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.
