A Fear of Dark Water (4 page)

Like the neck of some improbable nocturnal dinosaur, the massive arm of a Liebherr LTM 1130-5.2 lattice-boom truck swung overhead, heavy cable and chains swinging and clashing. A team of firemen fastened the chains around a tangle of wood and metal that had been swept up onto the wide expanse of flooded ground beside the Fischmarkt. The lattice boom hoisted the debris up and clear of the flood area, lowering it onto the back of a flatbed. A second, smaller crane lowered a section of armoured evacuation pipe into place and the same fire team rushed forward and snapped shut the camlock couplings to connect it to the rest of the pipe. As soon as the connection was made, Kreysig shouted into his radio and another two pumps came on line.

And still Kreysig felt the thrill of battle. This was Man against Nature. And he was the man.

Kreysig had known well in advance that the storm had been coming. It had wrought devastation across France and England; the North German Climate Bureau and the German Weather Service had tracked its progress. They had also tracked another cluster forming in the North Sea, one hundred and eighty kilometres south-west of Jutland. It was like two armies gathering before attacking at once, combining their strengths before the onslaught on the Netherlands, Denmark and Northern Germany. Kreysig had seen Hamburg devastated by flood before. The 1953 flood had been before he was born, and he had been a baby when the ’62 storm had hit and killed more than three hundred and left sixty thousand homeless in the city; but he remembered ’76 and had been a senior fire and rescue officer in 2007. Each time the water had hit higher, but each time Hamburg had been that little bit readier, that little bit more protected.

And this time, before the flood hit, millions of euros’ worth of flood barriers had paid for themselves in a single deployment: blocking and channelling the storm surge. But some flooding was inevitable, and they had known where to be ready, where the battle lines would be drawn, including here, at the Fischmarkt, where St Pauli met the city centre.

Tramberger, Kreysig’s deputy, came across to him and leaned his weather-beaten face in close, shouting to be heard above the combined clamour of storm and machine.

‘That’s all the electric submersibles and all the diesels on line. We’ve got an ebb and the water level is dropping. We’re down to plus three metres.’

Kreysig grinned and slapped his deputy on the shoulder. They were winning. He looked around at the teams he had deployed; all were still working full tilt: hard, muscle-tearing work against a far stronger opponent, but no one showed any sign of the fatigue that must, by now, be adding lead to every movement. It was a good team. A bloody good team. He had put it together himself, picking the best from the Hamburg Fire Service, from the Hamburg Harbour Police, from the Hamburg City and State Engineering Department.

He checked in with his other crews, further to the west on Klopstockstrasse and Königstrasse. Same news. He checked his watch: it was nearly five a.m. They had been fighting the flood for twelve hours. Looking up at the still-dark sky, Kreysig saw the heavy clouds scud malevolently over the city. It was like watching a fleet of bombers pass overhead, laden with potential destruction. But these clouds, he knew, would wreak havoc elsewhere. Hamburg’s turn was over. For now.

It was then that he noticed one of the teams had stopped working. The firemen stood in a circle looking down at something on the newly exposed tarmac of Elbestrasse. The team leader looked across to Kreysig and Tramberger and beckoned, urgently, for them to come over.

Something, Kreysig could tell, was wrong.

Part One

Chapter Five

Jan Fabel awoke. Gradually. He had been dreaming: a dream about sitting in the house he’d grown up in in Norddeich, in his father’s old study, talking with a young man whom Fabel knew was dead and who knew it himself. Fabel wanted to leave the dream behind, where it could be forgotten.

He surfaced slowly from the depths of his sleep and became aware of the sound of voices. The radio alarm. NDR Radio. A debate. One of the voices vaguely familiar.

He lay staring at the ceiling for a moment, mustering the sleep-scattered pieces of his consciousness and trying to work out what the voice on the radio was talking about. And
who
the voice belonged to: Fabel realised that he recognised the male voice from somewhere in his fully awake world but, for now, he was too sleepy to concentrate on locating it. He rolled over onto his side; Susanne had her back to him. He shook her shoulder and she made a sound somewhere between sleepy contentment and irritation.

