A tagline reported the plight of the Newcastle football team, trapped in Mumbai after losing the Cup Final. And the news flicked out as Benj cycled through the channels. At last he settled on a kids’ channel, showing a gory cartoon.
Lily had just got the rice boiled when the power failed again. Both the kids groaned in frustration as the TV died. Lily hastily poured the last of the boiling water into another thermos, and shoveled in instant coffee after it.
21
Early that afternoon Piers Michaelmas came calling for Lily. He knocked on the door, standing there in battle dress. He refused a coffee from the thermoses.
He was here, he said, to take her on a boat ride into the heart of London. “Sorry I couldn’t call. Blessed phones, you know what it’s like. Here.” He handed her a mil-issue satellite phone. “For future contingencies.”
“So what’s this trip about?”
“Call it old times’ sake.”
So she lodged the kids with a neighbor, and put on her blue AxysCorp coverall. They walked briskly down the street, past the bowser, to the shoreline where the road was submerged. Here a Marine waited for them in an inflatable orange boat tied up to a lamp post. The Marine helped Lily and Michaelmas into the boat, and made her put on a life jacket and a light face mask.
Then he pushed the boat away and started a small motor, and the boat drilled straight down the line of the drowned street toward the old riverbank. Lily found the face mask confining, it was like a surgeon’s theater mask, but given the rising stink of the river and the unidentifiable lumps that floated in the water, she was glad of it.
She watched the Marine check his position on a GPS sleeve patch. He had a kind of miniaturized sounder set up in the boat at his side, and he peered suspiciously at every shadow in the water as they passed. “Tricky navigation,” she said.
“It is that, miss,” he said ruefully. He was grizzled, his skin leathery, though he looked no older than forty. His accent was robust Scottish.
“Don’t be modest,” Piers said. “Harry’s always been a bit of a sailor, is what I hear.”
“Aye, that’s true. I grew up on Skye, you know. But this is different. After all, nobody’s sailed down the Fulham Road before, that I know of. It’s full of obstacles, traffic cones and cars and rubbish. I can’t see a thing in this murk, so thank Jim for this sounding stuff.” The safest course, it seemed, was to make your way down the center of the submerged roads, or better yet to seek out the old river itself, where you could be reasonably sure of clear water beneath your keel.
They reached the Thames a little way upstream from Putney Bridge. There was low clearance under the bridge’s arches, enough for this dinghy but not for anything much more substantial. Indeed one expensive-looking cabin cruiser was stuck fast. The current was quite strong, the murky water turbulent and smelling faintly of rot and sewage. Lily saw a cloud of mosquitoes, a new arrival in a transformed city.
From the river the old banks were quite invisible. The river had become broad, the flooding spreading as much as a kilometer inland. Houses, schools, churches, industrial developments all poked out of the muddy water, isthmuses of brick and concrete and steel and glass. An elevated section of road soared, a bridge going nowhere, cars stranded motionless on their backs. The remaining population clung to bits of higher ground, islands rising out of the water. Lily saw kids waving from one, and a helicopter perched in a school playing field on another. The Thames valley was turning into an archipelago.
Piers showed her a sketch map based on satellite imagery of the latest version of the river’s course. “You can see the floodwaters have gathered in these ‘embayments.’ Independent hydrological units, I’m being trained to call them.” The embayments were lagoons, sudden, spectacular features in themselves, some kilometers long, bearing the names of the areas they covered: Hammersmith, Westminster, Bermondsey, Isle of Dogs, Greenwich. “They’re virtually cut off from each other by necks of high land, though there are tunnels and sewers and so forth that connect them. The good news is that flooding in one area doesn’t necessarily imply flooding elsewhere. The bad news is you have to pump them all dry, they won’t drain naturally . . .”
Under Wandsworth Bridge, they saw a copper restraining a bunch of youths from going for a swim. The Marine tutted and shook his head. “Soon as the sun’s out people want to go paddling, even with the floating corpses and the turds and that.”
