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 co
uldn’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.
The hospital grounds were heaving with a greater intensity of activity than Ben had ever before seen concentrated in one location. As the truck threaded its way into the gates and though a floodlit pandemonium of vehicles and jostling crowds to the emergency wards, it was immediately obvious that the medical staff were overwhelmed far past breaking point. They were every bit as confused and shocked as the hordes of limping, bloodied, bandaged, screaming, dying or near-dead, panic-stricken, terrorised humanity that kept pouring relentlessly into the place in makeshift ambulances, cars, trucks, on foot or even in wheelbarrows. TV crews were already on the scene to capture the mayhem on camera. Choppers rattled in and out every few seconds, their downdraught tearing at the sheets on the gurneys the paramedics were wheeling in in droves.
Inside the hospital, every inch of stifling space was filled with patients, while harried doctors and nurses ran to and fro to attend to as many as they could. Men, women and children huddled miserably in corners waiting to be seen. Broken bodies, not all of them alive, were wheeled about under bloody sheets. Doors were constantly banging open and shut with the traffic passing through. Pools and trails of blood on the floor went unmopped by orderlies too rushed to keep up. Those who’d lost someone in the confusion were hunting through the tightly packed throng for their missing loved ones, calling their names, showing pictures to anyone who would spare a moment to look before just shaking their heads. The corridors rang with screams and weeping and the calls of the doctors and nurses just a step away from losing control. Sights, sounds, smells. A swirling, dizzying cacophony of pain.
Through the middle of it, Ben carried Roberta in his arms. Eventually, he managed to find a nurse who had a few free seconds between attending to a dying man and a lost, howling child, and escorted them through teeming corridors to a ward where a bed had just been freed up by a patient being rushed into surgery.
Ben laid Roberta carefully down on the bed and covered her with the single sheet. The nurse hurried off with the promise of returning in five minutes; she vanished into the mayhem and it was twenty minutes before Ben saw her again, accompanied by a young Indonesian doctor wearing a name badge that said ‘Dr Rahardjo’ and who looked as if he hadn’t slept in a week.
‘Please,’ Ben said. ‘She’s been unconscious a long time.’
The doctor examined Roberta’s head injury, looked concerned at the deep gash in her scalp, peeled back one eyelid at a time and shone a light in her pupils, asked Ben a few questions about her symptoms and quickly diagnosed acute concussion. He spoke in rapid broken English and Ben caught alarming words like ‘subdural hematoma’ and ‘subarachnoid bleeding’. How serious was it, he wanted to know. Dr Rahardjo wouldn’t commit to a prognosis. It was potentially a good sign that for the few moments she’d been conscious, she’d recognised Ben and remembered his name. But they couldn’t ignore the fact that the trauma was quite severe. He could say no more until they’d X-rayed and knew what they were dealing with.
Ben was reluctant to leave her side, but allowed himself to be shooed from the ward as the staff whipped a curtain around Roberta’s bed and began the job of cutting off her clothes so they could bathe and treat her other wounds while preparing the X-ray. She was in good hands now, the nurse assured him.
Ben could barely stand up and was only now becoming aware of the pain from the scores of cuts and bruises that covered his arms, legs, back and chest. ‘I’m fine,’ he protested, but the nurse insisted on sitting him down to examine his injuries before jabbing a syringeful of antibiotics into him, followed by another of painkillers. Then she had to rush off as a fresh crisis demanded her attention, another in an endless line that would keep her rushing all night and into the dawn.
Ben found a corner in a hallway outside Roberta’s ward and slumped, exhausted, on the floor with his back to the wall. All he could do now was rest, and wait, and hope, and trust in Dr Rahardjo and the nurses.
And pray. Bowing his head, he tried to mutter a few lines to appeal to God’s mercy and ask for Roberta to come through this safely. But the words wouldn’t come and it just made him feel awkward and stupid that he couldn’t even muster up a prayer. Some future clergyman he was.
