Flood (27 page)

Amanda recalled images of the 2004 tsunami in the Indian Ocean, and Istanbul just a year ago, and Macao and Hong Kong since. Bodies hanging from trees. “So Dartmoor’s not safe after all.”

“Amanda, you can see why I had to get you out. This is going to smash apart what’s left of Britain, and there won’t be the resources to recover.”

Kristie was staring at the screen. “What about Molly and Linda, and Barry and George—?”

“Local kids in Postbridge,” Amanda explained to Lily.

“Can we warn them?” Kristie asked.

Lily handed over her phone. “Call whoever you like, honey. There will have been an official warning by now anyhow.” Kristie immediately began to make calls.

Benj was angry.“You knew this was coming, didn’t you, Lily? It’s just like Greenwich. We just ran off and left them to die, even though you knew this was going to happen.”

“Yes. But if I’d shot my mouth off none of us would have got away. Look—you’ve got a conscience, Benj, and that’s a good thing. But can you see what I had to do?” She glared at him until he subsided.

Much later, when they were in the air aboard the AxysCorp chopper, Lily’s phone chimed with another urgent incoming call. Kristie was still making her calls to Postbridge; she handed the phone back.

The call was from AxysCorp, in fact from Nathan himself. Helen Gray had been staying with family in Chester. She had been lost when the great wave hit.

Amanda took Lily’s hand.“I know what that means to you. The first of you gone.”

“I promised to look after her kid,” Lily said desolately.“How the hell am I supposed to do that?”

40

June 2019

F
rom Kristie Caistor’s scrapbook:

A patrol of river police searching for survivors in submerged districts of Paris came under automatic fire from an apartment building.

A raid was organized. A gang of teenagers was flushed out; one officer was lost. Half-starved, many of them ill from drinking polluted floodwater, the teenagers had plenty of alcohol, and weapons. All but one had carried Kalashnikov AK47s.

This was a global phenomenon. Even before the flood there had already been something like a hundred million Kalashnikovs, or close imitations, circulating in the world, so simple was the AK47 to manufacture, so reliable was it at doing its job. Even more had been churned out by factories around the world before they had drowned. Many guns had been stashed away by “
faux
Napoleons,” the French police spokeswoman said, fueled by visions of future wars over the high ground. Nobody knew how many of these stashes might exist across the planet, or where they were, or how many AK47s existed.

The AK47 was said to be the most effective weapon ever invented, in terms of lives taken. Now it was emerging as a final bloodstained monument to the age of industry and mechanized killing that had spawned it, and was likely to be a shaping force in the age to come.

The Parisian teenagers were, all but one, killed with the weapons in their hands.

41

October 2019

G
ary Boyle was working at the instrument reel on the aft deck of the
Links
. He saw Sanjay McDonald hurry aboard just as the ship was about to cast off. He called and waved.

Sanjay made his way aft. Laden with a bulging backpack, Sanjay was sweating from the heat of the day, and he wore a thin linen mask over his bearded mouth to keep out the smoke from the Istanbul fires. He dumped his bag with relief, and accepted a flask of cold water from Gary. He lifted his mask and took a deep slug of water; then he poured the rest over his head and face. “Do you mind?”

“The ship’s got its own desalination plant,” Gary said. “Fill your boots.”

“Thanks.”

It was time to leave. A boatswain lined up cast-off hawsers into neat parallel rows. Gary could see the captain on the bridge, standing alongside the Turkish pilot who would navigate the boat through the strait. The whole boat shuddered as the twin screws churned the waters of the Golden Horn. Some of the scientists came up from the main laboratory below decks to see the sights. Mostly young, mostly weather-beaten and shabby, they milled around the deck, peering at the murky water, the walls of the channel. But this was a working cruise, and in the small compartment above the bridge, which they called the top lab, a couple of researchers were already booting up the echo-sounding gear.

Sanjay leaned on the rail and looked out at the skyline of Istanbul, gliding slowly past the ship. Despite the flooding, despite the quakes, it was still a stunning sight. Eighteen months after the initial quakes the stubbornly unbroken dome of the Hagia Sophia had become an iconic image for a stressed world, and the low morning sun glinted from the minarets and gilded domes of the mosques that crowded the old city. But smoke rose up in lazy towers from the burning districts, and choppers flapped through the murk.

