The Tsunami Countdown

by Boyd Morrison

  “Now I know why you were reluctant about the scuba camp,” Teresa said.

  “I didn’t want to scare you.”

  “He should scare you,” Brad said. “My Harley is a hundred times safer than scuba diving.”

  “I’m not coming with you,” Kai said.

  “Okay,” Brad said, and the smile returned bigger than ever. “But you’re missing out on some easy money. I’m playing with a couple of guys from Ma‘alea Realty. They have no idea you and I are two-handicaps. I’ve already got them up to twenty bucks per hole. With any luck, I can double it with a little creative playing on the first couple of holes.”

  “I’m not going to swindle a couple of guys out of their money. If they want to play a fair round … Wait a minute. Why am I even talking about this? I’m not going.”

  “If you want to spend the day inside, it’s your loss.” Brad turned to Teresa. “I’ll buy you a mai tai tonight at the luau and dispel all those lies Kai told you.” Brad lowered his voice and spoke into Kai’s ear. “Make sure my seat is next to Teresa’s.” Then he made a slight bow to the girls. “Ciao, ladies!”

  In a well-choreographed motion, Brad put his helmet on, fired up the Harley, and peeled off, much to Lani and Mia’s delight. When he was gone, the girls finished putting their supplies in the Jeep.

  “He’s a good guy,” Kai said, “but he can be a little much to take.”

  “Don’t you dare let Rachel try to play matchmaker. I’m very happy being on my own right now.”

  “I wouldn’t dream of it,” Kai said. “I’ll make sure you don’t get stuck with him all night.”

  “I’ll hold you to that,” she said, climbing in. She unrolled her window and nodded at the center’s main building, a low, squat structure typical of the government cinder-block construction from the 1940s. It was bland but tidy, with a fresh coat of whitewash and neatly manicured hedges. The words “Richard H. Hagemeyer Pacific Tsunami Warning Center” were emblazoned on the front of the building in large letters, honoring a longstanding director of the National Weather Service. It was only a hundred yards from Kai’s house.

  “Must be nice being a thirty-second walk from the office,” Teresa said.

  “Not always.”

  “I get it. The good part is being close to work. The bad part is being close to work.”

  “Exactly.”

  Teresa laughed. “All right, you two,” she said to the girls. “Seat belts.”

  “Oh, I almost forgot,” Kai said. “Rachel wants you to call her on your way.”

  “Okay. And I might as well get your number in case I have to reach you.” Teresa dug her cell phone from her purse and flipped it open. “Oh, crap!”

  “What’s the matter?” Kai said.

  “I didn’t charge my phone last night. The battery is almost dead.”

  “Now, don’t you wish we had my cell phone here?” Mia said.

  Teresa swiveled in her seat. “What I wish is that I had taken it away from you before we got that bill for three hundred dollars’ worth of text messages last month.” She swung back around to Kai. “What’s your number?” Their fingers pecked at the phones as they traded info.

  “I’ll just talk to Rachel for a minute,” Teresa said. “If I don’t answer my phone, you’ll know why.”

  “No problem,” Kai said.

  They gave a wave and were off. Kai patted Bilbo on the head.

  “Looks like it’s just us boys now,” he said, but the dog was already sniffing around the hibiscus bushes and making his mark.

  Kai’s cell phone rang. He opened it assuming it was Rachel, but the caller ID told him it was the PTWC. He punched the Talk button and heard the voice of Reggie Pona, the only other geophysicist staffing the Center that morning.

  “Hey, Kai,” Reggie said. “I tried you at home but no answer. Are you around?”

  “I’m standing outside. Just saw the family off.”

  “As you can see, the tour group isn’t here yet. But I thought you might want a few minutes to look at something before they get here.”

  “Why? What’s up?”

  “I just issued a tsunami bulletin.”

  FIVE

  9:03 a.m.

  The Grand Hawaiian was the newest and swankiest of the luxury hotels lining Waikiki Beach. Constructed over the razed remains of a 1940s apartment building, the 1,065-room hotel was the brainchild of a Las Vegas resort mogul looking for new locations to expand his empire. An airy pedestrian sky-bridge at the sixth-floor conference facility connected its two twenty-eight-story towers. Rachel strode onto the sky-bridge from her offices in the Akamai tower toward the main ballroom in the Moana tower, carefully reviewing the checklist for the disabled veterans brunch while she walked. The governor of Hawaii was scheduled to address the group and then accompany them to a remembrance ceremony at the Hawaii State Veterans Cemetery. It was the biggest event in the young hotel’s history, and she was on the hook to make sure everything went off without a hitch.

