The Nemesis Program (Ben Hope) (40 page)

Ben burst gasping up to the surface, blinked the water out of his eyes and looked around him. Where were Roberta and Quigley? He yelled for them. No reply, no sign.

The capsized yacht had grounded on a high wooded ridge on the rising slope of the terrain inland. The uprooted trunk that had tipped the vessel over must have been torn away under the impact, and had taken half the hull with it. What was left of the boat was stuck fast between the two trees and its prow buried in a mud bank.

‘Roberta!’ he yelled again. ‘Quigley!’

He swam for the bank, reached out for an exposed tree root and dragged himself up the slippery mud onto solid ground, where he clambered to his feet on aching, trembling legs and looked back in the direction of the ocean.

He’d never seen such unbelievable devastation, not even in war. From his vantage point he could see all along the coastline that stretched away to the east – except that it wasn’t there any more. Only the tops of a few trees and buildings that had withstood the force of the tsunami protruded from the water. Further inland, the flood was still surging onwards over the lower ground. From a distance the wreckage-strewn tide seemed to move like lava. As he watched, a distant village was swamped. A truck, carried sideways on the current, smashed through the front of a wooden house. Tiny figures of running villagers were engulfed and disappeared.

Nothing could be done to save those poor souls. Ben looked away. ‘Roberta!’ he bellowed once more at the top of his voice. Still no reply. A feeling of chill dread began to grip him. He blamed himself for losing her.
Why, why did you let go of her hand
?

From the ridge where the boat had grounded, the forested terrain rose steadily upwards. Maybe she’d been flung clear of the water. He staggered through the bushes, searching left and right.

It was then that he heard a hoarse shout. Quigley’s voice, coming from the far side of the overturned boat. Ben turned and scrambled back down the bank towards the sound, clambered over the upside-down hull and saw him lying in the mud near the water’s edge.

Quigley’s face was bloody from a fresh gash on his forehead. ‘Help me!’ he gasped in pain, pointing at his left leg. ‘I can’t move.’ Ben saw why: his left leg was pinned underneath the boat wreck.

Ben hesitated for a moment, torn between the need to help the man and the overwhelming desire to find Roberta, but he couldn’t leave the American lying there trapped. He slid the rest of the way down the bank, hunted around in the mud for something to dig with and found a large flat stone that could act as an improvised shovel. He crouched next to Quigley and began to scoop the wet earth out from under his leg.

‘Where’s Roberta?’ the American gasped.

‘I don’t know,’ Ben said grimly and kept digging. In a couple of minutes Quigley’s leg was free. ‘It’s not broken,’ Ben said, looking at the ugly swelling on his ankle. ‘Just a sprain. Can you stand?’

‘I think so.’ Quigley gripped the hand that Ben offered him, scrambled wincing to his feet and limped up the bank to lean against a tree on the more solid ground. ‘Holy shit,’ Quigley breathed, gazing across the scene of absolute destruction.

‘Stay there,’ Ben said.

‘Where are you going?’

‘I have to find her,’ Ben replied over his shoulder as he scrambled back down towards the water. Without hesitation he plunged in and began to swim out past the boat, fighting against the drifting debris, searching everywhere, yelling her name. With every passing moment the awful certainty increased: she couldn’t swim. Even if she’d managed to escape being crushed under the overturning boat, the currents had overwhelmed her. He wasn’t going to see her again.

He gasped in a lungful of air and dived deeper into the murk, propelling himself downwards with powerful strokes. Where the tree roots had torn part of the yacht’s hull away he found the ragged hole eight feet down and swam inside the dark space. Hoping for a trapped air pocket. Visualising Roberta clinging on inside, still alive.

But there was nothing inside the wreck but dirty water. He swam back out through the hole and thrust his way back to the surface.

‘There’s no use,’ came Quigley’s call from the bank. ‘Give it up; she’s gone, man.’

Ben ignored him. He couldn’t give it up. He battled his way around the half-submerged stern end of the hull to where more of the western side of the ridge came into view, and swam hard towards it. Treading water, he paused to run his eye along the waterline, up the sloping banks to the trees. The edge of the flood was a seething, bobbing mass of debris. Above the waterline, he could see nothing but thick foliage. The voice of despair inside him was telling him that Quigley was right. It was hopeless.

