Choke Point

FIFTY-TWO

What 30K saw at the moment might’ve been painted by an artist who’d swallowed some magic mushrooms, a long-haired recluse who preferred watercolors and whose pallet was limited to simply black. And white.

As for the rest of his senses, well, they seemed jerry-rigged back together with electrical cords, duct tape, and a dab of Gorilla Glue.

30K blinked. He blinked again.

A baritone hum rang in his ears.

The sky was a tarpaulin of black with thin gray scratch marks, as though from a cat, and the water, which he felt now on his neck, was like a warm and salty soup. He could finally taste the waves and began to wince and spit.

And then, slowly, his vision returned, the pier growing distinct, the men gaping at him from above in their fatigues and helmets, their mouths working, their words garbled against the hum.

He began to paddle forward, marveling over the fact that his arms and legs still worked. He craned his head and screamed, ‘Kozak? Kozak?’

The problem with being a geek is that you know too precisely how explosives and other ordnance can kill you, which was why Kozak should not have stolen a look into that open shipping container to spot that C-4. He could have spared himself the misery.

But no, he had, and even as he’d vaulted forward, knowing that he might only have a few seconds to live, he’d been contemplating the math, calculating how much force the explosives would produce, how much air pressure the human body could survive versus the pressure produced by the explosion –

And he’d been doing that right until the explosion stole all of his senses.

It was the pier, the descent, and the water combined that had helped to save their lives, he concluded as he swam toward 30K, barely hearing the man’s voice above that sound in his ears that reminded him of the Emergency Alert System.

His mind kept taking him back to the exact moment of detonation. They’d been launched like RPGs, carried by the blast wave, then had drifted out of it to plunge into the water before further damage could be done to their bodies. Had they not been adjacent to the pier, Kozak speculated that they would probably be dead — the pressure, debris turned to shrapnel, and the fires all vying with one another to kill them.

There might also be an easier explanation. The monks back at Saint Tikhon’s would simply call it a miracle and stop there. No need to calculate God’s will.

Kozak sighed as he thought about how they’d tell his mother of his death. The dreaded car, the men in uniforms getting out, she back in the kitchen of the restaurant, coming to the front door, dropping the spatula in her hand.

Ross and Pepper were hollering and pointing for them to swim toward an adjoining dock, where several ladders led down to the water, allowing smaller craft to berth. Kozak saw the ladders and came up alongside 30K, who was talking to him, but again, Kozak could barely hear a word.

They reached the ladders and shakily ascended. Not two breaths after they crawled on to the pier, Oliver was there with his van, and Ross and Pepper helped them inside. Despite the warm air, Kozak was shaking like the misfiring engine of his first car — a 1987 Mustang GT, and he realized that all this shuddering was not from the cold. He’d had some close calls as a Ghost, but never anything like this.

30K glanced at him, mouthed some curses, then held up his fist. Kozak banged fists, then threw back his head and began to chuckle, softly at first, then at the top of his lungs, laughing like a madman — all the stress coming out.

And 30K was right there, joining him.