Flash Flood

by Chris Ryan

  Down a side street Ben caught sight of a figure trudging slowly along, head bent against the rain. The man was walking away from him, but Ben’s heart leaped at the thought of company. Should he run to join him? This trek was so lonely. He had never had to fend for himself and make all these decisions before. He yearned to have someone to talk to, the reassurance of another human being. Someone to stop him imagining he heard screams in the wail of a car alarm.

  No, Ben told himself. I know where I’m going. Keep to the plan.

  As he walked on, he caught sight of himself in the window of a bookshop. He looked bedraggled, as if he’d been sleeping rough. The expensive Burberry mac on top of his sodden jeans was obviously stolen. No wonder no one wanted to stop for him; he looked a real vagabond.

  He glanced down a flooded street and saw a red dinghy with an outboard motor chugging slowly along between the buildings, at first-floor level. One of the boat’s three occupants was standing up, looking in through the windows. They were dressed for the weather in heavy-duty rubberized yellow sailing coats.

  They must be looking for people in trouble, thought Ben. At least some people were helping each other. It restored his faith in human nature.

  In a richly furnished house down one of the flooded streets, a middle-aged couple were carrying boxes up the stairs.

  ‘There’s a boat out there,’ said the woman, spotting the small dinghy chugging along outside the window. She came into the living room and put the box down on a black bin liner on the pale carpet. It contained their passports, building society books and share certificates from the safe downstairs. Another box was filled with the jewellery she had inherited from her grandmother – a diamond necklace and a string of pearls. They lay in satin-lined leather boxes on top of some other essentials – some bottles of water, a few croissants and the keys to the BMW in the garage – although the car was probably ruined: the garage was in the basement and the whole ground floor was underwater.

  Those boxes were all the couple had been able to salvage from the ground floor when the flood started.

  ‘Did you hear me?’ said the woman. ‘I said there’s a boat out there. People are getting out of London … Do you think we ought to?’

  Her husband was easing his wellington boots off, careful to keep them on a black bin liner so that he didn’t mark the carpet. ‘No, we should be all right here.’

  The woman noticed that one of the men outside was standing up in the boat. She waved at him and he waved back. The boat stopped beside the window to the stairwell, so she put down her box, crossed to the window and opened it to talk to them.

  Two of the men climbed in without waiting to be invited, muddy water dripping off their boots.

  The owners were a bit surprised, but then it all turned very strange indeed. For, shockingly, unbelievably, rather than helping them, one of the men pointed a stubby handgun at them.

  The woman felt the blood drain from her face.

  ‘Stay quiet and no one will get hurt,’ said the gunman. Rain dripped off his yellow coat onto the pale carpet.

  The other burglar pushed past them and went over to pick up the box on the sofa.

  ‘Hand over your valuables and no one gets hurt,’ said the gunman. He nudged the woman with the stubby end of the weapon and she whimpered.

  Reluctantly her husband stood back, letting them take the box. The burglar turned it upside down. The slim black jewellery boxes fell out on top of the passports and certificates. He picked up the jewellery and stashed it in his jacket pockets. He left the rest, and gestured to his partner.

  ‘That’s it. All done here.’

  ‘See?’ said the gunman. ‘Painless if you let us get on with it.’

  And the intruders climbed back out of the window and joined their partner in the boat.

  As they started up the engine, they could hear the woman sobbing.

  ‘Better get away from here,’ said the gunman. ‘She’s screaming the place down and the neighbours might hear.’

  The other man took the jewel cases out of his pockets and put them in a rucksack on the floor of the boat.

  The burglars had been at a boat show in Earl’s Court when the flood struck. As well as the small motorboat they’d got the yellow coats, some binoculars – and the flare pistol, which was proving extremely useful. Since then, they had visited so many people that afternoon, all of them rescuing their valuables from their safes; all of them sitting ducks for burglars.

  The gunman was now focusing the binoculars down the street. ‘I think our next stop should be that big house at the end of the road,’ he said. ‘I can see a lady waiting for us with a leather briefcase …’

  Chapter Fifteen

  Bel was not at Charing Cross, waiting for Ben.

