The Tsunami Countdown (13 page)

10:43 a.m.
39 Minutes to Wave Arrival Time

A
s Reggie analyzed the data from the DART buoy, Kai had been keeping an eye on the evacuation via one of the cable channels
and was horrified by what he had seen. On most channels, the Emergency Alert System broadcast was being repeated over and
over. In the last few minutes a new warning from the governor had been broadcast, perhaps to give the warning more weight,
but the content wasn’t significantly changed from the one Brian Renfro had so powerfully relayed. There was still no mention
of a meteor impact, and that may have been one reason that so many people were either ignoring the warning or were confused
about what to do.

About ten minutes before, Kai had begun watching the TV more closely because he wanted to see how the evacuation was progressing.
He tuned to the national MSNBC
feed, which didn’t broadcast the EAS warning because their main audience was the continental United States. The network relayed
the feed from one of their affiliate’s local Honolulu camera crews.

A reporter standing on Waikiki Beach motioned to the scene behind him. Some people ran in panic. Packed with cars, the road
along the beach moved so slowly that the vehicles were almost idling. Many more cars could be seen trying to merge into the
traffic from the garages of hotels lining the strip. Police attempted to direct the traffic at several of the intersections,
but the sheer volume made it virtually impossible for the vehicles to make headway.

Still other people strolled along the beach completely unperturbed by the evacuation. The reporter, his close-cropped hair
rigidly resisting the wind swaying the trees behind him, stopped an obese man in swim trunks and a towel slung over his shoulder.

“Sir,” the reporter said, “you don’t seem particularly concerned by the tsunami warning. Can I ask why?”

The man shook his head dismissively. “It seems like we get these warnings once a year. I just wait until about fifteen minutes
before the wave is supposed to get here, and then I head back to my condo.”

“Your condo?”

“Yeah, it’s right over there,” the obese man said, pointing at a white building behind him. “Eight stories up with
a great view of the beach, so I just watch from there. Usually there isn’t much to see, but hey, maybe today will be different.”

“You sound like you consider it entertainment.”

“Well, it’d be pretty amazing to see a real tsunami, don’t you think? But I’m sure this is another false alarm.”

“Are you aware that the warning now says the wave could be two hundred feet high?”

“That’s just crazy. What are the chances of that?”

The man continued his walk, leaving the reporter to head over to a Lexus SUV, one of the cars making tortured progress along
Kalakaua Avenue. In the background, along with a few individuals running in terror, crowds of people could be seen walking
leisurely along the street, as if they were being herded in a particular direction by some unseen guide. Kai found the scene
infuriating, but he knew it was typical behavior in an evacuation.

The Lexus owner, a deeply tanned man in a tank top and a hideous comb-over, had his window down. His eyes kept darting in
the direction of the ocean as he talked. At first, Kai thought he was concerned that the tsunami might come in while he was
still in his car.

“Sir,” the reporter said, “do you think the traffic will let you get to a safe location in time?”

“Oh, I’ll be safe,” the driver said, his eyes continuing to flick away from the camera. “I’m heading down to the Ala
Wai marina to get my sailboat. I don’t want to see it get sunk because of some stupid tsunami.”

“Are you planning to tow it back home?”

“No, I don’t have a trailer. I’m going to take it out to sea. I gotta protect my property.”

“What about your car?”

“My car?” It looked like the first time the guy had considered what would happen to his car.

“Yes, you’ll have to leave it at the marina, right?”

“Dammit!” he yelled, pounding on the steering wheel. “I knew I should have brought my son with me.”

The camera pulled back to the reporter, but Kai had seen enough. He turned to Reggie.

“These people aren’t getting it. We need to do something.”

“Like what? The inundation maps we have are worthless. Even if we could develop new ones in the next few minutes, we don’t
have enough time to distribute them. Besides, we don’t even know for sure how large the biggest wave will be.”

Kai sighed at the futility of the situation. The published inundation maps and evacuation signs were now woefully inadequate.
They would lead the evacuees to supposedly safe locations that would be wiped out by the first seventy-five-foot tsunami.
Kai didn’t want to think about what would happen when those areas were hit by a two-hundred-foot monster.