Gary was glad to see Sanjay, who was one of a loose network of climatologists and oceanographers Gary had kept bumping into in the last couple of years, as they traveled the planet monitoring its extraordinary changes. But he’d thought Sanjay had missed his chance today. “You cut it fine, don’t you?”

Sanjay shrugged. “You know what travel is like nowadays.”

“Yeah. Well, there are plenty of spare berths. I’d guess only about half the promised attendees turned up, despite all Woods Hole could do.”

“But Thandie Jones is here?”

Gary grinned. “You couldn’t keep her away.”

“This is a Woods Hole ship, isn’t it?”

“Yeah.” Gary kicked a rusty deck plate. “Used to be a salvage ship during the Second World War. Shivers like a drying-out drunk. But I figure if she hasn’t sunk in eighty years, she’s not gonna sink under me now.”

“Let’s hope not.”

One by one the scientists drifted off to begin work. Gary’s laptop beeped for his attention, as data came in from the various teams aboard the vessel.

The narrow Bosporus strait was the only connection between the Black Sea and the Sea of Marmara, which in turn linked to the Mediterranean through the Dardanelles, and then the Med kissed the Atlantic at Gibraltar. So the Bosporus was the only way the rising global ocean could reach the Black Sea.

For millennia the Black Sea had been a freshwater ocean, fed by several major rivers and draining out into the Marmara. But under the Bosporus’s freshwater outflow there had always been a deep countering saltwater current going north, from Marmara into the Black Sea. Since antiquity navigators had made use of this; you could lower a basket full of stones into the deep water and have yourself pulled against the surface current. The saltwater flow was a relic of the post-Ice Age surge which had seen a dammed and half-dried-up Black Sea refilled catastrophically from the rising Marmara. Now the oceans were rising again, and that subsurface salt current was much stronger than it had been. Gary supposed that eventually it would overwhelm the surface flow altogether, and the Bosporus would become a saltwater aqueduct, filling up the Black Sea basin.

From there, however, from the Black Sea, the rising ocean water had nowhere to go—not for now. An anticipated change in this situation was the primary motive for this expedition.

Another alarm chimed on Gary’s laptop. Time for him to go to work himself. He began to unreel the instrument chain, dropping it into the water; it would trail the boat’s starboard flank, thus staying well away from the screws.

Sanjay inspected the instrument reel. It was a cable of chain links, with more than a hundred thermometers attached along its length. “For measuring the temperature variations across the thermocline?”

“You got it. The Bosporus has to be one of the most intensely studied waterways in the world. And yet so much has changed, we know scarcely anything about its condition now. Every time you make a measurement it’s a discovery . . . So where have you come from?”

“Australia.”

“How are they faring there?”

Sanjay shrugged, his expression hidden by his face mask. “The sea is covering the coasts, of course. The inhabitants of the great cities, especially on the east coast from Melbourne up to Brisbane, are fleeing inland. Tent cities on the Great Dividing Range. But the most interesting event has been the sea’s forcing its way inland from the southeast, up the Spencer and SaintVincent gulfs. The Murray River Basin is pretty much drowned, and the sea has broken through to a lake, called Lake Eyre, which was actually below the old sea level.”

“So Australia has had its own refilling episode.”

“Refugees from Bondi Beach tried to surf the incoming waves. Fools.” Sanjay laughed. “Elsewhere it is as you would expect. Dry places become dryer, wet places wetter. To a first approximation agriculture has ended in Australia. Now they rely entirely on imported food, such as they can get, and the rationing is ferocious. But the native Australians have gone.”

“The Aborigines? What do you mean, gone?”

“They always remembered how to live in the continent’s red heart. Now they are leaving the white folk to their drowning cities.”

Gary put the question that every climatologist kept asking. “And if the sea keeps rising?”

Sanjay shrugged again. “Then the Aborigines are fucked. But so are we all, in the end.”

The ship had reached the narrows between the steep bluffs of Kandilli and Kanlica, which still stood high above the water.

