The Tsunami Countdown

TWENTY-SIX

10:47 a.m.

35 Minutes to Wave Arrival Time

In the cockpit of his Cessna, Matthew Perkins frowned. 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. Perkins 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 twenty-five minutes of warning passes hadn’t been heard by anyone. He radioed in to Civil Air Patrol 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.

“Wouldn’t NASA see an asteroid headed toward earth?” Pimalo asked as Kai went to his computer. “We should have heard about this days ago, maybe even months ago.”

Reggie scooped up one of the memos from his desk and pointed at the text.

“You see the period at the end of that sentence? Now imagine being two miles away from it. That’s what it’s like trying to find a five-hundred-meter-wide asteroid that’s five million miles away.”

“But as it gets closer to earth, wouldn’t it get easier to see?”

“Asteroids move at twenty-five thousand miles per hour. It would get here in less than ten days. And there aren’t nearly enough telescopes around the world to find every chunk of rock flying around out there. In 2002, an asteroid came within seventy-five thousand miles of earth, well within the orbit of the moon. The asteroid was one hundred meters in diameter, big enough to destroy a major city if it had collided with earth.”

“But it missed,” Pimalo said.

“Right. Barely. But the date of closest approach was June 14. The asteroid was detected on June 17. Three days after it had gone by. It’s completely believable that the first we would know about an asteroid was after an impact. In fact, it’s lucky it hasn’t happened up until now.”

Kai’s e-mail pinged, and there was the message from Gail Wentworth. Eight JPEG images were attached to the e-mail. 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 a.m. 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 exploded 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 seafloor.”

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 thirty-second increments, the dot grew larger until, in the final image, the explosion was plainly visible for what it was: the asteroid strike ejecting billions 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.

“Good God!” Pimalo asked. “The explosion was fifteen miles across?”

“At least the mushroom cloud was,” said Reggie.

Kai grimaced. He had hoped that the certainty 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 twenty-five minutes apart.”

“So now we know what we’re dealing with,” Reggie said. “It’s not just a theory anymore.”

“Maybe people will realize they have to leave the high-rises now and get to high ground,” Kai said.

Lara Pimalo put a hand to her ear 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 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 Boulevard, 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 Street,” 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 surfboards or 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. The camera zoomed in.

“Oh my God,” Brad said.

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 little more 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.