“Civilians, eh, Harry?” Piers said. “But you can’t blame them. A lot of people are playing around. You know, you can take a motorboat ride into Westminster Hall. I’m told that’s been flooding since the thirteenth century. Or a gondola trip around Soho. And in the City the whizz-kid types are water-skiing around the skyscrapers.”
Lily studied him. “You seem very sanguine, Piers. I don’t want to pick at old wounds, but you weren’t a particularly relaxed character back in Barcelona.”
He stiffened a bit, but smiled. “Well, so the shrinks keep telling me whenever they get their hands on me. But it’s just so good to be out, isn’t it? That’s what’s starting to sink in, I think. Even though we’ve been plunged into crisis the moment we stepped out of the wretched AxysCorp chopper.”
She knew he was divorced, without children, and had no family to visit, no real home to go back to. Before his abduction he had been a senior figure in military and diplomatic circles; that was why he had been attempting his peace-brokering in Spain in the first place. Now, after his strange, brave, demon-exorcising adventure on the Isle of Dogs, which he had told her all about, he seemed ready to engage with his own world again, and she was glad to see him functioning.
“As regards the flooding,” he said now, “we’re moving into a different phase. The long term. Tough decisions have to be made, and followed through. And that’s what I’m beginning to wrap my puny brain around. Rather therapeutic, I’m finding it.”
As they talked they passed beneath more of the bridges of London. As they neared the Chelsea Bridge she could already see the towers of Battersea Power Station looming defiantly above the water.
She asked, “What tough decisions?”
He glanced around, as if they might be overheard. “The worst is yet to come, believe it or not. The services are working flat out to recover the power stations, and get the water-treatment works running again, and so on. We’re continuing with the immediate recovery operations—there are twenty hospitals in the flooded regions to be evacuated, for example. We’ve also got far too many temporary holding centers not yet cleared, old folk and mums and babies who’ve been stuck in schools and church halls for weeks.
“But a few more days of these conditions and you’re looking at epidemics. Typhoid, cholera. The water’s full of toxins from the industrial areas too. That’s not to mention the deaths we’re already seeing through starvation and thirst. All this even if the flooding doesn’t recur.”
That last sentence, with its if, chilled her.
“We want to do everything we can to avoid a full-scale evacuation of London. That really is a last resort. We’re preparing for it, of course. We’re bringing in assault craft and inflatable boats, battlefield ambulances and field hospital units, heavy gear from across the country. It’s like another D-Day! Away from the city we’re assembling new caravan parks and tent cities on the high ground, the Chilterns and the South Downs and so forth. We’re even looking as far north as Birmingham. We’re using military police to keep open the routes out of London.
“But the thought of doing it for real, of moving millions, is an horrific one. I mean we have no way of shifting most of them save just walking them out. Not to mention the fact that the citizens in the reception areas aren’t altogether happy about the idea of accommodating so many drowned-out Londoners. I suspect a lot of pie-eating flat-cap types in the north are rather enjoying seeing London dished!
“But the fact is we have a capital city whose infrastructure is ruined—water, transport, communications, power. Millions homeless. Insurance
claims alone could bring the financial sector down. The international banks and so forth have already relocated to their disaster recovery centers—our friend Lammockson has no doubt made plenty of money out of that—but what’s to induce them to come back? It will take London years to recover from this, if ever. And so there are limits to what the country can afford . . .”
“But we must try,” Lily said. “I think you’re looking forward to the challenge, actually, Piers, for all you’re a doom merchant.”
“Well, perhaps. I admit it is nice to get up in the morning with something to do. I think I’m a realist, however. Things won’t be as they were before. But we will recover, one way or another, if the waters go down.”
And she noted that word again. If.
They sailed under Lambeth and Westminster bridges. The Palace of Westminster, lapped by water, was lit from within, a rump of the government machine defiantly functioning inside its walls.
Harry nosed the craft cautiously toward the shore, away from the course of the river, just before Hungerford Bridge. “I’m aiming for the centerline of Northumberland Avenue,” he murmured, concentrating, watching his sensors and the lamp posts and building fronts that protruded from the water around him. “Have to be careful not to snag . . .”
