The Tsunami Countdown

FORTY-ONE

11:47 a.m.

Second Wave

The remnants of the skybridge swayed in the breeze, screeching where the metal rubbed against the side of the Moana tower of the Grand Hawaiian. Bill Rogers had been able to hold on, but he struggled to pull himself up onto the pillar that he was dangling from. Paige looked down helplessly from the safety of the building not more than ten feet away. “Mommy, help Daddy!”

Paige’s daughter Ashley had wandered away and was now standing at the edge of the broken skybridge. Paige yelped and snatched the girl back from the six-story precipice.

“Honey, wait over by that door.” Paige pointed at the stairwell exit sign.

“But Daddy—”

“You have to do what I tell you so that I can get Daddy, okay?” Ashley grudgingly nodded and retreated to the door. Paige returned to see Bill clinging to the tenuously attached remnants of metal. The pillar was bending from his 250-pound weight now that it was not firmly anchored at both ends. It was all he could do to keep from falling. There was no way he’d be able to climb up on his own.

“Bill, I’m going to find something to lower down to you.”

“Is Ashley okay?” Bill yelled.

“She’s fine.”

“Good. Hurry. I can’t hold on much longer.”

Paige went to find the only thing she could think of that would be both strong enough and likely to be found somewhere nearby. A fire hose.

“Stay there!” she told Ashley.

She ran toward the ocean side of the building, hoping to find a hose still in its hallway glass storage case. Given the extent of damage from the previous wave, it could be in any state.

That’s when she heard the tsunami. Paige saw the foamy white line building and cascading across the bay and realized that she had no more time to find something to lower to Bill. She would have to do it herself.

Paige ran back to the skybridge. From his vantage point, Bill had already seen the tsunami.

“Did you find anything?” he said.

“I didn’t have time. I’m going to climb down onto that pillar above you and grab your hand.” She began to lower herself over the edge.

“No!” screamed Bill. “The skybridge can’t take your weight too. We’ll both go down.”

“Then what should I do?”

As the freight-train roar of the wave got louder, Bill gave Paige a look that was both sad and loving.

“Go.”

“No!” Paige sobbed when she understood what her husband meant. “I’m not doing it!”

“Paige, you have to get Ashley to safety. You have to be their mom.”

“No! No! You’re coming with me!”

“Paige, I won’t let you die trying to save me. Go!”

“You don’t have a choice. I’m not leaving you!”

The wave was no more than five hundred yards away.

“I’m not leaving you!” she repeated.

“I understand. It’s not your fault. I love you!”

And with that, he let go.

“Bill!”

The six-story plunge was mercifully short. His broken body lay motionless on the debris below. Paige stepped back, wailing in anger and grief. She leaned against the wall, rooted to the spot as she sobbed.

The riotous sound of the wave shook her loose. The water was almost upon them. She had to make sure that her daughter was safe, that her husband hadn’t sacrificed himself in vain.

Still crying uncontrollably, Paige swept Ashley up in her arms and dashed into the stairwell.

The view from Wheeler Army Airfield was far removed from the action, but Reggie had a front-row seat, courtesy of a TV hastily set up at the front of the crowded office. He was talking with Frank Manetti, his contact at the West Coast/Alaska Tsunami Warning Center, on his cell phone.

“You seeing this?” Reggie said, absently patting Bilbo, who panted beside him. When Reggie had snagged his ride during the evacuation, his only condition had been that Bilbo would be allowed to come with him. Lying obediently at Reggie’s feet, the dog never took his eager brown eyes off the commotion around him.

The TV showed a helicopter view of the second tsunami coming in. The TV stations, which weren’t going to let a little thing like complete destruction of their facilities get in the way of covering one of the biggest disasters in history, had quickly moved their satellite uplink vans to high ground. Any cameras still operating in the islands were now broadcasting via those vans.

When Manetti didn’t respond, Reggie said, “Frank, you still there?”

“Yes. I just can’t believe what I’m seeing.”

“Believe it. Kai’s still somewhere out in that.” I hope, Reggie thought. The news from the Black Hawk that Colonel Johnson had sent wasn’t encouraging.

“You found him?” Manetti said.

“Not yet. I haven’t heard from him since his last message. The helicopter didn’t find anyone on the rooftop. The building next to it was blown to hell. Maybe they got out in time and made a run for it.”