And it looked as if some people weren’t following even the established instructions, let alone the new warning telling them
that the current inundation maps were useless. They didn’t understand the severity of the situation, and unless Kai did something
fast, many of those people would be killed.

Brad, who had been manning the phones, came back into the operations room. When he told Kai about his conversation with Teresa,
Kai felt the blood drain from his face. His daughter was somewhere out there, and he had no idea whether she was safe or not.
That was when the personal nature of the upcoming disaster fully hit him.

“Isn’t there something we can do to help her?” Brad said. “Call the police to find her?”

“Are you kidding?” Reggie said. “Half the people on the island are probably calling the police right now.”

“Well, we’ve got to do something! What about the governor? She said we should call if she could do anything for us.”

“Oh, that’ll look great,” Reggie said, “using our connections for personal reasons while the rest of the people fend for themselves!”

Brad raced over to Reggie, who had a good four inches and a hundred pounds on Brad, and got within an inch of his face. “I
don’t give a shit how it looks! That’s my niece!”

A snarl twisted Reggie’s face, and Kai pushed himself between them before it got ugly.

“Hey! Hey!” he said, pulling Brad back. “Ease up! I know it’s tense in here, but let’s just bring it down.”

Brad’s idea was tempting, but even if Kai called the police or the governor, what could he tell them? That the girls were
somewhere on Waikiki—maybe? Kai didn’t even know that for sure.

“We’re not calling them,” he said. “The police are already doing what they should be doing. They have a duty, just like I
do.”

All Kai could do was hope that Teresa would find them in time or that they would call to tell him they were in a safe place,
if they knew what that was.

Reggie went back to the computer. Kai escorted Brad to the other side of the room so he could cool off for a minute.

“Brad,” he said, “I want to thank you for everything you’re doing today.”

“Lucky for you, I was free today. And I don’t have to warn my employees. They have the day off.”

Kai realized what he meant. Hopkins Realty had its corporate offices across from the Ala Moana shopping center, which was
located only a few hundred feet from the beach in Waikiki. Outwardly, Brad might have seemed blasé about the business, but
Kai knew it meant a lot to him to run the company his father had started.

“I’m sorry. I didn’t think about Hopkins Realty until you said that.”

Brad shrugged. “It’s no big deal.”

“But the office. The files …” Kai said.

Brad smiled. “Believe it or not, my insurance covers tsunamis.”

Kai stared at Brad in disbelief. Most insurance policies didn’t cover tsunamis unless you specifically purchased an expensive
rider. They were more popular now, especially after the Asian tsunami, but still pretty uncommon.

“Hey,” Brad said, “my big brother is the assistant director of the Pacific Tsunami Warning Center. I had to get it.”

Kai smiled at that. At least there was one thing he could feel good about.

“The phones have been ringing nonstop,” Brad said, looking at notes he had written. “We’ve gotten calls from everyone.
New York Times
, CNN, Fox, ABC, NBC. CBS even has a crew out by the front gate. I told them they couldn’t come in—”

“You mean they’re here?”

“They were filming some story over in Ewa and got over here as soon as the warning went out. They’ve been trying to get in
to interview you. I told them you were too busy.”

“All the data analysis in the world won’t help if people
don’t understand what’s going on. What do you think, Reggie?”

Reggie grudgingly nodded. “Why not? It might be better than a phone interview.”

“We’ll show them the video from Johnston Island. Maybe that will convince some people to move faster. Brad, open the gate
and tell them that only the reporter and the cameraman can come into the building. Anyone else will have to wait outside.
I don’t want a mass of people in here.”

In two minutes Brad ushered in a slender Asian woman in a blue blazer, followed by a bearded cameraman wearing jeans and a
Detroit Tigers baseball cap.

“Dr. Tanaka, I’m Lara Pimalo,” the reporter said, shaking Kai’s hand firmly. She nodded toward the cameraman. “This is Roger
Ames. Thank you for meeting with us. I know you must be extremely busy.”

