The Tsunami Countdown (26 page)

12:04 p.m
.

8 Minutes to Third Wave

J
erry had fallen unconscious, his head wound more severe than Rachel had first thought. After spending a few minutes trying
to wake him, they decided to carry him up the stairs. Even though he was skinny, it took all three of them—Rachel, Paige,
and Sheila—to pull him down the hall and up the stairs. At each landing, they stopped for thirty seconds to catch their breath.
They had only made it up one flight to the twelfth floor. As they carried him, Doris kept the children occupied and told them
about herself and her kids. Their last name was Wendel, and Doris had been widowed two years earlier when her husband, Herbert,
had been stricken with cancer. Neither of her children, Sheila and Jerry, were married, so they had all come out to Hawaii
for a family vacation. When the tsunami warning was issued, they had returned to their room as they were initially instructed.
When the warning changed, Jerry had thought it was best to stay put.

After the first tsunami, they realized that staying was a bad idea, so they got in the elevator to get up to the roof. That’s
when the power went out, and they’d been left stranded. As Rachel listened to the story, it dawned on her that she was risking
her life for people who had blatantly disregarded her warnings to leave. She wanted to shake these people and say,
Why didn’t you listen?
But dwelling on their ignorance wasn’t going to help.

Their progress climbing the stairs was slow; at the rate they were going, they wouldn’t be on the roof until the next tsunami
hit. They needed help carrying Jerry.

As they took another breather, Rachel heard voices coming from the stairway above them The voices were getting louder: people
headed down toward them.

“Hello!” Rachel called out.

The movement above froze. She saw two faces peer over the railing about sixty feet above her at the twentieth floor. One of
the strangers waved. Then they began coming down the steps even quicker than before.

In less than a minute they had covered the distance. A thirty-something couple, obviously happy at finding other survivors,
smiled at Rachel, their bright red faces burned from exposure to sun they weren’t accustomed to.

“Are you coming from the roof?” Rachel said.

The couple looked at each other and shrugged. The man in the couple then started speaking rapid-fire in a language that sounded
Slavic.

“Oh, no,” Rachel said. “Are you with the Russian group? Russki?”

The man repeated the word “Russki” and pointed at him and the woman. He then started speaking in Russian again.

“Do you speak English?”

“
Nyet
.” He shook his head. “No English.” Rachel guessed that it was the only English phrase he knew.

They were two more of the hotel guests who had failed to leave their rooms when the evacuation was taking place. Either that,
or they had gotten separated from their group when they had been shuffled around the lobby. In any case, they were going the
wrong way.

Rachel pointed down and said, “
Nyet
.”

At this, the smiles disappeared. The man’s voice became angry, even indignant. Perhaps he didn’t like being told what to do
by a woman. Whatever the reason, he gesticulated and nodded vigorously as he pointed down.

Rachel motioned to her badge, which was still attached to her soggy suit. It said:
Rachel Tanaka, Hotel Manager
. Under those words was an image of the Grand Hawaiian logo. She hoped that would lend her an air of authority.

She pointed at Jerry’s inert form and tried to indicate
that they needed help carrying him. The man, who was fairly burly, nodded and grabbed his arms.

“Good. He understands.” She turned to the Russian man. “Thank you.
Spasibo
.”

Rachel grabbed one leg, and Sheila got the other. But instead of continuing up, the man rotated Jerry around and made as if
to carry him down the stairs. Rachel immediately put his leg down and grabbed the man’s arm. She shook her head.

“
Nyet!
”

The Russian became furious and practically dropped Jerry onto the cement. He made a rude gesture and took his girlfriend,
who had been watching all of this silently, by the shoulder. They continued down the stairs, the man muttering to himself.

“Where are they going?” Sheila said.

“They’re going to die,” Rachel said, the weariness evident in her voice. She was too tired to sugarcoat anything. “They don’t
know another tsunami is coming, and that it’s going to be bigger than the last one.”

