Declare

SEVENTEEN: Mount Ararat, 1963

He pointed through the window—opening into space that was filled with moonlight reflected from the snow—and threw out an empty whisky bottle.

“No need to listen for the fall. This is the world’s end,” he said, and swung off. The lama looked forth, a hand on either sill, with eyes that shone like yellow opals. From the enormous pit before him white peaks lifted themselves yearning to the moonlight. The rest was as the darkness of interstellar space.

—Rudyard Kipling, Kim

The morning breeze down from the high glaciers was positively Arctic.

Kim Philby had photographed Mount Ararat extensively during his posting as SIS Head of Station for Turkey, a job that had lasted from February of 1947 through September of 1949. Using as cover the SIS surveying operation code-named Spyglass, he had taken pictures of the Ahora Gorge from every angle, climbing as high as the 8,000-foot level to get clear pictures of the bottom slopes of the valley over the gorge, the glacier-choked Cehennem Dere. He had studied the accounts of previous explorers—Archbishop Nouri of the Nestorian Church in India, who at the Chicago World’s Fair in 1893 had made a plausible claim to have found the Ark on Ararat five years earlier; Hardwicke Knight, who in 1936 had climbed the western face of the Ahora Gorge in search of a legendary ruined Armenian monastery and found instead, at about the 14,000-foot level, a huge structure of ancient black timbers protruding from the glacial moraine; and the American Carveth Wells, who was reportedly led to the Ark by Armenian shepherds in 1943. Philby had not been able to fly a helicopter so near to the Iranian border, but Guy Burgess had relayed to him a sheaf of photographs taken in the mid-’40s from Mikoyan-Gurevich fighter planes out of the Soviet air base at Erivan—prints that clearly showed a boxy black shape over-hanging a glacier lake near the Cehennem Dere, at the foot of the higher glacier known as Abich I. Each of these photographs included in the frame another MiG, flying at a lower altitude, as if to establish a Soviet claim.

The MiG photographs had been taken during the summer—the lake would be frozen now, in late January.

Mount Ararat was of primordial volcanic origin, and its slopes were littered with “pillow lava,” smooth igneous stones formed when the magma had flowed out under sea water. And although the mountain had sunk, so that it was now surrounded by a moat-like caldera of snake-infested marshes, its nearly 17,000-foot height was imposing because it stood virtually alone on the Kars-Van plain, the northernmost sentinel of the Zagros mountain range.

Until the death of the fox in September of last year, Kim Philby had lived for the day when he should finally climb up to the structure that folklore had mis-identified as Noah’s Ark, and take at last his destined role as human emissary to the djinn— rafiq to the spirits of the air.

Now that his father was irretrievably lost, though, his only hope was that Hale’s Declare operation would ignobly succeed and that the djinn would all be killed before he could be subjected to the devastating recognition of the inhuman powers that inhabited the high glaciers.

Standing now on the broad face of the Cehennem Dere glacier above the Ahora Gorge, Philby looked back at the two white nylon tents, and at the two motionless Spetsnaz commandos in their white parkas, holding their white-painted automatic rifles; and he leaned his weight against the bitter wind and tried to comprehend the fact that the rest of his life lay north of this point—and east.

He shuffled around in the snow to peer through his goggles in that direction, the heels of his boots squeaking on the compacted dry powder; mists in the middle distance blurred the cliffs of the Ahora Gorge below him, and against the white blur of the winter sun he could not see the Aras River, twenty miles away to the northeast. But if today’s climb were successful, he would be crossing that river, that Rubicon, tomorrow, never again to recross it. He would be greeted as a hero in Moscow, no doubt—he had been honorarily awarded the Soviet Order of the Red Banner after his assistance in placing the drogue-stone in Berlin in 1945, and had even been shown a photograph of the medal, with its red-and-white striped ribbon, gold-wreathed medallion, and enameled banner. He would be able to take physical possession of it, soon, and wear it to… state dinners at the Kremlin. Evenings at the Bolshoi.

He had never even bothered to try to learn Russian.

Truly he had always imagined that he would live undercover— know, not think it—for the rest of his life; that he would one day return to En gland with Eleanor, and there attend cricket matches, write for the Times, send his sons to Winchester and Cambridge. He had won his Commander of the British Empire in ’46, and that was only two ranks below being knighted! And he would always have been warmed, as he watched the Derby from the Members’ Stand at Epsom or drank malt whiskey with the lawyers and journalists in the Garrick Club, by the secret knowledge that he had done more to undermine this capitalist decadence than any other Soviet spy in history.

He had to tilt his head now, to see down the gorge past the fluttering fur fringe of his parka. The action reminded him of trying to see with the bandage on his head, back in Beirut.

Nicholas Elliott, who had been Head of the SIS Beirut Station until Peter Lunn had taken over in October of last year, had returned to Lebanon thirteen days ago. He had telephoned Philby the next day, a Friday, and proposed a meeting at the flat of Lunn’s secretary. Philby’s head had still been taped up with gauze then, and when he arrived at the flat the first thing he had said to Elliott had been, “You owe me a drink. I haven’t had one since I did this to my skull on my birthday, ten days ago.” Not strictly true, any of it—his skull had been cracked by Miss Ceniza-Bendiga’s .30-caliber bullet, and he had been drinking like a champion ever since—but Philby had been smiling confidently as he spoke, holding out his right hand. Only three days had passed since Andrew Hale had frightened and insulted him on Weygand Street, and he’d been eager to numb the smart of that humiliation in reminiscences of braver, grander days.

Philby and Elliott had become friends at War Station XB in St. Albans during the war, and later in Broadway the two SIS men had worked together at trying to design a non-Communist postwar Germany—though, unknown to Elliott, Philby had seen to it that all the proposed agents were safely killed before the war ended. In 1948 it had been Elliott who had found a Swiss nerve specialist for Philby’s second wife, after her incautious curiosity about Philby’s work with Burgess had begun to cause her to lose her mind; and later, in the dark winter of ’51, after Burgess and Maclean defected and Philby was suspected of complicity, Elliott had been Philby’s staunchest defender in Broadway. Eventually Elliott had helped Philby get journalism work with The Observer and The Economist, and had steered a lot of under-the-table SIS work his way, mainly so that Philby wouldn’t starve.

But on that Friday afternoon in Beirut nearly two weeks ago, Elliott’s eyes had been cold behind his horn-rimmed glasses, and he’d said, “Stop it, Kim. We know what you’ve done. You took me in for years—and now I’ll get the truth out of you, even if I have to drag you to Ham Common myself. I once looked up to you—my God, how I despise you now. I hope you’ve enough decency left to under stand why.”

Well, it had been the SIS confronting him at last, hadn’t it—and, as Hale had said, they were offering immunity in exchange for Philby’s full confession. You will pretend to cooperate, Hale had told Philby, but you will not tell him about the Ararat operation, and you will not return to En gland. And so Philby had flippantly conceded his guilt and typed out a rubbishy confession, admitting only to having spied for the Comintern and claiming to have quit in ’49, when the Attlee government’s reforms had “disproved Marxism.” God!

But it had all gone down well enough with Elliott.

Elena Teresa Ceniza-Bendiga had sidled up to Philby at the Khayats Bookshop in Avenue Bliss the next day, and over the stacks of Life and Paris Match she had told him that the SDECE was prepared to exfiltrate him to France right then, from the bookstore; a news delivery lorry was in the alley behind the shop, its engine idling. He had put her off, said he needed to clock in with Mammalian first, and had got her to agree to meet him again by the Pigeon Grotto on the cliffs at Chouron Street, that evening—and then he had gone back to the Normandy Hotel and told Mammalian that the French SDECE agent Ceniza-Bendiga was in Beirut, and that she had approached him with a defection proposal; he told Mammalian when and where he had agreed to meet her, and he had then gone upstairs and got drunk alone in his room.

Philby had not seen Elena since then. Perhaps Mammalian had killed her—Philby hadn’t asked.

Nicholas Elliott had taken Philby and Eleanor to dinner that night at Le Temporel, and both men had tried to talk and laugh as if their old friendship had not been a betrayal from the start. Poor Eleanor had sipped her wine nervously, glancing from her husband to Elliott and back, clearly aware of the forced tone. In the men’s room Philby had passed Elliott two more typewritten pages of chicken-feed confession.

