Flood

11

The chopper, run by the Environment Agency, was a modified Puma. It was fitted out with an instrument pod with temperature, pressure and windspeed gauges, and a neat little unit with radar and infrared monitors to measure the depth of the river water and other properties such as speed, surface roughness and temperature. A camera was mounted beneath the hull. There was even a sonde, a fish-shaped gadget attached to a winched cable that could be lowered into the water, though Sanjay insisted the sonde wouldn’t be used today; the water was too turbulent, the risk of snagging on some bit of flotsam too great.

As Sanjay checked the gear, Thandie grinned at Gary with a glint in her eye, a look he recognized well. She had always had a streak of recklessness about her, a willingness to go chasing hurricanes and tsunamis, all in the name of science, always willing to go that bit further than anybody else. Disaster hunting, she called it, surfing the extreme weather.

And it scared him to his bones when they got into the chopper and Thandie herself took the pilot’s seat. She pulled a radio cap over her head and started snapping switches. An engine roared into life and the rotors overhead turned.

Sanjay opened up a laptop on his knees to make connections to the chopper’s instrument suite. He had a kind of harness that strapped the machine to his thighs. As it booted up he observed Gary’s expression. “You didn’t know she was the pilot, I’m guessing.”

“You guess right.”

“Well, nobody else was available. All the regular pilots have emergency duties. Lucky us-”

Thandie called back,“Hold onto your lunches, guys, this elevator car is going up.”

The chopper surged into the air, rising over the control tower. For a few seconds while Thandie checked her handling they hovered in the air, buffeted by the wind; the chopper felt as fragile as a leaf.

Gary looked down. The Barrier was once more revealed, those steel cowls lined up stoutly, and the Thames raged more violently than he remembered from only a few minutes ago. On the shore, at a fence protecting the Barrier tower, he saw a crowd of protesters, all soggy banners and waterproofs, faced by a line of police in riot gear.

“What’s their beef?” he asked.

Sanjay looked over his shoulder. “Rich versus poor. Protesting about the billions spent to protect London while the rest of England floods, and so on.”

Thandie snapped,“Would they prefer it if London was drowned? Let’s get to work.”

The bird surged forward, heading east into the oncoming storm, and Thandie whooped.

The rain splashed against the cockpit glass, coming in so hard Gary could barely see out. The small cabin, crowded by the three of them and the science gear, juddered and clattered as it was thrown to and fro, harnesses rattling and the hull creaking. This wasn’t like the smooth professional ride Gary had been given by the AxysCorp pilot earlier. Thandie seemed to challenge the storm, just barreling straight through the turbulence. Sanjay was trying to work his laptop. Now Gary could see why he had strapped the sleek pad to his knees.

Gary leaned forward. “So what have I missed in your branch of the soap opera, Thand?” He had to shout above the noise.

“Not much,” she yelled back. “It’s the same old same old in the academic world. Write your papers, scramble for citations, put together proposals for grants for a couple more years, fend off the wandering hands of eminent professors. Climate science has been booming the last few years, especially since all our modeling started going awry, but it’s just as hard to make a living.”

“Thus the life of the junior research scientist.”

“Yeah. Oh, I got myself thrown out of the Royal Society, in London. Got in an argument with an old boy who called me a climate-change denier.”

“You’re kidding.”

“Nope. But I came up with data on sea-level rise that didn’t fit the paradigm.”

“So you weren’t denying anything.”

“Just pointing out that something different seems to be happening. Something new, not explicable by the usual mechanisms, ice-cap melt and ocean-water thermal expansion. Those old guys have been arguing their case too long, Gary, and against too much below-the-belt opposition. They take any questioning, any at all, as attempts at refutation. But on the other hand, there are plenty of commentators taking these exceptional events as proof that global warming is a reality, even though there’s no immediate causal link, and all the old deniers of global warming are getting worked up in response. It’s a mess.”

“Your data was lousy,” Sanjay said. “At the Royal Society. Your conclusions were leaps in the dark. I would have thrown you out, even if you hadn’t told Isaac Keegan he had his head up his arse.”

