Boyd Morrison - The Tsunami Countdown

Voices below him shouted. “Help us! Jerry! Get us out of here!”

“Jerry, you all need to climb up and get out right now. Look!” Rachel pointed at the water shooting up the elevator shaft next to him from below.

“Oh, crap!” He began to babble. “They can’t. It was hard enough for me to get out with their help. My sister isn’t exactly thin, and this is my mom’s cane. She’s seventy-eight.”

“Listen to me,” Rachel said as the water continued to rise at an astonishing speed. “You’re in an express elevator. It only serves the sixteenth to twenty-eighth floors. There are no doors for that elevator between here and the lobby. This is the only way out.”

“Maybe we should wait for the fire department.”

“Nobody else is coming. You’re lucky I heard you.”

The water rose inexorably.

“I already tried lifting them,” the man said. “I can’t do it myself. Please!”

Rachel ran around the corner and shouted to the kids at the end of the hall.

“Wyatt and Hannah, stay there. There are some people stuck here. I’ll be back in a minute. If the water keeps coming up, go up the stairs.”

Rachel came back around and dropped down onto the elevator roof. She peered through the emergency hatch. A plump woman in her forties and a frail elderly lady looked up at her.

“Who are you?” the elderly woman asked.

“I’m Rachel Tanaka, the hotel manager. The power is out in the hotel. We have to get you out of there immediately.”

“How? We don’t exactly have a ladder in here.”

“The water is almost here,” Jerry said.

Rachel looked over the edge of the elevator. The water no longer shot up, but it was still rising. It looked to be to the thirteenth floor, only twenty feet below the bottom of the elevator.

“Can you both swim?”

“Are you kidding?” the younger woman said.

“No,” Rachel said.

“There’s water coming up, Sheila,” Jerry said. “She’s right. You may not have a choice.”

“Can you swim?” Rachel repeated.

“Just because I have a cane doesn’t mean I’m a cripple,” the older woman said. “Of course I can swim. If you kids had let us leave when I wanted to, we wouldn’t be in this mess.”

“This is Jerry’s fault!” Sheila said. “He’s the idiot who wanted us to stay.”

“If we had taken the stairs like I wanted to,” Jerry said, “you wouldn’t be stuck down there!”

“Shut up!” Rachel said. The last thing she needed was a bickering family. “What we’ll do is wait to see how high the water gets. If it comes into the elevator cab, you’ll float up and we can pull you out. If it starts to go down before then, we’ll have to figure out something else.”

The water reached the bottom of the cab.

“It’s coming in!” Sheila said.

But the water didn’t stop rising. The level crept up the side of the cab.

“How high is this going to get?” Jerry said.

“I don’t know,” Rachel replied.

“What if it comes over the top?

“I don’t know,” she repeated. “Do you have a better suggestion?”

He shook his head meekly.

The water level had risen three-quarters of the way up the exterior of the elevator cab, but the water inside was still only two feet high, trickling in slowly through the doors.

Paige appeared at the doorway of the elevator with Wyatt, Hannah, and Ashley.

“Paige! Thank God you made it! Where’s Bill?”

Paige said nothing, but the stream of tears running down her face said it all.

“I’m sorry, Paige. I’m really sorry, but we need your help down here.”

But Paige could only stand there, crying. The children started crying too.

“Okay,” Rachel said. “You stay up there. There are three people down here. You can help pull them up.”

The water kept rising. When it reached the top of the elevator, the water inside was only three feet high, still too shallow to float in. The seawater poured over the edge of the cab’s roof and across the flat surface, where it lapped at Rachel’s feet, drained through the emergency trapdoor, and filled the elevator at three times the previous rate. The rush of falling water was not loud enough to mask the screams of the two women trapped inside.

11:50 a.m .

22 Minutes to Third Wave

When the second wave hit the Moana tower of the Grand Hawaiian, the swaying of the building had caused panic among the people still on top. The evacuation had been going smoothly, with a helicopter arriving every five minutes to pick up new passengers. At one point, an Army Black Hawk helicopter was able to pick up fifteen of them, including the men who were the most disabled. Now just a handful were left. Max leaned over the edge and saw the surface of the water flowing past the fifteenth floor. Rachel had not come back, and they had heard the collapse of the sky-bridge.

Another tourist helicopter landed. It had enough room for the rest of them, including Bob Lateen, who had insisted on remaining until everyone else was gone.

“Adrian,” Max said as they hauled Lateen into the chopper, “tell them to wait for a minute.” He hopped out onto the roof.

“Where are you going?” Adrian asked.

“Rachel should have been back by now. I’m going to check the stairs.”

Max flung the door open and looked down the stairwell. He couldn’t make out any movement between him and the water a hundred feet below. He yelled down.

“Hello! Rachel! Are you there?”

No response. But the sound from the helicopter could have masked an answer. He closed the door, ran down two floors, and tried again.

“Rachel! Are you there? Anyone?”

Still nothing. Surely, if Rachel had made it, she would be climbing the stairs right now.

Adrian opened the rooftop door.

“Max, the pilot says they’ve got lots of other people still to rescue. He needs to go now.”

With a heavy sigh, Max went back out onto the roof and got in the helicopter with Adrian.

“What happened to Rachel?” Adrian asked.

“I don’t know. She must have gotten caught in it. I shouldn’t have let her go. Okay, pilot. Let’s go. There’s no one left here.”

They took off, leaving the empty roof behind them.

When Kai saw the ruined car jack, he was crushed. It meant another trip down to find a jack in another car. Of course there was no guarantee they would find one, and they would have the same time crunch getting it back here and getting Brad and Mia out before the building either collapsed or a third wave came in.

By this time the water had reached its peak height. Kai could feel the water stop flowing away from the ocean and begin its inevitable slide back where it came from. Flooding Honolulu to a depth of 150 feet had taken less than three minutes.

Kai felt something pulling on him. It was Lani. She grabbed his hand and pointed it and the dive light in the direction of the jack. He turned the light on his own face and nodded that he understood the situation. But then she did something completely unexpected: she patted the life raft and then pointed at Kai.

He shook his head, thinking that she wanted to use the raft to float up to the surface. She focused the light on herself and made a wide gesture with her hands, mimicking the inflation of the raft. She then pointed at the girder and pretended to push it up.

Of course! Leave it to a kid to think outside the box. She wasn’t saying that they should use the raft as a boat. She was suggesting using the raft as a jack.

That’s my girl , Kai thought. He raised his hand and nodded. He needed a minute to think.

The raft was attached to a CO 2cartridge, so it would inflate itself in seconds. Kai focused the light on the side of the raft. It was rated to hold eight people. That meant at least 1,600 pounds of displacement on the surface. Underwater, it was at least twice that. If it was placed in the right location, it might be enough to lift the girder.