Two days later Elliott had flown back to London, telling Philby that Peter Lunn would take over the interrogation and make arrangements for Philby’s return to England. Lunn had clearly been embarrassed by the spectacle of a Cambridge-and-Athenaeum-Club man confessing to having been a Soviet spy, and Philby had no difficulty in postponing their first meeting for a week—and then on the night of the twenty-third, the Rabkrin expedition had left Beirut.

January twenty-third, Philby thought forlornly.

Now, shuddering in mountaineering boots and a parka on a windy glacier 13,000 feet above sea-level, Philby allowed himself the useless fantasy of reconsidering his decision. He could have stayed with Eleanor, his wife of very nearly four years. Perhaps the SIS and the MI5 together could have protected him from facing “the truth” at the hands of Jimmie’s ultra-covert old SOE, in England, at least—but he didn’t believe that. According to legend, Declare had dealt with the code-breaker Alan Turing, and T. E. Lawrence, and even Lord Kitchener, drowned off the Scapa Flow in 1916. Philby clenched his mittened fists in frail bravado. Very well, so what if they would have killed him, eventually? Or even as soon as he was released from interrogation at Ham Common? He could have died as a loyal husband and father. If I should die, think only this of me: that there’s some corner of England that is forever a foreign land!The thought made a hash of Rupert Brooke’s scansion, but Philby smiled at it. And in the eighteenth century Edward Young had written, Death loves a shining mark, a signal blow. But more recently Eugene Fitch Ware had countered it: We fixed him up an epitaph, “Death loves a mining shark.” And it was something more like a mining shark that Philby had become, in his furtive career— burrowing, hiding, voracious, without conscience.

And, he was honest enough to admit to himself, profoundly afraid of dying. Meet your Maker… ! At least if vile Hale was successful here, there would be a very large-scale dying of djinn. The idiotically ghoulish amomon thistle would be blooming in the wastelands, probably even in Soviet Armenia. And he still had Theo Maly’s sealed instructions.

What had Maly called it? A more profane sort of eternal life.

To his credit, he felt, Philby had actually tried to give his children the better sort of eternal life—though admittedly he had been maudlin drunk each time. Did it still count, he wondered now on this cold flank of Mount Ararat, if it was administered by a drunk? A resolutely atheist drunk? With the older four of his children he had found opportunities to spill water onto their heads, and then, while seeming to try to wipe it off, covertly make the feared Papist sign of the cross on their foreheads—he had cringed to do it, and his teeth had actually hurt each time as he had mumbled, I baptize thee in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost, amen— but in the case of poor young Harry, his youngest son by his previous wife, Philby had eventually resorted to pushing the boy out of a rowboat on the Dog River, near Ajaltoun in the Lebanon mountains, mumbling the hated litany as he’d pulled the boy back aboard and pushed the wet hair out of his eyes, up and then sideways.

And he was always aware of the power of birthdays and anniversaries. The zodiac wheel was in precisely the same position again on such days, and the events they commemorated were in a sense repeated in all their vulnerabilities, renewed in their purposes.

And so of course the Rabkrin expedition had left Beirut on the twenty-third of January! At five o’clock on that rainy evening, with no warning, Mammalian had given him a passport in the name of Villi Maris and ordered him to get into a Turkish truck bound for the Syrian border. “We go now,” Mammalian had told him. But Philby and Eleanor had been expected at a dinner at the house of the First Secretary of the British Embassy on that night, and Philby had simply demanded to be allowed to call Eleanor and tell her to go on without him, that he would meet her there later. Mammalian had eventually given in and driven him through the downpour to a telephone kiosk from which he could make the call. When Philby had dialed the number, thirteen-year-old Harry had answered the telephone, and in every hour since then Philby had wished that Eleanor had picked up the extension, so that he could have heard her voice one more time; but in the rain-drumming telephone kiosk, with Mammalian scowling at him over his dripping beard in the open doorway, Philby had only dared to say, “Tell your m-mother I’m— g-going to be late, H-Harry—my b-boy. I’ll m-meet her at the B-Balfour-Pauls’ at eight.” While he had fumbled for words to say more, Mammalian had reached across him and pressed down the plunger.

The next day, the twenty-fourth, would have been Philby’s and Eleanor’s fourth wedding anniversary.

Till Death do us part, Philby thought now as he blinked rapidly to keep tears from spilling down his cheeks, where they might freeze the snow-goggles to his skin. Thin veils of dry snow were blowing past him down the snowpack slope, like white dust.

Off to his left he could see a couple of the others lumbering out of the nearest tent, looking like polar bears in their hooded parkas and boots. One was Mammalian, the tallest; the other would be one of the Turk Rabkrin agents. There had been no snow last night, and they were standing in the darker, tromped-flat area around the tents. The commandos who had been standing watch slung their white Kalashnikov machine guns and began trudging to the farther tent— hourly rotation of watch, Philby recalled.

“Sutle ekmek!” called one of the Turks to Philby, his voice thin in the chilly air. Bread and milk, and it would be sour milk.

“Ben onsuz yapabilirum,” Philby shouted to him across the snow. I can do without it.

“And briefing,” called Mammalian over the wind. “Synchronizing our watches, girding up our loins for battle, revelations of secrets not to be divulged down in the lowlands. Come in here.”

Philby sighed a gust of steam and plodded back across the wavy snow, planting his boots in the same holes they had made when he had walked away from the tents; and the sky was too overcast for him to throw much of a shadow. Perhaps he was not really walking back to the tent at all.

Oddly, and he smiled wryly at it, he was feeling an extra bit of guilt here—Hale and I didn’t finish that poker game in 1948, he thought, but I took the whole pot anyway: I had Señorita Ceniza-Bendiga the next day in Dogubayezit, and I kept Maly’s amomon instructions too.

Andrew Hale looked up from his cup of tepid tea when Philby came stamping back into the tent.

Hakob Mammalian was right behind him, followed by the surlier of the two Turks, Fuad.

“Sit,” said Mammalian as he ponderously lowered himself into a cross-legged position on the rubberized canvas floor, scattering floury snow from his boots. Philby and Fuad sat down, and the Turk by the little paraffin stove began handing disks of flat bread to Hale, who passed them to Mammalian. Hale was just wearing his tan wool liner gloves, and he could feel that the bread was hot.

“When we were here in ’48,” Mammalian said, his breath steaming in the razory cold air, “we did not come this high. We did not presume to knock at their door, but called them down to the gorge. We were cautious because of some old stories—St. Hippolytus wrote in the third century that climbers who tried to ascend Ararat were thrown down to the valley floor by demons; and in the fourth century, Faustus of Byzantium recorded the story of an Armenian bishop, Jacob—”

Fuad snorted around a mouthful of the bread. “An Armenian named Jacob!” he said in English. “Was he a saint?”

“He was,” said Mammalian imperturbably. “And he climbed part-way up the mountain, hoping to see the Ark. Where he slept, a spring burst out of the rocks; we passed that spring in the gorge yesterday, by the cairn of rocks that marks his grave, though the shrine that used to stand there was destroyed in the 1840 earthquake. He too found himself abruptly at the foot of the mountain—but he had been carried there by an angel, who gave him a piece of wood from the Ark and told him that it was God’s will that he not attempt to climb the mountain. That piece of wood is today in the Armenian Ortho-dox monastery in Echmiadzen, in Soviet Armenia. The angel was a Christian one, and knew that Jacob might be killed if he climbed higher. With my own eyes as a boy I saw a demon face staring angrily from the Ark. Perhaps we Armenians are in a privileged position; my father and I were not molested.”

“The mountain does not belong to Armenia,” said Fuad. “It is in Turkey. Why do you Armenians have it on your coat-of-arms?”

“Does the moon belong to Turkey?” asked Mammalian. “It is on your flag.” He gave Fuad a dismissive wave. “But”—he shrugged— “in fact men of many nationalities have ascended to the Ark and survived; and in this century the djinn have been more quiescent, possibly because one of their number is abroad now, in Russia. In 1948 our group on the north side of the gorge was not attacked, but our covering party below the southern cliffs, as well as a British and a French group that tried to sabotage our operation from that side, were nearly all killed—many men were lifted away into the sky, doubtless to be thrown down onto the plain, as Hippolytus described.”

