Rogue Wave

Chapter 26

Michael Perkins, the 19-year-old Civil Air Patrol pilot, had become concerned that nobody seemed to be listening to his warning, even though he was flying low enough to be easily heard. On one of his passes, he told the kayakers below to wave with both hands if they could hear him. They simply looked up as he flew past.

He opened the window of the plane, stuck the handset out of the window, and keyed it to on. The resulting feedback should have been loud enough to hear even over the roar of the engine. Nothing.

Damn! The loudspeaker wasn't working, he realized. The past 25 minutes of warning passes hadn't been heard by anyone. He radioed in to CAP headquarters to tell them about the problem and that no one off the Waikiki coast had yet been warned by the CAP.

As he set a course back to the airport to fix his loudspeaker, he was informed that another plane was on the way to Waikiki to take over his duties there.

Kai opened his email, and there was the message from Gail Wentworth. Eight JPEG images were attached to the email. Pimalo's cameraman shot over Kai's shoulder as he opened the pictures.

He clicked through them in the sequence that Wentworth had labeled them. The first image showed a viewpoint looking straight down on a mass of clouds covering a wide swath of the Pacific. Two barely visible lines could be seen over the storm, as if someone had slashed a pen across the picture. At the bottom right, a time stamp showed GMT 18:40:00.

Kai pointed at the numbers and said, "Greenwich Mean Time, which is ten hours ahead of Hawaii. That would make the time 8:40 AM in Honolulu."

In the photo stamped 18:40:30, the previous two lines were gone, but taking their place was a much brighter line, and Kai finally understood what he was seeing: the trails of asteroids burning up in the atmosphere.

"It wasn't just one meteor," he said. "It was a meteor shower."

Reggie pointed at the bright trail in the second picture. "That one must have caused our earthquake. If the first two were small enough, they would have burned up before they hit the water."

"They all must have been pieces of the same asteroid," Kai said.

"Just like Shoemaker-Levy," Reggie said. When he got puzzled looks from the others, he went on. "It was a comet that hit Jupiter in '94. It didn't hit all at once, but in pieces. Looks like the same thing might have happened here, but the first two pieces were small. Relatively."

"Any of them could have destroyed the airliner," Kai said.

Reggie nodded. "Sure, but the third one, the one that caused the bright streak in that second photo, was big enough to make it intact all the way to the sea floor."

Kai could hardly imagine the amount of energy it would take to enable an asteroid to plunge more than three miles to the bottom of the ocean and cause a major earthquake. For a moment, his finger hovered above the mouse. He dreaded what he would see next, but he forced himself to continue through the photos.

In the third picture, the line was gone, replaced with a small bright dot at the center of the storm clouds. As Kai opened each successive image, which the time stamp showed to be in 30 second increments, the dot grew larger until, in the final image, the explosion was plainly visible for what it was: the asteroid strike ejecting trillions of tons of superheated rock and steam into the atmosphere. On this last image, Wentworth had drawn a line parallel to the explosion and under it had written "15 miles."

"The explosion was 15 miles across?" Pimalo asked.

"At least the mushroom cloud was," said Reggie.

Kai flinched at the words "mushroom cloud," the phrase universally equated with absolute destruction. He had hoped that the surety of knowing that it was an asteroid would help him grasp the situation better, but if anything, he was in a daze. The abstract number crunching they had done when they were theorizing about the size of the asteroid was no longer abstract. It was real, and Kai sat for a moment processing it.

Reggie's voice snapped him out of his trance.

"We're getting another wave!" Reggie said, looking at the data coming in from the DART buoy. As before, the line rose inexorably, but this time it didn't stop until it had reached 1.3 meters.

Brad, now knowing the implications of the reading, said, "Jesus!"

"What!" said the reporter Pimalo. "What does that mean?"

"The second tsunami," Kai said, "is going to be over 150 feet high."

"The second one! What do you mean, Dr. Tanaka? How many are there going to be?"

"There's no way to know for sure. But we do know now that they are coming about 25 minutes apart."

"I can't wait to talk to the guys at Los Alamos about this," said Reggie. "Looks like their computations were off if they thought the first wave from an asteroid impact would be the biggest. You can't argue with proof like this."

Lara Pimalo put a hand to her ear, obviously to listen to what the producer was saying to her. She waved to the cameraman to stop filming. After a second, she ran over to the TV and turned it to MSNBC. They were just rerunning the video of the wave hitting Ka Lae, the southern tip of the Big Island, with the two hikers consumed by the tsunami. Then the picture switched to the photos they had just seen from LANDSAT-8.

After the sequence of photos was shown, they kept repeating those shots in the upper right corner and switched back to video of Waikiki, where people were pouring out of buildings and running through the streets, some screaming, some lugging a ridiculous number of items, such as suitcases and electronics.

"I guess it worked," Reggie said. "People are definitely leaving."

"Not all of them," Brad said.

For Kai, it was amazing and sad to see how quickly circumstances like these brought out the worst in some people who saw the disaster as an opportunity to take advantage of the situation. Farther down the street, two youths smashed in a plate glass window and grabbed several unidentifiable objects from the storefront. A policeman who had been directing traffic ran after them around the corner and out of sight.

"That stuff is going to be gone in a half hour anyway," Brad said. "Might as well let them have it."

The main picture then switched to an overhead shot from a helicopter hovering over Waikiki. It zoomed in to show Ala Wai Blvd., which ran parallel to the Ala Wai Canal on the north side of Waikiki. People could be seen streaming toward it and then turning to follow it westward.

"Tourists who don't know the city," said Reggie. "It seems like the most direct route from the beach, but they don't know there are no bridges over it. Locals would."

"The closest bridge is McCully St.," Kai said. "That could be a mile away if you're heading from the east end of the canal."

The view then changed to the camera in another helicopter, this one flying over the water off shore from Waikiki. The camera panned around and showed people still out in the water, some in boats, most on surf boards or other small watercraft.

"What are they doing?" Kai said, turning up the volume. A woman's voice, distressed, described the scene.

"…have apparently ignored warnings from the Civil Air Patrol to evacuate to land. I would like to repeat that this is an extremely dangerous situation, and you are recommended to stay as far away from the shore as possible."

"Don't those idiots hear the sirens?" Brad said.

"They might be too far from shore," Reggie said. "That's why the CAP does flyovers."

The camera zoomed in on a surfer kicking lazily back to shore. Then it moved across two more surfers and slid over until it focused on four kayakers. They were paddling slowly back in the direction of Waikiki, parallel to the beach. As the camera zoomed in even more, Kai gaped in disbelief at what he was seeing. It felt as though someone had yanked the floor out from under him and simultaneously plunged an ice pick into his chest. He staggered backward, as if the image had hammered him with physical force.

"Kai!" Brad yelled. Before Kai could fall, Brad caught him and sat him down. Kai's eyes never left the screen.

On TV, the faces of the four were clearly visible now. Kai didn't know the boys, but he instantly recognized the two girls with them. With less than half an hour before the largest tsunami in recorded history would strike Honolulu, his own daughter looked directly at the camera and happily waved.