Hilo Town had been softened up and good. Their eyes widened at all the devastation. One bridge was out and debris had been piled up. Yet other objects had been swept around as if shoved there by giant hands. Whole bungalows and shacks pressed into one another, some slanting, none with any foundation. A train caboose lay stuffed under the sharply leaning second story of a clapboard building bearing the remnant of a sign that read CHOP SUEY. Cars, trucks, and even boats lay in heaps like toys, some upside down. The buttressed span of a railroad bridge stood forlorn on flat, dry lowland, looking like a skeleton of a hill.

Lett whistled under his breath, but only to disguise the briny taste in his mouth and the stomach reverberations like writhing worms from the old dogface dread that always returned at sights like this. He thought about taking another dose, even though he’d already taken one today. He wondered how he would explain his taking his shot to the rest of them. Call it insulin maybe. Penicillin would do, but he’d have to come up with a story there, too. Mostly, he didn’t want the team to think him a weak number—it would only make them worry. So, he didn’t take the second dose. And yet, no episode followed his briny taste and wormy stomach.

Then they saw that the devastation wasn’t from a bombardment of any kind. Nothing looked scorched or shredded with shrapnel. Low areas closer to the water’s edge looked to have been streets before they became swamps, the rocks and debris and trees in piles there, too. This destruction had hit a while ago, and their trained eyes picked out details that proved it. The rebuilding far outnumbered the debris, for example. Cranes rose closer to a modest main street where the downtown met the beach. Fresh plywood waited on flatbeds, paving crews were patching cracked roads, and the tang of tar filled their noses.

“You guys really don’t know?” said the local kid in the know. “Tsunami.”

“Why should they know?” said the Japanese-looking one.

“I’m not following,” Lett said.

“Tsunami means a tidal wave, see? Hit Hilo a year or so ago. Still mopping up.”

Before the center of town, they took a bumping cracked side road heading straight for the water, for the wharf area. A water tower loomed, and Lett couldn’t help but scan it for snipers or forward observers, and he wasn’t the only vet doing so. They could hear the ocean crashing against rocks. The driver was barking into a portable radio. At the south end of the wharf they passed between tall storage tanks, which the local kid said were full of molasses. “Well, I’ll be,” ex-paratrooper blurted.