Hale passed the last piece of bread, not taking any for himself— the thought of eating nauseated him, and he almost gagged at the thought that the bread smelled like khaki—and he touched the lump in his pocket that was the special derringer he had bought a week ago in Allenby Street in Beirut. He made himself stare back at Mammalian with no expression.

“But,” Mammalian went on, steepling his fingers in front of his beard and glancing from Hale to Philby and back, “the djinn did speak, that night. They said, in Arabic, ‘Answer whom? The brothers are divided.’ ”

A moaning gust of wind from the peak bellied the tent wall behind Mammalian and snapped the outer flap like a flag; Hale’s nostrils constricted at a cold whiff of metallic oil over the bread-and-rubber smell of the tent.

Mammalian shucked the leather mitten off of his right hand and began unsnapping his parka. “Wear your drogues outside your clothing!” he barked.

Hale hooked a finger into the leather thong at his neck and drew out the flat rectangular stone Mammalian had given him yesterday, at the camp by the trucks on the plain. The stone was the size of a thick playing card, with a protruding ring at the top, and a cross had been grooved across its matte face.

Each of the five men in the tent was clutching one of the stones now; and over the long course of ten seconds the keening wind outside diminished away to silence. Hale was braced for the ground-tremors of an earthquake, but none came.

His pounding heartbeat didn’t slow down. He didn’t think it had slowed to less than a hundred beats per minute in the last forty-eight hours, and in his sleeping bag on this rubber floor last night he had not got more than two hours’ restless sleep.

Mammalian tapped his drogue stone. “These are better than your Egyptian ankhs,” he said to Hale. “When Gilgamesh tried to take a boat to where the immortal Upanishtim could give him eternal life, do you recall that he nearly made the voyage impossible when he broke the ‘things of stone’ with which the boat was equipped? They were stone anchors in this shape, but more than just the kind of anchor that keeps a boat from being swept away. These fix the attention of the djinn, and thus impede new intentions.”

“What brothers?” rasped Philby. Hale looked at him—the man’s face in the parka hood was pasty and he was staring at the ridged rubber floor. “What brothers were divided?”

“The two sons,” said Mammalian, “of Harry St. John Philby. They are yourself and Andrew Hale. This is the truth.”

Philby stared at Hale then, and Hale almost looked away— Philby’s wet eyes were wide with hurt, and something like loss, and even sorrow. “I d-did know it, suspect it,” Philby said thickly. “I— d-damn me!—I s-s-some-t-times thought I s-saw— him—in y-you.”

Hale had to take a breath to speak. “And treated me accordingly?” The words came out with more bitterness than he had intended to show, and he glanced down at his boots to hide any tears that might well up in his own eyes. The lost father I used to daydream about, he thought. Have I seen him in you, Kim? I wouldn’t have known.

“You h-had n-no— right,” Philby choked.

“Nor say,” said Hale shortly.

“Together,” said Mammalian in a loud voice, “you will approach their castle, today. Together you will be the one person who was consecrated to them in 1912, in Amballa.”

Ten years before I was even born, thought Hale tensely. Mother, why in the name of Heaven did you—

He glanced again at Philby, and thought he caught a flicker of wild, fearful hope there. No, Kim, Hale thought in sudden specific alarm—I will not serve as your fox; your father was willing, but I will not consent to sharing the ordeal of the djinn sacrament with you. Aloud, he said to him, trying not to speak quickly, “Did you ever go through the espionage-paramilitary course at Fort Monkton?”

Philby blinked. “Y-Yes, in ’49.”

“I did it in ’46. You remember the litany? ‘Would you kill your brother?’ ” It hurt Hale’s jaw to speak so much. “We both answered yes to that. Don’t expect a lot of brotherly love, right?”

He hoped that was innocuous enough not to rouse suspicion in Mammalian, and at the same time a clear enough message to Philby—If you tell them about me, about this Declare infiltration and sabotage, you will go through with the djinn sacrament, as the Rabkrin has planned—alone; and you will live ever after as a pampered imbecile in Moscow, never again able to read, or think.

He saw the hope die in Philby’s eyes as the import sank in, and Hale took a sip of his cooled tea to cover his frail relief: clearly the psychic sharing did have to be voluntary. Our father, Hale thought, loved you very much, Kim.

“Brotherly love,” echoed Philby emptily.

“—is not called for here, fortunately,” said Mammalian. “Plain professionalism will suffice. We are going to be ascending to the Abich I glacier today, and then traversing it to the top slope of the Parrot glacier. We may get snow, and the winds are constant, but no storm is expected. It will be dangerous nevertheless—the traverse will be across a convex snow surface at about a thirty-degree angle, so avalanches are a real possibility—and of course there are deep crevasses in the ice—but,” he said, rocking his head toward the other tent, “our Spetsnaz commandos were chosen because they have mountain-climbing experience, and we’ll all be roped in a line. It is what they call a static rope. Not much climbing should be required—simply follow the directions of the leader. If a man near you should fall into a crevasse, try to plunge your ice-axe into the surface near you, to moor yourself; and if you fall in, just hang there—don’t thrash or struggle, lest you pull the rest of us in after you.”

“Jesus,” said Philby.

“Prayer, I think,” said Mammalian judiciously, “would be contraindicated. We will all carry our automatic rifles, but it’s unlikely that we’ll encounter opposition at this point; nevertheless you will have a full magazine loaded and a live round in the chamber. Radios are not likely to work this close to the Ark and its inhabitants, but we have flare-guns, and since we are so close to the Soviet border a Mil helicopter will be here in less than ten minutes if we fire them.”

Mammalian paused and reached up to one of the hang-loops for his bottle; the liquid in it was cloudy, arak already mixed with water, and certainly it would be as cold as he could ask for. After he had uncorked it and taken a swig, he went on, exhaling licorice fumes, “In addition to the natural hazards of mountaineering, many climbing parties upon this mountain have been troubled by… irrational irritability and fear among the climbers, even abrupt insanity. Equipment has failed, inexplicably. These are evidences of resistance by the inhabitants of the peaks. We appear to have experienced nothing of the sort so far on this climb, which perhaps means that we are not unwelcome, but that condition may change when we get onto the higher glacier. So if you find yourself suddenly angry, or afraid, or disoriented, remind yourself that it is not a genuine, justified emotion! The Spetsnaz have been told this too, as clearly as seemed advisable. Simply stop, breathe deeply, recite the multiplication tables. And we have drugs that might help counter these effects.”

He looked beside him at Philby, then at Hale. “The Ark is on a ledge, over a lake,” Mammalian said. “It should be accessible, and we have enough men to dig it out if it is not. The two of you are to approach it, together. Don’t bother to try to walk in step or anything of that sort—it will be enough that you are side by side.” To Philby he said, “You have the rafiq jewel.”

“I contain it,” said Philby.

“As in 1948.” Mammalian took another sip of the arak and then corked the bottle and smiled. “As if that would stop us from taking it from you, if such was our purpose! The two of you may shout to the vessel, if there is no immediate response, but I think the Ark will open for you, at the mere approach of… the completed son.”

“And what,” asked Hale, not having to feign anxiety, “do we do then?”

Mammalian spread his hands and smiled. “Improvise.”

Hale nodded. That was what Hartsik had told him too. He remembered the djinn confined in the pool at Ain al’ Abd saying, This is the Nazrani son—and he remembered the king of Wabar telling him, The ghosts of my people could see that you have not the black drop in the human heart.

Prayer, I think, Mammalian had said here, would be contraindicated.

“Could I, er, have a bit of your arak?” Hale asked.

“I’ve got Scotch,” said Philby suddenly, “and gin. Both.” He was looking at the floor again.

Hale gave him an uncertain glance. He had seen Philby drinking from a steel water bottle that he had topped up last night from a bottle of Gordon’s gin, so Hale said, “Well, gin, actually.” He clenched his teeth, then made himself say, “Thanks.”

He was peripherally aware of Mammalian smiling ironically at him.

Improvise.