Until that moment, Ben hadn’t realised fully how much he cared for Roberta. He turned away, defeated, suddenly as weary as he could remember having ever been in his life. He could barely muster up the energy to keep himself afloat. The water was beginning to recede now, as if the ocean was calling it back. He could feel the current dragging him, and had to fight it. All along the edge of the ridge, the level was dropping visibly by the foot, so that the ground appeared to rise up from the surface, surrounded by the gigantic mass of wreckage washed up in the mud.

And that was when, out of the corner of his eye, Ben saw the bedraggled shape half-hidden behind a rooted-up tree grounded on the bank twenty yards to his right. His heart jumped. He turned and began splashing towards the bank.

‘Roberta!’

It was her. She was lying limply in the mud. Her hair was slicked almost black over her face.

The relief that flooded through him as he swam towards her quickly dwindled to a sense of renewed terror as he saw the blood on her. ‘Roberta!’

He reached her.

She wasn’t moving.

Chapter Fifty-Nine

Ben wrenched away the foliage and branches that half-covered her limp body, took her in his arms and pulled her further up the bank. Her clothes were ripped and the exposed skin was striped by dozens of cuts made by the raking branches of the tree wreckage, but most of the blood had come from the deep gash on her forehead, just below the hairline. Where her face wasn’t streaked with blood it was pallid, almost white. Her lips had a bluish hue. Her eyes were closed. She felt as cold as a corpse.

Clear of the water, he knelt beside her and urgently turned her on her side. Water gushed from her mouth. ‘Don’t be dead don’t be dead,’ he kept mumbling as he felt for a pulse. His own was hammering.

No pulse.

Ben instantly began CPU. Her lips felt icy and lifeless against his. He blew hard into her mouth, then straightened up to compress her chest and force her lungs to start working again.

Nothing. He tried again.

Again. Again.

A tiny gasp burst from her mouth. Her closed eyelids gave a flutter. She coughed.

Ben felt her pulse. It was back. It was there. But it was terribly weak, and so irregular it might stall again at any moment.

‘Quigley!’ he shouted with a force that tore his throat. ‘I found her! Over here!’

Quigley’s replying shout returned a moment later. ‘I’m coming!’

Roberta’s eyelids gave another flutter, and slowly opened. She seemed not to be able to see him at first, then her gaze focused and she gave a tiny smile. ‘Ben?’ she murmured, almost inaudibly.

‘I’m here. I’m with you. You’re going to be fine,’ he said, his heart hammering with intermingled joy and terror. He held her. ‘I thought I’d lost you,’ he whispered into her wet hair. ‘I’m so sorry I let you go.’

‘Ben—’ she began, then passed out again. He quickly felt for her pulse. Still there, but still barely perceptible.

‘Quigley!’ Ben roared. ‘Get over here!’

The American appeared moments later and came sliding down the muddy bank towards them. ‘My God, is she okay? Is she alive?’

‘She’s had a bad blow to the head,’ Ben said, hearing the ragged edge in his own voice. ‘Looks to me like an acute concussion. She needs to get to a hospital. Help me move her.’

‘We’ll never make it up there,’ Quigley said, eyeing the steepness of the thickly-wooded slope above them.

‘Then we’ll go that way,’ Ben said, pointing east beyond the trees. ‘The ground’s lower. There’s got to be a road somewhere.’

‘The high ground’s the only place that’s not underwater,’ Quigley replied. But as they spoke, the flood was receding faster and faster.

It was a long, hard struggle across the ridge, supporting Roberta’s unconscious weight between them as they clambered through mud and impenetrable thicket. The sun was dropping lower in the sky. In a few more hours, night would fall. But as they marched on, often having to stop while the limping Quigley rubbed his sore ankle, Ben saw that his hunch about the lie of the terrain had been right. The ground began to slope downwards and the forest gradually thinned out.

Breaking clear of the trees they caught their first view of the scale of the utter devastation, strangely sepia-lit in the glow of the descending sun. The flood waters had completely receded now, just a few gigantic pools here and there to show for the tsunami’s passing. The drenched landscape was as flattened and ruined as if a nuclear blast had levelled it.

‘Oh, Jesus,’ Quigley muttered as they took in the surreal spectacle. ‘How could they have done this?’

‘They did it,’ Ben said grimly. ‘And they’ll keep doing it.’