“Shouldn’t we try to stop them?” Doris said.

“How? That guy is bigger than any of us. And you heard all the Russian I know. If you can make them understand, be my guest.
Our bigger problem is that this is taking too long.” She waved her hand at Jerry. “It would go a lot faster if we got some
help.”

“From that guy? You just said—”

“No. From Max.”

“Who’s Max?”

“He’s my assistant manager. He’s up on the roof with the other guests.”

“But if one of us goes,” Paige said, “there’s no way two of us can carry him.”

“No, but we can still make progress if Wyatt goes. He can run up those stairs in just a few minutes.”

“Sure I can!” Wyatt said.

“What if something happens to him?” Paige said. “What if he gets lost?”

“There aren’t many choices. They’re either still in the restaurant or they’re on the roof. He just needs to tell Max to come
down and help us.”

Paige pulled Wyatt close to her, sheltering him from some unseen enemy. She buried her face in his hair and then faced Rachel,
her eyebrows arched in despair.

“I’m sorry about what I said earlier. About you being responsible for Bill.”

“Don’t be.”

“When that building fell down, all I could think …” Paige broke down without finishing.

“It’s okay,” Rachel said, placing her hand gently on Paige’s shoulder.

“You saved our lives,” Paige said. Then she squared her
shoulders in renewed determination and knelt beside Wyatt.

“This is very important, honey. Do you understand what we want you to do?”

“Go and get Max.”

“Or any other adult up there. But you come right back down as soon as you find him, you understand?”

He nodded.

She hugged him. “I’m so proud of you. I’ll see you in a few minutes.”

Wyatt padded up the stairs. The rest of the group picked up Jerry again and renewed the slog upward.

“How are you doing?” Kai asked Lani. Her breathing was a ragged rasp.

“Hurts a little.”

“I’ll give you a lift in a minute.” Even though they were jogging, Kai needed at least a little bit of a break. He ached all
over from being twisted and turned by the water. He had strained his shoulder when he was holding on to the doorway, trying
to keep from going out to sea. Not to mention cuts and bruises too numerous to count. Still, it could have been much worse.

Teresa put her hand on his shoulder and squeezed. Kai winced but didn’t pull away.

“Thanks, Kai. For Mia. If you hadn’t gotten her
free …” Her voice trailed off, the implications too much for her to bear.

Kai put his arm around her and returned the hug. “I know. Same for Lani.”

“Where are we going?” Brad said. “Isn’t that building closer?” He pointed at the building directly in front of them, about
three hundred yards away.

“It’s closer, but it’s only twenty stories tall. I’m not sure that’s high enough. Besides, it’s going to get the brunt force
of the next wave. I’d rather be in one that has a little protection and doesn’t get a direct blast. Remember, the next wave
is going to be the biggest yet.”

“I wish you’d stop saying that,” Brad said. “So which one are we going to?”

“To that one,” Kai said, nodding.

“Which one?”

“The one with the boat sticking out of it.”

On the ocean side of a thirty-story apartment building, the aft end of a sixty-foot charter fishing boat was suspended ten
stories above the street. Its twin propellers were easily visible from their current position about a quarter mile away.

“Man!” Tom said.

“If that doesn’t show the power of a tsunami,” Kai said, “I don’t know what does.”

“Yeah,” said Brad, “we sure haven’t seen enough
examples of that yet.” He jumped in front of Kai and led the way, Mia still clinging to his back.

Lani began coughing again from the exertion.

“That’s enough jogging for you,” Kai said. “Hop on.” She jumped on his back, and he continued to trot, albeit a bit more slowly.
The debris was getting treacherous. The terrain was literally postapocalyptic. They continually detoured around large heaps
of splintered wood, twisted metal, and dislodged concrete that impeded their progress.

They were still two blocks from their designated refuge when they found an intersection piled three deep with cars, buses,
and trucks that had gotten wedged against the bottom of a cement foundation. Brad skirted it and stopped when he rounded the
corner of the pile.

