The Tsunami Countdown Read online

  They started paddling. Jake was far ahead. Lani looked at her watch. Only nineteen minutes left. She paddled harder.

  TWENTY-NINE

  11:04 a.m.

  18 Minutes to Wave Arrival Time

  After leaving the clothing store where she had watched the first tsunami wave engulf the hikers on the Big Island, Teresa had returned to the beach to check the note in her bag. To her dismay, the bag was still there, with no sign from the girls. Her first thought had been to find another phone so that she could call someone for help. But without the phone book in her dead cell phone, she didn’t know any numbers to call. When she finally convinced an obliging tourist to let her use his cell phone, her calls to information went unanswered, as had her calls to the Grand Hawaiian. There was no way for her to contact anyone she knew.

  By this time, the evacuation had reached its peak. People walked and ran in all directions, some calm, others crying or screaming. Many of them were families, the children struggling to keep up with their parents. Teresa hadn’t taken the time to get an update on the tsunami, but whatever people were seeing on TV was spurring them to get out fast. When she tried to stop passersby to show Mia’s photo, most people brushed her aside, immersed in their own problems. Of the ones who did take the time to look at the picture carefully, none recognized Mia.

  Numerous possibilities for where Mia and Lani had gone fluttered through Teresa’s mind. The most likely explanation was that they were in one of the hotels or condos lining the beach, either oblivious to the mass panic below or dismissive of the danger. Or they could have gotten a ride in someone’s car. Teresa didn’t think Mia would do something like that, but given her own state of dread, she wasn’t ruling out anything.

  If the girls were in a vehicle or a hotel room, she’d never find them in time. Her only hope was that the girls would become aware of what was going on and come back to find her.

  Teresa’s search led her back to the east end of Waikiki Beach, where she came to a stop at the corner of Ohua and Kalakaua. While the midday sun blazed unimpeded by clouds, the ocean breeze kept the temperature to a comfortable eighty degrees. Nevertheless, sweat glistened on Teresa’s arms and brow, more a result of her anxiety than the climate.

  She scanned the two blocks between her and the end of the developed part of Waikiki where the Kapi‘olani Park began.

  “Mia!” she yelled. “Lani!”

  A few heads turned, but none of them belonged to her daughter. She was about to turn and head back in the other direction when a muffled sob caught her attention.

  Tucked in an alcove was a little boy no older than six. He was hunkered down against the wall, tears streaming down his pale face, the wind tousling his ash-blond hair. The people hurrying by were so engrossed in the evacuation that he had escaped attention. If Teresa hadn’t stopped there, she most likely wouldn’t have seen him either.

  She knelt down in front of the boy, forgetting about her own lost child for a moment.

  “Hey there, kiddo. Are you lost?”

  He nodded glumly between sobs.

  “What’s your name?”

  “David.”

  “Hi, David, I’m Teresa.”

  He looked at her dubiously, as if he had already told her too much.

  “My mom said I shouldn’t talk to strangers.”

  “That’s usually a good idea, David. Where is your mom?”

  He paused. Teresa could see that he was unsure whether to trust her.

  “David, I’m a doctor, and doctors help people, right? And all I want to do is help you find your mom.”

  “You don’t look like a doctor.”

  “What do doctors look like?”

  “Like my doctor, Dr. Rayburn. He’s old, and he has a funny nose.”

  Teresa smiled at that.

  “I swear I’m a doctor. Here, let me show you.” She plucked her medical ID from her wallet. It showed her in her white lab coat. Apparently, that was enough for David, and the information poured out.

  “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 Hs 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 Ws. 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.

  THIRTY

  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.”

  “But there are more waves coming. The TV said they’re twenty-five minutes apart. That’s not enough time to get to safety before the next wave comes in, is it?”

  “I don’t know,” Rachel said. “But we have less than fifteen minutes left now. Unless we do something, they’re going to be sitting in the lobby when the wave comes in.”

  A few moments later, the elevator opened and Adrian Micton, one of the front desk clerks she had conscripted to warn the guests still in their rooms, stepped out. Rachel expected to see five staffers, but only Melissa Clark was with him.

  “Where are the others?” she said.

  Adrian hesitated, then said, “They … left. Out the back. I guess they didn’t want to run into you.”

  Rachel couldn’t blame them. They were hotel workers, not firefighters. Risking their lives wasn’t in the job description. A part of her wanted to join them.

  “Did you finish the sweep of the hotel?” she said.

  “Yes. Every room’s been notified.”

