Flash Flood by Chris Ryan Read Free Book Online Page B

won’t. They’ll have shorted too.’
    The light show continued behind the cupboard door. ‘All the electrics are on fire in there.’
    Then Ben noticed that one of the windows wasopen; a thin man in a dark, sweat-stained shirt was sitting on the window ledge, looking down at the water lapping at the white marble building just a couple of metres below.
    Ben remembered the helpless figures hurled by the tide against the concrete walls outside. He pushed through the group of people and seized the man’s arm.
    ‘Don’t,’ he said.
    The man looked at him angrily. ‘I’m a strong swimmer – I can get to that rail bridge over there.’
    Ben kept his voice calm and looked into the man’s eyes. ‘I just saw someone die doing that. They must have thought they could make it too. The current is too strong.’
    The man’s colleagues were obviously also having doubts. ‘Don’t, Richard,’ said the woman with the wet gypsy skirt. ‘There must be another way.’
    Richard sighed, then got to his feet, turned and carefully lowered himself back into the room.
    Suddenly the door of the burning cupboard burst open and smacked against the wall. Smoke billowed out, along with a smell of burning cable. From the floor above there was another bang.
    As the crowd surged away from the fire, Ben gradually found himself swept to one side. His elbow caught a door handle and he stumbled backwards into an adjoining room – a small meeting room.
    The stinking cloud of smoke followed him in …

Chapter Ten
     
    Ben realized that there were three other people with him in the room: sweaty-shirted Richard; a young Chinese man with an identity pass on his belt that said his name was Guang and he worked in the IT department; and a woman in a glittery top. They stared at the smoke filling the room outside, listened to the screams and the sounds of running feet.
    ‘It’s the transformer for this floor,’ Guang said. ‘It must have shorted. That smoke will be nasty.’
    On the other side of the room’s glass wall was a frosted transfer with the ArBonCo logo. It began to blur as the heat melted it. A figure appeared throughthe smoke and Ben recognized the thin woman in the headscarf he had spoken to earlier. The woman in the glittery top let her in. She came in coughing on a wave of heat, as though she had escaped from an oven.
    ‘Cheryl, bring her over here to get some air.’ Guang edged around the big table in the middle of the room and opened the windows onto the river. The new arrival leaned on the table, coughing. Cheryl, the woman in the glittery top, put her arms around her shoulders and led her to the window. ‘Come on, Kabeera. You’ll feel better in a minute.’
    Ben noticed that the smoke outside was getting thicker. Richard was standing glaring at him. ‘You stopped me getting out. I’d have swum to that bridge by now,’ he told him.
    No you wouldn’t, thought Ben, but if I say so we’ll just have a pointless argument. On the wall was a display of rescue equipment for oil rigs, including a big, orange inflatable raft.
    ‘Maybe we don’t have to swim,’ said Ben. He moved quickly to the wall and pulled the raft down. ‘Help me with this.’
    Richard looked at him mutinously, refusing to help.
    Ben realized that he couldn’t waste time trying to talk him round. If Bel had been here, she’d have told him he was being an idiot. He’d get the others involved instead. What were their names? Ben searched his brain. Oh, yes. ‘Guang, Kabeera – we’ve got a raft!’ Ben tugged the raft off the wall and laid it on the conference table in the middle of the room.
    Cheryl grabbed the other two, and pointed at the raft on the table. ‘Quick, help with this.’
    ‘Where do we inflate it?’ Guang asked. ‘Everybody look for a valve or a gas canister.’
    On the other side of the glass, the smoke was thick and grey, like insulating wool. All the plastic frosting had turned black and charred. Everyone patted the orange