Rogue Wave

by Boyd Morrison

  "I'm sorry. I didn't think about Hopkins Realty until you said that."

  Brad shrugged. "It's no big deal."

  "But the office. The files…" Kai said.

  Brad smiled. "Believe it or not, my insurance covers tsunamis."

  Kai stared at Brad in disbelief. Most insurance policies didn't cover tsunamis unless you specifically purchased an expensive rider. They were more popular now, especially after the Asia tsunami, but still pretty uncommon.

  "Hey," Brad said. "My big brother is the Director of the Pacific Tsunami Warning Center. I had to get it."

  Kai smiled at that. At least there was one thing he could feel good about.

  "The phones have been ringing nonstop," Brad said, looking at notes he had written. "We've gotten calls from everyone. New York Times, CNN, Fox, ABC, NBC. CBS even has a crew out by the front gate. I told them they couldn't come in…"

  "You mean they're here?"

  "They were filming some story over in Ewa and got over here as soon as the warning went out. They've been trying to get in to interview you. I told them you were too busy."

  "All the data analysis in the world won't help if people don't start taking this damn thing seriously. What do you think, Reggie?"

  Reggie grudgingly nodded. "Why not? It might be better than a phone interview."

  "We'll show them the video from Johnston Island. Maybe that will convince some people to move faster. Brad, open the gate and tell them that only the reporter and the cameraman can come into the building. Anyone else will have to wait outside. I don't want a mass of people in here."

  In two minutes Brad ushered in a petite Asian woman in a blue blazer, followed by a bearded cameraman wearing jeans and a Detroit Tigers baseball cap.

  "Dr. Tanaka, I'm Lara Pimalo," the reporter said, shaking Kai's hand firmly. She nodded toward the cameraman. "This is Roger Ames. Thank you for meeting with us. I know you must be extremely busy."

  "We are," Kai said. He held up a finger. "My one condition on you being here: if I ask you to stop filming, you'll do so immediately. OK?"

  "Of course," she said.

  "Good. The reason I'm letting you in here is because the evacuation is going poorly. We need to motivate more people to leave. Quickly. I believe I have something here that will help."

  "What is it?"

  "Can you show video of something on a computer screen?"

  "Sure. It won't look great, but it should be recognizable. But doctor, graphs and such don't make for great…"

  "It's not a graph. It's video from Johnston Island this morning. It shows a massive tsunami obliterating it. I want you to broadcast it."

  She and Ames were stunned for a moment, but Pimalo couldn't hide her excitement about getting such a great scoop.

  "Just tell us what monitor it will be on," she said, "and we'll set up for the shot."

  As Ames got the camera ready, Pimalo said, ""Why don't you just email the video to someone at the studio? Not that I mind the exclusive."

  "Can you make sure they broadcast this live?"

  "Oh, we're planning to."

  "With a live broadcast, I know the video will be seen. If I emailed it, how do I know it wouldn't just sit there waiting for someone to open it?"

  "Good point. I'll let the station know to be ready for the broadcast."

  In another minute, the camera was in position, and they were rolling. As the video from Johnston ran, Kai narrated what was happening on screen.

  As the tsunami approached the camera, Pimalo spoke to the anchorman through the microphone, "Are you seeing this, Phil?" Kai couldn't hear the response, but her rapt attention told him it was getting through.

  When the video went to black, Kai motioned for her to put the camera on him.

  "Ms. Pimalo, I'd like to make another statement."

  "Of course, Dr. Tanaka. Those were incredible pictures."

  Kai thought to himself, it's about to get a lot more incredible. He couldn't believe he was about to say it on national television, with the possibility of making a fool of himself. After a moment of hesitation, he saw Brad and Reggie look at each other. They both nodded at Kai's unspoken question, and he felt some comfort knowing they were with him. He cleared his throat and began speaking.

