as if the wave had pushed up one edge but couldn’t wrest it from its steel cables.
The midday sun poured through the hole in the sky-bridge roof, illuminating the sorry state of the floor itself. Like every other surface the tsunami had touched, a fine layer of soupy silt coated the decking. In many places, holes had been punched through the floor as well as the ceiling. Fifty feet below, the outflow of water was now only ten feet deep. They were lucky the skybridge was still there at all. It certainly wouldn’t stand up to another onslaught of water.
As Rachel approached the bridge, the family appeared on the other end of the sixty-foot walkway. They heaved visibly from the exertion of racing down twenty flights of stairs. The father carried a small girl, while an eleven-year-old boy and another girl several years younger than the boy leaned on their mother. All three kids had their mother’s black hair and lean figure, but their light-mocha skin was obviously a combination of their parents’ complexions. The man, slightly jowly, towered over them. His shirt draped over a beer gut past its infancy.
The family hadn’t started across the skybridge yet; they were terrified by the creaking structure. The railing along the beach side of the slanted walkway had been ripped off and rested atop the railing on the other side.
Rachel yelled down the hall, “I’m the hotel manager! My name is Rachel Tanaka! Are you all right?”
“Yes,” the father said.
“What are your names?” In her line of work, Rachel found that it always made things go more smoothly if she knew the names of the people she was dealing with.
“I’m Bill Rogers,” the father of the three children said. “My wife is Paige, and my kids are Wyatt, Hannah, and the little one is Ashley.”
“Is it safe to cross?” Paige asked.
“I don’t know,” Rachel said. “The incline is going to make it difficult to get across. Bill, can you get down the stairs in your tower?”
“No,” Bill said. “I checked. It’s totally blocked by that barge.”
“Then you don’t have a choice. You’ll have to come over here.”
“Maybe we should just stay here. That bridge looks rickety.”
“We’re trying to get a helicopter to come to our rooftop—”
“Then we can do the same thing in this tower.”
“That won’t work,” Rachel said. “There’s nowhere for a helicopter to land on your roof.”
“Yeah, Dad,” Wyatt said. “Remember that big spike on the top of the building?”
“Then we’ll just go back up to the top floor and wait until this is over.”
“Look,” Rachel said, “I don’t want to frighten you more than you already are, but there are more waves coming, and they’re going to be much bigger than the last one. Maybe even taller than this building. We need to get out of here.”
They still hesitated.
“Come on! We don’t have much time left!”
“But how do we get the kids across?” Paige said with a slight accent suggesting a Caribbean Island origin. “I’m not letting any of them cross on their own.”
“And it’s too shaky for you to all come at once,” Rachel said.
“I’ll come back and get them,” Bill said.
“That will take too long. You see that water going out? That means another wave is coming soon. We have ten minutes at most.”
“We don’t even know if the bridge is strong enough,” Paige said.
Rachel looked at the slick floor of the skybridge and realized she’d have to go out there if she was going to save those children. Her maternal instinct overrode the fear she felt.
“How about if I come and meet Wyatt halfway and bring him back with me?”
Without waiting for an answer, she kicked off her shoes and stepped onto the bridge. Her arm span was wide enough that she could keep hold of one pillar while she inched along to grab the next one. She made her way carefully, keeping her toes along the edge for more grip.
“See,” she said. “It’s still sturdy enough. Come on, Wyatt. Come to me.”
Bill and Paige exchanged looks and nodded.
Paige held Wyatt’s shoulders. “Can you do this, Wyatt?”
Wyatt looked scared, but he nodded.
Paige hugged him. “Okay, but if it’s too hard, you come right back.”
Wyatt grabbed one of the floor-to-ceiling pillars and pulled himself toward Rachel.
“Come on, honey,” Rachel said as she continued edging across. “You can do it.”
Wyatt gingerly pulled himself along. When he was almost to Rachel, the skybridge creaked ominously. He stopped, and they all held their breath. The creaking subsided, and Wyatt continued to make his way until Rachel took his hand.
“Great job, Wyatt,” she said. “Now hold on to me.”
Wyatt nodded again. Rachel had Wyatt hold on to one pillar, and when she had safely grabbed the next, she pulled him with her. They paused when they heard another shriek of grinding metal. Paige covered her mouth in terror, but there was nothing she could do to help them without endangering them further.
The grinding stopped, but it was another reminder of how precarious the walkway was.
As they proceeded across, Rachel and Wyatt got into a steady rhythm. They had reached the last pillar when Wyatt suddenly slipped on the muck as he was moving from one pillar to another. Both his feet flew out from under him and he went down, pulling Rachel down as well.
Shouts of “
With one hand, Rachel clung to the bottom of the pillar with a fierce grip. If she let go, nothing would keep them from sliding to the opposite side of the skybridge. Only the pillars on the other side would stand between them and a six-story fall to the water below.
THIRTY-SEVEN
The conditions at Wheeler Army Airfield were spar-tan, but Reggie Pona had power for his laptop and an Internet connection, thanks to the Air Force’s backup electrical system. As soon as power had been lost from the island’s main plants, the base’s own generators had taken over. Reggie had been able to outrun the first wave and had finally gotten in contact with Renfro at Hawaii State Civil Defense, which sent one of the trucks evacuating from Pearl to Wheeler to pick him up. In the chaos, HSCD had gone thirty minutes before realizing that they weren’t getting updates from the PTWC anymore. When they finally called the Alaska warning center, Palmer immediately took over updating the Pacific nations about further tsunami readings, including the
Wheeler sprawled across the midsection of Oahu, at least five miles from the nearest shoreline. Already, the air base’s taxiways were jammed with Boeings and Airbuses from seventeen different airlines.
Reggie shared space with countless other displaced government agencies, including other NOAA officials, the National Weather Service, FEMA, even the FBI, all of whose offices were located in the heart of downtown Honolulu. Most of those buildings had already been inundated, and the rest would be underwater in the next hour.
The only working landline telephones were reserved for the U.S. military, and they were in short supply. The cell phone tower that Reggie’s service linked to was still operating, and his cell phone had provided his best news of the day so far.
Reggie had listened to the message from Kai three times to make sure he had the correct information. He tried calling Brad’s cell phone back repeatedly, with no success. He had no way of knowing if the subsequent
