Flash Flood (13 page)

There was water down there.

And something moving.

Outside, Francisco Gomez shrugged his shoulders, easing the movement back into his arms. A rucksack hung from his hand, filled with screwdrivers, a Stanley knife and other useful items from the sculptor’s studio. He’d also found a warm navy blue jacket so at least he could keep warm. Best of all, he’d picked up a tattered
A–Z
that was lying on the floor. It was soggy with rain.

When he floated away from the police station on the park bench, he’d drifted through the streets of Chelsea for quite a way. He was at the mercy of the water because of his handcuffs, so had to pick his
moment to jump off. Eventually the bench got caught against some iron railings outside one of the grand town houses. He didn’t know where he was so he waded for quite some way to make sure he was well out of the district and to get clear of the flood water before trying to get rid of the handcuffs. Now he was a free man. Thank goodness for the British weather.

That
A–Z
was a useful find. He looked at it, got the information he needed, then tossed it in a bin. It had even been open on the page he needed: Charing Cross Station. That was where he was heading for. There were things he had to collect there. Things he had put away in case he had to flee Britain suddenly. And things his partner would need too – if he was free as well by now. They were professionals; they always had a plan and a course of action to follow whatever happened, and he knew José would stick to it just as he was. If everything went as he hoped, they would rendezvous shortly and then make their escape …

‘The Paddington branch of the Grand Union Canal has flooded and there are barges stranded on the railway line.’

Meena Chohan never thought she’d be back in the air so quickly. When the soldiers printed out her pictures, they had shown useful detail not available in the satellite pictures – but there weren’t enough of them. So here she was up in the cockpit of a Puma helicopter, talking through a headset to an army cartographer in the seat behind, who was working on a battery-operated laptop. Using her detailed knowledge of London, they were creating a map of the disaster zone, marking areas with flooding so that they could co-ordinate evacuation services. They also needed to mark significant vehicle wreckage and traffic congestion which would result in rescue vehicles not being able to gain access.

It was like doing the usual daily traffic report, but bizarrely different. The transformation of the city was stunning. The river was at least ten times as wide as normal, its distinctive kinks completely gone. She had mixed feelings about it. One part of her was impatient to get her pictures to a newsroom before someone else pipped her to the post. Another part was already imagining how she would write up this trip as a much better, much bigger story.

The water was full of debris. Once again she was astounded by the sight of the wreckage. Cars, buses and lorries turned on their sides, on their backs, piled up against the walls of buildings.

The cartographer, whose name was Phil, was keying in the information. There was a grinding sound as he saved the file to disk, then he tapped the pilot on the shoulder and gave him the thumbs-up. ‘Nearly done. I’ve just got to process it now. Fly around in a circle for a bit while I see if there are any gaps.’

The pilot had his name – Dorek – handpainted on the back of his helmet; he twitched the control stick between his knees and swung round in a loop. Down below, Meena could see rows of army vehicles and big canvas tents pitched on Hampstead Heath. It looked like a giant khaki circus. The incessant rain pooled in the roofs of the tents like lakes, reflecting the Puma as it passed overhead.

Another helicopter, a Sea King, had obviously just landed there. Soldiers were helping civilians out, hurrying them towards the tents. Everyone looked soaking wet.

‘What’s going on there?’ said Meena.

‘That’s where they’re taking evacuees from the flooded area,’ said Dorek.

They circled back to the flood zone, flying over a series of low flat-roofed buildings at the water’s edge. On one roof a soldier was dragging along something that looked like a man, leaving heel marks in the gravel surface. As Meena watched, he propped him up at the edge of the roof and buttoned his jacket round the railings to keep him there. Another soldier was tying a red marker to the TV aerial.

‘I’ll mark that one,’ said Phil.

A cold feeling crept all the way up Meena’s back. ‘What are they doing?’ she asked.

‘We can’t move all the bodies yet,’ said Dorek. ‘So we’re putting them in easily accessible places to pick up later.’

‘Why are they being tied to the railings?’

‘In case there’s another surge. Now we’ve got them in one place we don’t want them floating away somewhere by themselves. It’s just to keep them out of everyone’s way really.’

Meena looked out of the other window and spotted
what she thought were more bodies below. ‘Oh, there’s another lot,’ she said.

Phil followed her gaze. ‘No, no. It’s the Chelsea Pensioners. See if they need a hand.’

Dorek took them in lower, over a big, sprawling building. It was the Royal Hospital, Chelsea, home of the Chelsea Pensioners. Some figures in red coats were using a window-cleaner’s cradle to hoist some bedraggled figures in civvies up to the top floor.

‘It looks as though they’ve got things under control,’ said the pilot. ‘They’re rescuing a load of civilians.’

The Chelsea Pensioners? thought Meena. She had a mental picture of frail old men in red coats with shiny buttons and war ribbons and black tricorn hats, shaking hands with the Queen at the Chelsea Flower Show. ‘I thought those guys were about seventy,’ she said.

‘They’re tough old guys,’ chuckled Dorek. ‘Hold tight.’ He slid the Puma down sideways. The down-draught made ripple patterns in the rain-spattered water. He nudged the control stick and the Puma tilted from side to side and then flew level again.

The pensioners recognized the salute and gave a thumbs-up in return.

‘They seem to be doing fine,’ said Dorek, and headed downriver again. They flew on, passing over the bulk of St Thomas’s Hospital, water lapping all around the building, and he banked for the return journey.

‘I’m just sending the map now,’ said Phil. ‘We’re done here.’ He tapped some keys and sent the map by secure satellite e-mail.

Dorek pulled away and sped up, back towards Essex.