Trafalgar Square came into sight. Lily saw that a Chinook sat proudly before the steps of the National Gallery.
Harry killed the engine, and jumped out into water that rose up to the crotch of his waders. He tied up to a lamp post before the ruined shopping parade on the south side of the square, and helped Piers and Lily down into the water. Then he went back to wait with the boat.
They waded the few meters to the square itself. The water was grimy here, even worse than upstream in Fulham, littered with floating garbage, splitting bin bags, the corpses of pigeons. In the square itself the water was only centimeters deep, but they had to pass through a military cordon to get to it. Aside from more squaddies around the square’s perimeter, and what looked like gallery staff coming and going laden with packages, the square was empty. Lily looked back the way they had come, down Northumberland Avenue. The buildings of London stood proud on water that stretched to the horizon, flat and calm and gleaming in the sun.
“I can’t help thinking of those elders from Tuvalu,” Piers said. “You remember, at Lammockson’s party.”
“What about them?”
“I wonder if they’re gloating.”
“Hm. So why the Chinook? Why the perimeter?”
“Can’t you tell? They’re stripping the National Gallery. The water didn’t quite breach the steps, but it did make a mess of some of the cellars. We’ve got squaddies helping the staff move their treasures to upper stories, or shipping them out altogether to the higher ground. I just thought you’d like to see what’s a pretty unusual sight—a Chinook at the feet of Nelson.”
“You’re showing off, is what it is, Piers.”
Gary Boyle came strolling up, grinning. Lily hadn’t seen him since Lammockson’s party on the afternoon of the flood. And here came Helen Gray, walking arm in arm with an older man Lily didn’t recognize. Lily felt inordinately glad to see them all, islands of familiarity in a world full of strangeness. They embraced each other.
Piers said, “We did promise to keep in touch, back in Barcelona. I thought we should get together again before the winds of fortune scatter us. Oh—lest I forget.” He handed the others mil-spec radio phones of the type he’d given Lily.
Helen introduced her companion. He turned out to be with the Foreign Office; he was called Michael Thurley. “Mike was assigned to help me sort out the issues around baby Grace. And no,” she said with a forced smile, “I haven’t got her back yet. Don’t even know where she is.”
Gary said grimly, “I can guess what your future plans are, then.”
“Well, I don’t have a choice, do I?”
Thurley said, “And I’m intending to help her.” He said he had got a kind of sabbatical leave to travel with Helen full time. Their first destination was to be Saudi Arabia, home of the baby’s father. “It’s become something of a cause for me, I’m afraid. We of the FO didn’t achieve a great deal for Helen—and she did pretty much save my life on the day of the flood.”
He sounded tweedy, self-mocking in a very English way that reminded Lily of Piers. His mannerisms seemed exaggerated, and he linked arms with Helen like an older brother. Maybe he was gay. Lily sensed a strength in him, under the public-school bullshit. She did wonder if there was something else he was really after, if he was glomming onto Helen to serve some need of his own. But the flood had been a great trauma for a lot of people. Maybe Michael was simply as he said he was, his motives uncomplicated.
Gary said, “So what about you, Lily? You going to stay with your sister?”
Since coming out of the hole in Barcelona she’d been living from day to day, without thinking much further. Her USAF pay was coming in for now; she supposed she’d be pulled back into the fold eventually. But ahead of that she’d made no plans. “I haven’t decided.”
Gary said immediately, “Then come with me.”
That took her aback. “Where?”
“Iceland.”
“Say what?”
He told her of his encounter with an old friend at the Barrier, a ragged-sounding American oceanographer called Thandie Jones.