‘It’s time to get up,’ he said.

Another low, sleepily discontented muttering.

He swung his legs out and sat on the edge of the bed. Berthold Müller-Voigt. That was whose voice he recognised on the radio. He had been sure he had heard it before somewhere. Müller-Voigt was the Environment Senator in the Hamburg Senate and someone with whom Fabel had had dealings in the past.

Fabel frowned and pushed his blond hair back from his eyes. He shook Susanne again: another grumpy response. Switching the radio-alarm off, he rose and stretched and made his way through to the shower. Susanne and he had lived together in this flat for more than two years, but he still found that he had to think about its early-morning geography. He shaved and showered. Dressed. Roll-neck sweater, expensive English tweed jacket, chinos, brogues.

He had just made the coffee when Susanne came into the kitchen, still in her bathrobe. Her thick dark hair a tumbling statement of her unwillingness yet to face the day.

‘You’ll be late,’ he said. He meant
they
would be late. Susanne usually worked from her office in the Institute of Legal Medicine in Eppendorf, but two days a week she worked out of the police Presidium. On those mornings they took one car. And on those mornings Fabel was always rattled by Susanne’s tardiness. This morning, he was even more tense: Susanne was attending a seminar at the Federal Crime Bureau in Wiesbaden and he had agreed to run her to the airport to catch her early-morning flight to Frankfurt.

‘I’ll be ready.’ She took the cup of coffee he offered and leaned on the kitchen counter. ‘Did you sleep okay?’ she asked. ‘That bloody storm kept me up half the night.’

‘I think it woke me up.’ He lied. It hadn’t been the storm that had woken him in the middle of the night; but they didn’t talk any more about Fabel’s dreams. The bad dreams.

Susanne switched on the small TV they had in the kitchen. It was one of the compromises Fabel had accepted: he was no great television watcher and never had understood why people needed more than one in their homes. But one day he had come back from work and had found it sitting on the counter. A new and gleaming intrusion into his world. A cohabitational
fait accompli
; another indication that his space, his life, was now shared.

‘Look at this …’ she said. The report on the TV was of serious flooding all along the banks of the Elbe. There was footage of the flood defences down by the harbour and the Fischmarkt being deployed. The reporter did his piece to camera with practised gravity.

‘It’s good we’re not travelling along the Elbchaussee this morning,’ she said.

‘We may have problems getting to the airport anyway. I would imagine that there’s going to be more traffic, what with the diversions and everything. We’ll have to leave that bit earlier,’ Fabel replied, looking pointedly at his watch. Susanne made a face and went back to a leisurely enjoyment of her coffee.

‘I’ll phone the airport just to check the flights are on time …’ Fabel made to lift the phone.

‘Why phone in?’ asked Susanne from behind her coffee cup. ‘Just check it online.’

‘You never know when these things are updated,’ said Fabel. ‘At least if you talk to a human being …’

Susanne snorted. ‘A human being? We’re talking about someone who works in an airport. Trust me, use the computer – it’s less robotic. I tell you what, I’ll do it when I’m dressed. I just don’t get why you’re so technophobic.’

‘I’m not technophobic,’ muttered Fabel. ‘I’m
traditional
. Anyway, I fully admit that I’m not too keen on the digital age. Look at this so-called Network Killer we’ve been chasing for the last six months … or at the havoc that reliance on computers causes. We’ve had all kind of memos about this Klabautermann Virus that’s been hacked into the Hamburg State email system.’

Susanne laughed. ‘You don’t
hack
a virus. Tell me, how come you survived when the meteor hit?’

‘What meteor?’ Fabel asked irritatedly.

‘You know, the one that wiped out all the other
dinosaurs
…’ Susanne emphasised the word and laughed at her own witticism. ‘Anyway, as far as I can gather, the Klabautermann Virus hasn’t breached the Polizei Hamburg’s security. We’ve got it at the Institute for Legal Medicine, though. It’s a pain, I’ll give you that. But we were able to back-up all our emails before it hit.’

‘I’ve got a simpler solution. It’s called print on paper.’