“You’ve got to be kidding,” Brad said.

“What?” Kai said, coming to a stop beside him.

“There’s a couple of people up ahead. They’re heading this way.”

Sure enough, two young men were making their way through the debris toward them. Kai couldn’t tell if they were high school
or college students, but they couldn’t have been older than twenty. They looked like they were in good shape, and both had
their shirts off and sticking out of the back of their shorts, as if they were on an afternoon stroll. One of them held a
video camera.

“Hey!” Brad yelled. “You’re going the wrong way.”

The men looked in their direction, appraising the motley crew. “No we’re not, man,” the one with the camera said. “You are
if you don’t want to die.” “Look, we’re not stupid, you know. We’re heading to that building on the beach.”

“You
are
stupid,” Kai said. “There’s another tsunami coming.” He kept going, and the others followed. He wasn’t stopping to chat with
these bozos.

“Why do you think we’re taking this with us?” the one without the camera said. “We’re gonna sell the video. We’ve already
got some good stuff of that building coming down over there.” He pointed at the remains of The Seaside.

“You idiots,” Brad said. “We were in that building.”

“Cool,” the cameraman said, and turned his camera on them.

Their comment got Kai to stop. He turned and stared at them, unable to comprehend how crass and greedy some people were.

“You two little shits look at all this destruction and death,” Kai said, “and all you can see is some money for yourselves?”

“Hey, the TV networks are making money off this. Why shouldn’t we?”

“You’re not going to make any money because you are
going to die. That building is not going to stand against a wave two hundred feet in height.”

The two men laughed at that.

“You think this is funny?”

“Man, this is going to be great footage.”

“Turn that camera off, you asshole!” Brad yelled. He moved as if he were going to try to take it away from them, but Kai stopped
him.

“Forget it, Brad. No one’s ever going to see that footage anyway. If they’re too dumb to take good advice, they’re on their
own. We don’t have time for it. Let’s go.”

The two men stumbled off in the direction of the beach, talking in low voices and laughing.

Kai was angry at them, not just because they were cold opportunists, but because they made him see how futile his job could
be in some cases. Kai’s job was to warn people of danger. The people could do with that warning what they wished. He couldn’t
force them to get to safety. He couldn’t save them if they didn’t want to be saved. Now he was seeing that reality up close.
And what made Kai feel even worse was that he didn’t want to save them. They deserved whatever happened to them.

As Kai’s group got close to the “boat building,” as he had come to think of it, Lani tapped him on the back.

“Daddy, I hear something.”

“What?”

“A voice, I think. It’s coming from your bag.”

My bag?
Then Kai realized how stupid he had been. In all the rush, he hadn’t remembered to check the phone or the walkie-talkie.
Someone was trying to reach them.

12:08 p.m
.
4 Minutes to Third Wave

J
erry made it to the twenty-first floor before the women carrying him were too fatigued to continue. Even for three of them,
Jerry’s deadweight was too much. They were spent. “What are we going to do now?” Jerry’s sister, Sheila, said, her voice strained
from fatigue and worry. “We can’t just leave him.”

“He’s too heavy. We need some help. We’ll have to wait for Wyatt to get back.”

“What’s taking him so long?” Paige said. “He should have been back by now. I shouldn’t have let him go. I should have trusted
my instincts. I’m going to look for him.”

Despite her exhaustion, Paige forced herself up the stairs, but before she could get to the next landing, a door slammed and
the sound of light feet drifted toward them. She stopped.

“Wyatt?”

“Yeah?” Wyatt replied. They could hear him crying as he came down.

“Are you all right?”

“No!”

Paige quickened her pace upward, and Rachel followed. They met him on the twenty-third-floor landing. His eyes were red, his
cheeks stained with tears.

“What’s the matter, honey?” Paige ran her hands over him, looking for injuries. “Are you hurt?”