  "My name is Kai Tanaka, and I am the director of the Pacific Tsunami Warning Center in Ewa Beach, Hawaii. About 40 minutes ago, I issued a tsunami warning for the Hawaiian Islands. I cannot overemphasize how dangerous this situation is. To this point, we have not released the cause of this tsunami because we did not have the data to verify it. However, I am concerned that the evacuation is not moving fast enough, so I will now disclose what we believe caused the tsunami. At 8:41 AM Hawaii time this morning, we suspect that an asteroid struck the central Pacific Ocean. If this turns out to be true, we can expect a disaster of unprecedented scale for the Hawaiian Islands. As we speak, the southern tip of the Big Island should be experiencing the brunt of the first wave. In a little more than 15 minutes, it should reach Kona and then Hilo. Fifteen minutes after that, Honolulu will be hit."

  One TV was set to a local station broadcasting the EAS and the other continued the feed from Waikiki. Neither of them showed video from the southern tip of Hawaii.

  The phone rang yet again, and Brad picked it up.

  "Excuse me, Dr. Tanaka," said Pimalo, "but these are incredible assertions. What evidence do you have that an asteroid struck the Pacific this morning?"

  This was the touchiest part of the interview. Kai knew that if he went into a lot of detail, he might lose the viewer. But he also knew that the audience needed something if they were to believe this crazy notion.

  "We have very little time left, so I don't want to go into all of the details, but we don't have any direct evidence to support…"

  "You do now," Brad broke in, putting his hand over the receiver. "Gail Wentworth from OSEI is on the line. You have eight images in your email that they're about to release to the news agencies. It's a series of shots from LANDSAT-8 showing a massive explosion in the central Pacific. NASA is confirming that we were hit by an asteroid."

  Chapter 26

  10:48 AM

  34 minutes to Wave Arrival Time

  Michael Perkins, the 19-year-old Civil Air Patrol pilot, had become concerned that nobody seemed to be listening to his warning, even though he was flying low enough to be easily heard. On one of his passes, he told the kayakers below to wave with both hands if they could hear him. They simply looked up as he flew past.

  He opened the window of the plane, stuck the handset out of the window, and keyed it to on. The resulting feedback should have been loud enough to hear even over the roar of the engine. Nothing.

  Damn! The loudspeaker wasn't working, he realized. The past 25 minutes of warning passes hadn't been heard by anyone. He radioed in to CAP headquarters to tell them about the problem and that no one off the Waikiki coast had yet been warned by the CAP.

  As he set a course back to the airport to fix his loudspeaker, he was informed that another plane was on the way to Waikiki to take over his duties there.

  * * *

  Kai opened his email, and there was the message from Gail Wentworth. Eight JPEG images were attached to the email. Pimalo's cameraman shot over Kai's shoulder as he opened the pictures.

  He clicked through them in the sequence that Wentworth had labeled them. The first image showed a viewpoint looking straight down on a mass of clouds covering a wide swath of the Pacific. Two barely visible lines could be seen over the storm, as if someone had slashed a pen across the picture. At the bottom right, a time stamp showed GMT 18:40:00.

  Kai pointed at the numbers and said, "Greenwich Mean Time, which is ten hours ahead of Hawaii. That would make the time 8:40 AM in Honolulu."

  In the photo stamped 18:40:30, the previous two lines were gone, but taking their place was a much brighter line, and Kai finally understood what he was seeing: the trails of asteroids burning up in the atmosphere.

  "It wasn'
t just one meteor," he said. "It was a meteor shower."

  Reggie pointed at the bright trail in the second picture. "That one must have caused our earthquake. If the first two were small enough, they would have burned up before they hit the water."

  "They all must have been pieces of the same asteroid," Kai said.

  "Just like Shoemaker-Levy," Reggie said. When he got puzzled looks from the others, he went on. "It was a comet that hit Jupiter in '94. It didn't hit all at once, but in pieces. Looks like the same thing might have happened here, but the first two pieces were small. Relatively."

  "Any of them could have destroyed the airliner," Kai said.

  Reggie nodded. "Sure, but the third one, the one that caused the bright streak in that second photo, was big enough to make it intact all the way to the sea floor."