Hale had been improvising without cease ever since Mammalian had ordered him into the Bombard inflated motorboat in the storm surf below the Normandy Hotel on the rainy night of the twenty-third. And his calculations had become more complicated when he and his escorts had joined the rest of the team at the camp below Ararat last night.

Philby unsnapped a water bottle from a webbing harness on the floor, and Hale reached across to take it from him, willing his fingers not to tremble.

When the time came, Hale would shoot his derringer upward, into whatever form the djinn assumed; perhaps he could do it with the little gun held down by his belt, so that it would not be obvious that he had fired it, or even that the noise had been a gunshot. There might well be other, covering noises. But how wide would the shot spread, out of the gun’s short barrel?—widely enough to blow Hale’s face off? And then—the djinn would die? What ferocities might that involve? If he had to shoot more than twice, he would have to reload, and then aim. What would the Spetsnaz commandos make of that? Short work was what they’d make of him. And he had to save one round to fire into Philby’s back.

He took a big mouthful of Philby’s gin, and let it sting his mouth for a few seconds before swallowing it.

“Thanks,” he whispered more sincerely, handing the water bottle back to Philby.

“Up,” said Mammalian, slapping his hands onto his thighs. “Fuad and Umit will stay here—we take up our rifles and… ascend!”

The big Armenian was cheerful as he stood up again and began refastening the snaps of his parka; and Hale remembered coming to the conclusion, on the St. Georges Hotel terrace eighteen days ago, that Mammalian’s loyalties in this operation were to the djinn themselves, and not to the Rabkrin.

Hale got to his feet, glad that the climbing pants were so thick as to hide the shaking of his knees, and he pulled the snow-goggles down over his eye sockets and the bridge of his nose. His crampons were slung at his belt beside the head of his ice-axe, and he shuffled to the corner of the tent and picked up one of the white-painted Kalashnikovs. It weighed about ten pounds with the full thirty-round magazine attached in front of the trigger guard, but its weight was comfortable when he had slung it over his shoulder Bedu-style. Five spare magazines clicked in his pockets as he shifted to tug the leather mittens on over his liner gloves.

The tent had been cold, but he shivered when he had stepped out onto the snow and the icy wind found the gaps at his throat and wrists. Ice dust was sweeping down over the snowpack from the peak like the ghost of a fast, shallow stream, and he was glad that their route would not be taking them higher than the 14,000-foot level. Even under clouds the white glare of the snow field was dazzling, and the cornices of the Abich I glacier to the west glittered like diamonds.

He sat down on the trampled area of ice outside the tent to strap the steel-spiked crampons tightly onto the soles of his boots. Under the trampled snow the surface of the Cehennem Dere glacier was black, impregnated with lava dust—and he remembered the black glass beads he had found at Wabar, and then he thought of the oval shot pellets in his derringer.

The thought that he would be firing at least two shells of those pellets today made his belly flutter so loosely that he was afraid he might wet his pants; but he felt an aching tightness in his chest, as if his lungs were struggling against his closed throat for fresh air while he was submerged far under water. I’m forty-one years old, he thought as he took deep breaths of the frigid air to try to dispel the feeling. I didn’t die at Ain al’ Abd three weeks ago—will I really finally do it today?

Pot’s right, no more bets, showdown.

He remembered his dismay at finding himself committed to a hand of cards without having honestly looked at the stakes, fourteen years ago. Had he been doing it again? But if the stakes were too frightening to consider, and the game was already lost, what value could there be in clear comprehension?

“All I can do is play out the hand,” he whispered. “I can’t change anything at forff-forfeit-forty—at my age.”

He stood up, still breathing deeply of the thin, icy air, and used his teeth to tug tight the wrist strap of the left mitten. The ten Spetsnaz commandos had filed out of their larger tent, and for the moment Hale avoided looking at them. Even seen peripherally they did look bulky, and he had to assure himself that a 7.62-millimeter round would easily penetrate even the thickest layers of leather and nylon weave and kapok fiber. He tugged his bulky parka hood over his head and trudged forward behind the rocking white rifle-barrels slung on the backs of Philby and Mammalian.

One of the Spetsnaz commandos pointed at Hale and barked some syllables in Russian. Hale forced himself simply to pause, and not to shuck his right hand free of its mitten to grab the Kalashnikov stock.

Mammalian turned around to face Hale—his black beard below the gleaming snow-goggles was already powdered with ice dust, but was still a conspicuous spot in this white sky world—and he called, “He says you will kill someone accidentally, holding your gun that way. Sling it the way they do.”

“Da!” yelled Hale obediently. But when he pulled the sling off over his head and then put it on again, the rifle barrel was pointed down, so that one yank on the barrel would bring it back to the Bedu position. The Spetsnaz seemed to be satisfied.

West of the tents the white slope climbed toward the tumbled chunks of ice at the foot of the Abich I glacier wall, and down here at the level of the tents one of the Russian commandos had begun axing out a square, yard-wide step in the snowpack. Another was lashing three snap-link carabiners at fifteen-foot intervals on a long white rope, and when he had finished he beckoned to Philby, Hale, and Mammalian.

He clicked the carabiners one by one onto similar links at the fronts of their climbing harnesses, so that the three men were attached to the rope.

The Russian muttered something, and Mammalian laughed and translated: “Our borscht-blooded friend says we are three babies that must be leashed.”

Neither Philby nor Hale had any funny rejoinders.

The Russian who had chopped out the step in the slope was now crouched in front of it, digging at the vertical wall of snow he had exposed. When he stood up and began speaking to one of his fellows, Hale could tell by the man’s tone that he was not happy. Hale peered at the exposed surface of snow, and saw that the Spetsnaz had scooped loose snow and ice out of several horizontal layers—apparently the snowpack was not uniformly dense.

Hale was the last man on the rope, and he walked up to where Philby stood, dragging the slack behind him. “Is that bad, do you suppose?” he whispered to Philby.

“This is all bad,” Philby muttered. “Our father has doomed us both.”

The Russian was speaking, and Mammalian waved backward at the two Englishmen; then he turned and said, “The ice is subject to shearing, sliding. Avalanche is a—real possibility.”

“Well, we knew that, for heaven’s sake,” snapped Philby.

“Uh,” Mammalian went on, translating, “it will be more dangerous when we are moving across the slope, above—rather than straight up it, as here. Make no noise—tread lightly, not stomping— and—don’t speak.”

One of the Spetsnaz, whose white machine gun was equipped with a folding stock and a collapsible bipod at the muzzle, walked downhill past Hale and knotted a lighter line onto the trailing end of the rope and clicked his own harness carabiner onto the bight of the knot. The three amateurs were now bracketed at either end. The rest of the Spetsnaz had attached their harnesses along the far half of the long rope with similar knots, and now the procession had begun to move up the white slope, in single file.

After Mammalian and then Philby had begun plodding forward, Hale took up the pace, hearing the crunch of the Spetsnaz’s boots start up behind him.

Hale could feel the grade of the hill in his calves, for with the crampon-spiked boots it was not possible to walk on his toes; but the mild ache was pleasant for now.

Soon the men at the front of the rope had stopped at the foot of the thirty-foot glacier wall, and after Mammalian and Philby and Hale had walked close enough for the rope to lie slack on the ground between them they halted too. The Abich I glacier was gray-white in cross-section, and Hale was staring up at the overhanging cornices of snow and ice when he noticed that the leader had begun to climb the bumpy, gullied wall.

The man moved upward in a contorting but graceful series of moves, like slow-motion bullfighting; at one point he would stretch out a leg to hook an outcrop with his instep, at another he would wedge his forearm or elbow into a gap in order to reach higher with the other hand, and once he simply pulled his whole weight up a yard like a man doing chin-ups. He paused near the top to hang a loop of slung rope on the face, and then after climbing up another yard he stopped below a gap in the overhanging cornice, unslinging his ice-axe to reach up and prod the surface with the pointed butt end of it.

At last he climbed up to the gap and jackknifed through it and out of sight; and a moment later another man was moving up the face, in rapid scrambles, and the line had begun moving again.

Hale was dizzy at the thought of making that ascent himself. There wasn’t enough slack between himself and Philby for him to hope that the men at the crest could simply lift them up like sacks of coal—clearly some climbing, some supporting of his own weight, would be required. Under all his clothing he could feel sweat on his chest, and suddenly his mittens seemed as clumsy as the fins of a fish. Was one supposed to take them off?—they were thonged together through a loop at his collar.