Gary asked, “So what keeps you going, Sanj? How are your family? Your kids?”

“They and their mothers are with my sister, Narinder, and her own family. They are in a village in the Scottish Highlands, not far from Fort William. Safe up there. But they may have to move. After the tsunami the central British government all but collapsed, and is capable of organizing nothing but evacuations and emergency relief. In the highlands the old clans are forming again! Our father left us a family tree he mapped back to before the time of Bonnie Prince Charlie. So we have allegiances.”

“You’re not tempted to join them?”

“Maybe eventually, if things get bad enough. For now the science keeps me occupied. We must continue. What else is there to do?” Sanjay glanced at the sky, which was all but clear of smog. He slipped off his mask and sniffed the air.

42

H
aving passed through the strait, the
Links
tracked the coast of the Black Sea to the eastern shore. She landed close to the border between Russia and Georgia, over a drowned seaside resort called Sochi.

There was no functioning harbor here. Shallow-draft boats had to shuttle the scientists to a kind of pier that had been improvised on a main north-south road called the Kurortny Prospekt. There was nobody to help them disembark save the ship’s crew, and they had to haul their own luggage and equipment. But there were trucks waiting, hired by Woods Hole. Gary wondered how much the fuel had cost the distant bursars of Woods Hole.

Much of the town of Sochi, where it survived above the waterline, seemed abandoned, the shops and bars closed up or burned out, and there were few people about. A Russian girl called Elena Artemova, seconded from the Shirshov Oceanology Institute in Moscow, pointed gloomily to the mountains that loomed over the coast.“Everybody sensible has gone to the high villages,” she said. “And so must we, for the night.”

The trucks took the scientists and their gear up into the mountains to a village called Krasnaya Polyana—once a favorite of President Putin, a leathery, tobacco-chewing driver somberly informed them. The drive was spectacular but somewhat scary, the road snaking along ledges cut into steep mountain gorges. As they climbed Gary could clearly see how the coastal resorts had been flooded, their beaches drowned, and how the ocean had pushed deep into river valleys lined with conifers.

This was the Caucasus, the fat peninsula that stretched across the south of the Russian Federation, bounded by the Black Sea and the Sea of Azov to the west, and the Caspian Sea to the east. Gary had studied the local topography. It was varied country, with the north dominated by steppe and to the south mountains, until very recently still snow-capped. What was most interesting to the climatologists was that northern band of steppe, stretching from Rostov to Groznyy, much of it a meadow carpeted with wild flowers and rush-filled river valleys. This was the lowest stretch of this neck of land that separated the Black Sea from the landlocked Caspian. And when the rising Black Sea broke its bounds, across the steppe was the way the water would flow.

At Krasnaya Polyana they were taken to what had once apparently been quite a grand dacha, a scatter of single-story buildings under a canopy of spruce. The trucks parked for the night, and the drivers disappeared to their own dwellings in the main village. The scientists explored the dacha, calling to each other. The only tall building was a grand limestone block covered with stucco and peeling paint. The long entrance hall had a decorated ceiling, the images obscured by damp, and iron spiral stairs led to rooms off the upper balconies.

There were staff here, locals, mostly elderly, who spoke no English, and Elena Artemova and other Russian-speakers had to interpret. They seemed disappointed the scientists were so few, and that they would need little space. Elena seemed embarrassed to be drawn into negotiating over fees with an elderly woman.

Sanjay said, “You wonder what use money is to people like this.”

“Just as well this old crone hasn’t figured that out,” Thandie murmured. “While her sons have pissed off to the hills to grow corn and fight over the girls, she’s stayed on, accumulating a stash of rubles against the day things get back to normal. Good plan.”

“Perhaps she has no choice,” Elena said harshly. “Did you think of that?” Aged twenty-eight, she was a gloomy woman, but beautiful. Her face was long, with pale, luminous skin, large eyes, a downturned mouth; she wore her hair pulled back, which emphasized the boniness of her forehead.“Perhaps her sons would not take her to “the hills.” Perhaps she cannot work up there. This is all she has. Each of us is under pressure in a changing world,Thandie Jones. And we don’t all have rich western institutions backing our adventures.”