  Kai could hardly imagine the amount of energy it would take to enable an asteroid to plunge more than three miles to the bottom of the ocean and cause a major earthquake. For a moment, his finger hovered above the mouse. He dreaded what he would see next, but he forced himself to continue through the photos.

  In the third picture, the line was gone, replaced with a small bright dot at the center of the storm clouds. As Kai opened each successive image, which the time stamp showed to be in 30 second increments, the dot grew larger until, in the final image, the explosion was plainly visible for what it was: the asteroid strike ejecting trillions of tons of superheated rock and steam into the atmosphere. On this last image, Wentworth had drawn a line parallel to the explosion and under it had written "15 miles."

  "The explosion was 15 miles across?" Pimalo asked.

  "At least the mushroom cloud was," said Reggie.

  Kai flinched at the words "mushroom cloud," the phrase universally equated with absolute destruction. He had hoped that the surety of knowing that it was an asteroid would help him grasp the situation better, but if anything, he was in a daze. The abstract number crunching they had done when they were theorizing about the size of the asteroid was no longer abstract. It was real, and Kai sat for a moment processing it.

  Reggie's voice snapped him out of his trance.

  "We're getting another wave!" Reggie said, looking at the data coming in from the DART buoy. As before, the line rose inexorably, but this time it didn't stop until it had reached 1.3 meters.

  Brad, now knowing the implications of the reading, said, "Jesus!"

  "What!" said the reporter Pimalo. "What does that mean?"

  "The second tsunami," Kai said, "is going to be over 150 feet high."

  "The second one! What do you mean, Dr. Tanaka? How many are there going to be?"

  "There's no way to know for sure. But we do know now that they are coming about 25 minutes apart."

  "I can't wait to talk to the guys at Los Alamos about this," said Reggie. "Looks like their computations were off if they thought the first wave from an asteroid impact would be the biggest. You can't argue with proof like this."

  Lara Pimalo put a hand to her ear, obviously to listen to what the producer was saying to her. She waved to the cameraman to stop filming. After a second, she ran over to the TV and turned it to MSNBC. They were just rerunning the video of the wave hitting Ka Lae, the southern tip of the Big Island, with the two hikers consumed by the tsunami. Then the picture switched to the photos they had just seen from LANDSAT-8.

  After the sequence of photos was shown, they kept repeating those shots in the upper right corner and switched back to video of Waikiki, where people were pouring out of buildings and running through the streets, some screaming, some lugging a ridiculous number of items, such as suitcases and electronics.

  "I guess it worked," Reggie said. "People are definitely leaving."

  "Not all of them," Brad said.

  For Kai, it was amazing and sad to see how quickly circumstances like these brought out the worst in some people who saw the disaster as an opportunity to take advantage of the situation. Farther down the street, two youths smashed in a plate glass window and grabbed several unidentifiable objects from the storefront. A policeman who had been directing traffic ran after them around the corner and out of sight.

  "That stuff is going to be gone in a half hour anyway," Brad said. "Might as well let them have it."

  The main picture then switched to an overhead shot from a helicopter hovering over Waikiki. It zoomed in to show Ala Wai Blvd., which ran parallel to the Ala Wai Canal on the north side of Waikiki. People could be seen streaming toward it and then turning to follow it westward.

  "Tourists who don't know the city," said Reggie. "It seems like the most direct route from the beach, but they don't know there are no bridges over it. Locals would."

  "The closest bridge is McCully St.," Kai said. "That could be a mile away if you're heading from the east end of the canal."

  The view then changed to the camera in another helicopter, this one flying over the water off shore from Waikiki. The camera panned around and showed people still out in the water, some in boats, most on surf boards or other small watercraft.

  "What are they doing?" Kai said, turning up the volume. A woman's voice, distressed, described the scene.

  "…have apparently ignored warnings from the Civil Air Patrol to evacuate to land. I would like to repeat that this is an extremely dangerous situation, and you are recommended to stay as far away from the shore as possible."