But when Mammalian went flexing and reaching away up the face, Hale saw that although the man was climbing, he was at the same time giving some of his weight to the rope, which was being tugged up from the top—and his mittens were off, swinging loosely behind his belt. I can do that much, Hale thought, shucking off his own and flexing his hands in the liner gloves; and when Mammalian had disappeared over the cornice and even Philby was halfway up the face, puffing and grunting and scrabbling with his crampon spikes at the ice, Hale stepped gamely up to the face and found that it was not difficult. With the rope taking his weight at his waist and tugging upward, he even found several times that he had to pause before stepping up to the next hand-hold to allow the rope to come taut again.

Then he had rocked over the lip in the cornice gap and was crawling across snow, the drogue stone swinging below his chin. Only one of the Russian commandos was hauling the rope up now, and the others were squatting on this new slope.

They were on the Abich I glacier now. It was more steeply inclined from south down to north than the Cehennem Dere had been, and it was mostly bare ice, with pockets of snow clinging to the face only where cracked, compacted sections of ice had been pushed up to make steps.

The air stung the inside of Hale’s nose, too cold at this height to carry any smells except a faint tingle like sulfur. Hale pulled his mittens back onto his aching, numbed hands, and the exposed patches of his face stung as if with a burn. He shifted around to look southward up the mounting slope to the peak, still three thousand feet above, and he quailed at the lunar remoteness of it, and of the white streamers of snow that trailed away from the peak across the gray sky.

Mammalian was standing by the slack rope beside him, looking down toward his boots. Hale followed the direction of his gaze and saw a smoothly oval two-inch hole cut into the ice.

“A borehole,” said Mammalian, speaking loudly to be heard over the static-like roar of the wind, “from one of the scientific expeditions. Round, originally—the glacier flow has made it elliptical.”

Hale just nodded. Hartsik had said that the djinn had no problem with elliptical holes. Well, Hale had brought some elliptical solids, a few thousand of them, packed tight for now in .410 shot shells.

Too soon the Spetsnaz were all on their feet again, and then one by one, as if through an invisible bottleneck, they were moving out in single-file across the glacier face. In less than a minute it was Mammalian’s turn to start forward, and then Philby’s, and then Hale was plodding out onto the glacier, his crampon spikes clashing on the ice.

They were walking up a convex slope. The surface was bumpy and cracked, but it seemed solid enough, and the few yards-wide gaping crevasses they skirted were conspicuous. If I could kill the man behind me with one round, Hale thought with a sort of dazed abstractness, I could probably catch the other nine with a couple of careful bursts—they’re all within a ten or twelve degree wedge in front of me. Twenty-nine bullets for nine men; well, ten men, I suppose, counting Mammalian.

But he didn’t know how much mountaineering skill would still be required before they reached the Ark; and if even one of the Spetsnaz was not killed outright, Hale would find himself the target of very professional return fire; and anyway he knew he could not shoot men in the back. Especially not Hakob Mammalian.

The rubbing-alcohol wind was stinging his cheeks and forming ice crystals around his nostrils. I can at least put the load of birdshot into Philby’s back, he thought despairingly—and as long as I don’t kill him, as long as he can still flee to Moscow, that will have turned over the hourglass on the Moscow ghula, Russia’s guardian angel, Machikha Nash. She’ll die shortly after Philby does, and he’s already fifty-one; and the Soviet Union should collapse within only a couple of years after that; assuming Declare’s math is right, now. And I should be able to fire at least one shell into the djinn too, before the Spetsnaz cut me down.

Play out the hand.

He was light-headed, almost drunk, and he watched his alternating boots scrape the ice as if they were images on a movie screen. He had not seen Elena again after that late afternoon three weeks ago when he had stood in the doorway of the Normandy Hotel bar and watched her kiss Philby. He had had no clear chance to ask Philby about her, and truthfully he hadn’t tried to make a chance— she had presumably been part of the SDECE team with plans to exfiltrate Philby, back when Philby had still believed he had the luxury of considering a defection offer, and in any case Philby would assuredly not have told Hale anything that could have been helpful to her; and Hale was bleakly sure that her only response to the sight of Andrew Hale now would be to try to kill him.

At least she didn’t look up and see me, that afternoon at the Normandy bar, he thought now, bitterly. At least she didn’t see me. That’s warming consolation to take with me to… to “the house whence no one issues.”

At least the Babylonian myths hadn’t said anything about it being cold there! The tightness in his chest, a feeling like the useless urge to breathe underwater against a resolutely closed throat, was stronger.

He had been daydreaming, and he only realized that he had passed the crest of the glacier and was now plodding through calf-deep snow on the lee side when a hard yank at the waist of his harness webbing snapped his head back and pulled him forward off his feet; he jerked his head back down and saw that he was falling toward snow, but the snow surface was breaking up in chunks and tumbling away below him into deep shadow, and the rope was a tight line slanting steeply down.

Hale landed with his knees on snow-padded ice but his chest out across the rope, over a black abyss; and an instant later his hands had clamped like vises onto the rope’s taut length. He was hanging over the pit of a bottomless-looking crevasse, and he was stable as long as he didn’t move: he was a downward-pointing triangle, with his solidly braced knees being the two secure points of it. He had hit the rope with his face, and his snow-goggles had been knocked down over his chin—his eyes were stinging in the sudden cold.

From behind him he could hear a rapid metallic hammering, and from far away ahead, on the other side of the abyss, he could hear Mammalian shouting English words at him; but most of Hale’s weight was on the rope, and he was squinting straight down into the darkness, watching the diminishing fragments of white snowpack fade into the black.

Hale didn’t breathe, or think. Coils of intenser blackness were moving, far away down there, like gleams of reflected absence-of-light on vast shoulders and ribs and thighs. The mountain wasn’t tall enough to encompass the downward distance Hale’s gaze seemed to be plumbing—he must be looking down into the heart of the earth. He became aware of two spots of a blackness so absolute that he had to look away, dazzled, fearing that he would blind himself by staring straight into them; and then he was glad that he had looked away, and he clung even more tightly to the quivering rope, for he realized that the two astronomically distant orbs of blackness were eyes.

Wisps of radiant vapor flicked up past his face, but he knew they indicated no heat below—he guessed they were simply the chunks of ice and snow that had fallen in, twisted by tidal forces until their very molecules had been wrung apart and the atoms dispelled in all directions.

Hale’s own eyes were blinded by frozen tears. Even though he was not looking down into the pit, he could feel the attention of the thing down there stretching his identity.

What was down there would unmake him, though afterward the stuff that had been him would fly away into the sky here, into the upper air, perhaps to trouble radio broadcasts with idiot recitations of nursery rhymes.

Pot’s right, no more bets, showdown.

The Destroyer of Delights, the Sunderer of Companies, “he who layeth waste the palaces and peopleth the tombs”—call it Death, call it the Devil who had brought Death to Adam and Eve. I was afraid because I was naked, and I hid myself. He would never be found, if he hid here. He needn’t fire the derringer at all.

Lay down your losing hand, he told himself, and forfeit everything.

A line from Rupert Brooke echoed in his head: And I should sleep, and I should sleep. How much longer could he have been expected to keep on being Andrew Hale, alone?

It would be easy to free himself from the rope and plummet down to what waited; and in this vertiginous instant it seemed to be inevitable. I’ve lost my father, I’ve lost Elena—I can save Theodora the trouble of verifying me, and lose myself, at last. Already one of his hands, without his volition, had shucked its mitten and crawled to his waist, and was clutching the carabiner snap-ring. One squeeze of the spring-loaded gate, and then all he would have to do would be shift his weight to one side or the other.

He had been aware of Mammalian’s voice shouting at him, as if from the other side of the sky, but now he heard a phrase— for God’s sake, man!

And it seemed as if he could hear him because Hale had surfaced from deep, cold water. His throat could now open at last in surrender to the insistence of his lungs, and he was breathing in great gasps while his lips formed unvoiced syllables; and when he made himself listen to what he was saying, he heard, hallowed be Thy name, Thy kingdom come, Thy will be done…

Hale strained to raise his head, blinking and squinting to see around the frozen tears. He was just able to lift his head high enough to make out Mammalian, sitting twenty feet away in the snow on the far side of the fissure. “What?” shouted Hale to him, in a rusty voice.