Wyatt shook his head.

“Then what’s wrong?”

“I couldn’t find anyone,” Wyatt said between sobs.

“No one anywhere?” Rachel said.

“I swear, I looked all over. They’re all gone.”

He took out the walkie-talkie that Rachel had given him before the incident at the elevator.

“I even tried this. I couldn’t find anyone. I’m sorry!” He wailed, the experience too much for him. “I’m sorry! I tried!”

Paige held him to her. “It’s okay, sweetie. You did great.”

“They must have found a helicopter,” Rachel said.

“Why didn’t they wait for us?” Paige said, her voice pleading.

“I don’t know. Maybe they thought we didn’t make it.”

“So now we’re stranded?”

Paige was on the brink of hysterics. Rachel tried to soothe her.

“If they found one, we can too. We just have to let them know we’re here. Who knows? Maybe they’re planning on coming back.”

“So what do we do? We can’t carry Jerry.”

“We’ll have to go up there and try to flag a helicopter down. There’s nothing else we can do.”

A faint voice called from the walkie-talkie still in Wyatt’s hand.

“Rachel! Rachel! It’s Kai, are you there?”

Kai had stopped at the lobby of the boat building so that he could get at the dry pack. He lowered Lani and let her walk on
her own. While Kai climbed the stairs of the apartment complex, he opened the bag to retrieve the walkie-talkie.

When he got it out, the walkie-talkie felt moist to the touch. He inspected the bag and found a tiny tear in the seam. It
must have happened when he was battered by the wave. The bag wasn’t soaked inside, but it was damp. He didn’t bother looking
at the photo album, the only thing he’d saved from his house. It was either intact or it wasn’t, and now wasn’t the time to
see. The most important thing was the electronics. Kai opened the cell phone. The LCD
display was cracked, another victim of debris impact. He tried calling 911, but there was no sound. It was useless.

Kai keyed the Talk button on the walkie-talkie.

“Rachel! Come in!”

He didn’t know if he was getting through because he couldn’t hear more than a crackling hiss. The voice that they had heard
before sounded like a kid, so Kai wasn’t even sure whether they were getting the signal from Rachel or from someone else.

“Rachel! Rachel! It’s Kai, are you there?”

He listened carefully, trying to hold his breath as he climbed. The volume was turned up all the way. Then, loud and clear,
Kai heard her voice.

“Kai, it’s me. Are you all right? How’s Lani?”

“We had a close shave, but she’s fine. Teresa, Mia, and Brad are okay too. But Jake, the boy you saw at the Grand Hawaiian?
He didn’t make it.”

“Oh my God!”

“How are you?” he asked.

“I’m better now that I hear you,” she said, the relief in her voice palpable. “It’s been a little rough. I’m just glad you
two are all right. When the other tower collapsed, I couldn’t—”

“What? The tower collapsed? You’re still at the hotel? I thought you would have caught a helicopter by now.”

“There were some people in trouble. It’s been crazy.
We’re heading to the roof now. Where are you? Did you get out of Waikiki?”

“No,” Kai said. “It’s been crazy for us too. We’re about a mile from you. Of course, the tsunami has obliterated all the street
signs, so I don’t know exactly where we are, but it’s a white thirty-story apartment complex. There’s a big boat sticking
out of it, if that helps.”

“Okay. We’re on the roof now. I’m not sure if I see your building. I don’t see a boat sticking out.”

“You may not be able to from your angle. When we get to the top, I’ll see if we can wave to you.”

“Everyone else is gone on this building. They must have found a helicopter.”

“Can you see one to flag down?”

“I see a few,” Rachel said, “but they’re not close enough to see us.”

“We’re going to have the same problem. Listen, is anyone with you?”

“Yes, there are eight of us in all, including three children.”

“Eight? Jesus. Does anyone with you have a cell phone? I lost mine and Brad’s got smashed.”