“There’s more to what’s going on than they’re releasing to the public.” He waved south over the square, at the placid water. “This wasn’t a freak event, a one-off storm. Thandie thinks there’s a global sea-level rise going on. And that’s why there’s been flooding all over the country, all over the damn world—”
Piers said, “Now hold on. Much of the flooding has come from flash flooding, freak rainstorms—”
“Caused,” Gary said, “by an exceptional loading of water vapor into the atmosphere, driven in turn by heat energy in the rising ocean. The science, the modeling is there, Piers. I grant you it’s patchy, and there’s no consensus. But Thandie thinks her data is good, and she’s going out to collect more. We’re talking about sea-bottom exploration, Lil. How cool is that? Thandie’s reporting this up through her own hierarchy, to the National Science Foundation in the US. But no government, no intergovernmental agency, will back her—in particular the IPCC, the climate change panel—because, she says, if they did it would be a tacit admission that there’s a real problem.”
Piers snorted. “Well, she would say that, wouldn’t she? As opposed to the possibility that her ‘science’ is a whole lot of nonsense.”
Gary said, “Well, now she’s got funding—thanks to me.”
Helen saw it. “Nathan Lammockson. She’s tapped him up.”
Gary grinned. “Old Nathan likes to splash the cash where it will do some good, especially if it’s visible. What could be more visible than saving the world? Anyhow this new program of exploration is being run out of Iceland, and that’s where I’m going. And I want you with me, Lily. I don’t know what we’re going to face out there. I’d like to have somebody with me I could trust.”
She smiled. “And I’m the best you could come up with?”
“You’ll do,” he said earnestly. “And besides you’ll help keep Nathan on board.”
Helen was frowning. She pointed to the south. “Isn’t that water level a little higher than it was before? That bin over there is almost submerged now—the shop fronts—I’m sure it wasn’t like that before.”
Harry the Marine was waving from the boat, in water that was waist deep.
“My God, you’re right,” Piers said. “We have to go. That’s that, then.”
For one last moment they stood together, the four hostages, Thurley. Helen said wistfully, “Don’t forget me. Or Grace.”
“We won’t,” Lily promised.
“Come on, Lily,” Piers snapped, “let’s get you home.” He grabbed her arm and hurried her down the steps, splashing in ever-deepening water toward the boat.
By the time they g
ot back to Fulham the river had already pushed out dramatically, a small rise in level translating to a major wash inland over the shallow streets. This time there was no storm, nothing but a clear blue sky. Without apparent cause, the water just rose.
From the boat Lily hurried toward Amanda’s home. She glimpsed a police van splashing up the Fulham Road, heard an amplified voice ordering an evacuation. Residents were piling stuff in the street, carrycots and water bottles, suitcases, bundles of gear wrapped in blankets. Others, evidently intent on staying put even now, were feverishly sandbagging their drives and doors. The bowser was standing in a pool. Residents were queuing even so, in rubber boots and waterproof trousers, the Yuppies and Single Dad; water still poured from the brass tap. But there would be no more deliveries here, Lily saw.
Amanda’s front door was open. Lily hurried in. Filthy water poured down the stairs, black and reeking. Lily saw the two kids sitting before the TV, which was, by some miracle, working, the power still on. The kids looked subdued, unwilling to move.
Amanda came stamping down in her rubber boots, carrying rucksacks and clothes. She still wore her work suit. “Lily, thank God you’re back. Can you give me a hand with this lot? It’s started pouring out of the toilet again like last time. You’re supposed to drop a sandbag down there, but that didn’t work last time either. Well, this is it, isn’t it?”
Lily grabbed bundles. “I heard them calling for evacuation.”
“It’s on the news.” Amanda glanced around at the filth on the stairs, the damp, moldy patches on the walls. “Just when you think it’s over, when you’ve had enough it starts up again.” She seemed more angry than stressed, grim rather than panicking. Lily wondered if she was in some way relieved that the worst was here at last. Amanda called to the kids, “You’d better get up there and sort out what you want, you two.”
But Benj said, “I don’t think we’ll be going anywhere, Mum.” He pointed at the TV screen. It was showing a live news broadcast, a helicopter view of cracked tarmac, fallen flyovers, crushed and burning cars.
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