“I regret nothing,” Thandie yelled back. “The first reports of anything new in the world are always shouted down. You knew Hansen at Goddard, Gary, you know what it’s like for mavericks.” She sang,“ ‘They all laughed at Christopher Columbus…’ ”

“But you’re still working,” Gary said.

“Somehow, yeah.”

“So what else don’t I know? You got a man in your life these days, Thandie? Is there a Mister Jones?”

Thandie hesitated. Sanjay glanced over at him, then looked down at his displays.

Thandie said, “I guess you didn’t hear about that.”

“About what?”

“I met this guy. Dot-com entrepreneur who was interested in marketing personalized weather forecasting. Not the dumbest idea in the world. You’d base it on public-domain wide-area models, supplemented by a sensor suite that would track the micro-climate in the customer’s vicinity and anticipated route-”

“Thandie. The guy?”

“Yeah. To cut a long story, we got married. Your mother was there-your ambassador, I guess. I got pregnant. Lost the kid. Then lost the guy, or we lost each other.”

He was shocked by the suddenness of the telling.“Oh. I’m sorry. You didn’t want to try again?”

“That turned out not to be an option,” she said crisply. “Not for me. The doctors-hell, it doesn’t matter now.”

“Christ, Thandie, what a terrible thing.”

“It’s just life. We all go through these changes. Births, deaths, whatever. It was just a road not taken.” She sat rigid amid the buffeting of the flight.

Sanjay tapped Gary on the shoulder.“Myself, I have two children, by two marriages. One child in Glasgow is mostly Scottish. The other in Middlesex is mostly Bengali. Life is always complicated, my friend.”

“So it is. But-” But Gary had known a different Thandie before, a wild, reckless, exuberant, imaginative Thandie. He wondered if he would ever be able to get to know this new, damaged person.“It’s a tragedy that I’ve been away so long.”

Sanjay said, “A tragedy for you, your family and your friends. You must resent what was done to you.”

“Hell, yes.” More and more as the days went by, in fact. Maybe he’d got too used to his captors, or even fond of them, or some damn Stockholm-syndrome thing. Domesticated by his long captivity. Now he was out and going through some other process; now he hated them.

But the chopper dipped, and he was reminded that the world was going through its own novel processes, which had no patience for the revolutions in his head.

The chopper swooped over a peninsula that jutted out from the north bank of the river, incised by a deep brook. Industrial facilities sprawled across both sides of the brook, oil storage tanks and refineries and chimney stacks and big gas storage vessels, all embedded in a web of walkways and pipelines. One big line strode overhead across the brook itself.

Gary asked, “Where are we? What is that?”

“Canvey Island,” Thandie called.“And to the west of the creek, that’s Coryton. Petrochemical installations.”

The terminals were serviced from the river. One immense supertanker huddled against a jetty, with the compact shapes of tugs nearby. Brightly lit, a carpet of sodium light, this landscape looked as if it went on for kilometers, and Gary could see it had some protection from the water in the shape of a stout concrete sea wall that had to be meters high. But the land wasn’t entirely given over to industry. There were estates of houses down there, clusters of brick red like scrubby flowers huddling in the rain, some of them only a half-kilometer, less, from the industrial plant.

And there was clearly an evacuation underway. Gary saw cars streaming out of the housing estates, crowding the roads that fed into the big arterial routes to the north. It was so dark now, though it wasn’t yet four in the afternoon, that most of the cars had their lights on. The traffic, however, was all but motionless, and helicopters, bright yellow search-and-rescue machines, prowled along the riverbank. Gary saw all this in glimpses through sheeting rain, from a chopper that bucked and rolled in the wind. He heard Thandie talking to some kind of air traffic control.

And now there was a spark of lightning, a crackle of thunder.

“The storm front’s only a couple kilometers thataway,” Thandie called, pointing east. “Sanj, how’s the data? You got GPS?”

“I got that,” said Sanjay, staring at his screen. “Climate sensors nominal, though that wind gauge is going to rip clean off at this rate. And the pressure’s dropping. Nine seventy. Nine sixty-five… The radar’s working, the sonar not so well, you’d expect that. It would help if this tub wasn’t bucking like a fairground ride.”

“Doing what I can, brainbox.”