  She wanted to be, but she was still stuck in Westminster – though at the present moment she wasn’t quite sure where in Westminster.

  The room was small – about five metres square. It contained a desk, a telephone and several chairs. It reminded Bel of a dentist’s waiting room, except she had never been in a waiting room that had blank concrete walls and no windows. The only thing to look at was the two sets of doors.

  One set led to a stairwell. That’s where they had come in. The other doors were massive and thick, with steel bars and rivets. They reminded Bel of the blast doors she had seen in the Tube.

  One minute she had been in a meeting room in the Cabinet Office, waiting for the Prime Minister of Canada to arrive and talking to Clive Brooks and Sidney Cadogan, his boss from the Department of the Environment.

  The next minute some alarms had gone off and a plainclothes policeman had come in and asked them to follow him.

  He had ushered them into a corridor full of security men – plainclothes policemen with handguns bulging under their jackets. They were searching the offices and evacuating any members of staff they found.

  Bel and the others were escorted to a door with a sign on it saying ‘NO ADMITTANCE’. The Foreign Secretary, Madeleine Harwood, was already waiting there. She was a plump woman in a tweed suit, but not the trendy kind; it was the kind worn by fierce headmistresses. The ‘NO ADMITTANCE’ door was unlocked and they were told to go through.

  Bel thought it must be a bomb scare. She followed a policeman and Sidney Cadogan down a narrow flight of concrete stairs that went down and down and down. Madeleine Harwood puffed behind, complaining that she was getting dizzy.

  The policeman was waiting for them beside another open door, this time leading to another set of stairs. The journey down continued. Finally they had ended up in this room.

  Sidney Cadogan looked the most at home. He sat in one of the plastic chairs, one suited leg crossed over the other to reveal socks in fine grey wool and a black polished shoe. The sole was biscuit-coloured leather and embossed with the name Church’s. It looked so clean that Bel thought he must levitate everywhere, or at least only walk on carpets.

  Madeleine Harwood sat beside Sidney, trying to appear as cool, but not quite managing. She kept smoothing down the skirt of her tweed suit and looking nervously at the big door. Clive Brooks sat opposite, running his hand through his thinning badger hair.

  Bel didn’t know how any of them could sit still. She wanted to pace but there wasn’t any room. She rolled the sleeves of her purple suit up to her elbows, her classic gesture of impatience, and stood near the blast door with the policeman, studying it.

  ‘So where are we?’ she asked. ‘Buckingham Palace’s secret bunker?’

  Sidney Cadogan answered. ‘Ten floors beneath the Cabinet Office.’

  ‘What’s happened?’ Madeleine Harwood asked the policeman. ‘Is it a bomb threat? A fire drill?’

  ‘I think it’s a flood.’

  That surprised them all. Bel frowned. ‘A flood? How bad?’

  ‘I believe Downing Street is under water. But they’ll probably have more details when we get inside.’

  ‘Inside where?’ said Bel.

  A green light came on
over the blast doors. Slowly they opened. Beyond was a corridor with a row of lights along the ceiling.

  ‘Follow me, please,’ said the policeman.

  They followed him into a cylindrical tunnel. It was lined with rings of concrete bolted together.

  ‘Are we in the Tube?’ said Bel.

  ‘No,’ said Sidney Cadogan. His tone said, Don’t ask any more questions.

  ‘Well, where are we?’ said Bel, irritated. ‘It’s a bit late to be secretive now, Sidney. I’m already here.’

  They came to three signs. One pointed right, to Horse Guards Parade. The middle one pointed straight ahead to 10 Downing Street, which was blocked off with another set of blast doors.

  Madeleine Harwood looked at the signs with sudden recognition. ‘This is Q-Whitehall.’

  ‘That’s right,’ said Clive Brooks. ‘Haven’t you been down here yet?’

  ‘You know I only took up office last month,’ she told him. ‘No one’s had time to give me the tour yet.’

  Sidney glared at her as though she had betrayed some great secret. ‘Be careful what you say, Madeleine,’ he said.

