins, pelted by the rain.

Then there was a surge, and a wave topped the wall and rushed down toward them. Children screamed, and parents broke and ran, dragging their kids away from the water. Amanda reached for Benj.

Then it was on them like a tide coming in, a wave of water that reached Amanda’s knees, and then another pulse came that soaked her to her waist and made her stagger.

The policewoman was yelling, “Go that way, the way I told you! Go on toward the flyover! Keep together!”

The party struggled in that direction. But the water continued to pour over the bank wall, spreading eagerly over the car park. The current was surprisingly strong for such shallow water, and it was difficult to walk through it. One little girl went under. The policewoman and her mother helped her up; she surfaced, coughing, soaked to the skin. And still the water poured over the wall.

Amanda tried to stay standing, staring wildly about. “Kristie. Kristie!”

“She’s safe!” It was Lily, running up out of nowhere, in a wetsuit and heavy orange coat, splashing toward her. And Kristie was with her, holding Lily’s hand, her pink backpack bright.

Amanda grabbed her daughter gratefully. Even Benj let Kristie bury her face in his coat.

Amanda said, “Lily, where the hell did you come from? — Never mind. Where did you find her?”

“She couldn’t get back to you, and she couldn’t make it here, so she went to a police missing-persons point. They’re all over the peninsula. Smart kid. They logged her in, I found her there, came for you-”

A fresh wave came over the wall, and they all jumped.

Lily grabbed Kristie’s hand. “Come on, we need to get out of here. The chopper’s waiting.”

“What chopper?”

“AxysCorp.”

Benj said, “What about everybody else?”

“We can’t take everybody,” Lily said grimly. “I’m sorry, Benj.”

Amanda asked, “Lily, how can all this be happening?”

“I don’t know,” Lily said. “For now I just want to get us out of here. Now come on. Hang onto me…”

Clinging to each other, they struggled through the increasingly powerful currents that swept across the car park, heading for the chopper.