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The ocean was lulling him to sleep when a phone buzzed in his pocket.
Pulling out the phone, he recognized the number of his brother, a police officer in Phuket. It was 10:18 a.m. He never called this early, especially not on a Sunday, the day after Christmas.
“Wa ngai, pii?” Jo said in Thai. “What’s up, brother?”
“Nam tuam,” his brother replied. “Flooding. In Phuket.”
“Flooding?” said Jo in disbelief. The morning sky above him in Phang-nga, next to Phuket, was clear and blue.
“A big wave come,” said his brother. “Big big wave. They call it sunami.”
“A what?”
“Su-na-mi. It means big big wave. Destroy houses, cars, everything. Kill many people in Patong beach. Everybody running away.”
“You’re joking,” Jo said. “I never heard that word before.”
The phone line went dead. Jo checked his battery level—still full. Maybe his brother’s battery was low.
Jo waited, then tried ringing again. Still no response. There was also no connection to his brother’s home or work numbers at Kathu police station. He thought it was a problem with his phone service. His server was cheap, only one baht a minute during daytime hours. He often had trouble receiving calls or retrieving messages.
Waiting for his brother to call back, Jo arranged the chairs and tables in his open-air restaurant, the Oceanview. It had the best view in the whole resort area of Khao Lak; maybe the best view in all of southern Thailand. From his perch, Jo could see dozens of resorts hugging the coastline all the way to Laem Pakarang, Coral Point. They were packed with thousands of tourists, mostly from Germany and Scandinavia, who resembled an army of ants invading the beaches of southern Thailand. But Jo didn’t mind them. They were good customers. They paid above the local price. They also liked to marry Thais and buy land. Maybe they would buy his restaurant some day. A sign at the restaurant’s entrance along Highway 4 said “Khai Tii-Din”—Land for Sale.
Jo also enjoyed practicing English with foreigners. These farang liked futbawn. Jo, wearing a red Liverpool jersey, was a football fanatic. Like millions of Thais, he stayed up late Saturday night watching English and other European league matches. A Liverpool poster, with their anthem “You’ll never walk alone”, presided over his shrine, which included posters of Singha beer and a Coke ad calling itself “The Pride of Phang-nga People”.
Still unable to reach anybody in Phuket, he began to worry. His wife Maew was at her mother’s place in Phuket with their daughter. Maybe his brother wasn’t joking about the big big wave.
Jo looked out to sea. The Andaman was a blue marlin in the morning sun.
And then, on the horizon, he saw it. It was a thin line of white, stretching all the way from south to north.
Below on the beach, he also noticed something unusual. The tide was out much farther than normal. Tourists on the expanded sand bar were taking pictures of the bizarre sight. Thai hotel staff were collecting fish stranded on the exposed sea floor. “The water’s dry,” they called out to each other. “Come and get some fish!”
The crowds on the beach couldn’t see what Jo could see from his hilltop viewpoint. The white line was moving fast, and heading straight for the beach, and the hundreds of people still asleep in their rooms.
He got two ideas. First, he took his video camera from the counter. Steadying his hand, he panned from the approaching wave to the dried up coastline. Then he phoned the Khao Lak Paradise resort, where Oi worked. Staff were either too busy, or too hungover, to answer. He called Oi on her mobile, and this time got through.
Oi, who had been asleep, didn’t realize what was happening.
“Ma laew, ma laew,” Jo warned her, recording his voice in the camera’s microphone. “It’s coming, it’s coming! Tell everybody to go away from the beach.”
While they talked, the white line transformed into a violent, frothing wave. At least a few kilometers away, it looked small in his viewfinder. But he knew it would be massive closer up.
Seeing the wave, the women working in the restaurant called out to the tourists below, in English. “Run! Run! Go! Go! Go out! Quick! Quick!”
They clapped their hands but couldn’t get their attention.
Jo had to hurry. “You must tell every hotel, please,” he told Oi before hanging up. He wanted to call police in Khao Lak, or a TV station. TVs were always on upcountry. But he didn’t have their numbers in his phone. The restaurant didn’t have a phone directory. Never mind, he thought. Maybe police in Phuket already called police in Khao Lak or a TV station.
The women, panicking, screamed louder. “Run fast!”
The wave came roaring in. Now he could appreciate its true size. It was higher than the people on the beach. Much higher.
He focused on a Thai village lady with her back to the wave. She was not even running. She was walking at an sedate pace, a rhythmic stroll through a warm and timeless place, unaware of the change about to come.
With a dragon’s puff of watery smoke, the Andaman smothered her. The restaurant staff screamed. Jo kept the camera rolling. It was 10:25 a.m., five minutes into the film now, seven minutes since his brother called from Phuket.
He zoomed out for a panorama. Where’s the coastline? Where’s Laem Pakarang? The Andaman was gushing into the flat land below.
Narrating the video, he sounded like the Thai announcers broadcasting Liverpool versus Manchester United. “Hetgaan ni mai khoei het tii pratet Thai na khrap. An incident like this has never happened in Thailand.”
As the sea drowned humans like ants in a sink, he continued to film. He didn’t run. He didn’t think of calling Sri Lanka, India, Somalia, or even people farther north up the Thai coast, who still had time to escape. Instead, he recorded.
Then it occurred to him. Down there, in that swirling black water, were Oi, his relatives, friends, customers, and just about everybody else he knew.
(End of Chapter 1.)
Christopher Johnson
© Christopher Johnson. All rights reserved by the author.
ISBN: 978-974-8446-141
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