  “Are all the guests leaving?”

  “No. There are twelve rooms where the guests said they wanted to stay here.”

  “Dammit! You couldn’t get them to leave?”

  “For whatever reason, they thought they were safer staying in their rooms. You want me to try again?”

  “No, we can’t make them go. You’ve done enough. I want you to get everyone down here and leave the hotel immediately. And I mean run. You don’t have much time left.”

  “What about you?” Adrian said.

  “We’ve got a bunch of people down here who can’t leave. We’re going to take them upstairs.”

  “I’ll help.”

  “Thanks, but we need you to lead everyone who can get out to safety. They may get lost.”

  “I’m staying,” Adrian said. “Melissa can take the others out.”

  Rachel smiled. “Okay, you and Max start taking the vets up to Starlight.” Starlight was the restaurant on top of the Moana tower.

  “All of them?” Max said. “That’ll take longer with just the express elevator. What about the Akamai tower?”

  “No, we should stick together. Divide them up between you and use the service elevators. They’re bigger and faster. Shouldn’t take you more than five minutes to get them all up there.”

  “Then what? What happens when the next wave comes?”

  “I don’t know, all right?” Rachel said, exasperated at his bickering. “We’ll deal with that when the time comes. All I know is that they are not going to make it if they try to walk.”

  “But how do you know? How can you be sure?”

  “Because if my husband says that the wave is going to be eighty feet high, I believe him. And if it’s that high, they won’t make it to safety in time. Now, just do it, okay?”

  Max reluctantly started gathering up the guests.

  Rachel looked outside and saw the Russians still milling around. Melissa Clark, one of her staffers who had been on the elevator with Adrian, was futilely trying to answer questions from a couple of the disabled vets’ wives.

  “Melissa,” she said to the tall cashier, “come with me. I need you to help me.”

  One of the Russian men, probably the leader, immediately started barking in Russian at Rachel and gesticulating wildly. She put up her hands to quiet them down. Speaking to them would be useless. She tried the one word she thought they might understand.

  “Tsunami. Tsunami?”

  They stared at her with blank expressions. She curled one arm over the other in a motion that she hoped would convey a wave crashing while saying “Boooosh!” Then a small woman in the back with an equally small voice said, “Tsunami.”

  Rachel seized on that and repeated the word. The petite Russian woman spoke rapidly to the others, with the word “tsunami” sprinkled through it.

  After a moment, the entire tour group realized that they were in danger and surrounded Rachel, screeching at her in panic. Rachel motioned them toward Melissa, who waved for them to come with her. Thankfully, that calmed them, and they
followed her.

  “Good luck,” Rachel said. “And, Melissa?”

  Melissa turned back to see the deadly serious look on Rachel’s face.

  “Run.”

  Lani took a second from paddling to look up and saw Jake reach shore far ahead of her. He curled out of the kayak and splashed up to the beach. He fell to the sand for a moment, and Lani was afraid he would be too exhausted to go on. But he quickly clambered to his feet and jogged off in the direction of the Grand Hawaiian as his kayak floated along the shore.

  “Hold on, Mia. Jake’s reached the shore. He’s running to the hotel for help.”

  Mia could only sputter in response. The wake from Tom’s paddling continually got her in the face, and she heaved up salt water periodically. However, with the strap firmly tied to her life vest, she wasn’t in danger of being left behind.

  “How did Jake get so far ahead?” Tom said, huffing and puffing, Mia’s drag requiring him to more than double his effort.

  “What?” Lani said. “Towing Mia is slowing you down a lot.”

  “No, that doesn’t explain it all. Sure, he should be ahead of us, but not that far. It seems like we’re standing still.”

  Lani looked to where Jake had made landfall. To this point, it had looked like he was directly in front of them. But now she realized that he was at an angle to them, and she knew what was wrong.

  “We’re in a riptide. That’s why we’re not making any headway.”

  “A riptide? Here?”

  “It may not be strong, but it might be enough to keep us from getting farther.”

  “How do you know?”

  “I’ve been boogie boarding a lot and got caught in a rip one time. We need to go parallel to the beach to get out of it.”

  They began paddling westward, and in a minute Lani could feel a shift in the current.

  “I think we’re out of it.”

  “Thank God,” Tom said. “We’ve got a little more than ten minutes left.”

  Lani willed her tired arms to pull as hard as they could. She didn’t want to say anything to discourage them, but judging from how far they were from the shore, ten minutes didn’t seem like nearly enough time to get there.