“Do you want to live, or die? Please be honest.”

One more bet, after all. Double or nothing.

Hale bared his teeth at him before letting his head drop back down. “To live, Hakob.” He could feel that his innermost shirt was slick with sweat.

“Then go ahead and unsnap your harness,” Mammalian called to him patiently, “but then grab the line again, and crawl backward.” Hale’s hand was already on the carabiner, and now he squeezed the gate and freed himself from the link lashed to the rope; instantly his hand was back on the rope, and with infinite care he pushed himself backward, feeling his knees slide back up the slope behind him, inch by inch, until the edge of the ice crevasse was under the heels of his hands and he was able to crawl back across the glacier surface on all fours.

Then strong hands had grabbed him under the arms and pulled him back up the slope. He saw the shaft of an ice-axe standing up from the snow, and the taut uphill length of the rope was looped around it and then moored to a piton that had been hammered into the ice a yard away—clearly the Spetsnaz behind him had managed to use the axe as an anchor, and had then protected the mooring with the piton. Several of the commandos were on this side of the crevasse now, and Hale could see by their tracks in the snow that they had freed themselves from the lead section of the rope and walked around the uphill side of the hole.

Their faces were snow-dusted white masks below the crusted lenses of the snow-goggles, no more human-looking than their steel and nylon equipment, and Hale quickly pulled his own goggles up into place to hide behind a similar mask.

The rope was still bent sharply into the hole—Philby was hanging at the low point in the middle, and he was upside-down. All Hale could see of him was the baggy knees of his white climbing pants.

A new rope had been spliced onto the old one on this side, and now four of the Spetsnaz held it taut while another of them pried up the piton. Then they were slowly feeding the newly extended rope out, hand over hand, while their companions on the far side of the hole pulled the other end in; Philby’s knees began to wobble away, toward where Mammalian sat.

The Spetsnaz who had levered the piton out of the ice now scuffed across the snow to Hale and stared at him through white-powdered snow-goggles. Then he pointed from Hale to himself and waved back along the tracks that led around the crevasse to the other men on the far side. “Hah?”

Hale nodded.

The two of them trudged uphill and along the crest of the glacier for several yards, and then back down to the snowy lee side. The Spetsnaz was leading, and by pointing he conveyed to Hale that they were to follow the already trodden track, presumably to avoid another collapse—which would be fatal, since the two of them were unroped at the moment. Hale nodded to show that he understood, but reflected that the bit of ice that had given way under Philby had already been walked over by ten pairs of boots. Like the Russian ahead of him, Hale walked in a tense crouch, with his ice-axe half-raised in his right hand.

By the time they got to where Mammalian was now standing, Philby had been drawn to the crevasse lip and pulled up onto the snow.

Mammalian glanced at Hale, and just from the set of his mouth Hale could tell that he was frowning. “Do you need a pill, a stabilizing drug?” Mammalian called to him. “It looked from here as though you were suffering from ‘abrupt insanity’—trying to free yourself in order to drop down into the hole.”

“Optical illusion,” Hale assured him, speaking loudly enough to be heard over the wind. But in fact he suspected that it had been a supernaturally induced temptation that had seized him as he had hung over the gulf. And when the choice had finally been between breath and death, Hale had found himself saying the Our Father.

Certainly he didn’t want to talk about it now, and he looked away from Mammalian.

The commandos on the far side of the crevasse had walked back around and were laying the rope out across the snow on this side— to let the fibers relax, Hale guessed. Philby was lying on his back and panting steam like a locomotive, his drogue stone upright in the snow beside his head.

In Berlin in 1945, after Hale had crashed that truck back onto the western pavement of the Brandenburg Square and he and Elena had run back to the restaurant where they had met Philby earlier, Elena had asked Hale, But do you imagine that you are an atheist, still?He had said he didn’t know, and she had said that he was not honest. Had she been right, had he simply not wanted to admit that he was at core still a believing Catholic? It was a terrible thing to admit, freighting an already difficult world with supernatural responsibilities and consequences. Was he actually admitting it now? The idea of facing some kind of judgment for the actions of his life set his heart thudding with an extra dimension of terror.

The Spetsnaz commandos had lifted sections of the rope and were lashing themselves onto it, and one of them marched over and clicked the first moored carabiner onto Mammalian’s belt; then he glanced at the men near Philby and barked something in Russian.

Philby was hoisted to his feet, and he managed to limp over to Mammalian and Hale. His face was beet red under the glittering snow-goggles, and Hale was suddenly afraid that the man might have a stroke or a heart attack right here.

“Are you all right?” Hale asked him quietly, having to speak directly into his face to be heard. “You could call for a rest. It can’t be near noon yet.”

Philby just shook his head, swinging the drogue stone that hung at his chest.

A moment later Philby and Hale had been snapped into their places in the line, and one of the Spetsnaz said something to Mammalian.

“Now we descend the Parrot glacier,” the Armenian told Hale, “to the ledge on which rests the Ark itself. The way is treacherous, and our Russians will cut steps in the ice for us.”

The men in the front of the line began walking over the snow, stepping carefully up onto the shelves where the glacier had buck-led, and eventually it was Philby’s turn to move. He seemed to stride forward easily enough, and Hale fell into step behind him.

Hale touched the lump under his parka that was the derringer. Soon now, he thought. Should I be praying?

Though the helicopter that swept through the Seyhli valley east of Dogubayezit was painted mottled gray-and-white to match the sky, and bore no markings, by its sleek lines it was recognizable as a French Aerospatiale Alouette III—but the same model had been purchased by the military operators of many nations, including nearby Syria; and in any case it was racing over the grasslands at a height of only a hundred feet, and was not likely to show up on Turkish radar, nor to have been noted by anyone but the taciturn Kurdish mountain tribes when it had crossed the Turkish border in the remotest wastes of the Zagros Mountains to the south. It had taken off an hour ago from the bed of a truck outside Khvoy, in the desolate northwest corner of Iran, and two seven-tube 70-millimeter rocket launchers were mounted low on either side of the fuselage.

Acquisition and equipping of this particular helicopter, and transporting it to Khvoy, had taken the SDECE more days than it should have, but Elena Teresa Ceniza-Bendiga had insisted on the Alouette III—three years ago one of these aircraft had made successful landings and takeoffs at a height of nearly 20,000 feet in the Himalayas, in mid-winter. She had, after all, no idea how high up the slopes of Ararat the Rabkrin team intended to climb.

She sat on the corrugated-steel deck beside the armament control panel in the stripped cargo bay, rocking with the sharp lifts and descents of the racing helicopter, puffing a Gauloise.

The departure of the Rabkrin team from Beirut three nights ago had taken the SDECE by surprise; Elena had been monitoring the surveillance by radio from a motor yacht off the north Beirut shore, for since the night of January 12 she had not dared set foot in the city.

On the evening of the seventh she had encoded and tapped out a message to SDECE headquarters in the Quai d’Orsay in Paris, saying that Philby’s defection offer appeared to be genuine, accompanied as it was by all the authentic signs of confusion and dislocated pride that one looked for in a ripely breaking defector; but then she had not been able to speak to Philby again until five days later, when he went into the Khayats Bookshop on Avenue Bliss, momentarily alone. He had been evasive then, too hearty in his greeting, and all the caution-warnings in her head had sounded when he proposed meeting her that night at the Pigeon Grotto cliffs.

She had kept the assignation, but she brought along a full covering team of SDECE street-play experts—known as gamins des rues—and she stood on the inland side of the street, on the entry steps of Yazbeck’s all-night pharmacy. And even against the back-drop of a public building, she had been shot at.

She had made sure to maintain a six-foot distance from every pedestrian, and, on the frail theory that a sniper required two full seconds to bring the crosshairs of a telescopic sight to bear on a target, she had been moving constantly, with many abrupt about-faces. In such a crowded, public place, with the whole Rabkrin team still in town, any kind of full-automatic fire seemed ruled out. Her legs were twitching with the urge to tap out one of the old clochard nothing-right-here rhythms, but she was afraid that such a move would hide her from Philby’s notice, if he did show up.

