gave her the okay sign, which she returned.
On the other side, Brad and Mia seemed to be all right, although Brad still had a look of terror on his face. Teresa and Tom were discernible at the edges of the dive light, but Kai couldn’t make out their condition.
He focused the light on the air tank he and Lani shared to make sure it was still intact. It was in one piece, but Kai found the source of the impact sound that he had heard.
Just to the right of the air tank, the car jack that he had strapped to the girder dangled from its rope. Some unseen object had crushed it. The jack was now completely useless.
They had no way to free Mia and Brad.
“Hello!” Rachel yelled through the closed elevator door. “Are you all right?”
“Thank God!” A man’s voice replied. “Yes. I’m fine. I’m on top of the elevator cab roof.”
The building shuddered from the tsunami impact.
“Oh my God!” the man said, his voice rising an octave. “What was that?”
“It’s another tsunami. Are there others with you?”
“My sister and my mother are still in the elevator. I climbed out through the hatch to see if I could reach the outer door, but I can’t get it open. The elevator shaft is pitch-black. I can’t see a thing.”
“Hold on. I’ll get something to pry the door open.”
A fire ax hung just around the corner from the elevator. Rachel broke the glass and wrenched it out.
She put the ax head into the space between the doors and used the leverage to separate them. When they were six feet apart, she wedged the ax under one door to hold them open.
About three feet below her stood a bald man of about forty-five. He was gangly and holding a metal cane. The man squinted and blinked at the first light he’d seen in twenty minutes.
“Thank God you came. I couldn’t get the doors open from here. Without any light, I couldn’t tell what to do.”
Voices below him shouted. “Help us! Jerry! Get us out of here!”
“Jerry, you all need to climb up and get out right now. Look!” Rachel pointed at the water shooting up the elevator shaft next to him from below.
“Oh, crap!” He began to babble. “They can’t. It was hard enough for me to get out with their help. My sister isn’t exactly thin, and this is my mom’s cane. She’s seventy-eight.”
“Listen to me,” Rachel said as the water continued to rise at an astonishing speed. “You’re in an express elevator. It only serves the sixteenth to twenty-eighth floors. There are no doors for that elevator between here and the lobby. This is the only way out.”
“Maybe we should wait for the fire department.”
“Nobody else is coming. You’re lucky I heard you.”
The water rose inexorably.
“I already tried lifting them,” the man said. “I can’t do it myself. Please!”
Rachel ran around the corner and shouted to the kids at the end of the hall.
“Wyatt and Hannah, stay there. There are some people stuck here. I’ll be back in a minute. If the water keeps coming up, go up the stairs.”
Rachel came back around and dropped down onto the elevator roof. She peered through the emergency hatch. A plump woman in her forties and a frail elderly lady looked up at her.
“Who are you?” the elderly woman asked.
“I’m Rachel Tanaka, the hotel manager. The power is out in the hotel. We have to get you out of there immediately.”
“How? We don’t exactly have a ladder in here.”
“The water is almost here,” Jerry said.
Rachel looked over the edge of the elevator. The water no longer shot up, but it was still rising. It looked to be to the thirteenth floor, only twenty feet below the bottom of the elevator.
“Can you both swim?”
“Are you kidding?” the younger woman said.
“No,” Rachel said.
“There’s water coming up, Sheila,” Jerry said. “She’s right. You may not have a choice.”
“Can you swim?” Rachel repeated.
“Just because I have a cane doesn’t mean I’m a cripple,” the older woman said. “Of course I can swim. If you kids had let us leave when I wanted to, we wouldn’t be in this mess.”
“This is Jerry’s fault!” Sheila said. “He’s the idiot who wanted us to stay.”
“If we had taken the stairs like I wanted to,” Jerry said, “you wouldn’t be stuck down there!”
“Shut up!” Rachel said. The last thing she needed was a bickering family. “What we’ll do is wait to see how high the water gets. If it comes into the elevator cab, you’ll float up and we can pull you out. If it starts to go down before then, we’ll have to figure out something else.”
The water reached the bottom of the cab.
“It’s coming in!” Sheila said.
But the water didn’t stop rising. The level crept up the side of the cab.
“How high is this going to get?” Jerry said.
“I don’t know,” Rachel replied.
“What if it comes over the top?
“I don’t know,” she repeated. “Do you have a better suggestion?”
He shook his head meekly.
The water level had risen three-quarters of the way up the exterior of the elevator cab, but the water inside was still only two feet high, trickling in slowly through the doors.
Paige appeared at the doorway of the elevator with Wyatt, Hannah, and Ashley.
“Paige! Thank God you made it! Where’s Bill?”
Paige said nothing, but the stream of tears running down her face said it all.
“I’m sorry, Paige. I’m really sorry, but we need your help down here.”
But Paige could only stand there, crying. The children started crying too.
“Okay,” Rachel said. “You stay up there. There are three people down here. You can help pull them up.”
The water kept rising. When it reached the top of the elevator, the water inside was only three feet high, still too shallow to float in. The seawater poured over the edge of the cab’s roof and across the flat surface, where it lapped at Rachel’s feet, drained through the emergency trapdoor, and filled the elevator at three times the previous rate. The rush of falling water was not loud enough to mask the screams of the two women trapped inside.
FORTY-TWO
When the second wave hit the Moana tower of the Grand Hawaiian, the swaying of the building had caused panic among the people still on top. The evacuation had been going smoothly, with a helicopter arriving every five minutes to pick up new passengers. At one point, an Army Black Hawk helicopter was able to pick up fifteen of them, including the men who were the most disabled. Now just a handful were left. Max leaned over the edge and saw the surface of the water flowing past the fifteenth floor. Rachel had not come back, and they had heard the collapse of the sky-bridge.
Another tourist helicopter landed. It had enough room for the rest of them, including Bob Lateen, who had insisted on remaining until everyone else was gone.
“Adrian,” Max said as they hauled Lateen into the chopper, “tell them to wait for a minute.” He hopped out onto the roof.
“Where are you going?” Adrian asked.
“Rachel should have been back by now. I’m going to check the stairs.”
