Dorek took them in lower, over a big, sprawling building. It was the Royal Hospital, Chelsea, home of the Chelsea Pensioners. Some figures in red coats were using a window-cleaner’s cradle to hoist some bedraggled figures in civvies up to the top floor.
‘It looks as though they’ve got things under control,’ said the pilot. ‘They’re rescuing a load of civilians.’
The Chelsea Pensioners? thought Meena. She had a mental picture of frail old men in red coats with shiny buttons and war ribbons and black tricorn hats, shaking hands with the Queen at the Chelsea Flower Show. ‘I thought those guys were about seventy,’ she said.
‘They’re tough old guys,’ chuckled Dorek. ‘Hold tight.’ He slid the Puma down sideways. The down-draught made ripple patterns in the rain-spattered water. He nudged the control stick and the Puma tilted from side to side and then flew level again.
The pensioners recognized the salute and gave a thumbs-up in return.
‘They seem to be doing fine,’ said Dorek, and headed downriver again. They flew on, passing over the bulk of St Thomas’s Hospital, water lapping all around the building, and he banked for the return journey.
‘I’m just sending the map now,’ said Phil. ‘We’re done here.’ He tapped some keys and sent the map by secure satellite e-mail.
Dorek pulled away and sped up, back towards Essex.
Down below in the hospital, the medical staff were doing their best in the difficult circumstances. A nurse wearing theatre scrubs, a torch strapped to her forehead, was bending over a patient, squeezing a plastic bottle in a slow, regular rhythm. A tube led from the bottle into the patient’s throat. He had been on the operating table when the power cuts came, plunging them into darkness.
It was freezing cold in the recovery room. The water that had flooded into the bottom of the building was acting like a gigantic fridge, cooling the whole place. Except for her torch the room was totally dark. This part of the hospital had no external windows — to maintain a sterile environment and to stop people from seeing in. What went on in operating suites was not for public viewing. Especially not today.
The door swung open and a girl came in with some blankets. She put one around the nurse’s shoulders. It was blissful, like a hot bath. ‘Thanks, Vicky,’ the nurse said. Her rhythm squeezing on the bottle never faltered. Squeeze — hiss. Squeeze — hiss. That was what was keeping the patient alive.
Vicky put the other blanket over the patient, careful not to disturb the drips that ran into his arm. She looked shell-shocked. Poor girl, thought the nurse, she had only just started work there that afternoon. So far she’d had a hell of a first day.
Vicky went back to the stores to collect some more blankets. She had two fleeces on under her scrubs but still she was freezing cold. The head torch cast weird shadows in the corners.
She had been looking forward to taking up her first hospital job after qualifying. She’d been a PA back home in Wales and had retrained as a hospital administrator. She’d never dreamed that her first day at work would be like this. It had started badly enough — she had been delayed on the train and had to come straight to the hospital, without stopping off at her flat first. She hadn’t even sat down at her desk when the flood hit. She had still been trying to find her way around the computer system when the power failed. Everyone was calm and just waited for the generators in the basement to come on. Except that they didn’t. And slowly the news had sunk in that they weren’t going to start either — the building was surrounded by water and the level was rising.
Then all hell broke loose. Nurses burst out of the operating theatres calling for lights — and help. Vicky suddenly found herself in a darkened scrub room, along with every other nurse, porter and secretary. They were told to wash their hands and put on gloves and gowns. Vicky was given some head torches and instructed to take them into one of the operating theatres.
When she had put her head torch on and pushed open the theatre doors, the sight that greeted her was like something from a bad dream. Her light fell on the incision in the patient’s side and she saw a mass of blood spilling over the green cloth and onto the floor below. Quickly she looked away, but immediately the surgeons yelled at her for directing the light away from their work. They hadn’t spotted the bleeding until she came in with the torch. She’d had to stare at the spurting artery while they got to work with metal clamps. They couldn’t waste precious seconds putting head torches on themselves; instead they made her stand over the table like a mobile spotlight.
Vicky began to make sense of the shape on the operating table in front of her. The wound was in the patient’s hip. It was an appalling mess. The surgeons had been cutting muscle away, to get down to the bone to insert a replacement hip, but now they had to abandon the operation and just try to patch up the damage. Vicky wanted to be sick, but she didn’t dare move — the surgeons were relying on her light to work on the patient.
Vicky was aware of the anaesthetist and a nurse at the patient’s head and she suddenly had a terrible thought: what about the anaesthetic or whatever was keeping the patient asleep? Would that fail without the power?
The nurse finally grabbed a head torch from her and went hunting in the cabinets. She brought back a loaded syringe and injected it straight into the patient’s drip.
Finally the surgeons got control of the bleeding and Vicky was allowed to move away and distribute the other torches.
When she stumbled out of the theatre, she felt sick to her stomach. As she struggled to calm herself down, she told herself she was lucky. She could have been down in casualty or outpatients, or working in the morgue. They had been completely flooded. No one knew what had happened to the patients and staff there.
One by one, the patients in the theatres were closed up and wheeled out. Their operations would have to be performed again later. All the surgeons could do was sew up cut vessels, repair the holes they had made in muscles, stitch together the skin.
Now each of those patients lay in a recovery room, a theatre nurse standing over them, checking their progress. One of them had stopped breathing after the operation, and had to be resuscitated by hand. A nurse was bending over him, squeezing a bag that pushed air in and out of his lungs.
When Vicky had visited operating suites before, they had been busy places, full of bustle and the background hum of machines. Machines that made a soft hissing as they breathed for the patient, bleeped quietly as they monitored heart and brain activity. There was none of that noise now; it was silent and eerie. The only sound was the rhythmic hiss of the ventilating bag.
As Vicky walked past another recovery room, she saw the nurse’s head in a ghostly circle of light like a halo; she was checking the patient’s pulse with a worried expression. The nurse saw her light and called out to her. ‘Vicky, can you get Doctor Okanga to dispense me some more morphine? I think he’s coming round.’
‘Yeah, sure.’
She hurried along to the pharmacy. This was the moment she had been dreading. When the poor, hastily patched-up patients came back to consciousness.
And would they have to evacuate? If the flood waters rose any higher, would they have to move the patients elsewhere? Surely they could not stay in a hospital without power …?
Chapter Twenty-one
Ben thumped hard against the door with his shoulder but the bolt was solid and it held. The sound reverberated around the cellar.
Was that another sound — something in the water? Not for the first time, he peered down into the gloom, trying to see how deep it was, But he couldn’t see anything. The cellar was black.