‘Oh yeah?’ Susanne put her cup down and sauntered past him, letting her hips swing as she walked. ‘Then we wouldn’t have to worry about Klabautermann Viruses or system crashes … all we’d have to worry about would be little bookworms like you, wouldn’t we, honey?’ She ruffled his hair as she passed. Fabel frowned.

It had stopped raining by the time Fabel and Susanne made their way to where Fabel’s BMW convertible was parked, but the sky was glowering and heavy, the colour of ship steel. Fabel sighed as he put Susanne’s suitcase and attaché case in the trunk.

‘Another shitty day,’ said Susanne gloomily. She closed the car door and cursed when a trail of rainwater from the roof dribbled into her hair. ‘This thing’s leaking – you know that, don’t you?’

‘It never used to be a problem,’ said Fabel in an almost-mutter. ‘I had covered parking at my old place.’

‘You really should think about trading this in.’ Susanne ignored his comment. ‘It must be ten years old now. You’re always banging on about the environment; this can’t be that fuel-efficient or environmentally friendly compared with what you could get now.’

‘It does me fine,’ said Fabel, manoeuvring the car from its parking space. ‘I don’t see how adding another car to the roads could be considered environmentally friendly. And anyway, if you’re so green, why are you flying to Frankfurt? You could have asked to go by train.’

‘You’re the tree-hugger, not me.’ She grinned maliciously. ‘It must be because you hardly saw a tree when you were growing up in the good ol’ flatlands of East Frisia. I suppose all that wind blew them down.’

‘We had trees. Maybe not as many as you had in darkest Bavaria, but we had trees.’

‘We had trees, all right,’ said Susanne. ‘Forests full of them. And mountains. You know what a mountain is, don’t you Frisia Boy? It’s like a really, really, really big dyke.’

‘Very funny.’

‘I’m surprised you moved here to Hamburg. We must be all of two metres above sea level. Don’t you get nosebleeds?’

Fabel laughed. ‘If people like you keep taking domestic flights then we’ll be below sea level soon enough.’

‘Then I’ll travel by boat. Or U-boat.’ Susanne started to hum the tune of ‘Yellow Submarine’, smiling contentedly.

Rather than battle through the city, Fabel headed out along Behringstrasse and onto the A7 autobahn. As they approached the ramp, Fabel noticed a huge poster by the side of the road: a picture of a tumultuous sea beneath a stormy sky, a small, distant lighthouse casting a beam of light across the waters. Beneath the image was a logo of sorts: the words THE PHAROS ENVIRONMENTAL PROJECT in English, next to what looked like some kind of stylised eye. The slogan below stated in German:
The Storm is Coming
.

‘D’you think it’s real?’ Susanne asked abstractly, watching a huge four-by-four Mercedes thunder past them.

‘What?’

‘Anthropogenic climate change.’ Susanne repeated the question while tilting the rear-view mirror in her direction as she applied lipstick. ‘Do you think it’s real? That we’re responsible for screwing up the climate. Creating storms like last night?’

‘Of course it’s real.’ Fabel snapped the mirror back to its correct position, pointedly sighing his irritation. ‘All the evidence points to it being real. You’re a scientist, you’ve seen the data. You saying you don’t believe it?’

‘No … I’m not saying that. But maybe it’s not all us. Maybe there’s a natural shift. It’s happened before. And as well as natural shifts, a single volcano can do more damage than we’ve done over our entire history. Just look at the impact of all that Icelandic ash belched out into the atmosphere. If that baby or one of her bigger brothers really blows, then it could be winter for years. Mass starvation. Maybe even total and irreversible climate change. That’s not us. That’s Nature.’

‘Maybe there is a natural shift, but we’re definitely adding to it. It makes sense: releasing millions of years’ worth of stored carbon energy in a century and a half.’ Fabel sighed and looked at his watch. The road was even more congested than he had predicted. Luxury congestion: from the number of Range Rovers and battleship-sized Mercs and Lexuses, Fabel guessed that most of the usual commuter traffic from the affluent suburb of Blankenese, a little further upriver and upmarket from his Ottensen flat, had been redirected away from the Elbchaussee, the main route running along the side of the river.