“If they did, they’ve got a bigger problem headed their way.”

“I know,” Reggie said. “The third tsunami.”

“That’s not what I mean.”

“What could be a bigger problem than a two-hundred-foot tsunami?”

“There’s a fourth wave.”

“A fourth wave!” Reggie blurted out. “Are you sure?”

“We just got the reading from the DART buoy a minute ago. But the really bad news is its size. The wave is going to be over three hundred feet high.”

“Dear God!”

As Reggie said that, the second wave slammed into the buildings lining Waikiki.

Kai closed his eyes as the seawater bashed in the front windows and engulfed the condo. The noise bombarded his eardrums, and it got even worse as the water found them. It crashed into the hallway from multiple directions, converging on their position, where it smacked into them with tremendous force.

Anyone who has ever ridden one of those water slides that plunges hundreds of feet in seconds has experienced the discomfort and indignity of having their bathing suit ride up during the deceleration from sixty miles per hour to zero at the end of the ride. Although tsunamis only travel at forty miles per hour on land, the effect from the current is similar. The shoes of people caught in tsunamis are the article of clothing most easily ripped from their bodies, but they are lucky if they aren’t stripped completely naked by the water, as the man Kai had seen earlier had been.

Because they were inside the building, the current did not flow steadily past them. Instead, it was a turbulent mess that would rush in one direction one second, then reverse itself. The effect whipped them around like they were in a washing machine.

Pieces of debris pummeled Kai. Most were small, but a sharp piece of glass stung his cheek as it tore by. He heard a bang as something large hurtled past over his head and struck a hard surface. Somehow it had missed him. Many deaths in a tsunami are not the result of drowning but from being crushed by large objects. The respirators that Kai and the others were relying on wouldn’t protect them from that.

Kai braced his feet against the girder in the hope that he could keep his shoes on. He would definitely need them to clamber over the debris in their escape from the building, if they made it that far.

His ears popped several times as the water above them got higher and higher. Every thirty-three feet under the water equaled one atmosphere of pressure, and they had been submerged to twice that depth in a matter of seconds. Kai just hoped none of them suffered punctured eardrums. They didn’t need to add to their problems.

Kai opened his eyes and shut them again immediately, the filthy water stinging them. After what seemed like forever, the worst of the current eased, although it continued in the general direction away from the ocean. To Kai’s relief, the building had been able to sustain the initial impact, but that didn’t mean much. It could still collapse at any moment, undermined by the ebb and flow of the wave.

He tried opening his eyes again, and although the water was still foul, it didn’t scratch his eyes as much as before. According to the dim glow of his dive watch, little more than thirty seconds had passed. As the water continued to rise above them, the light from the sun became more and more indistinct until the gloom was virtually complete.

Kai felt for the dive light that he had lashed to his wrist. It was still there. He turned it on.

The murk of the silt did not obstruct as much of the view as he had expected, but the visibility was still minimal. The fuzzy outline of the light played over a scene that seemed unfamiliar to him, even though he had seen it in broad daylight not a minute before.

He searched for Lani. Kai’s chest tightened for a moment when he didn’t see her face where he had been expecting it. He rotated the light over a larger area until he saw her floating above him. Her eyes were screwed shut, but Kai could see that her mouth was still tightly clamped around the regulator. Then a string of bubbles emerged from the mouthpiece, and he knew she had made it through the worst of it.

Kai gripped her arm to let her know that he was still there. Her eyes fluttered open for a second, and Kai gave her the okay sign, which she returned.

On the other side, Brad and Mia seemed to be all right, although Brad still had a look of terror on his face. Teresa and Tom were discernible at the edges of the dive light, but Kai couldn’t make out their condition.

He focused the light on the air tank he and Lani shared to make sure it was still intact. It was in one piece, but Kai found the source of the impact sound that he had heard.

Just to the right of the air tank, the car jack that he had strapped to the girder dangled from its rope. Some unseen object had crushed it. The jack was now completely useless.

They had no way to free Mia and Brad.

“Hello!” Rachel yelled through the closed elevator door. “Are you all right?”

“Thank God!” A man’s voice replied. “Yes. I’m fine. I’m on top of the elevator cab roof.”

The building shuddered from the tsunami impact.

“Oh my God!” the man said, his voice rising an octave. “What was that?”

“It’s another tsunami. Are there others with you?”