She had been wearing body-armor under her coat, and her hat weighed ten pounds with the steel-and-resin-and-ceramic laminate of its low-hanging crown—but this was as perilous a game as tightrope-walking, and she made herself do it mainly in atonement for having prematurely tried to shoot Philby eleven nights earlier, on the evening of New Year’s Day. Surely this ordeal, putting herself in the way of a bullet, was adequate penance!

A rifle bullet would have penetrated any of her protections—but by standing on the inland side of the street she had apparently disrupted any plans for placement of a rifle, and so it was just three fast 9-millimeter handgun rounds that hammered her hat and punched her twice in the spine. The impacts threw her forward onto her hands and knees on the sidewalk, but the gamins des rues were on her in an instant, and dragged her limp body into the pharmacy. The body armor had kept the bullets from reaching her, but the shot to the head had stunned her.

She had been bundled into the backup vehicle, a flower-decked hearse, which accelerated away to a boat dock by the Place Côte d’Azur south of the city. Philby’s status was switched from exfiltration-target to a proposed assassination-target; but orders for an assassination would have to come from the Quai d’Orsay, and anyway Elena had been the only assassination-qualified SDECE agent in Beirut, and she was ordered to control the stalled operation from a boat in the north-shore marina.

Philby had moved furtively after that, and the Rabkrin team had set up a protection cordon around his apartment building on the Rue Kantari, and the apartment’s curtains were always drawn.

Andrew Hale had been kept even more secluded by the Rabkrin, after his arrest for public drunkenness on the morning of the eighth.

It appeared that Hale really had defected to the Rabkrin side; Claude Cassagnac had been killed at Hale’s house in England three and a half weeks ago, and the SIS stations really did have Hale on their urgently-detain lists all over the Middle East. The cover identity the Rabkrin had given him must have been very solid, to get him through a sûreté interrogation. Oddly, the SDECE had not been able to get a transcript of the interrogation from the police.

According to protocol, she would also need authorization from the Quai d’Orsay to kill Hale—if she proposed doing it in Beirut. But the counter-Ararat operation had already been approved, and it included a provision that all members of the Rabkrin team might be killed, if they made it onto the slopes of Mount Ararat.

Elena had requested the Alouette III, with specific modifications, and she told the SDECE to get the French diplomatic corps to work on calling in favors from the Iranian Pahlavi government—the helicopter needed to be trucked to some remote spot in the northwest corner of Iran, near the eastern Turkish border.

The Iranian government had been hard to convince—a national election was scheduled for the twenty-sixth, and the progressive White Revolution party didn’t want to provide any excuses for anti-Western sentiments—and so the helicopter, and the peculiar warheads in its four-nozzle 70-millimeter rockets, had not been ready and in place until the twenty-second; and on the very next night the Rabkrin team had surreptitiously left Beirut.

From the rain-swept deck of the yacht, Elena had actually seen one member evacuated.

Beirut had been a neon blur through the sweeping veils of rain on that night, and from the crackling speaker of her radio in the main cabin she listened to her surveillance agents out there in the city complaining about stalled cars and flooded intersections. They had lost Philby, but hoped to regain contact at a dinner he was going to that night at the house of the First Secretary of the British Embassy. Immediately after that transmission she had heard a motorboat laboring through the storm surf outside, and she had snatched up her binoculars, unlocked the cabin door and gone swaying out onto the deck.

She had barely been able to see the boat through the rain. It had been a flat-bottom inflatable Bombard rescue-craft with an outboard motor at the stern, and it was showing no lights. As she watched, the ponderous rubber boat rocked over the low waves and slid up the beach below the Normandy Hotel.

The Normandy was where the Rabkrin team had been staying.

Dimly in the reflected glow from the hotel windows she had seen two figures waiting on the beach; one of them got into the boat, and then it was pushed away, back into the whirling surf.

She had gone back inside and picked up the radio microphone. “I think your target won’t show up at the dinner,” she told the surveillance team. “I think he’s bolted. I think they all have.”

She had poured herself a glass of brandy then, for the Rabkrin team appeared to be on its way, after all, to Mount Ararat. The SDECE force had failed to stop the Soviet operation in Beirut, and she had not turned Philby—but the Alouette III was at last in place in Khvoy, and within a couple of days Philby and Hale would both be on the mountain.

She wondered if she had meant things to work out this way all along.

The Rabkrin party would climb to Noah’s Ark—and then all of the witnesses of her shames would be together in one place: the djinn with whom she had participated in the deaths of her men in the Ahora Gorge in 1948, Kim Philby who had heard her secrets and been permitted into her bed, and Andrew Hale, whom she had loved.

The 70-millimeter rockets in the seven-tube rocket launchers were cyclotol explosive packed in shells lathed from Shihab meteoric steel. A barrage of them should take care of everyone.

In her earphones now she heard the helicopter pilot say, “Une dizaine minutes.” Ten minutes or so to target. Out the port windows she could see through the ground mists the white south shoulder of Ararat, still twenty miles away. She threw her cigarette onto the helicopter deck and ground it out under the toe of her boot; then she turned to the armament control panel and clicked up the switch that armed the rocket launchers. The green STANDBY light went out, and the red ARMED light was now glowing, right next to the red that light had all along been indicating that the gun-firing solenoids of the .50-caliber machine guns were activated.

“Montrez-moi,” she said into the microphone by her chin. Show me.

EIGHTEEN: Mount Ararat, 1963

This is a tale of those old fears, even of those emptied hells,

And none but you shall understand the true thing that it tells—

Of what colossal gods of shame could cow men and yet crash,

Of what huge devils hid the stars, yet fell at a pistol flash.

—G. K. Chesterton, To Edmund Clerihew Bentley

One of the Spetsnaz commandos had taken an end of static rope down the lee face of the Parrot glacier slope in a controlled glissade, using the butt end of his ice-axe as a rudder while he slid down the convex snow surface. When he reached the house-sized chunks of tumbled ice at the glacier’s next broad step, fifty yards below, he plowed to a halt and began climbing over the broken serac toward the east, away from the supposed Ark site, while the men up at the top of the slope slowly fed out more rope and the slope between them grew steeper. Hale estimated that the Spetsnaz paid out thirty feet more of the rope. At last the man below waved, indicating that he had found a good place from which to proceed, and the Spetsnaz at the crest walked to a point over him and hammered pitons into the ice for mooring two descending static lines.

Two of the Spetsnaz immediately crouched and lashed themselves to the ropes somehow, and then hopped backward and began descending the ice slope in long, descending bounds.

Mammalian and Philby and Hale were to descend separately. Hale was to go first, and one of the Russian commandos knelt down in the snow with Hale and tied a yard-long looped cord to Hale’s harness carabiner and then tied the free end to the descending rope in a fist-like Prusik knot; and he made Hale practice yanking on the knot and then flicking it upward, to show Hale that the knot would slide down the rope if it was loose but would grip the rope tightly if weight were put on it.

The man gestured down the slope. The wind from the peak was flinging spirals of dry snow against them with increasing force, and it was easy for Hale to lift the cord and slide back and down. His legs slid out from under him in the snow and the cord tightened as he fell to his knees, but a moment later he had got his spiked boots under himself and had done it again, descending a good three yards and landing upright and balanced.

The glacier grew steeper as he progressed downward, and when he was halfway to the bottom, he felt a thrumming in the rope. He looked up and saw that one of the Spetsnaz was leaping and sliding down above him, and Hale began to spring farther out from the ice slope with each jump and to let more of the rope buzz through the Prusik knot before reaching out with his toes to slow down and put weight on it.

At last he was hanging with his boot-spikes dangling a yard above a patch of snow between two truck-sized ice-boulders. One of the Russian commandos standing below him took hold of his boots and pushed him upward, and Hale used the slack to slip the loop of cord right out of his carabiner; then he waved, and when the man let go of his boots Hale dropped and sat down, jamming the barrel of his slung machine gun into the snow.

He got up and stepped away from the rope, trying to peer through his ice-clotted snow-goggles. From the shadows on the west side, another of the Spetsnaz reached out and caught Hale’s hand and drew him along the narrow, back-slanting ledge to a sheltered hollow under an ice cornice. Hale swiped a mitten across his goggle lenses.

