Boyd Morrison - The Tsunami Countdown

“We’re from California and we heard about the tsunami, so we were running out of our hotel with some other people and I let go of my mom’s hand by accident and I couldn’t see her or my dad, so I followed the other people. But she wasn’t there, so I turned around to try and get back, but I got lost and now I don’t know where she is.”

The last statement set off another round of tears, and Teresa gave him a hug.

“We’ll find her, David. Do you know the name of your hotel?”

“Hana.”

“The Hana Hotel?”

“It’s pink.”

“Your hotel is pink?”

He nodded.

This being Teresa’s first trip to Honolulu, she had no idea where the Hana Hotel was. She looked each way along Kalakaua Avenue but couldn’t see any pink buildings lining the beachfront road.

“Is your hotel right on the beach?” she asked, wanting to make sure she hadn’t missed it.

David shook his head. “We had to walk down a street to get to the beach.”

Since she was at Ohua Avenue, Teresa thought that was as good a street as any to try. She led David by the hand and hurried along the sidewalk away from the beach, joining the other evacuees.

“Tell me if you see your hotel,” she said to David.

The boy trotted at Teresa’s side, occasionally tucking behind her to get out of the way of another fleeing tourist. She asked a few people if they knew where the Hana Hotel was, but none of them did. She spotted a phone booth across the street and angled toward it.

“I don’t see the hotel yet,” David said.

“I know. We’re going to try to get the address.”

Teresa tried not to think about what would happen if she couldn’t find David’s parents. She certainly couldn’t abandon the little boy, but his plight was derailing her search for Mia.

A yellow pages hung from the bottom of the phone booth, and she flipped it open to the hotel section. She scanned the H s until she came to the place where Hana should have been listed. It wasn’t there.

“David,” she said, “are you sure it’s called the Hana Hotel?”

The boy screwed up his face in concentration.

“I’m pretty sure.”

The hotel section of the yellow pages was huge, but she didn’t think David would have invented that name on his own. She quickly scanned down the list until she got to the W s. There it was. The Waikiki Hana on Koa Avenue.

The front of the phone book had a map of the Waikiki area. Koa Avenue didn’t intersect with Ohua, so she would have missed it heading in this direction. She took David back down to Kalakaua and jogged the two blocks to a road that would intersect with Koa. In another minute she spotted the pink façade of the Waikiki Hana.

Stragglers still emerged from the hotel. She went into the hotel lobby, and even before she could ask David what his mother’s name was, a woman screamed “David!” and swept the boy up in her arms, weeping with joy at holding her lost son. She turned to Teresa and clasped her shoulder.

“Thank you for finding him,” the woman said. “I don’t know what happened. One second he was there, and the next he was gone.”

“You’re welcome. Now you need to get out of here.”

“But my husband—he went out to find David! I don’t know where he is!”

“I’m sorry. But—”

“How will I find him?”

Teresa saw the woman’s desperation and realized that her own search for her daughter was futile. There was no way she would find Mia or Lani running around on the streets. She needed to go where they might go.

“How will I find my husband?” the anguished woman repeated.

“I’m sorry,” Teresa said. “I don’t know.”

She took one last look at the little boy and mother she had reunited. Then she sprinted out the front of the lobby and ran toward the Grand Hawaiian.

11:07 a.m.

15 Minutes to Wave Arrival Time

The lobby of the Grand Hawaiian seethed with scared and confused tourists. One couple from New York argued with a staff member about retrieving their luggage from their room. When they were told that no bellman would have time to get it for them, they became irate, demanding that they get, in writing, the promise of a full refund for their stay. Rachel told them personally that they could get their own damn luggage or leave and that they were not to talk to any of her staff again. Most of Rachel’s employees were busy running from room to room, knocking on doors to make sure that no one was left behind. They were almost done. Only the top two floors were left, but Rachel knew time was running out. Luckily, those were the floors with suites, so there weren’t many doors to knock on.

The interpreter for the Russian tour group had never shown up. Rachel tried to explain to the group that they had to leave, but when she shooed them out of the front of the hotel, they stoically came to a stop, as if they were waiting for further instructions.

The Russians watched as Rachel helped some of the disabled vets into one of the buses she had hastily arranged to pick them up. Only about half the buses she needed had shown up. When she realized the deficiency, she tried to triage so that the most disabled would go first. Many of the vets could walk well enough that she sent them with the crowds now making their way up Kalakaua Avenue. That left her with about seventy-five vets and their wives who would need to be evacuated somehow. Bob Lateen, the chairman of the conference, was one of them.

“Mrs. Tanaka,” he said, “when is the next bus coming?”

“We’re working on that right now, Mr. Lateen.”

“But they said we only have fifteen minutes left to evacuate. You’ve got a lot of scared people here.”

Rachel used her most reassuring voice, but she couldn’t help letting some testiness through. “I’m aware of that, Mr. Lateen. We’re doing the best we can.”

She saw Max, whose tailored gray suit and slick black hair looked as perfect as ever, despite the chaos. He hadn’t even deigned to loosen his tie. Rachel’s suit, on the other hand, was already rumpled, and small sweat stains peeked out from under the arms of her jacket.

“Excuse me,” Rachel said to Lateen. “I’ll be right back.” Despite Lateen’s protests, she left him and pulled Max into a quiet niche.

“What about the hotel airport shuttle?” she said.

“Just checked. It’s still over at Honolulu International. It got caught there when the initial warning went out.”

“Maybe we could take them in our own cars.”

“We don’t have enough drivers left. Besides, we wouldn’t make it far in this traffic.”

“Well, do you have any suggestions?”

“Yes,” Max said. “I suggest we get ourselves the hell out of here.”

“You’re not serious.”

“Rachel, what else can we do?”

They had already seen many cars abandoned by their drivers, leaving the road a mess, littered with unattended vehicles. That was one of the reasons that the last bus had come and gone more than twenty minutes ago. The rest simply couldn’t get to the hotel. In fact, one bus that had already left reported back that it had resorted to pushing abandoned cars aside just to get through.

Guests continued to stream out of the hotel, but anyone moving at less than a jog was not going to make it to high ground in time, since the first wave might well reach more than a mile inland in some places.

“You have to help me get these guests up to a higher floor.”

Max’s jaw fell open.

“What? But you said the building wasn’t safe! It might collapse.”

“Keep your voice down!” Rachel said. “Look at these people.” Many of the vets left in the lobby were on walkers or in wheelchairs. Some had their wives with them because the women wouldn’t leave their husbands. “They wouldn’t make it to the Ala Wai Canal before the wave hit, let alone to a safe distance.”