Boyd Morrison - The Tsunami Countdown

“I’m just signing some papers with him,” Max said.

“Put him on the walkie-talkie. Now.”

A second of silence elapsed before John Chaver, the contractor, came on the line.

“This is John.”

“John, this is Rachel Tanaka. You and your men need to come back up here immediately. The ramp is installed improperly.”

“It’s built according to my specs.”

She edged away from Lateen so that she was out of earshot and explained the problem with the dais. This guy picked the wrong day to mess with her.

“The ramp is useless. Now, if you want to continue to do business at this hotel—a hotel that’s scheduled to have over a hundred and fifty conferences this year—you better get back up here and fix that ramp in the next twenty minutes.”

“Just a minute.”

Another few moments of silence. Then Chaver came back sounding much more contrite.

“I’m sorry, Mrs. Tanaka. I just checked with one of my guys. He installed the wrong ramp. We’ve got the right one in our truck. I’ll be there in a minute.”

“Good.” Rachel walked back to Lateen. “A Mr. Lateen will be up here to describe exactly what he needs,” she told Chaver. “He is a very important guest, and I expect you to extend him every courtesy.”

“Of course. I’m on my way.”

She replaced the walkie-talkie on her belt.

“Thank you, Mrs. Tanaka,” Lateen said. “I appreciate your help.”

“Not at all. I’m sorry for the inconvenience. I hope this won’t discourage you from using our hotel in the future.”

“If we get this fixed, you can consider me satisfied.” Chaver arrived, and Rachel left him with Lateen to get the ramp changed.

As she walked away, her cell phone rang. It was Teresa.

“Are you still awake?” she said.

“Are you kidding?” Teresa said. “Most nights I’d kill for five hours’ sleep.”

“Thanks for staying up late. You’ve got so many good stories about the hospital.”

“I just told you the glamorous stuff. Tonight I’ll tell you the things I normally deal with, like strung-out junkies, idiotic insurance forms, and every bodily fluid you can imagine. It’s not pretty.”

“I’m still proud of you.”

“Yeah, well, I’m proud of you too.”

“For what?”

“For having such a great family. You’ve got something good going there.”

“I know. Thanks.”

“Okay, I gotta go. The juice on my cell is running low.”

“Wait! The reason I wanted you to call was because I reserved you a spot in the Grand Hawaiian parking garage. Just tell them I sent you.”

“You kick ass, Rachel! I’ll see you later.”

“Bye.”

Rachel got only two steps back into the skybridge when her walkie-talkie crackled to life. It was Max.

“Rachel, we have a problem with the Russian tour group.”

“What’s the problem? Something with their rooms?”

“I don’t know. I can’t understand them. But they’re getting pretty irate.”

“There’s no interpreter?”

“Nope. And none of them speaks a word of English.”

“That may be the problem. Where are they?”

“Second-floor mezzanine.”

“I’ll be right there.”

Rachel stopped and leaned against the skybridge railing. She took a deep breath to gather herself as she watched thousands of carefree people enjoying their holiday on the beach. Then she headed to the elevators, ready to take on the day’s next emergency.

9:08 a.m .

Kai wasn’t worried about the tsunami information bulletin Reggie had issued. It was a standard message issued whenever sensors picked up seismic activity in the Pacific basin that might be powerful enough to generate a tsunami. Since it hadn’t been a tsunami warning , the event must have been between 6.5 and 7.5 on the moment magnitude scale, fairly common readings that rarely resulted in a tsunami. Below 6.5, they didn’t even bother to issue a notification. The bulletin was sent to all of the other monitoring stations in the Pacific as well as the West Coast/Alaska Tsunami Warning Center in Palmer, Alaska, which served as the warning center for Alaska, British Columbia, and the west coast of the United States. The PTWC covered the rest of the Pacific. All of the emergency and civil defense organizations in the Pacific Rim were notified, including the U.S. military, which had extensive bases in the Pacific.

None of these organizations had to take any action; the message was strictly to inform them of a seismic event and its potential to generate a tsunami. Already that year, the PTWC had issued over forty bulletins. None had actually resulted in a tsunami.

Once the bulletin was issued, the real work started. They had to analyze the data to determine how likely it was that a destructive tsunami was heading for a populated coastline. If the event happened off the coast of Alaska, the closest tsunamigenic zone to Hawaii, remotely operated buoys called Deep-ocean Assessment and Reporting of Tsunamis buoys—commonly called DART buoys—would be able to tell the size and velocity of a tsunami headed across the Pacific. While much of the work was computer-automated now, it still took a lot of sweat to verify the threat and calculate specific wave arrival times. It only took five hours for a tsunami to reach Hawaii from Alaska, which was barely enough time to mount a coordinated mass evacuation.

The interior of the PTWC was just as neat and functional as the exterior. A reception area greeted visitors, and next to it was a small conference room. The receptionist, Julie, had the day off, as did most of the rest of the staff. Kai picked up a sheet of paper lying on the front desk to look at the specifics of the school group that would be touring the facility that morning. Since the Southeast Asian tsunami disaster, tours had become much more in demand. When Julie had scheduled the tour for Memorial Day, Kai was a bit surprised that a school would want to do anything that day that didn’t involve sand and surf. Then she told him the school group was from Japan, one of the countries covered by the PTWC, and it made sense.

He scanned the sheet. Twelve sixth graders from Tokyo for a thirty-minute tour, escorted by a teacher fluent in English. They planned to be done by nine thirty and move on to a full day of sightseeing.

These students might actually be interested in what I have to say , Kai thought. Sometimes he’d get a school group of bored American teenagers who’d be itching to leave as soon as they got there. Kai couldn’t get those tours over fast enough.

He dropped the sheet back onto the counter and patted Bilbo.

“Come on. Let’s find out what’s going on.”

Following Bilbo, Kai walked the few steps into the data analysis facility, which was packed with state-ofthe-art computers and seismic sensing equipment. Huge maps of the Pacific lined two of the walls. Since the news media often got information faster than the PTWC did, the two TVs on either side of the room were perpetually tuned to CNN. He and Reggie spent most of their time in this room. Still farther back in the building were the individual cubicles and Kai’s tiny office.

Normally, George Huntley and Mary Grayson, the two most junior geophysicists, would be manning computers on the other side of the room. It hadn’t taken Kai long to realize they had started a relationship, and the last he had heard, they had both taken their day off to go surfing together on the North Shore.

Three of the other scientists were attending a conference that week in San Francisco, while the director, Harry Dupree, was on a three-day holiday to Maui.

Kai found Reggie hunched over a computer monitor, munching on an egg salad sandwich, the empty wrapper of a second sandwich lying next to him. When Reggie heard the dog’s claws clicking on the linoleum, he looked up.