A pause, and then: “Yes, Paige has a cell phone. We’ve tried 911 and can’t get anything.”

“Reggie left me a message earlier. You can try him.”

“What’s his number?”

It was in Brad’s now-smashed cell phone. Kai had a pretty good memory for numbers, but he couldn’t quite nail down the sequence
Reggie had left in his message. He gave Rachel three variations he thought were close.

“Try all of those. It’s got to be one of them. See if he can find a free chopper.”

“Okay. I’ll call Reggie.”

“And, Rachel, the next one may be at least two hundred feet tall. Stay on the roof. Get a helicopter as soon as you can. If
one tower has already fallen—”

“I know,” she said. “We all watched it collapse. None of us wants to stay here longer than we have to.”

“I’m so glad to hear your voice, honey.”

“Me too. I’ll radio back after I get Reggie.”

Kai had fallen behind the others as he talked to Rachel, so he sped up until he caught up to them on the twentieth floor.
He filled them in as they continued trudging up the stairs.

When Kai opened the door to the roof, he expected to see another empty expanse of concrete, devoid of people. Instead, a couple
stood at the edge of the roof, looking up at the sky. When the door banged into the wall, they turned. The woman, dressed
in a stylish gray jogging suit, looked like someone in her forties who hoped that cosmetic surgery would keep her in her thirties.
Her oversized breasts strained against her top, and her forehead
showed the unmistakable rigidity of frequent Botox injections.

The man with her wore a shiny silk shirt and Italian slacks, more expensive than tasteful. His curly hair was too jet-black
for his age, and he had the wiry build of a fitness buff. He strode over to Kai, pulling a rolling carryon suitcase behind
him.

Kai smiled and said, “We’re glad to see that we’re not the only ones—”

The man interrupted him. “We were here first.”

Kai’s smile faltered. “What?”

“Are you deaf? I said, we were here first.”

Brad stopped next to Kai. “What’s that supposed to mean?” Brad said.

“It means that any helicopter that lands here is ours. You can ride along if there’s room.”

“Are you serious?” Teresa said. “Don’t even think about getting on a helicopter before these girls do.”

“They have kids, for God’s sake,” the woman said. “Be human for once.”

The man looked at Mia and Lani and then grudgingly said, “The girls can go first. Then us.”

Brad jabbed his thumb at the man. “Who
is
this guy?” he said to Kai.

“Chuck is my soon-to-be ex-husband,” the woman said with venom. “We were out shopping when we heard
about the tsunami warning. Genius here thought we had all the time in the world to come back to the apartment and get into
his safe—”

“Denise,” Chuck said with a warning tone.

“—a safe I didn’t even know we had—”

“Don’t tell them about that.”

Brad pointed at the suitcase. “So, Chuck, what’s with the luggage?”

Chuck paused and narrowed his eyes at Denise. “It’s important papers,” he said through clenched teeth.

“I’ll tell you what’s in it,” Denise said, happy to sell Chuck out. “His collection of signed baseballs is in there. Babe
Ruth, Mickey Mantle. Must be dozens of them. But that’s not all he had in that safe. When he was getting the baseballs out,
he dropped some photos. Photos of him and his girlfriend.”

“I wish I was stuck here with her instead of you,” Chuck spat at Denise. He pointed at Kai. “And remember, we were here first.”

Kai had heard enough. He showed the walkie-talkie to Chuck.

“Guess what, Chuck,” he said. “I have a radio. If
we
get a helicopter,
you
are welcome to come along with us if there is room. Now excuse me while I try to get our butts rescued.”

Kai nodded to the others to follow him and walked to
the edge of the roof to get as far from Chuck as he could. He pressed the walkie-talkie’s Talk button.