  As she ran through the routine checklist, Rachel couldn’t help but think about her late-night conversation with Teresa. As a resident, Teresa was charged with saving patients on a daily basis, making a fundamental difference in their lives and those of their families. Rachel, on the other hand, was responsible for making sure that there were enough servings of mahi mahi at the brunch.

  Her job as a hotel manager was comfortable and paid well, but being a doctor had to be infinitely more rewarding. Rachel had thought about going into medicine long ago, but for financial reasons she never seriously considered it. So when she met Teresa, it was Rachel’s opportunity to help someone else achieve her dream.

  Teresa had been a nurse when she introduced herself to Kai and Rachel during Lamaze class. Teresa and Rachel had hit it off immediately, but the lout Teresa was married to at the time didn’t get along as well with Kai. The two women got even closer once Rachel, after years of working on Teresa, finally convinced her to pursue her passion and go to med school. Teresa’s husband, who wanted her to give up working altogether and become a stay-at-home mother with five children, filed for divorce. To make things worse, it also turned out that he’d been having serial affairs on his business trips. During that difficult period, Teresa had leaned on Rachel, and Lani and Mia spent every non-school hour together.

  When Kai accepted his new job, Lani was devastated about leaving Mia. So as soon as Teresa had a week off from her third year of residency, she planned a trip to Hawaii, and the Tanakas happily agreed to host them.

  With Teresa visiting, Rachel was reminded that she had abandoned her dreams for practicality, and she didn’t want her daughter to make the same mistake. If Lani wanted to become a scuba diving instructor or a professional soccer player or anything else, Rachel wanted her to have that opportunity.

  Halfway across the bridge, Rachel was so deep in thought that she nearly ran into Bob Lateen, the chairman of the veterans conference. His frown told her she was about to have another problem.

  She shook off her reverie. “Can I help you, Mr. Lateen?”

  “Mrs. Tanaka,” Lateen said, keeping up with Rachel in his motorized wheelchair while she walked, “you assured us that we would have sufficient accommodations for our accessibility needs, but there is a serious situation in the ballroom that needs to be taken care of immediately.”

  Rachel squinted from the sunlight streaming through the floor-to-ceiling windows of the skybridge but still maintained a polite smile.

  “Mr. Lateen, I want you to know that we take your concerns very seriously, and we value your patronage. I will do anything I can to help. Now, what’s the problem?”

  They exited the bridge and came into a lavish foyer. Some of the attendees were already milling about. Rachel and Lateen weaved their way through and entered the Kamehameha Ballroom, the largest in the hotel.

  “The problem,” Lateen said, “is that we are supposed to start the brunch in less than an hour, and I can’t even get onto the dais.”

>   He pointed to the wide raised table at the back of the ballroom. On the right side, a standard staircase led up to the dais. On the left side, a short ramp had been constructed over the staircase. Now Rachel could see the problem.

  As instructed, a ramp had been installed, but whoever oversaw the construction either hadn’t done it before or hadn’t thought about the needs of the person that would be using it. They had essentially laid the ramp directly over the stairs, canting it up at a slope impossible for anyone in a wheelchair to negotiate.

  “If I use that ramp,” Lateen continued, “I will look like an idiot because I will have to have three people help me up. They might as well carry me up the stairs on the other side.”

  “I understand the problem, sir. Let me contact the contractor. We’ll have this fixed before the brunch starts.” She pulled out her walkie-talkie.

  “Max, is the dais contractor still in the hotel?”

  Max Walsh, her assistant manager, picked up immediately.

  “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.

  SIX

  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 perpe
tually 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.

  “Thanks for joining us this fine morning,” Reggie said. “I thought maybe you were gonna play hooky today.”

  Kai nodded toward Reggie’s sandwich, which was already half its previous size. “Is there ever a time of day when you don’t eat?”

  “Hey, I don’t want to get all skinny like you.”

  There was no danger of that. Reggie Pona, a huge bear of a man who used to be a defensive lineman at Stanford, must have weighed at least three hundred pounds. Reggie was also one of the brightest geophysicists Kai had ever met. A Samoan by birth, he had used his college football scholarship to accomplish his true goal of becoming a scientist.

  Reggie took a bite and continued to talk while he chewed. “I thought you might go with your friends to the beach. Teresa is hot, by the way.”

  “You know, sometimes you almost convince me that you’re not a nerd,” Kai said. “But then you open your mouth to talk and remind me. Besides, I couldn’t leave you alone with all those impressionable sixth graders. You scared the bejesus out of the last group.”