The electricity was due to be cut in fifteen minutes, but Damien had a significant dilemma on his hands. Not only was Hawaii currently swamped by the hurricane, but a massive wave had triggered the emergency buoys—about forty miles off the coast of Ni’ihau.
“Nicole, did you see that?” he yelled across the room.
“The buoys? Yeah. They just went from twenty-two to thirty-six feet.”
“What’s the seismograph say?”
“Nothing. No earthquakes. Nothing. Maybe it was an error.”
“Has it ever done that before?”
“Not that I’m aware of. No.”
Damien couldn’t remember it happening either. When he had moved to Hawaii from D.C. eight years ago—and pursued his meteorology degree—tsunamis had been of particular interest to him. Turned out they were far more rare here than he’d imagined. He also learned that they weren’t always caused by earthquakes—one type wasn’t anyway.
Meteotsunamis often formed in the eyes of deep tropical cyclones—hurricanes like this one. Extremely low atmospheric pressure and swirling winds could create a dome—or bubble—of water that would move in with the storm surge causing the surge to spike in shallow water laterally—like a tsunami. To an observer they would appear no different. The bigger the storm, the bigger the meteo… and hurricanes didn’t get any bigger than this.
The forty-mile buoys had spiked fourteen feet over the last recorded wave set. They would reset in a second and they’d get another reading, but Damien knew if it had been a meteotsunami or storm surge the wave was already well past those buoys. If the thirty-mile alarms went off…
The thirty-mile alarms sounded then. The buoys recorded thirty-nine feet. Not good. “You’re sure there’s no earthquake?” he shouted at Nicole again.
“No. I swear.”
“Nicole, it’s gotta be storm surge or a meteotsunami. Either way it’s moving fast and growing.”
“There’s no earthquake recorded though.”
“Meteos don’t need earthquakes, just the right atmospheric elements and a big-ass hurricane like this one. With Ni’ihau’s west to east slope it’s going to use that island like a ramp and crush Redemption, but I have no way of warning them.”
“What about the Tsunami Prevention Channels?”
“Not enough time for the TPCs. I need eight minutes—we maybe have four. Meteos can travel at over four hundred miles an hour. This one is much slower but you can’t anticipate them—there’s no call sign like a seismic wave. I can’t stop this.”
“So what about Redemption?”
Damien shook his head, glancing at his watch. He had to power everything down now—thirteen minutes early. “Best guess, the wall of water will surge to forty-five feet, accelerate off the shallows, rocket off Ni’ihau, and hit them like a sledgehammer on a thumbtack.” Damien pulled down the five levers of the master power box. The switchboards and their respective islands went dark one by one. The emergency lights came on in Area 52, and Damien turned to look at Nicole. “They’re dead in the water.”
Nicole winced as the twenty-mile alarms went off. “So you powered it down early for Kauai?”
Damien nodded. “The storm surge will slow a little at Ni’ihau but won’t diminish in mass or force. It’ll hit Kauai two minutes later. It’s the only chance they’ve got.”
The surge would hit Oahu too, but the hurricane sirens had been blaring here for hours, so people hopefully had been smart enough to clear the flood zones. Unfortunately, there was no guarantee of that. Some people always think they knew better than the weather.
The big, round, blue light on the wall turned on then. The Shield was back up. The other two operatives—Stacy and Dewey—had just climbed the stairs to the Shield’s transceiver. Their task had been to power the Shield up manually when Oahu went dark. The blue light signified success on that front.
The generator had turned the lights back on in Area 52, but Damien didn’t turn anything else on. As much as he and Nicole wanted to watch the attempted rescue on Kauai, they couldn’t chance someone else hacking into their feed and tipping off the captors.
“Kind of weird isn’t it?” Nicole rocked back in her chair.
“What’s that?”
“All these dark screens, none of that electronic buzz… it’s like the silence in a movie theater between the previews and the feature film.”
That comparison drew a little laugh from Damien. “Yeah, I know what you mean. I was thinking it was kind of eerie myself.”
“At least we have lights,” Nicole added.
The lights and power were off everywhere else. In the governor’s mansion, Barnes sat straight up in bed as his fan slowly creaked to a stop. He couldn’t sleep without a fan. Not that he’d had much luck sleeping in this hurricane. He was trying to follow the orders he’d received from Twix and Trigger but he was restless—his worries increasing by the minute for his wife.
Barnes checked his watch. 9:48. He jumped up and ran to the window. Not a single light on anywhere. This was big. This was bad. He knew his mansion was beyond the flood zone, but the power going out spooked him. There was always a chance this wasn’t hurricane related. There was a chance the men at the Marine base were coming for him.
The generator in his mansion kicked on a minute later, bringing the overhead fan and bathroom light behind him back on. The smoke alarm above his head beeped and made him jump. The lights and fan coming back on did little to ease the governor’s mind. He was wondering how widespread the outage was. Is every island affected or just this one?
The governor had no way of knowing this was an intentional outage. But the Pack did. It caught them a little off guard—coming twelve to thirteen minutes early—but they adjusted and moved quickly. The split second the lights went off at the gate, Deacon, Royce, Trigger, and Twix were scaling the fence and lunging into the trees. No sooner had the four of them reached cover inside the compound, than the lights flicked back on all over the property and the electric fence was buzzing again. The compound’s generators had brought the place back to life in less than two minutes. There was no way the men inside that pink house would imagine two Army Rangers and two Navy SEALs were now on that property with them. They were probably inside checking their monitors, but they wouldn’t see anything and they’d settle back in. The four armed men in Special Forces “ghost suits” were counting on that as they crept toward the garage.
The bigger issue for the men inside that pink house would be their communication links off the compound. With Hawaii’s entire electrical grid down, there would be no reaching the Marine base by the Hexagon, or the governor, or anyone else. Losing their access to the Hexagon would mean being completely blind beyond their compound—until the power came back on across the islands.
It would take them a few minutes to realize the breadth of this outage and for it to sink in that something significant must be keeping the Hexagon completely shut down—given that they surely knew the Hexagon and Shield would have fail-safes in place.
FIFTY - Sounds of Silence (Tara)
I was quite familiar with the expression “when it rains it pours” and how accurate that could be in life. I’d been through my fair share of torrential downpours and floods in my personal life. I’d just never experienced anything quite like this in my physical life.