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don’t like your father criticizing the kids.”
    “I don’t like it either,” she said, “but you know how he is. And you know what he lost because of a bunch of religious fanatics.”
    “Jae, come on. He overreacted. Connor brought it up and—”
    “He has a reason to be hypersensitive about it.”
    “We all have painful areas, Jae.”
    “Of course we do.” Jae steered the children toward their beds and tucked them in. “But, Paul, he did lose his entire army and the population of a whole state. Hawaii was a state then, you know.”
    Paul bent to embrace Connor, who turned away, appearing upset by the tone of the conversation. “There were a lot of states then, Jae.”
    “What’s that supposed to mean?”
    They closed the kids’ door and stepped into the hall. “Just that it’s not like losing a whole region would be now. And it doesn’t give him the right to tell me how to raise my kids.”
    “Oh, Paul, he doesn’t mean it that way. He was a general. He’s used to speaking his mind.”
    “So am I.”
    Tears welled in Jae’s eyes. “Paul, please—I want this to be a nice holiday. Mom thinks Dad’s testy because he’s having trouble adjusting to his consultancy—being out of the limelight.”
    “That was his choice, to hear him tell it. He was tired of management and could be more ‘creative’ in special projects, whatever that means. And it’s been more than a year.”
    “Yes, but for someone like him, it’s tough giving up the big staff and the authority and the perks, even if he’s doing what he wants. So go easy on him. Can’t you go back down there and try to make nice?”
    “How’m I supposed to do that? I’m not going to apologize because I didn’t—”
    “I’m not asking you to apologize. Just smooth things over. Have a drink with Dad. There’s a lot you two could talk about. Let’s not start the holiday off on the wrong foot.”
    “I guess I could do that. Whatever you think, I don’t enjoy butting heads with the old blowhard.”

    Trudging down to the den felt like going to the principal’s office. Paul was well aware that nothing upset his father-in-law more than religion. Ranold had been commander of the U.S. Pacific Army during the war. He was on his way back from Washington to his headquarters at Fort Shafter, north of Honolulu, when disaster struck. Conflict between Asian religious factions in the South China Sea resulted in the launching of two nuclear warheads. A colossal chunk of southern China, including Kowloon, was literally separated from the rest of the continent. Besides the devastation from the bombs themselves, which snuffed out tens of millions of lives, the violence to the topography caused a tsunami of such magnitude that it engulfed all of Hong Kong Island, swamped Taiwan with hundreds of feet of water, raced to the Philippine Sea and the East China Sea, obliterated Japan and Indonesia, swept into the Northwest Pacific Basin and the Japan Trench, finally reaching the North Pacific Current.
    It was upon the whole of the Hawaiian Islands, swallowing the entire state before any evacuation could take place. Not one person in all of Hawaii survived. The great tidal wave eventually reached Southern California and Baja California, reaching farther inland than expected and killing thousands more who believed they had fled far enough. It changed the landscape and the history of millions of acres from the Pacific Rim to what was then known as North America. The global map would never look the same, and decades later the grief at the human toll still lingered.
    A million times more destructive than the atomic bombs that had brought an end to the previous war, the killer tsunami seemed to sober every extremist on the globe. It was as if, over-night, every nation lost its appetite for conflict.
    Antireligion, antiwar factions toppled nearly every head of state, and an international government rose from the ashes and mud. The United States was redrawn to consist