He closed his eyes and sat motionless for a long time, but he wasn’t asleep. Out of the worry and the pain and the confusion in his mind about his feelings whenever he thought about Brooke, or Roberta, came a new emotion. Cold and hard and searingly sharp, like a steel blade forged and tempered in ice and fire. It was pure murderous explosive rage that made his fists clench and the blood pump faster through his veins.
When he opened his eyes again, sensing a presence, Jack Quigley was standing over him. ‘Hey,’ the American said.
‘Wasn’t sure we’d see you again,’ Ben said.
‘I’ve nowhere much else to go. How is she?’
‘I don’t know yet.’
‘Mind if I join you? They pumped me up with codeine but my ankle still hurts like a sonofabitch.’
‘Be my guest,’ Ben said, and Quigley slumped on the tiled floor next to him. ‘I’d offer you a smoke, if I had any,’ Quigley said.
‘How about a shot of surgical spirit?’ Ben said. ‘I could do with one.’
‘She’ll be okay,’ the American muttered after a silence. ‘Don’t worry.’
‘Thanks, Quigley. I’m trying.’
‘Jack.’
‘Okay, Jack.’
‘How long you two been together?’
The question took Ben by surprise. ‘It’s not – that is, we’re not—’ He sighed. ‘She and I are friends, that’s all.’
‘I assumed … I mean, you seem pretty close.’
Ben said nothing.
Quigley’s expression tightened and he gazed at the floor for a few moments, obviously deep in memories. ‘Like Mandy and me,’ he added in a whisper. ‘We were going to get married.’
‘I’m sorry,’ Ben said.
‘Yeah.’ Quigley gave a grim smile and fell silent, staring into space for a while.
‘I was getting married, too,’ Ben said. ‘It would have been two days ago.’
Quigley glanced at him. ‘But I thought you said—’
‘It’s a hell of a long story,’ Ben said.
‘It’s going to be a hell of a long night.’
‘Some other time,’ Ben said. ‘Let’s pick another subject.’
‘Like what?’
‘You said something about being a Marine.’
‘Uh-huh. Semper Fi. Got the marks to show for it.’ Quigley pulled up the sleeve of his grimy, bloodied shirt to show a tattoo on his upper arm. The faded blue ink depicted an American eagle perched atop the globe, with an anchor behind it and the letters USMC together with the Marine Corps motto Semper Fidelis. ‘Eight years,’ he said.
&nb
sp; ‘Still got the chops?’ Ben asked.
Quigley shrugged. ‘Feels like a past life sometimes. But you don’t forget. You?’
‘British Army, 22 Special Air Service,’ Ben said. ‘I haven’t forgotten everything either.’
‘You trying to say something, aren’t you?’
‘Yes, I am.’
‘I think I get the idea.’
‘The minute she pulls through this and I get her somewhere safe.’
‘And if she doesn’t?’ Quigley said, looking at Ben levelly.
‘The same. Only worse. Either way, this ends.’
‘I read you.’
‘I can’t do it alone,’ Ben said.
‘You won’t be alone,’ Quigley told him.
‘We might not get out.’
‘Like I give a shit. I only care about one thing now.’
Ben nodded. ‘Then we understand each other. Tell me everything Herbie Blumenthal told you about Mandrake Holdings and Triton.’
Chapter Sixty
Quigley had been right: it was a hell of a long night. But while the American finally passed out from fatigue, Ben had to suffer every minute of it wide awake. The first time he tried to check on Roberta, he was sternly denied access by the doctor and backed off. The second time, he was told by an orderly that she’d been moved. Dr Rahardjo would know where to – except Dr Rahardjo was nowhere to be seen either.
Ben was reduced to pacing up and down to keep himself from going insane with worry. But then, he wasn’t the only one for whom sleep was impossible. As the hours went by, the influx of injured disaster survivors showed little sign of abating and the hospital staff were given no rest. Sometime after three in the morning Ben caught sight of the nurse who’d helped him earlier, weeping in a corner as the strain finally got to her. He went to fetch her a drink of water. As she sipped it gratefully and wiped her tears, he gently asked if she had any news of Roberta. She said she’d try and find out more.