Redemption

by Ever N. Hayes

  “Nothing. No earthquakes. Nothing. Maybe it was an error.”

  “Has it ever done that before?”

  “Not that I’m aware of. No.”

  Damien couldn’t remember it happening either. When he had moved to Hawaii from D.C. eight years ago—and pursued his meteorology degree—tsunamis had been of particular interest to him. Turned out they were far more rare here than he’d imagined. He also learned that they weren’t always caused by earthquakes—one type wasn’t anyway.

  Meteotsunamis often formed in the eyes of deep tropical cyclones—hurricanes like this one. Extremely low atmospheric pressure and swirling winds could create a dome—or bubble—of water that would move in with the storm surge causing the surge to spike in shallow water laterally—like a tsunami. To an observer they would appear no different. The bigger the storm, the bigger the meteo … and hurricanes didn’t get any bigger than this.

  The forty-mile buoys had spiked fourteen feet over the last recorded wave set. They would reset in a second and they’d get another reading, but Damien knew if it had been a meteotsunami or storm surge the wave was already well past those buoys. If the thirty-mile alarms went off...

  The thirty-mile alarms sounded then. The buoys recorded thirty-nine feet. Not good. “You’re sure there’s no earthquake?” he shouted at Nicole again.

  “No. I swear.”

  “Nicole, it’s gotta be storm surge or a meteotsunami. Either way it’s moving fast and growing.”

  “There’s no earthquake recorded though.”

  “Meteos don’t need earthquakes, just the right atmospheric elements and a big-ass hurricane like this one. With Ni’ihau’s west to east slope it’s going to use that island like a ramp and crush Redemption, but I have no way of warning them.”

  “What about the Tsunami Prevention Channels?”

  “Not enough time for the TPCs. I need eight minutes—we maybe have four. Meteos can travel at over four hundred miles an hour. This one is much slower but you can’t anticipate them—there’s no call sign like a seismic wave. I can’t stop this.”

  “So what about Redemption?”

  Damien shook his head, glancing at his watch. He had to power everything down now—thirteen minutes early. “Best guess, the wall of water will surge to forty-five feet, accelerate off the shallows, rocket off Ni’ihau, and hit them like a sledgehammer on a thumbtack.” Damien pulled down the five levers of the master power box. The switchboards and their respective islands went dark one by one. The emergency lights came on in Area 52, and Damien turned to look at Nicole. “They’re dead in the water.”

  Nicole winced as the twenty-mile alarms went off. “So you powered it down early for Kauai?”

  Damien nodded. “The storm surge will slow a little at Ni’ihau but won’t diminish in mass or force. It’ll hit Kauai two minutes later. It’s the only chance they’ve got.”

  The surge would hit Oahu too, but the hurricane sirens had been blaring here for hours, so people hopefully had been smart enough to clear the flood zones. Unfortunately, there was no guarantee of that. Some people always think they knew better than the weather.

  The big, round, blue light on the wall turned on then. The Shield was back up. The other two operatives—Stacy and Dewey—had just climbed the stairs to the Shield’s transceiver. Their task had been to power the Shield up manually when Oahu went dark. The blue light signified success on that front.

  The generator had turned the lights back on in Area 52, but Damien didn’t turn anything else on. As much as he and Nicole wanted to watch the attempted rescue on Kauai, they couldn’t chance someone else hacking into their feed and tipping off the captors.

  “Kind of weird isn’t it?” Nicole rocked back in her chair.

  “What’s that?”

  “All these dark screens, none of that electronic buzz … it’s like the silence in a movie theater between the previews and the feature film.”

  That comparison drew a little laugh from Damien. “Yeah, I know what you mean. I was thinking it was kind of eerie myself.”

  “At least we have lights,” Nicole added.

  The lights and power were off everywhere else. In the governor’s mansion, Barnes sat straight up in bed as his fan slowly creaked to a stop. He couldn’t sleep without a fan. Not that he’d had much luck sleeping in this hurricane. He was trying to follow the orders he’d received from Twix and Trigger but he was restless—his worries increasing by the minute for his wife.