Down below in the hospital, the medical staff were doing their best in the difficult circumstances. A nurse wearing theatre scrubs, a torch strapped to her forehead, was bending over a patient, squeezing a plastic bottle in a slow, regular rhythm. A tube led from the bottle into the patient’s throat. He had been on the operating table when the power cuts came, plunging them into darkness.

It was freezing cold in the recovery room. The water that had flooded into the bottom of the building was
acting like a gigantic fridge, cooling the whole place. Except for her torch the room was totally dark. This part of the hospital had no external windows – to maintain a sterile environment and to stop people from seeing in. What went on in operating suites was not for public viewing. Especially not today.

The door swung open and a girl came in with some blankets. She put one around the nurse’s shoulders. It was blissful, like a hot bath. ‘Thanks, Vicky,’ the nurse said. Her rhythm squeezing on the bottle never faltered. Squeeze – hiss. Squeeze – hiss. That was what was keeping the patient alive.

Vicky put the other blanket over the patient, careful not to disturb the drips that ran into his arm. She looked shell-shocked. Poor girl, thought the nurse, she had only just started work there that afternoon. So far she’d had a hell of a first day.

Vicky went back to the stores to collect some more blankets. She had two fleeces on under her scrubs but still she was freezing cold. The head torch cast weird shadows in the corners.

She had been looking forward to taking up her first hospital job after qualifying. She’d been a PA back
home in Wales and had retrained as a hospital administrator. She’d never dreamed that her first day at work would be like this. It had started badly enough – she had been delayed on the train and had to come straight to the hospital, without stopping off at her flat first. She hadn’t even sat down at her desk when the flood hit. She had still been trying to find her way around the computer system when the power failed. Everyone was calm and just waited for the generators in the basement to come on. Except that they didn’t. And slowly the news had sunk in that they weren’t going to start either – the building was surrounded by water and the level was rising.

Then all hell broke loose. Nurses burst out of the operating theatres calling for lights – and help. Vicky suddenly found herself in a darkened scrub room, along with every other nurse, porter and secretary. They were told to wash their hands and put on gloves and gowns. Vicky was given some head torches and instructed to take them into one of the operating theatres.

When she had put her head torch on and pushed open the theatre doors, the sight that greeted her was
like something from a bad dream. Her light fell on the incision in the patient’s side and she saw a mass of blood spilling over the green cloth and onto the floor below. Quickly she looked away, but immediately the surgeons yelled at her for directing the light away from their work. They hadn’t spotted the bleeding until she came in with the torch. She’d had to stare at the spurting artery while they got to work with metal clamps. They couldn’t waste precious seconds putting head torches on themselves; instead they made her stand over the table like a mobile spotlight.

Vicky began to make sense of the shape on the operating table in front of her. The wound was in the patient’s hip. It was an appalling mess. The surgeons had been cutting muscle away, to get down to the bone to insert a replacement hip, but now they had to abandon the operation and just try to patch up the damage. Vicky wanted to be sick, but she didn’t dare move – the surgeons were relying on her light to work on the patient.

Vicky was aware of the anaesthetist and a nurse at the patient’s head and she suddenly had a terrible thought: what about the anaesthetic or whatever was
keeping the patient asleep? Would that fail without the power?

The nurse finally grabbed a head torch from her and went hunting in the cabinets. She brought back a loaded syringe and injected it straight into the patient’s drip.

Finally the surgeons got control of the bleeding and Vicky was allowed to move away and distribute the other torches.

When she stumbled out of the theatre, she felt sick to her stomach. As she struggled to calm herself down, she told herself she was lucky. She could have been down in casualty or outpatients, or working in the morgue. They had been completely flooded. No one knew what had happened to the patients and staff there.

One by one, the patients in the theatres were closed up and wheeled out. Their operations would have to be performed again later. All the surgeons could do was sew up cut vessels, repair the holes they had made in muscles, stitch together the skin.

Now each of those patients lay in a recovery room, a theatre nurse standing over them, checking their
progress. One of them had stopped breathing after the operation, and had to be resuscitated by hand. A nurse was bending over him, squeezing a bag that pushed air in and out of his lungs.

When Vicky had visited operating suites before, they had been busy places, full of bustle and the background hum of machines. Machines that made a soft hissing as they breathed for the patient, bleeped quietly as they monitored heart and brain activity. There was none of that noise now; it was silent and eerie. The only sound was the rhythmic hiss of the ventilating bag.

As Vicky walked past another recovery room, she saw the nurse’s head in a ghostly circle of light like a halo; she was checking the patient’s pulse with a worried expression. The nurse saw her light and called out to her. ‘Vicky, can you get Doctor Okanga to dispense me some more morphine? I think he’s coming round.’

‘Yeah, sure.’

She hurried along to the pharmacy. This was the moment she had been dreading. When the poor, hastily patched-up patients came back to consciousness.

And would they have to evacuate? If the flood waters rose any higher, would they have to move the patients elsewhere? Surely they could not stay in a hospital without power … ?

Ben thumped hard against the door with his shoulder but the bolt was solid and it held. The sound reverberated around the cellar.

Was that another sound – something in the water? Not for the first time, he peered down into the gloom, trying to see how deep it was, But he couldn’t see anything. The cellar was black.

He would have to try and take a run at the door. He stepped down gingerly, feeling his way with his feet. He’d have to be careful otherwise he’d fall down the stairs.

He launched himself up at the door and hit it with his shoulder.

It hardly moved.

Ben listened for a moment. Maybe the sound of him trying to break out would bring somebody. He shouted out.

Suddenly he heard a voice. No, it was only the radio, still broadcasting reassuring messages. The voice seemed to have been chosen specifically to sound authoritative and soothing, like a drug. ‘
This is the BBC, coming to you from our Manchester studios. All other services have been suspended after the flooding in the capital today. Scheduled programmes will be repeated at a future date. For details you can check our website, which we hope will be back on line shortly
.’