  "Don't those idiots hear the sirens?" Brad said.

  "They might be too far from shore," Reggie said. "That's why the CAP does flyovers."

  The camera zoomed in on a surfer kicking lazily back to shore. Then it moved across two more surfers and slid over until it focused on four kayakers. They were paddling slowly back in the direction of Waikiki, parallel to the beach. As the camera zoomed in even more, Kai gaped in disbelief at what he was seeing. It felt as though someone had yanked the floor out from under him and simultaneously plunged an ice pick into his chest. He staggered backward, as if the image had hammered him with physical force.

  "Kai!" Brad yelled. Before Kai could fall, Brad caught him and sat him down. Kai's eyes never left the screen.

  On TV, the faces of the four were clearly visible now. Kai didn't know the boys, but he instantly recognized the two girls with them. With less than half an hour before the largest tsunami in recorded history would strike Honolulu, his own daughter looked directly at the camera and happily waved.

  Chapter 27

  10:52 AM

  30 minutes to Wave Arrival Time

  After having paddled all the way to San Souci Beach, Mia had gotten tired and asked the rest of them if they could turn back. Although Lani was getting sore, she could have gone on a while longer and was disappointed Mia had given up so soon.

  They were a third of a mile out in Malama Bay near Kuhio Beach. The breeze had picked up, and the previously calm water now rocked their kayaks on undulating waves. At the rate they were paddling, their sore arms would take another half hour at least to get them back to their starting point on Waikiki.

  Lani had been surprised by the number of aircraft buzzing around. First, the low-flying plane that had passed over them three times. Then a news helicopter that seemed to be training its camera on them. That one, she had waved to. Now it seemed like another small plane was headed in their direction.

  Her attention was drawn away from the plane to a big commotion along Kalakaua Avenue, even more jammed than usual. People were running in both directions. Few souls were left on the beach.

  "Mia," she said, pointing, "what's going on over there?"

  The two boys also followed her finger.

  "I don't know," Mia said tersely. Her face had turned decidedly ashen.

  "Are you OK?"

  Mia nodded, but Lani recognized seasickness when she saw it.

  "Is there a parade today?" Jake asked.

  "Not that I know of."

  Tom shook his head in puzzlement as well.

  "Well, something's going on."

  Across Ma
lama Bay at Ala Wai Marina, a huge number of boats streamed from the harbor at a pace that seemed unsafe. In fact, it looked as if two of the boats collided, although they were so far away, it was hard to tell for sure.

  The plane was even closer now, as though it was aiming for them. Within another few seconds, she thought she heard a voice coming from the plane. It turned and began to circle them, and the voice became clearer. There was one word that was unmistakable.

  "…a tsunami warning has been issued for Hawaii. You must head for shore immediately and get to high ground. I repeat, a tsunami warning has been issued for Hawaii. This is not a drill. You must get to land immediately. The wave will reach Honolulu in 30 minutes. If you understand this warning, raise both your arms and wave."

  All four of them looked at each other and then started waving their arms frantically while still holding their paddles. The plane waggled its wings and banked toward a group of surfers about 500 yards away.

  "Why didn't we hear the sirens?" Jake said.

  "We're too far from the beach," Lani said. "The wind is blowing in that direction."

  "It doesn't matter why!" Mia screamed. "Let's just go!"

  "Come on!" yelled Tom. "This way!"

  Lani and the boys quickly turned their kayaks to the closest beach and began paddling furiously. Mia, who was not as skilled with the kayaks, took longer to turn.

  "Faster!" said Jake. "We don't have much time!"

  "My arms are tired!" Mia yelled, obviously distraught by the emergency. "I can't go faster."

  Mia was barely paddling at half the speed of the rest of them. At that rate, they would be in danger of not making it.

  Tom pointed at Jake. "Kayak back as fast as you can and get somebody to get a boat or something out here to get us."

  "Like who?" Jake said. "Your parents are gone for the day."