  Barnes checked his watch. 9:48. He jumped up and ran to the window. Not a single light on anywhere. This was big. This was bad. He knew his mansion was beyond the flood zone, but the power going out spooked him. There was always a chance this wasn’t hurricane related. There was a chance the men at the Marine base were coming for him.

  The generator in his mansion kicked on a minute later, bringing the overhead fan and bathroom light behind him back on. The smoke alarm above his head beeped and made him jump. The lights and fan coming back on did little to ease the governor’s mind. He was wondering how widespread the outage was. Is every island affected or just this one?

  The governor had no way of knowing this was an intentional outage. But the Pack did. It caught them a little off guard—coming twelve to thirteen minutes early—but they adjusted and moved quickly. The split second the lights went off at the gate, Deacon, Royce, Trigger, and Twix were scaling the fence and lunging into the trees. No sooner had the four of them reached cover inside the compound, than the lights flicked back on all over the property and the electric fence was buzzing again. The compound’s generators had brought the place back to life in less than two minutes. There was no way the men inside that pink house would imagine two Army Rangers and two Navy SEALs were now on that property with them. They were probably inside checking their monitors, but they wouldn’t see anything and they’d settle back in. The four armed men in Special Forces “ghost suits” were counting on that as they crept toward the garage.

  The bigger issue for the men inside that pink house would be their communication links off the compound. With Hawaii’s entire electrical grid down, there would be no reaching the Marine base by the Hexagon, or the governor, or anyone else. Losing their access to the Hexagon would mean being completely blind beyond their compound—until the power came back on across the islands.

  It would take them a few minutes to realize the breadth of this outage and for it to sink in that something significant must be keeping the Hexagon completely shut down—given that they surely knew the Hexagon and Shield would have fail-safes in place.

  FIFTY - Sounds of Silence (Tara)

  ---------- (Wednesday. August 10, 2022.) ----------

  I was quite familiar with the expression “when it rains it pours” and how accurate that could be in life. I’d been through my fair share of torrential downpours and floods in my personal life. I’d just never experienced anything quite like this in my physical life.

  The wall of water falling from the sky was only matched in its eeriness by the strongest wind I’d ever felt, the darkest blackness I’d ever seen, and the massive amounts of mud flying through the air. The wind was shredding the tree house. Six of us were crowded under the large granite island in the kitchen as the ceiling was turned to Swiss cheese over us.

  And then everything seemed to die down in a hurry. It was suddenly silent. Then it was worse.

  We knew we were in the eye of the storm, but we still couldn’t see anything. I could barely make out Ryan’s dad crouched ten feet from us—flashlight in hand—as he slowly crawled towards the railing for a quick look around. One second he was directly under our only light. And then I heard a sound I had never heard before—the loudest imaginable pop followed by a whoosh and then an explosion. I was next to Ryan. And then I wasn’t. His arms had been wrapped around me, and he’d whispered something like, “I’ve got you” or “I love you”—I could barely hear him—and then he was gone. I can’t adequately describe that awful sequence—especially the e
ardrum-stunning explosion. All I know is the entire tree house disintegrated around us as a wall of water smashed into it and scattered us like a farmer tosses seed. It was quite possibly the last thing we were expecting at that moment—ninety feet above the ocean.

  It had been Grandpa Dan’s idea to tether us to the tree in the center of the kitchen. He had detached four of the tethers from the zip line upstairs, and the four of us girls anchored ourselves to the tree with them. “Just as a precaution,” he’d said. He’d done it for the wind. It worked for the water. For Kate and I anyway—it saved our lives.

  But Ryan didn’t have a tether, and Jenna’s tether didn’t hold. Neither did Kaci’s. The wall of water swept the three of them and Grandpa Dan out of the tree house. After the wave passed, I was hanging over the edge of a piece of floor that was still connected to that giant tree. Kate was hanging beside me, unconscious—bleeding from the head. I pulled myself up onto the small platform and strained to pull Kate up beside me. It took all the strength I had to get her next to me, and then I wrapped my arms around her and just cried.

