Stephen Baxter - Flood

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.

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.”