A little way further down, the trees gave way to what had been grassland but was now one vast field of mud and debris. The minor twisting road running through it was smothered almost completely. They walked, just three small figures picking a path through an apocalyptic wilderness of destruction. Somewhere, there had to be people. There had to be something left.

Ben carried Roberta in his arms. Her head lolled on his shoulder as he marched onwards. He could feel her breathing, slow and shallow, against his body. He kissed her brow. ‘You’re going to be all right,’ he whispered in her ear, even though she couldn’t hear him. ‘I promise.’

‘She will,’ Quigley said, limping along beside him. ‘Somewhere at the end of this road, there’s gotta be a hospital. They’ll fix her up. You have to have faith.’

‘Faith,’ Ben muttered.

An overturned truck blocked the road, half-covered in debris. The driver was still inside, drowned at the wheel. Ben and Quigley skirted around the vehicle through the mounds of debris and kept walking. Evening was beginning to fall and the temperature was dropping. The night could become very cold.

‘You want me to take her a while?’ the American offered after another half hour’s weary trudge.

Ben’s arms were aching, but he didn’t want to let Roberta go. ‘Thanks, Quigley,’ he said, shaking his head.

‘Jack.’

‘Okay, Jack. I’ll let you know when I can’t carry her any further. Anyway, you can hardly walk.’

‘Don’t you worry about me,’ the American said.

They lapsed into silence. Darkness was falling and Ben was getting more and more desperately anxious about Roberta, comatose in his arms. She needed treatment soon. Without it, Ben feared that she wouldn’t last the night. He was deeply concerned, too, that Quigley was going to hold them back if his limp became any worse. The American was toughing it out but there was no hiding that he was in great pain from his ankle.

By now, they’d walked beyond the extent of the wreckage zone and the twisting little road seemed bizarrely normal, as if the disaster had never happened. Soon afterwards, it joined another, larger road and the extent of the disaster’s human impact began to reveal itself as scores of trucks and cars, even motorcycles towing makeshift trailers, came past crammed with both the injured and the dead. One vehicle after another after another, in an endless procession of lights while the dark shapes of helicopters clattered through the evening sky towards the stricken zone.

The rescue operation had begun. It would be a long and almost impossible task. Ben couldn’t even begin to imagine the final death toll, not to mention the damage inflicted on the lives of countless survivors for whom nothing would ever be the same again.

An open-backed truck came rumbling past. Its tailgate was hanging open and in the fading light Ben saw that its flatbed was filled with people – but not so filled that there wasn’t room for two or three more. He broke into a stumbling run, trying not to jolt Roberta too badly in his arms. ‘Wait!’ he shouted at the driver. ‘Hold on! I have an injured woman here. Hospital – hospital!’

Just as the truck seemed about to press on regardless, it stopped and with thanks to the driver Ben carried Roberta to the tailgate where willing hands helped to load her delicately on board the flatbed. Ben helped Quigley climb up after her, then joined them and sat next to where Roberta lay on a blanket someone had offered.

The truck rumbled onwards. It was a rough road and every lurch brought cries of pain from the many injured people on board. One Indonesian man had a compound fracture of the femur and was drenched in sweat despite the cool night air, convulsing in agony. A young girl of eight or nine had a bandage around her head and blood all down one side. Many of the uninjured were too shocked to speak; others couldn’t stop. There was a local woman called Mae who spoke good English and said she lived in one of the coastal villages with her family. It was no longer there. A white tourist in his late twenties who introduced himself as Franz from Alsace was eaten alive with worry having become separated from his wife Lisa after the wave had hit. He had a photo; had Ben seen her? Ben had to say no. In the hope that she’d made it onto one of the other trucks heading inland, Franz was trying very hard to convince himself he’d find her alive and well at the hospital in Padang Panjang, where most of the passengers concurred the convoy was taking them. Ben didn’t know what to say to the poor guy.

The truck went on jolting and rattling for what seemed to Ben like hours as he sat over Roberta, tried to clean the blood from her face and kept waiting for her to wake up. An old woman held her hand and said prayers. Quigley leaned against the truck’s side and closed his eyes, his head hanging to his chest. The injured went on crying out. The bereaved wept or sat numbly in silence. Franz talked on endlessly about finding Lisa. A long tail of headlights stretched out behind them from dozens of vehicles joining the rescue convoy. Now and then a faster-moving pickup truck or car would come shooting past, laden with more survivors.