  I could feel her heartbeat and hear her breathing as I put my ear next to her mouth. The gash on her head wasn’t terrible—it had just knocked her out. I moved my hands across her body, searching for other wounds and finding none. But knowing how hard I’d been slammed against the floor and tree, I was certain she’d been through the same. My first thought was of her baby. My second thought was of my own little girl. That wall of water was on its way to Kauai.

  And then I heard a cry for help.

  Then I thought of Ollie.

  FIFTY-ONE – Drawing Water

  ---------- (Wednesday. August 10, 2022.) ----------

  The meteotsunami surge that hit Ni’ihau was only forty-five feet high at impact, but—as Damien had predicted—it used the west to east slope of Ni’ihau to ramp up and slam Redemption. The surge may have been slowed a little from the nearly two hundred miles an hour it was when it hit Ni’ihau, but the destructive wake was still unimaginable.

  Ni’ihau and Redemption did little to slow the rest of the surge as it rolled toward Kauai, and with all systems down at the Hexagon, the Pack had no advanced warning. The storm surge rolled onto Kauai’s shores at nearly thirty feet in height and almost ninety miles an hour—and that wall of water tumbled inland, smothering trees and sweeping away everything in its path.

  The four members of the Pack had just entered the tunnel in the garage when the storm surge hit the property. Deacon was the last man in and a strange sound made him pause on the top step. A second later the distant distraction had become a roar—so loud and so close. Deacon ducked and dove into the tunnel just as the water removed the garage above him. The tunnel flooded and caved in on the Pack, which likely saved their lives—though the downforce of the surge pinned them for a full minute as the wall of water rushed up the hill east of the property. The basement of the house began to flood through the tunnel, but the prisoners were still alive. The same could not be said for the captors who had been sleeping upstairs. They were killed in seconds—slammed repeatedly against the steel and brick walls—like lightning bugs in a jar in the hands of an angry child.

  As the water retreated, it pulled most of the collapsed tunnel’s ceiling back off the Pack members, allowing them to break free and eventually swim. Twix was the strongest swimmer, and when he pushed through to the surface of the tunnel debris, he pulled Trigger up beside him. Together they plowed through the water to the flooded basement.

  They arrived with Deacon and Royce not far behind, and as Twix shouted instructions they all followed his orders immediately. Each man ripped open his pack and pulled out his diving masks and tanks. They dove into the deeper water of the basement and swam until they found the cell where the girls were trapped. Water was still pouring in and was almost up to the ceiling at this point. The prisoners were grouped together, taking their last gasps of air at the surface. Twix popped up mere inches from Reagan.

  His sudden appearance startled her. “It’s okay—you’re going to be okay.” Twix reached through the bars and took her hand.

  “Thank God,” Reagan gasped. “I thought no one was coming. I thought we were—” She began sobbing.

  “Hey, hey … Reagan.” Twix squeezed her hand. “Reagan, stay with me—do you know where they keep the key? Do they keep one down here?”

  “No.” Her lip quivered. “No, they don’t.”

  “Shhh … Reagan, listen … that’s okay.” Twix grabbed the bars of the door to their cell and pulled on them hard a couple times. They didn’t budge. With the water level quickly approaching the ceiling the prisoners were stuck. Twix knew he and the other Pack members had to give them their oxygen tanks. “Reagan, this is what I need you to do. We’ve got four sets of scuba gear here—one for each of you.”

  Reagan shook her head. “No. Four is not enough. There are five of us.”

  “Five?” Deacon asked.

  “Sam is here too.” Reagan nodded back toward them. Sure enough, Sam and the governor’s wife were both behind her with Emily and Abbey.

  There wasn’t time for more questions. In seconds there would be no air space left in the room. But the fifth person caused a huge problem. Once the sixty-minute oxygen tanks were activated, you couldn’t take the mouthpiece off underwater without letting the water in. They’d have to stay on whoever wore them. There was no way to share the air.