Gary had had no idea that all this industry was out here. “It’s like a city in itself. And kind of vulnerable, isn’t it?”

“When it comes to fuel London’s a big and thirsty monster, Gary. But they’re prepared for floods, they drill for them.” She snapped a switch, and the radio cut into a feed from a refinery crew going through shutdown procedures, working through checklists of pumps, furnaces, compressors, valves, catalytic crackers.

“Leaving it late,” Gary said.“The storm’s been tracked since Scotland.”

“A flood warning itself is an expensive event,” Thandie said. “With more than a million people living on the Thames flood plain, you don’t raise the alarm unless you have to. The river traffic is a problem too. The Barrier seems to be raised more often than it’s lowered nowadays. And shutting down those refineries is no joke, you don’t just throw a switch. It costs to abandon the processes they put their materials through. False alarms are unpopular. People are terrified of liability, legal claims.”

“And in this case,” Sanjay said, “the error bars around the storm’s probable track and effects were just too wide to be sure. I told you, our modeling is breaking down. What’s worse is that the interfaces between different models aren’t working so well either.. ”

Gary understood the principle. Mathematical models of the weather were generally based on dividing up land, air and sea into discrete elements and tracing the progress of variables like pressure, temperature and wind speed through from one element to the next. You might run a coarse model for the whole of the North Sea, and as a storm passed the Wash or the Thames estuary you would feed predicted conditions from the ocean model to finer-grained models to see what happened in there. But if all the models were suffering because of some underlying change in the physical condition in the planet’s weather systems, it would be at the edges and interfaces that errors would particularly multiply.

Sanjay said, “The last great London flood was back in 1953. That event led to the construction of the Barrier, eventually. Much of Canvey is below sea level; people died here. But that flood was a convergence of high tide with a big storm surge.”

The low-pressure air at the heart of a storm could lift the level of the sea below it, physically sucking it up into a hump that could be hundreds of kilometers across. And then the winds could drive the high water against the coast or into a river estuary. That was a storm surge.

“So is this a surge? Are we hitting a high tide?”

Sanjay said,“The storm is driving waves ahead of itself, but I wouldn’t call it a significant surge. And as for the tide, the predictions now are all over the place.”

Gary said, “So this event doesn’t have those key features that characterized the 1953 event. And yet we’re getting a flood even so.”

“Looks like it,” Sanjay said.“It’s not even a particularly severe storm.” He sounded unhappy, as if the real world were a bit of grit in the oyster-shell of his science.

And Thandie called, “Oh shit. Here it comes.” The chopper dipped and bucked as she hauled them back out over the river for a better view.

Gary, peering through a rain-streaked window, saw the wave coming, water raised and driven by the North Sea storm and bottled up in the narrowing, shallowing estuary. As it advanced it spilled almost casually over flood barriers and walls, and on either bank a dark stain spread over the roads and gardens and parks.

Thandie called back, “You getting this, Sanj?”

Sanjay was using a joystick to control the camera slung beneath the chopper’s body. “Pretty good,” he reported.

“We’re feeding the rolling news channels…”

The flood reached the petrochemical refineries and storage tanks. The water spread around the feet of the huge structures, looking as black and viscous as the oil that was processed there. Some lights failed, and a few abandoned cars were quickly submerged. The depth of the water must be increasing rapidly.

And now the flood started to spill over the housing estates. Thandie swooped lower so they could see. The rushing waters poured onto access roads still crowded with cars. Vehicles were overwhelmed, their lights flickering and dying. People scrambled out of their cars through windows and doors, and climbed onto the cars’ roofs, or tried to wade through the rising water. The current shoved the cars themselves, piling them into the fleeing people like logs.

All this Gary saw from above, from the warmth and comfort of his helicopter cabin. There was no human noise, no screams or cries; it was all drowned by the storm’s roar and the thrum of the chopper’s engine. Suddenly this was no longer just a stunt weather event, a puzzle for climate modelers. “Christ,” he said, “there’s a disaster going on down there.”

“The whole damn day is already a disaster,” Thandie said. “Let’s just do our job.”

The chopper roared up into the air and headed west. The flooded estate was reduced to an abstraction, a melange of water and land.