Boyd Morrison - The Tsunami Countdown

“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.