  Bel thought he was being an idiot. ‘Sidney, I hate to disillusion you, but kids talk about Q-Whitehall on the Internet. It’s no big secret. You ought to get out more.’

  The policeman took them down the left-hand branch, signed ‘Ministry of Defence’.

  ‘If they’re discussing Q-Whitehall,’ said Sidney, ‘that’s because we allow them to.’

  Bel would never normally have let such a pompous remark go unpunished, but she was wrestling with some far more unpleasant thoughts. It had suddenly struck her. When the policeman had said Downing Street was flooded, she’d assumed it was just that small area – a water main burst or something. Now she realized that was dumb. They wouldn’t have come down into this complex if it had just been a minor utilities problem. This had to be a major flood.

  She tapped the policeman on the shoulder. ‘How widespread is the flooding?’

  ‘It’s pretty bad, ma’am.’

  ‘Is it on the south bank as well?’

  ‘I don’t know, ma’am.’ They came to another set of blast doors. The policeman opened a flap in the wall and keyed in a pass code. He waited for a green light, then keyed in another combination. The doors began to vibrate and swung slowly open. They heard voices. Quite a lot of voices.

  Like the worries chattering in Bel’s mind. She’d been talking about London flooding on News Focus the other day. Without the Thames Barrier a lot of central London would be underwater, she’d said. They were her own words, coming back to haunt her. She wondered about Ben. Was he safe? The ArBonCo Centre was a tall building. If Ben just stayed there with Cally, he would be all right – Cally would have looked after him; she wouldn’t let anything happen to him, she thought.

  ‘Impressive, isn’t it?’ said Clive Brooks. He obviously mistook Bel’s silence for amazement.

  ‘All the people from the MoD building must already be down here,’ said Sidney. ‘I hope they haven’t got the best bunks.’

  They were directed to a table like a reception desk, and a man in a security armband looked up at them.

  ‘Another party from the Cabinet Office,’ said the policeman.

  The man behind the desk passed a clipboard to Sidney. ‘We need you all to sign in so we can keep track of who’s down here. Once you’ve checked in, please keep together.’

  Sidney handed the clipboard to Madeleine. ‘Ladies first.’

  Madeleine looked at Sidney frostily. ‘Don’t patronize me, Sidney,’ she told him, but she took the clipboard, then passed it to Bel.

  She signed in, then waited for the others. Next to her she saw a room marked as the library. It was a small block of a room with a low ceiling, as if someone had buried a concrete shoebox. The lighting was cold and clinical. It made her think of being in an underground car park.

  She spotted a map on the wall and went over to study it. The structure seemed to be a series of boxes connected by tunnels. There was a dining hall, common room one, common room two, two cinemas. Loads of storerooms, two generator rooms, air-conditioning plant, fuel store. One section was sleeping accommodation: small, cramped cabins like a row of lockers. The place looked like it was equipped to outlast a nuclear winter.

  There was another map too, which showed how that section fitted into a much bigger tunnel system. There was the entrance they had used, by the crossroads leading to Horse Guards Parade and Downing Street. Further away there were more exits all over central London. One came out at Charing Cross.

  Bel grabbed one of the plainclothes policemen. ‘Can I get out that way?’ she asked him, pointing at the map.

  ‘There’s no way out now, ma’am. All the exits are sealed until the all-clear.’

  Bel saw Sidney Cadogan pulling Madeleine Harwood to one side. ‘Madeleine, you’d better come this way,’ he said to her. ‘It looks like you’re the most senior minister here.’

  She quickly started to follow as he ushered Madeleine and Clive through a door marked ‘BRIEFING ROOM’.

  ‘Sidney, does that mean you’re in contact with the outside world?’ she asked him.

  Sidney gave her his most saccharine smile. ‘Authorized personnel only, I’m afraid. Unless we call you in.’ And he pulled the door shut.

  Bel stuck her foot in the way. ‘I need to know how bad the flooding is on the south bank. My son is in the ArBonCo Centre. Is there a phone anywhere?’

  The plainclothes policeman gently pulled her back. ‘There are no phones, ma’am. We’ll give you any news as soon as we get it.’