  Deacon handed his tank through the bars. “Emily. Put this mask on…and put this in your mouth.” She did, and Deacon turned the valve on the side of the tank for her. “Do not, under any circumstances, take this off. You have an hour if you keep them on. Just keep swimming—like fish—but stay next to the bars, okay?”

  Twix gave his gear to Abbey with the same instructions.

  “Give the other two to them,” Reagan said as Trigger and Royce handed their gear to Twix.

  “Sorry.” Twix shook his head. “No can do. One of these two is for you.”

  “And the other is for him,” the governor’s wife gasped, pointing to Sam.

  “No way,” Sam disagreed. “Never going to happen.”

  “Look,” Twix shouted. “There’s no time to roll dice or draw straws. If you don’t get these masks on in the next twenty seconds, you’re all dead. Reagan, damn it, you put yours on right damn now!”

  She did as she was told—albeit reluctantly.

  “Give me a gun,” Sam said through clenched teeth.

  “No way,” Twix said. He glanced back at Trigger, who was by the bars talking to the governor’s wife. Trigger was shaking his head, but Twix saw him hand her something.

  “No … Trigger—” Twix realized what he’d done, but it was too late. There was a subdued pop with a louder echo. Reagan was mere inches from Twix and understood at the same time what had happened. Twix turned to her as the water covered his face. “Get the girls over there.” He pointed to the far corner—the opposite end of the cell from the governor’s wife. He pushed back up to the last inch of air space in the basement. “Sam. It’s done. Put the damn mask on.”

  Sam shook his head, angry, but did as he was told.

  Reagan kept the girls away from the governor’s wife, who was floating on the opposite side of the cell surrounded by her own blood. Sam was right beside them, shielding the girls from the scene as best as he could. The four members of the Pack swam out of the basement and up the tunnel, finally emerging into the dark night air. They had one hour—at the most—to get the girls and Sam out of the cell. That was a given. How? That was the unknown.

  “What did she say to you?” Twix turned to Trigger. “Why did you give her your gun?”

  “She wanted to know if I knew what her husband had done and if I understood that he was just trying to save her. She asked me to protect him in the fallout. I told her I would. She asked me for my gun—said she needed to do it—and I didn’t argue. Someone needed to die.” Trigger took a deep breath and then looked at the other three, apparently realiz
ing how matter-of-factly he’d spoken. Then he continued. “She said they’d have no leverage on him now.”

  As Twix had explained everything involving the governor to Deacon and Royce earlier, they now all understood what his wife’s last words meant. The governor should be permanently on the right side now. He had nothing left he loved—to lose.

  On the flip side, Sam was still alive—a surprising discovery. Hopefully, they’d be able to keep him that way. They had work to do now to get all of them out.

  FIFTY-TWO – Aftershock (Tara)

  ---------- (Wednesday. August 10, 2022.) ----------

  Redemption Island. Hawaii.

  I could hear the cry for help, but I couldn’t do anything about it. In a state of shock, I somehow hadn’t even realized I’d lost Ollie. Here I was with my arms wrapped around Kate, trying to shield her from the rain as she slowly—groggily—came back around, and I hadn’t even thought about Ollie. When it finally hit me, I almost dropped Kate. There isn’t a word for how stunned I was at that exact moment. I began crying and dry heaving—finally vomiting off the edge of the platform. I clutched Kate tightly against me but now was also frantically looking around for any sign of Ollie.

  What kind of mother am I? What kind of mother lets her baby go without first losing her own arms and then doesn’t instantly think of him? I dropped my baby! I could feel the sob welling up in my chest before it came out, and once the first one broke through, they didn’t stop. I squeezed Kate tightly and rocked her, crying as hard as I’d ever cried. I’d lost my husband. I’d lost my baby. I’d experienced shock before but nothing like this. I could hear Kate mumbling, but her words weren’t registering. I was talking, but I didn’t know what I was saying. Finally, somehow Kate mustered enough strength to reach up and pull my hair. The pain—briefly—snapped me out of it. “Ouch, Kate. Ow.”