“My sister and my mother are still in the elevator. I climbed out through the hatch to see if I could reach the outer door, but I can’t get it open. The elevator shaft is pitch-black. I can’t see a thing.”

“Hold on. I’ll get something to pry the door open.”

A fire ax hung just around the corner from the elevator. Rachel broke the glass and wrenched it out.

She put the ax head into the space between the doors and used the leverage to separate them. When they were six feet apart, she wedged the ax under one door to hold them open.

About three feet below her stood a bald man of about forty-five. He was gangly and holding a metal cane. The man squinted and blinked at the first light he’d seen in twenty minutes.

“Thank God you came. I couldn’t get the doors open from here. Without any light, I couldn’t tell what to do.”

Voices below him shouted. “Help us! Jerry! Get us out of here!”

“Jerry, you all need to climb up and get out right now. Look!” Rachel pointed at the water shooting up the elevator shaft next to him from below.

“Oh, crap!” He began to babble. “They can’t. It was hard enough for me to get out with their help. My sister isn’t exactly thin, and this is my mom’s cane. She’s seventy-eight.”

“Listen to me,” Rachel said as the water continued to rise at an astonishing speed. “You’re in an express elevator. It only serves the sixteenth to twenty-eighth floors. There are no doors for that elevator between here and the lobby. This is the only way out.”

“Maybe we should wait for the fire department.”

“Nobody else is coming. You’re lucky I heard you.”

The water rose inexorably.

“I already tried lifting them,” the man said. “I can’t do it myself. Please!”

Rachel ran around the corner and shouted to the kids at the end of the hall.

“Wyatt and Hannah, stay there. There are some people stuck here. I’ll be back in a minute. If the water keeps coming up, go up the stairs.”

Rachel came back around and dropped down onto the elevator roof. She peered through the emergency hatch. A plump woman in her forties and a frail elderly lady looked up at her.

“Who are you?” the elderly woman asked.

“I’m Rachel Tanaka, the hotel manager. The power is out in the hotel. We have to get you out of there immediately.”

“How? We don’t exactly have a ladder in here.”

“The water is almost here,” Jerry said.

Rachel looked over the edge of the elevator. The water no longer shot up, but it was still rising. It looked to be to the thirteenth floor, only twenty feet below the bottom of the elevator.

“Can you both swim?”

“Are you kidding?” the younger woman said.

“No,” Rachel said.

“There’s water coming up, Sheila,” Jerry said. “She’s right. You may not have a choice.”

“Can you swim?” Rachel repeated.

“Just because I have a cane doesn’t mean I’m a cripple,” the older woman said. “Of course I can swim. If you kids had let us leave when I wanted to, we wouldn’t be in this mess.”

“This is Jerry’s fault!” Sheila said. “He’s the idiot who wanted us to stay.”

“If we had taken the stairs like I wanted to,” Jerry said, “you wouldn’t be stuck down there!”

“Shut up!” Rachel said. The last thing she needed was a bickering family. “What we’ll do is wait to see how high the water gets. If it comes into the elevator cab, you’ll float up and we can pull you out. If it starts to go down before then, we’ll have to figure out something else.”

The water reached the bottom of the cab.

“It’s coming in!” Sheila said.

But the water didn’t stop rising. The level crept up the side of the cab.

“How high is this going to get?” Jerry said.

“I don’t know,” Rachel replied.

“What if it comes over the top?

“I don’t know,” she repeated. “Do you have a better suggestion?”

He shook his head meekly.

The water level had risen three-quarters of the way up the exterior of the elevator cab, but the water inside was still only two feet high, trickling in slowly through the doors.

Paige appeared at the doorway of the elevator with Wyatt, Hannah, and Ashley.

“Paige! Thank God you made it! Where’s Bill?”

Paige said nothing, but the stream of tears running down her face said it all.

“I’m sorry, Paige. I’m really sorry, but we need your help down here.”

But Paige could only stand there, crying. The children started crying too.

“Okay,” Rachel said. “You stay up there. There are three people down here. You can help pull them up.”

The water kept rising. When it reached the top of the elevator, the water inside was only three feet high, still too shallow to float in. The seawater poured over the edge of the cab’s roof and across the flat surface, where it lapped at Rachel’s feet, drained through the emergency trapdoor, and filled the elevator at three times the previous rate. The rush of falling water was not loud enough to mask the screams of the two women trapped inside.