  Chapter Sixteen

  The beat of helicopters taking off drowned out everything in the controller’s headphones for a moment. He was in the emergency special operations room in the basement of the police training college in Hendon, north London, well away from the flood. The emergency – a Code Red – was too big for the normal emergency services to handle and the armed forces had been drafted in to support them.

  The controller, who was co-ordinating the emergency response, was a senior police officer. Right now he was on satellite link to Royal Naval Air Station Yeovilton in Somerset.

  The noise of the helicopter faded. ‘Sorry, Yeovilton, can you repeat?’

  ‘Thirty Sea Kings are on their way to you. We’re keeping five to cover the coast – the sea defences are looking ropey down here.’

  ‘Thank you, Yeovilton.’ The controller switched to the next channel. ‘Hampshire, this is Hendon. What have you got for us?’

  ‘Thirty Chinooks on their way to you, Hendon.’

  He switched again, to Royal Navy Force Deployment in Northwood, just up the road in Middlesex.

  ‘Twenty Sea Kings on their way to you now, sir.’

  ‘Roger.’

  He cut the connection and sat back, slipping his headphones off. Behind him, two men in formal, high-ranking uniforms had been observing: the Chief Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police, and General Thomas Chambers, the Head of the Armed Forces.

  The controller’s assistant also took off his headset and spoke to the Chief and the General. ‘Sir, we’ve got twenty-five more Pumas and Merlins from Northern Ireland – they’ll be with us in four hours’ time.’

  ‘Very good,’ said General Chambers.

  ‘The flood area is now clear of all non-essential air traffic,’ said another assistant. ‘All commercial flights passing over London are being diverted.’

  ‘Sir,’ called a female engineer in an army uniform. ‘We’ve got the satellite pictures.’

  The Chief Commissioner and General Chambers went across and looked over her shoulder. The devastation was even worse than they had feared.

  From Brixton to Westminster, from Greenwich to Shepherd’s Bush, London was underwater.

  Another soldier came up and spoke to them. ‘Satellite link to Q-Whitehall is up and running, sir.’

  ‘About time,’ said General Chambers. ‘Has the Prime Minister been informed y
et?’

  ‘Not yet, sir. We’re trying to get onto him. He had a confidential meeting this morning at Chequers.’

  General Chambers and the Chief Commissioner followed the soldier to a workstation. On the screen, they could see a room in the bunker – and a row of faces sitting at the table facing the camera. General Chambers spoke into the microphone. ‘I need a minister with authority over Rebro. Where’s the Home Secretary?’

  On the screen Madeleine Harwood spoke up. ‘I’m the Foreign Secretary. I’m the only minister in the offices today. Is everything under control?’

  The Chief Commissioner took the microphone. ‘We’re going to switch off Rebro and we need you to authorize it.’

  Madeleine Harwood looked baffled. ‘Rebro?’

  Clive Brooks explained. ‘The emergency services’ communications network. It’s been running on backup. We’ve got rescue helicopters coming in and we need the power supply for our satellite communications so that we can co-ordinate the rescue operation. We can’t run Rebro as well. You have to give us permission to switch it off.’

  General Chambers took the microphone. ‘It’s not a big problem, ma’am. The ambulances, fire engines and police cars won’t be able to communicate with each other. But half the roads are underwater and the ones that aren’t are gridlocked. They can’t do their job anyway so we’re sending the army in. That’s why I’m here with the Chief Commissioner.’

  Madeleine Harwood folded her arms. ‘Why do you need me to give the order? You’re the experts.’

  ‘Because in theory there are consequences for the civilian population and that’s not a decision we can make. The decision has to be made by the government. Are you giving the order?’

  Madeleine clearly wasn’t happy but she knew she had no choice but to act decisively and trust the experts. ‘All right. I’m authorizing you to switch it off.’

  ‘Thank you, madam.’ The General cut the audio connection to the bunker and spoke to the rest of the room. ‘Close down Rebro. Divert power to satellite communications.’

  Fingers flew over keyboards, orders were spoken into headsets as the emergency room staff made the necessary adjustments.