Flood

10

Fifteen minutes later an AxysCorp chopper was rushing west, heading back up the Thames, carrying Gary Boyle to the Barrier. The storm system was already funneling vigorously into the estuary, but it would take an hour to travel from Southend to the Barrier. The chopper easily outran it, though the winds and driving rain were ferocious. And, below, the river raged, turbid and frothing, pushing against the banks that contained it. Already the mud flats opposite Canvey and Tilbury were submerged, and floodwater glistened at South Benfleet, East Tilbury, Northfleet and on Rainham Marshes.

Gary was dropped off at the control tower for the Thames Barrier, on the south bank at a place called Woolwich Reach. The chopper lifted again immediately, reassigned to help out with evacuation operations.

Gary, left alone for a moment, walked to the riverbank. He had to lean into the wind, and the rain lashed his face. It was a July afternoon and the air wasn’t cold, but the low scudding clouds made it as dark as a fall day.

The Barrier piers strode across the river, steel sails each five stories high, glistening in the rain. The gates between the piers had already been raised, hollow slabs of plated steel each twenty meters tall, rotated up on tremendous wheels to turn the Barrier into a solid wall that rose seven meters above the regular water level. Bright red lights shone on the piers to warn any shipping that the river was closed. Gary had never seen the Barrier up close before, and the scale of it struck him. Each of the four central navigable channels was as wide as the central span of Tower Bridge, and each gate weighed four thousand tones. The Barrier was a monument to man’s attempts to control nature.

But the natural was testing the human today. The river on the downstream side, pushing in from the ocean, was already significantly higher than that upstream; spray leapt over the clean lines of the gates.

And through the howl of the wind, Gary could hear sirens wail all along the estuary.

Two figures approached him, both swathed in luminescent orange coats. “Gary! Is that you? You asshole, you’ll get yourself washed away. Have to put you on a lead, like those nutty Christians did in Barcelona.”

“Nice to see you too, Thandie.”

She wrapped him in her thickly sleeved arms. Thandie Jones was an oceanographer. When Gary had been captured she had been employed on weather-system modeling and climate-change studies for NOAA, America’s National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. A black, strong-featured Chicagoan, she was taller than Gary but wiry, always stronger.

The man beside Thandie had his hood closed up over his mouth, so only his nose and bespectacled eyes showed.

Thandie said,“Gary Boyle, meet Sanjay McDonald. Another climate modeler, poor sap.”

Sanjay exposed a bearded face and grabbed Gary’s hand. “I work at Hadley-that is, the Met Office’s Hadley Center for Climate Prediction. I heard all about you. Good to meet you, Gary. And I’m sure you’re glad you’ve come back to find some real weather going on.”

“Yeah,” Thandie said. “Speaking of which, let’s get out of it.”

She led them both into the control tower. She took Gary down to a kind of cloakroom, where she fitted him out with protective gear: a wetsuit, boots, a thermal jacket, a hard hat, even a life jacket. Gary had never been shy before Thandie. He stripped down and began to prize himself into a wetsuit that didn’t quite fit.

“You did me a favor phoning ahead to meet me here,” Thandie said. “You’ve got a teeny tiny grain of celebrity, Boyle.” She held her thumb and forefinger invisibly apart. “But it was enough to requisition me a chopper. We’re goin’ storm chasin’.”

He grinned back. “I knew it was a good idea calling you.”

Sanjay McDonald said, “I take it you two know each other well.”

Gary said,“We were at MIT together. I studied under Thandie, actually. I went off to work at Goddard, and Thandie drew the short straw and moved to NOAA.”

“Yeah, yeah,” she shot back.

“But we worked in the same area, climate modeling, with Thandie focusing on the interaction of the ocean and atmosphere-well, I guess you must know that. We worked together on some predictive modeling to aid the post-Katrina levee reconstruction project at New Orleans.”

“Our world, the world of climate modelers, is small,” Sanjay said solemnly. He looked Asian to Gary, but his accent was as Scottish as his surname.

“We missed you,” Thandie said to Gary. “I kept in touch with your mom. We signed the petitions, kept up the websites, nailed up the posters, tied the yellow ribbons on the trees on your birthday. Kept you in the public eye.”

This sort of thing touched Gary deeply. During his captivity he had had no idea that people were making such a sustained effort on his behalf. “I appreciate that. I mean it. It must have played a part in getting me out of there. And I know Mom needed the support. I haven’t seen her yet, though we’ve spoken…”

A few of the Barrier staff came through, all British, mostly men, looking harassed but excited.

Thandie said dryly,“Today’s the kind of day that makes it worthwhile for the guys who work here. Validation Tuesday. We’re trying to keep out of the way. Officially we’re guests of the Met Office’s Storm Tide Forecasting Service. They have a big modeling center up in Liverpool-”

“But the production models don’t work so well anymore,” Sanjay said.

“So,” Thandie said, “here we are at the front line with our experimental models trying to patch together new solutions.”

Gary said,“If the models don’t work, I guess the Met Office can’t say how this storm is going to play out.”

“That’s about the size of it,” Sanjay said.“And that’s why no warnings were issued about this storm until just recently. Ideally they like twelve or twenty-four hours’ notice, so they can order the schools to stay closed in the morning, and keep the commuters out of the city, that sort of thing.”

Thandie said,“And the models don’t work because the world is going awry. You’ve been missing all the fun, Gary Boyle.”

A deep mechanical groan reverberated through the concrete structure. Gary imagined the tremendous weight of the rising river water, pressing against the Barrier gates.

“So, you ready?” Thandie asked.