“To anyone who can hear this, we are trapped on the roof of a building in Waikiki …”

Reggie Pona had already tried calling Brad’s cell phone nine times, with no success. He left several messages to call, but
he didn’t really think that they were still alive to get them. The helicopter—the same one he had sent for Kai the first time—had
done a fly-by thirty minutes later and reported that the building had completely collapsed. There was no chance that anyone
inside had survived.

The devastation across the Hawaiian Islands so far had been unbelievable, even to those like Reggie who had seen the effects
of the Asian tsunami firsthand. He had taken a trip to Thailand and Indonesia two weeks after the tsunami to help document
the destruction, so that the PTWC would know what to expect if it ever happened in Hawaii.

The construction in South Asia was not up to the standards in the United States. Banda Aceh, on the northern tip of Sumatra,
had been wiped off the map, and the majority of the deaths occurred in that area. The only building still standing after the
tsunami was a sturdy white stone mosque. Previously it had stood among hundreds of shops, businesses, and homes; after the
tsunami, it rose alone from a plain of mud and fractured wood.

In Hawaii, buildings near the ocean were primarily hotels and other structures made of concrete and steel. Many of them withstood
the first and second tsunamis, a testament to the solidity of their designs. But a great number had already been swept away
or fallen when their foundations were undermined by the water, and any buildings made of flimsier materials no longer existed.
Pictures and video from Hawaii, Maui, Oahu, and Kauai now unspooling on the major networks showed miles and miles of shoreline
blasted free of the monuments of man, as if God’s own eraser had rubbed them out.

Hilo, on the Big Island, had endured two tsunamis in the twentieth century, events that sparked the creation of the Pacific
Tsunami Warning Center. The awful pictures from those earlier disasters looked quaint compared to what Reggie saw now. Little
was left of that small city, despite being located on the east side of the island, out of the direct path of the tsunami.
The wave had wrapped around Hawaii, capturing the island in a deadly embrace.

Lahaina was the Maui beach town best known as the place to see the humpback whales that came to breed each year. The pictures
from a helicopter were labeled lahaina, but Reggie couldn’t make out anything familiar, and he had been there at least seven
times on vacation. The only things left to signify that there might have actually been a
town were the outlines of concrete foundations poking out of the scoured sand.

And then there was Oahu, home to 80 percent of the state’s population. The current CBS feed from a helicopter hovering near
Waikiki showed the devastation in stark clarity. Reggie could barely recognize some parts of the city. Honolulu was the most
crowded part of the island; combining residents and tourists, some areas of Waikiki had a population density rivaling that
of Hong Kong and Manhattan. Over the years, the suburbs had stretched around the shoreline in both directions, so that there
was virtually no uninhabited land along the southern coast.

Hundreds of thousands had heeded the warnings and evacuated to high land all along the coast. Frightened masses hunkered on
the sides of Diamond Head and inside the protected crater itself. The mountains were lined with people. So many had retreated
to the confines of the Punchbowl National Cemetery that no room was left for helicopters to unload the people they rescued
from skyscrapers, remote beaches, and overturned sea vessels.

Tripler Army Medical Center was filled to the brim with evacuees from other hospitals on lower ground. It received one helicopter
after another dropping off the injured, a makeshift triage station set up on the grass next to the parking lot.

With little safe flat ground left, most of those rescued by
helicopter were taken to Wheeler Field, a ten-minute round trip from Waikiki, not including the time it took to get people
loaded and unloaded. It was possible Kai and the others had been picked up by another chopper and been deposited there. Possible,
Reggie knew, but not likely. He had practically given up when he heard about the collapsed building.

Reggie’s cell phone rang. He forced his eyes away from the TV and looked at the caller ID. He didn’t recognize the number;
it had a California area code. He flipped the phone open.

“Hello?”

He was shocked to hear the voice on the line.

“Reggie, it’s Rachel.”

“Rachel!” he shouted. When he saw others in the office staring, he brought his voice back to normal. “Thank God you’re all
right. Kai was …” Reggie hesitated, not knowing how to tell her. “I’m not sure, but—”