stop. They had run out of time. If they ran for the hotel, they weren’t going to make it. The boys got to the corner of the condo building before they turned and headed back toward Kai, who was now at the condo entrance.
He threw open the doors etched with the name “The Seaside” and frantically searched for the stairs. The unfashionable decor and peeling paint revealed the Seaside’s age, but the building also looked sturdy, and that’s all Kai cared about at the moment.
Teresa shouted, “There!” and wrenched Lani toward a staircase on the east side of the building. Kai followed, with Mia in tow.
The emergency stairwell was obviously built before new building codes required stairs to be protected within the interior of the building. These stairs were airy and bright and actually more attractive than the lobby because they were completely encased in glass.
To his right, Kai could see the tsunami crash with a mammoth splash onto Waikiki Beach. The wave reached the shore to the southeast first, smashing everything in its path. Instead of a vertical wall of water, the ocean rose like the world’s fastest-rising tide. At first the palm trees resisted, but the water was too powerful and bent them over like toothpicks. A five-story hotel farther down the beach was hit and the wave poured through it. Ranch-style homes near it were covered within seconds. Closer to Kai, surfboards bounced above the churning foam, their owners nowhere to be seen. The Jet Skis flipped over and disappeared. Then the woman in the muumuu was engulfed by the wave.
The sight made Kai gasp in terror. He raced up the stairs as fast as he could.
Before he reached the second floor, Kai could tell that Mia was completely spent. He grabbed her and held her in his arms like a toddler, sprinting up the stairs two at a time, the adrenaline kicking his energy to a level he had never before experienced. In any other circumstance, carrying an extra ninety pounds would have slowed him to a crawl, but with the wave about to crash down on them, Mia seemed to weigh no more than a sack of groceries.
Kai kept Teresa and Lani in front of him, willing them to go faster. The door on the first floor banged open. He knew it had to be Brad and the boys, but he didn’t take even a second to glance down at them. They had to get much higher.
He was on the eighth-floor landing when Kai heard a chilling sound. Over the roar of the water, the noise of glass shattering on the first floor signaled that their time was up. In quick succession, the wave blew out the windows on one floor after another, like a sharpshooter at a rifle range systematically shooting bottles on a fence.
The building lurched, throwing Kai off balance as he stepped onto the ninth-floor landing, and he slammed against the railing, almost dumping Mia over the side. He regained his footing and made it up the last flight of stairs to the top floor. He set Mia on her feet and looked down.
Brad pushed Jake and Tom in front of him at the sixth floor, the churning mass of water now only two floors below him and rising fast.
They all yelled at Brad from their perch. “Hurry! Come on!”
Kai held the railing in a death grip, hoping that their luck wouldn’t give out now. All he could do was watch as the tsunami stalked his brother from below.
THIRTY-FOUR
Rachel had watched in horror as Kai and Lani fled the wave and lost sight of them when they got to Kalakaua Avenue, the buildings obstructing her view. She immediately tried to call Kai’s cell phone to see if they were all right, but all she got was a fast busy signal, indicating all lines were jammed. She tried Max’s walkietalkie with no success. When she couldn’t see them anymore, she turned her attention back to the tsunami coming in. From her vantage point on the twenty-eighth floor, she was far above the maximum height of this tsunami, but as the wave grew, it looked like it would never stop.
“Will you look at the size of that thing?” said Max.
The boats that had been left stranded were picked up by the wave. The smaller boats capsized immediately or were borne by the wave as it rammed into the shoreline and buildings, smashing them into unrecognizable pieces. The people who had been running from the water were simply swallowed up.
The tsunami crashed into the white luxury yacht’s bow, driving it backward, but most of the wave’s force went around the yacht, and it floated on top of the water only a short distance from where it had been resting, its propellers churning at full speed to keep it from coming ashore.
The dredging barge that had been attempting to leave the inlet to the Ala Wai Canal was not so fortunate.
The barge was part of a project to dredge the accumulated sludge at the entrance of the canal. The captain had tried to get the barge and its equipment out to sea before the tsunami hit. However, the barge lacked quick maneuverability, and in the chaos during its escape, it had drifted too close to shore. The receding water left it stranded broadside to the wave, helpless. When the tsunami reached it, the wave picked up the three-hundredfoot- long vessel like a toy and threw it back toward the hotels lining the beach, on a direct collision course with the Grand Hawaiian.
“It’s coming right at us!” Rachel said. “Hold on, everyone!”
Many of the guests had crowded up to the window to see the wave come in, but most of them ran to the back of the room when they realized what was happening. Screams and yells filled the restaurant. Max and Rachel stayed at the window, transfixed by the ease with which the tsunami tossed the massive barge.
As the water rumbled toward them, the building shook as if a minor earthquake had jolted it. The glass vibrated in sympathy with the motion.
When the wave reached the original shoreline, the barge rotated so that its bow pointed straight inland. As the wave was about to smash into the Grand Hawaiian, the barge rotated just enough so that it cleared the building they were standing in, but now it headed for the second of the Grand Hawaiian’s twin towers.
The barge’s bow plunged into the Akamai tower with immense force. The sound of pulverized steel, glass, and concrete was audible twenty-eight stories up in the Moana tower. The top of the barge crashed through the sixth-floor balcony and came to a stop after fifty feet of the ship had disappeared into the interior. The tsunami kept up the pressure as it climbed higher and inundated the barge, sweeping the jumble of dredging equipment on its deck into the building. The stern half of the barge, buoyed by the water, rose up and snapped off, leaving the bow firmly wedged in the building. Detached from the rest of the barge, the stern glanced off the building and floated around the Akamai tower and out of view.
Vast amounts of debris choked the water. Cars, boats, pieces of buildings, trees, all combined into a morass of detritus flowing inland. Rachel knew that bodies must be mixed in with the wreckage, but thankfully she was too far up to make out those details clearly. For as far as she could see on either side of the hotel, water seven stories high filled the streets of Honolulu. Anyone caught in that would have needed a miracle to survive.
Rachel mentally reviewed her options. Evacuating the guests by going back downstairs would be futile. Even assuming the wave would retreat enough to let them out onto the streets, there wouldn’t be enough time before the next wave for them to reach safety. Their only hope was to be saved by air.
She gestured toward the helicopters, both military and civilian, buzzing around the city. Her best hope was to follow Kai’s suggestion.
“We have to try to get one of them,” she said to Max.
As she opened her cell phone to dial 911, the only way she could think of to get help, she happened to glance across at the Akamai tower. With a gasp, she pointed to a window about three floors below them where a man with a goatee leaned against it, a cell phone in his hand, peering down at the barge sticking out of the lower stories. The sun reflected off his bald spot, and his flowered shirt rippled in the breeze. Even from this distance, the desperation on his face was apparent.
“He’s trapped,” Rachel said, “and he knows it.”
