Boyd Morrison - The Tsunami Countdown

Vast amounts of debris choked the water. Cars, boats, pieces of buildings, trees, all combined into a morass of detritus flowing inland. Rachel knew that bodies must be mixed in with the wreckage, but thankfully she was too far up to make out those details clearly. For as far as she could see on either side of the hotel, water seven stories high filled the streets of Honolulu. Anyone caught in that would have needed a miracle to survive.

Rachel mentally reviewed her options. Evacuating the guests by going back downstairs would be futile. Even assuming the wave would retreat enough to let them out onto the streets, there wouldn’t be enough time before the next wave for them to reach safety. Their only hope was to be saved by air.

She gestured toward the helicopters, both military and civilian, buzzing around the city. Her best hope was to follow Kai’s suggestion.

“We have to try to get one of them,” she said to Max.

As she opened her cell phone to dial 911, the only way she could think of to get help, she happened to glance across at the Akamai tower. With a gasp, she pointed to a window about three floors below them where a man with a goatee leaned against it, a cell phone in his hand, peering down at the barge sticking out of the lower stories. The sun reflected off his bald spot, and his flowered shirt rippled in the breeze. Even from this distance, the desperation on his face was apparent.

“He’s trapped,” Rachel said, “and he knows it.”

The dredging barge had been driven into the middle of the tower like an enormous spike, most likely crushing the stairwell and any escape in that direction. The distinctive spire roof of the Akamai tower, in contrast to the flat roof of the Moana tower, provided no place for a helicopter to land.

“My God!” Max said. “He’s not going to jump, is he?”

“I don’t know,” Rachel said, waving her arms and banging on the window, trying to get the man’s attention.

A woman, as dark as the man was fair, ran to the man and hugged him, followed by three children. The man didn’t seem to hear Rachel, but the biggest of the children, a boy, caught sight of her in the restaurant and pointed. The man returned Rachel’s wave and motioned with his hands, asking what they should do.

“What now?” Max said.

“I don’t know. But if we don’t get a helicopter, none of us is getting out of here alive.”

She had just started dialing again when shouts of alarm coursed through the room. Every light in the restaurant went dark, and the air handling system fell silent. The power was out.

From the Hawaiian State Civil Defense’s bunker, Renfro had been monitoring Oahu’s major power stations with growing apprehension. All three of them sat on the coast, the biggest in Nanakuli, the others at Barbers Point and Honolulu. Of course, HSCD disaster planners had considered their proximity to the coast, but the most urgent concern was hurricanes, which battered the Hawaiian Islands periodically. In those cases, the tidal surge was never higher than fifteen feet. Tsunamis rarely reached more than thirty feet in height, and the power plants were above that level.

A mega-tsunami was unprecedented, so large that HSCD had not considered it a realistic possibility. The chances of it happening were so remote that planning for it was not deemed economically prudent.

And so, when the eighty-foot-high tsunami struck the coast of Oahu, the wave submerged all three power plants to a depth of thirty feet, shutting all of them down. The higher waves to come would destroy them completely.

Renfro shook his head as the reports came in. Not only were the power plants smashed, but the wave had washed away most of the power lines and their towers. Where lines remained intact, the water caused short circuits in the system. The power substations that weren’t submerged couldn’t handle the massive overloads, and the surviving circuit breakers were tripped.

The island of Oahu was in a blackout.

A few locations, however, still had power. Backup generators and batteries continued to power HSCD, hospitals, and the air traffic control tower at Wheeler Army Airfield.

Renfro knew only one other major system continued to function: small backup generators or batteries were included in the design of every cell phone tower.

On the tenth floor of the Seaside, next to the stairwell, a second set of stairs led up to the roof. Brad, Jake, and Tom had reached the top of the stairs without getting injured by the flying shards of glass. With the rushing water just below them, Kai ushered everyone up the last flight of stairs and onto the roof.

The flat expanse of faded and peeling white paint was broken up by a few large air-conditioning units and not much else. Kai ran to the edge of the building and looked down. At that height, he would normally see multitudes of beachgoers thronging the promenade far below. Instead, breathtakingly, the water was now only fifteen feet beneath them, the top floor dry by a few inches. Water surged like a river around the corner of the building, taking all kinds of debris with it.

Kai was relieved that the building hadn’t collapsed with the first wave. But he had no idea if it would stand up to the next one. Not that it would matter: the next wave was going to be another five stories high, completely covering this building.

He knelt by Lani.

“Are you all right, honey?” Kai said.

She nodded and gave him a tight hug. “I can’t believe you came to get us. How did you know where we were?”

“You were on TV. Then Jake led us to you when we got to the Grand Hawaiian. Was it your idea to send him there?”

She nodded again. She was a smart kid.

“Is Mom okay?”

“She was at the hotel. I’m sure she’s fine.” Although Kai tried to project a confident calm, he was in fact sick with worry about Rachel. He knew this thing was far from over, and he didn’t think she’d be safe for long where she was. Neither would they.

Kai took out the walkie-talkie and tried it first. After a few attempts he got through to his wife and breathed a sigh of relief.

“Rachel, are you all right?”

“Kai! Thank God! Please tell me you got Lani.”

“I have her right here. She has an exciting story to tell you.”

Kai passed the walkie-talkie to Lani and walked over to Brad. He was taking pictures of the flooding with his cell phone, which had been in the dry bag.

“What do we do now?” Brad said, snapping a photo of a boat floating past the eighth story of the building behind them, the twenty-story building they would have been in if only they’d had another minute to run over to it. Kai took Brad aside so that the kids wouldn’t hear them. Teresa joined them.

“We wait,” Kai said. “The water will recede. When it does, we need to make a run for higher ground. In the meantime, maybe we can wave one of those helicopters down.”

“We’re not the only ones,” Teresa said. “Look.”

She gestured to the other buildings around Waikiki and Honolulu. As far as the eye could see, buildings were topped with people leaning over the sides or waving to the skies. There had to be hundreds of them, if not thousands. Seeing that, it struck Kai as strange that they were the only ones on the top of this building. He had the awful thought that perhaps The Seaside held other people who hadn’t tried to evacuate their condos until the water was upon them.

To Kai’s surprise, Teresa grabbed both him and Brad in an embrace.

“I can’t ever thank you enough for saving Mia,” she sobbed. “I don’t know what I would have done if you hadn’t come along.”

“Hey, it finally got Lame-o here on a motorcycle,” Brad joked. “Of course, my Harley is now rusting away under about eighty feet of Pacific seawater. But it was a helluva last ride.”