Captain Martin Wainwright peered through the cockpit window of his C-130E at the bright blue ocean below. The chatter coming over the radio was like nothing he had ever heard in his eight years of flying for the 314th Airlift Wing. Reports were being thrown around about an immense tsunami heading toward Hawaii, but from an altitude of thirty-one thousand feet, the sea looked as calm and flat as a pond in his native Tennessee. The Air Force transport under his command had been flying for more than three hours on a mission from San Diego to Hickam Air Force Base carrying three brand-new Humvees for delivery to the naval base at Pearl Harbor. He was expecting the usual milk run for him and his four crewmates: land at Hickam, secure the aircraft, get off base for a few hours of sightseeing at Waikiki, hit the barracks for some sack time, then ferry a load of equipment back to the mainland the next day. Nothing that he hadn’t done a dozen times before. But the order he was now being given by the Honolulu Air Traffic Control Center was extraordinary.
“This is Air Force 547,” Wainwright said. He wasn’t sure he’d heard correctly. “Say again, Honolulu control. You’re closing Hickam?”
“Roger that, 547,” the controller said, his voice clipped and strained. “You are instructed to turn back immediately to the mainland and make for the nearest possible landing site.”
“That’s a negative, Honolulu control. We’re past the point of no return.” The four-engine turboprop had already sucked up over half the fuel in its tanks. They wouldn’t make it within three hundred miles of San Diego before they ran out of gas. Hawaii was one of the most remote archipelagos in the world, which meant that there weren’t any other choices to land.
“Roger that, 547. You aren’t the only one. Continue on your current heading. We’ll try to make room at Wheeler for you.”
“Affirmative, Honolulu control.”
“And 547, be advised that we’ll be evacuating Honolulu control in thirty minutes. We’ll be turning control over to Wheeler Field at that time.”
Wainwright glanced at his copilot in disbelief. To close down the airport was one thing, but shutting down the control center was unprecedented. The troubled look on his copilot’s face reflected his own. Their routine run to the islands had just become a nail-biter.
Teresa had been waiting for thirty minutes, and there was still no sign of Mia and Lani. The sirens kept wailing at regular intervals, but without a radio, she didn’t know what was going on. Even though it was critically low on battery power, she had turned her cell phone back on. She had to take the chance in case the girls called her.
The situation on the beach had changed dramatically in the last half hour. When the beachgoers finally realized that the warning siren was not a test, many of them had quickly gathered their belongings and started heading out. But many others, much to her surprise, kept on doing what they were doing. They seemed completely unconcerned about the fact that a monster wave could be headed their way.
Even when the police had started to arrive about ten minutes after the first siren had gone off and blared their loudspeakers at the beach, some people still did not heed the warning.
As he was making his way up the beach, one of the policemen had stopped when he reached Teresa.
“Ma’am, you need to leave the beach immediately. There is a tsunami coming.”
“I can’t. My daughter and her friend are somewhere on the beach, and they’re probably going to be coming back at any minute. The radio said the tsunami would be here within the hour. Is that right?”
“We’re getting a lot of conflicting information. All I know is that we were told to get everyone off the beach as soon as possible. But I’ve done these kinds of evacuations before. We’ve got a few hours to go. You should be okay.”
“Why isn’t everybody leaving?”
“We always get the nuts who want to come down and see the tsunami. They figure that they’ll head up to one of the hotels and have a party when the tsunami gets here.”
“Even after the Asian tsunami?”
“Well, not as many nuts now, but a lot of kids think they’re invincible. I see it every time. We can’t force them to leave. It’s still a free country. Even if that means they’re free to die. I’m sorry, ma’am. Good luck.”
He continued on at a deliberate pace. His comment about teens feeling invincible worried her.
Surely if Mia and Lani had heard the sirens, they would have had plenty of time to get back to her by now. She had been torn about whether to leave her location and chance missing the girls if they returned to find her. But by this time, the waiting had become agonizing. She just couldn’t sit there and hope they came back. She had to do something.
She rummaged through her bag until she found a Post-it pad and a pen. On the pad, she scribbled a note to the girls:
The Grand Hawaiian seemed like the best place to meet if they were able to rendezvous. She certainly didn’t want them waiting around on the beach until she came back.
Teresa took her keys and wallet out of her purse, placed the notepad at the top of the purse, and wrapped it in her towel. She could only hope that no one would steal the purse before the kids saw the note.
She then began jogging toward Diamond Head, the direction in which she saw the girls go, yelling their names as she went.
Within a minute, her phone rang. She looked at the number on the caller ID, hoping it was the girls. The number came up as unknown. They could have been calling from a pay phone.
When she answered, it was a familiar voice, but one that surprised her.
“Teresa, it’s Brad. Thank God, I finally got through to you. The lines have been jammed. Did you get my text?”
“No. Have the girls called you?”
“What? Aren’t they with you?”
“They went shopping about forty minutes before the siren went off, and they haven’t come back. I’m looking for them now.”
“Jesus! Teresa, you have to get as far away from the beach as you can. The tsunami is going to be huge.”
“I can’t leave them here! What if they can’t hear the warning?
“With all those sirens going off? I’m inside a concrete building three hundred yards from the beach, and I can hear them. Come on, they had to have heard it.”
“Then why didn’t they come back to me? Something’s wrong! I’m not leaving until I find them!”
“Okay! Calm down. We’ll figure out something. Where are you?”
“I’m on Waikiki. But my phone’s battery is drained.”
“I know. I got the message. If the kids call us, we’ll tell them to meet you and Rachel at the Grand Hawaiian, but you’ve got to be there before—”
Teresa’s cell phone beeped, and Brad’s voice cut out. The display showed a blinking battery graphic and then went dead.
She closed the phone and began calling out Mia’s and Lani’s names again, angling up to Kalakaua Avenue so that she would have both the shops on the streets and the beach in view. She had only gotten a block when she saw a clothing store called Sweet that looked like it catered to teens. She entered the store and looked toward the back. She yelled the girls’ names in a manner that would have raised eyebrows on any other occasion.
Televisions mounted along the walls normally showed music videos in a store as hip as this, but they were now all turned to various news stations. Most displayed the tsunami emergency broadcast warning. Others were tuned to national news networks that didn’t carry the signal.
A young saleswoman who had been entranced by the broadcast whipped around when she heard Teresa call for the girls.
“Ma’am,’ she said, smacking gum as she talked, “we’re closing for the evacuation.”
Teresa took a photo of Mia from her wallet. It was a year old, but it was good enough.
