The Tsunami Countdown

FORTY-FOUR

11:57 a.m.

15 Minutes to Third Wave

The water roiled and churned as it was sucked down the Grand Hawaiian elevator shaft. After a moment of confusion and paralysis, Rachel found her bearings and swam for the surface, crying out as she broke into the air. She looked up to see Paige and Sheila peering over the side of the elevator roof. They were already twenty feet above her and receding away from her at an alarming rate. As she got farther removed from the light coming in through the open door on the fifteenth floor, the gloom got heavier. “Rachel! Are you all right?” Paige yelled down.

“I’m okay,” Rachel replied. “Where’s Jerry? Jerry!” She spun around but couldn’t find him.

“We can only see you. Maybe he’s under us.”

“I can’t see him!”

Rachel paddled around the shaft, feeling for him under the water. Her leg brushed something in the middle of the shaft, and then it was gone.

“I think I touched him!” Rachel shouted.

More voices joined Paige’s above, all of them calling, “Jerry! Jerry!”

Rachel dove under the water, but the light was nonexistent. She felt around in the darkness, and her hand snagged on a piece of cloth. It was Jerry. Rachel kicked and pulled him to the surface.

Jerry was groggy, but conscious. He moaned and floundered, but he was able to keep his head above water.

“I found him!” Rachel yelled.

“Thank God!” someone cried back in relief.

“It’s hard to see, but I think he’s got a gash on his head. He must have hit it on something when he went over.” She shook him. “Jerry! Can you hear me?”

His eyes rolled back, like he was about to lose it. Rachel slapped him.

“Jerry! Stay with me!”

That got his attention, but he couldn’t manage more than a halfhearted dog paddle. They were still in the middle of the shaft, at least ten feet from any side.

“Where’s that light coming from?” yelled Paige, who was now more than thirty feet above Rachel.

Rachel looked down to see what Paige was talking about. A ghostly light began to filter up from beneath them. It seemed to be concentrated on one side of the shaft. Then Rachel realized with a start what it was.

“Oh my God! One of the elevator doors must have come open. Come on, Jerry! We need to grab on to something or we’ll be sucked right out of the hotel.”

Even though the elevator Jerry had been in was an express, the two next to it were not, so that part of the shaft had doors at every floor below.

Rachel pulled Jerry’s shirt. He gracelessly thrashed after her. The tug toward the open door strengthened. Their only chance was to get to the shaft’s emergency ladder before they were whipped through the door and out the lobby window. Rachel had picked up enough knowledge from being married to a tsunami scientist to know that being caught in open water during a tsunami was deadly.

If she let go of Jerry, she could make it to the ladder easily. But she wouldn’t release her grip. There was no way he could make it on his own.

The light wasn’t bright, but it was enough to see that there were only a few feet separating them from the open elevator door. Rachel reached for the ladder with one hand and grasped it. Jerry’s shirt became taut with the strain, but he made one last kick as well and grabbed on to a rung just as the water surface broke through the elevator door.

They steadied themselves on the ladder as the water rushed out with the sound of Niagara Falls.

“Are you okay?” Sheila yelled.

“We’re alive!” That was as good as it could get at that point.

After another few seconds the water reached an equilibrium with the open door, and the extra water on that floor rushed back through. Rachel could now read the floor number on the outside of the door.

“We’re at the eleventh floor.”

“Can you climb back up?”

“Jerry’s going to be lucky to be able to climb out right here. You’ll have to come down and help me. Hold on, Jerry.”

Jerry nodded hazily. He was in no condition to do much more than wait there.

It took a few minutes for the others to climb off the cab at the sixteenth floor and make it down to them by the stairs.

Guided by Rachel, Jerry stumbled down the ladder toward the eleventh floor. Hands snaked from just outside the door to grab on to him and pull him inside, where he collapsed on the floor of the elevator lobby.

Rachel crawled out, exhausted, and sat on the floor to catch her breath.

She looked at Paige, who was comforting her children.

“Paige,” Rachel said between gasps, “I’m so sorry about Bill.”

“You should be.”

“What?”

“It’s your fault!” Paige said, spitting her words at Rachel. “If it wasn’t for you, I never would have let us try to cross that rickety bridge. If we had stayed on the other side, he’d be alive right now.”

“Paige, I—”

A massive cracking sound came from the direction of the floor-to-ceiling elevator lobby window that faced the Akamai tower. It started as a few sporadic snaps and pops, but quickly merged into a grinding cacophony of agitated metal and concrete that overwhelmed the sound of the rushing water.

Except for Jerry, they all raced to the window to see what was happening. Dust began to puff out all over the building, as if its seams were popping. The scene was instantly recognizable to anyone who had seen the events of 9/11 unfold on TV.

Rachel turned to the others and yelled, “Get back!”

They dragged Jerry to the end of the lobby as the Akamai tower, weakened by the impact of the barge that had struck it, collapsed into a pile of rubble. They watched in horror as a building that just an hour before had seemed so solid—virtually indestructible, built to withstand hurricane-force winds, a state-of-the-art twenty-first-century exemplar of modern engineering—crumble in front of their eyes. And the worst part was that the Moana tower was identical.