“We are,” Kai said. He held up a finger. “My one condition on you being here: if I ask you to stop filming, you’ll do so immediately.
Okay?”

“Of course,” she said.

“Good. The reason I’m letting you in here is because the evacuation is going poorly. We need to motivate more people to leave.
Quickly. I believe I have something here that will help.”

“What is it?”

“Can you show video of something on a computer screen?”

“Sure. It won’t look great, but it should be recognizable. But, Doctor, graphs and such don’t make for great—”

“It’s not a graph. It’s video from Johnston Island this morning. It shows a massive tsunami obliterating it. I want you to
broadcast it.”

She and Ames were stunned for a moment, but Pimalo couldn’t hide her excitement about getting such a great scoop. She frantically
gestured to Ames to start filming.

“Just tell us what monitor it will be on,” he said, “and we’ll set up for the shot.”

As Ames got the camera ready, Pimalo said, “Why don’t you just e-mail the video to someone at the studio? Not that I mind
the exclusive.”

“Can you make sure they broadcast this live?”

“Oh, we’re planning to.”

“With a live broadcast, I know the video will be seen.

If I e-mailed it, how do I know it wouldn’t just sit there, waiting for someone to open it?”

“Good point. I’ll let the station know to be ready for the broadcast.”

In another minute the camera was in position and they were rolling. As the video from Johnston ran, Kai narrated what was
happening on screen.

As the tsunami approached the camera, Pimalo spoke to
the anchorman through the microphone, “Are you seeing this, Phil?” Kai couldn’t hear the response, but her rapt attention
told him it was getting through.

When the video went to black, Kai motioned for her to put the camera on him.

“Ms. Pimalo, I’d like to make another statement.”

“Of course, Dr. Tanaka. Those were incredible pictures.”

Kai thought to himself,
It’s about to get a lot more incredible
. He couldn’t believe he was about to say it on national television, with the possibility of making a fool of himself. After
a moment of hesitation, he saw Brad and Reggie look at each other. They both nodded at Kai’s unspoken question, and he felt
some comfort knowing they were with him. He cleared his throat and began speaking.

“My name is Kai Tanaka, and I am the assistant director of the Pacific Tsunami Warning Center in Ewa Beach, Hawaii. About
forty minutes ago, I issued a tsunami warning for the Hawaiian Islands. I cannot overemphasize how dangerous this situation
is. To this point, we have not released the cause of this tsunami because we did not have the data to verify it. However,
I am concerned that the evacuation is not moving fast enough because people don’t understand how unusual this tsunami is.
At 8:41 a.m. this morning Hawaii time, we suspect that a
meteorite struck the central Pacific Ocean. If this turns out to be true, we can expect a disaster of unprecedented scale
for the Hawaiian Islands because meteor strikes can generate gigantic waves, much larger than those from earthquakes. As we
speak, the southern tip of the Big Island should be experiencing the brunt of the first wave. In a little more than fifteen
minutes, it should reach Kona and then Hilo. Fifteen minutes after that, Honolulu will be hit.”

One TV was set to a local station broadcasting the EAS and the other continued the feed from Waikiki. Neither of them showed
video from the southern tip of Hawaii.

The phone rang yet again, and Brad picked it up.

“Excuse me, Dr. Tanaka,” said Pimalo, “but these are incredible assertions. What evidence do you have that a meteorite struck
the Pacific this morning?”

This was the touchiest part of the interview. Kai knew that if he went into a lot of detail, he might lose the viewer. But
he also knew that the audience needed something if they were to believe this crazy notion.

“We have very little time left, so I don’t want to go into all of the details. We don’t have any direct evidence to support—”

“You do now,” Brad broke in, putting his hand over the receiver. “Gail Wentworth from NOAA is on the line. You have eight
images in your e-mail that they’re
about to release to the news agencies. It’s a series of shots from Landsat-8 showing a massive explosion in the central Pacific.
NASA is confirming that we were hit by an asteroid.”

10:47 a.m.
35 Minutes to Wave Arrival Time

I
n 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.