Koa ran straight into the thick yellow smoke. The rotten egg stench overpowered all other smells. He began to choke and dropped to the floor as though back on the battlefield, crawling under the worst of the fumes. The building rumbled and the floor vibrated. Turning into a classroom marked First Grade, he saw a child lying on the floor ahead of him. He scrambled forward, grabbed hold of the child, a little girl, and pulled her toward the door. At the doorway, he scooped her up in his arms. Holding her tight to his chest, he felt her shallow breathing. Still alive. Crouching low, he dashed down the hallway. Coughing from the acidic smoke, he carried the first-grader to safety.
Handing the child over to a teacher, he raced back into the building. The smoke had grown thicker, and he again crawled down the hallway. The floor grew hot. His eyes burned. He scrambled past the first two classrooms before turning into another. The building shook. A deep growling sound reverberated. He couldn’t see. He banged into a desk, and then something soft. Another keiki. Choking uncontrollably, he became disoriented. Which way to the door? Clenching his teeth, he told himself not to panic. That instinct to remain in control had saved him many times.
Clutching the limp child, he inched forward. When he hit a wall, he followed it until he reached the door. A hacking cough racked his chest. He made it into the hall. Barely able to stand, he hauled the child into his arms and stumbled forward. His eyes, the inside of his nostrils, and his throat burned like acid. The hallway seemed to go on forever; he wasn’t sure he’d make it out. Finally, he reached the entrance and stumbled outside. His lungs were on fire. A teacher rushed forward to take the child from his arms. Koa gasped for air. He couldn’t breathe. He felt his legs go weak. The world turned gray, and he collapsed.
CHAPTER TWO
TEN MINUTES LATER, Koa awoke with an oxygen mask over his face. In another minute, he was sitting up and then standing. He’d have a sore throat and hacking cough, but that didn’t prevent him from getting back in the action.
By late afternoon, emergency personnel had achieved some measure of control. Police had cordoned off and evacuated a mile-wide circle around the crippled school. Braving the unrelenting noxious air inside the building, professional firefighters with protective gear had retrieved all of the children and bodies they could find. Hostile temperatures in the south end of the school blocked rescue personnel from checking the last few classrooms. The most severely injured, all of them children, had been evacuated to hospitals.
Big Island Mayor George Tanaka arrived on the scene with his aides—Ben Inaba and Tomi Watanabe. The mayor never went anywhere without his political operatives. They made an odd pair. Watanabe, the mayor’s press agent, stood no more than five-feet-two, wore ill-fitting clothes, sported an ugly black mole on his right cheek, and had an attitude to match. Inaba, eight inches taller, and smooth as polished obsidian, might have stepped out of a Tommy Bahama’s catalog.
Tanaka’s grim expression grew darker when Governor Bobbie Māhoe appeared with Francine Na‘auao, his Department of Education chief. Both mayor and governor had reason to look distressed, but KonaWili wasn’t the sole cause of their sullen faces. They were political enemies with wildly different agendas and personally disliked each other. That Tanaka made no bones about angling for the governor’s job didn’t help. Given the animosity between the two men, Koa could be forgiven for feeling like he was walking on fresh lava.
Māhoe, unlike Tanaka, the short, heavyset Hawai‘i County mayor, looked movie-star handsome, resembling a somewhat younger and taller George Clooney with jet black hair. A Republican in a heavily Democratic state, he’d taken the governor’s office by storm with a whopping 60 percent of the vote. Pundits attributed his victory to his good looks and friendly manner rather than his pro-development policies. His reputation as a charming ladies’ man hadn’t hurt. Now in the face of the KonaWili disaster, he wore a bleak expression and looked older than his sixty-three years.
Gearing up for a press conference, the politicians gathered in a police command vehicle. They wanted answers. Koa and ‘Ōhai did their best to lay out the sketchy facts. ‘Ōhai, still wearing firefighter’s boots and insulated pants, reported thirteen known fatalities, three teachers and ten children. One teacher and four children remained missing. Ambulances and helicopters had transported forty-five children to medical facilities—fifteen to Hilo Memorial and ten each to Queen’s Medical on O‘ahu, Maui Memorial in Kahului, and Kona Community Hospital.
When ‘Ōhai completed his accounting, Koa took over. “We’ve sealed off the site. It’s still early, but we’ve found no evidence of a terrorist attack. No one shot. No bombs. The medics report injuries consistent with extreme heat and volcanic fumes like we’d normally see in Hawai‘i Volcanoes National Park. All signs point to some kind of volcanic venting from Hualālai Mountain.”
Koa paused to scan the ashen faces of the state’s political leaders. “When I smelled sulfur gases, I called in Richard Tatum, a volcanologist from the USGS at Kīlauea. He’s here with us now.” Koa turned to the government geologist. “Richard, tell ’em what you’ve already shared with me.”
Tatum, a tall skinny man with wispy arms, a pinched face, and a high-pitched voice, began, “Hualālai is an active volcano. It last erupted in 1801, sending streams of lava through Kona into the sea. Keāhole airport, just down there—” he pointed downhill toward the commercial airport at the edge of the ocean—“is built atop one 1801 flow.”
“But that’s over two hundred years ago,” Na‘auao, the DOE chief, objected. In her sixties with thinning gray hair and dressed in an expensive, but conservatively tailored, charcoal dress, she carried herself with a presence that warned against challenge. Her patrician face, once attractive, had hardened into a statue-like caricature of itself, and her arrogance confirmed what little Koa knew from press reports.
“True,” Tatum acknowledged, “but Hualālai hasn’t been quiet. Pu‘u Wa‘awa‘a, the many-furrowed hill that looks like a Jell-O mold on Hualālai’s northern flank, erupted in 1859, and lava vented under the ocean south of Kona in 1877. More recently, in 1929, a month-long swarm of 6,200 earthquakes, including a couple of big ones, shook the mountain. Probably a failed eruption. Hualālai’s not extinct, and she’s gonna erupt again. It’s just a matter of time.”
The politicians reacted with dour faces and deep frowns. “Get to the point, man,” the governor insisted.
“Hualālai,” Tatum continued, “has three rift zones—fault lines where volcanic activity is most likely to occur. One of those faults runs directly under the KonaWili school building. Looks like the volcano vented along that fault under the school.”
“Holy shit,” the governor swore uncharacteristically. “Do we need to evacuate the area between here and the coast?”
“Not right away,” Tatum responded. “Our monitors haven’t detected the kind of earthquakes or ground swelling signaling a major eruption. You’ll have some warning—at least a few hours—before a full-scale eruption. It would be prudent, however, to begin planning for an evacuation.”
“Shit is right,” Mayor Tanaka interjected. “We’ll have mass panic on our hands if we’re not careful.”