The close landscape was all enormous surfaces of black stone and white ice tumbled together at slanting angles, with the wind whistling through it all as if the whole mountain were rushing up into space; there was no ground, and Hale was belatedly nauseated at the thought of having unsnapped himself from the rope to drop the last yard. The empty vault of gray northern sky in front of him was somehow obviously a high-altitude view, and he held on to the carabiner at the front of his harness, automatically blinking around for something to snap it onto.

The Spetsnaz who had led him into the shelter now tugged him farther along the ledge; and mercifully it widened out as it slanted to the left, and after a few scuffing steps for which he had to brace himself with his hands against the stone walls, Hale stepped forward past the Rus sian and hopped down onto the flat ice of a long frozen lake, its surface littered with gravel and chunks of ice like bomb-shattered concrete. The steep mountain shoulder stood up from the ice-lake fifty yards in front of him, with the Parrot glacier blocking the sky ahead of him and to his left; twenty or thirty feet behind him was the margin of the lake and then the infinite void.

He let his gaze rise from the ice-flat to the cliffs that were the body of the mountain, fifty yards away—and then through the veils of snow he saw the black wooden structure that loomed out from the glacier and shadowed that side of the frozen lake, and the only thing that kept him from falling to his knees was the recollection that this was not in fact Noah’s Ark.

The thing was huge, probably six stories tall, and rectangular— more like a long building imbedded in the ice than like any kind of ship. It hung above him out there, viewed almost end-on, and he could see that the underside was flat; the roof, which extended out past the high walls, was nearly flat, with a low peak at the center. The blacker squares of windows fretted the top edge, and a rickety wooden staircase, clearly of newer origin, had been erected across the flat front face and down to the ice.

Snow whirled in dust-devil arabesques across the lifeless ice of the lake below the thing, and in the atonal whistle of the dry wind Hale was sure he heard familiar chords, as if the mountain were a vast Aeolian harp, wringing music from currents that came down raw from the stars. Under it all throbbed an alliance of subsonic tones that resonated unpleasantly in the tiny pulsing focus of Hale’s ribs and made connected thought difficult.

Derringer, he told himself as he stumbled out across the ice; then, in terrified derision and self-contempt, Derringer? I’d do them more harm throwing it at them.

His balance was going—he had to keep glancing at the surface under his boots to assure himself that he was still vertical—and he sat down hard on the ice, resolved at least not to kneel. He clutched the drogue stone that hung in front of him, glad of the cross cut in its face.

From over the shoulder of the mountain, on the side by the Abich I glacier, he heard booming and cracking; and then the earthbound thunder sounded to his right, and he saw that it was the noise of avalanches, galleries and valleys of snow moving down from the heights and separating into fragments, then tumbling and exploding into jagged bursts of white against the remote gray sky before they disappeared below his view.

The cracks and thunders made syllables in the depleted air, but they didn’t seem to be in Arabic. Hale guessed that they were of a language much older, the uncompromised speech of mountain conversing with mountain and lightning and cloud, seeming random only to creatures like himself whose withered verbs and nouns had grown apart from the things they described.

The music was nearly inaudible to Hale’s physical eardrums, but in his spine he could feel that it was mounting toward some sustained note for which tragedy or grandeur would be nearly appropriate words.

Silently in the vault far overhead the clouds broke, and tall columns of glowing, whirling snow-dust stood now around the black vessel, motionless; Hale reflected that it must be noon, for the shining columns were vertical. The mountain and the lake and the very air were suddenly darker in comparison.

The columns of light were alive, the fields of their attentions palpably sweeping across the ice and the glacier face and the mountain, momentarily clarifying into sharp focus anything they touched; for just a moment Hale could see with hallucinatory clarity the woven cuffs of his sleeves.

Angels, Hale thought, looking away in shuddering awe. These beings on this mountain are older than the world, and once looked God in the face.

Which they will never do again, he told himself, and which I may, God willing. Against this spectacle he mentally held up his remembered view of Sainte-Chapelle in Paris, especially as he had seen it in a dream, in which the cathedral had been the prow of a ship laboring through a black ocean.

He rocked forward on the gravel-strewn surface, and by pushing downward with his hands he was able to stand up, shakily.

He looked back toward the gap he had climbed out through, and saw two unsteady figures step down onto the ice—one had a snow-whitened beard, and he knew they were Mammalian and Philby.

A new, louder note grew out of the mountain’s resonance, and resolved itself, incongruously, into the whine of a turbine engine. The sound was droning from the void behind him, and Hale rocked around to look northwest—and he was disoriented to see the nose and glittering edge-on rotor disk of a helicopter hanging out there in the sky. It was growing in apparent size, clearly speeding toward the Rabkrin position.

Even as he watched, two spots of fluttering white glare appeared below the onrushing cabin; but only a moment later the craft was climbing and banking to the east, and the machine-gun slugs blew a vertical series of bursts of white spray from the glacier face and then expended themselves away among the higher ravines as the helicopter, its guns still chattering in the thin air, disappeared with a roar over the mountain shoulder.

It had been one of the new French Aerospatiale Alouettes, and before it disappeared Hale had seen the fasces tubes of rocket launchers slung under the fuselage.

Why hadn’t they fired the rockets?

Probably they would on their next pass.

In her earphones the pilot was angrily demanding an explanation for Elena’s abrupt order to veer east.

She ignored him and clung to a stanchion on the port bulkhead, staring through eyes blinded with tears at the two accusing red lights on the armament control panel.

She had switched on the machine guns as the aircraft had climbed up for a sweep, and her finger had been poised over the button that would have sent a volley of rockets into the grotto where the obscene black structure protruded from the glacier and the tiny figures of the men were so conveniently clustered; but one lone figure had been out on the frozen lake, struggling to its feet—and she had somehow recognized the posture.

It had been Andrew Hale, and in another moment the shattering tracks of the machine-gun patterns would have stitched right over him.

Into her head had flashed an image of his bloody hand outside the garret window in Paris, when the Gestapo had been within seconds of breaking down the door, and she had heard again his voice in Berlin saying, I will not say good-bye ever.

And reflexively she had ordered the pilot to veer hard east. The move had required that they climb steeply, and in a moment the aircraft had flown right up over the glacier. But she believed the tracks of the bullets had missed Andrew Hale.

Out the starboard window she watched the clouds keep wheeling past—clearly the pilot was coming around for another pass.

And she remembered that the pilot too had an armament control panel on his instrument board.

Mammalian was shouting, but his voice barely reached Hale. “The angels must think the helicopter was ours! Approach them, quickly!”

Philby, propelled by a push from Mammalian, was lurching blindly out across the ice toward Hale. And Hale could feel the man’s approach in his mind, could feel the agitation of Philby’s fears and jangled memories aligning themselves with his own to form some bigger, other mind.

Father, where are you? I’m your son—we’re your sons, we’re your son—

The inhuman music of the sky seemed to respond, and the dust-devils of snow were dancing over the ice. The smell of metallic oil on the icy air was exotic, exciting.

I will not have this, Hale made himself think. I will not be the restored half of Kim Philby. God help me. Hale bit the mitten off of his right hand and thrust his hand into the deep pocket of his parka.

Behind him sounded the abrupt ripping roar of full-automatic gunfire. Hale spun on the ice, crouching and blinking through the frosted lenses of his goggles—but the gunfire was not aimed out toward himself and Philby. Mammalian was shooting at the Spetsnaz commandos.

Hale choked out an involuntary whimper as he turned back to face the Black Ark on the far side of the ice.

And it wasn’t a black wooden structure overhanging the ice now. The stone flank of the mountain was soaring obsidian arches and columns, and the ice cornices against the sky were gone, replaced by minarets shining in the sun, and the clouds were higher terraces and balconies of milky crystal, mounting away to the zenith. The towers of light stood in parallel out on the broad ice-paved square, each one wide as a house and taller than the mountain’s peak, and the crescendo of their inorganic singing was shaking clouds of snow from the high glacier crest and calling up answering verses in the mind that was Hale and Philby.

A cold white light was shining out of the high windows of the black structure, flowing out of it, to join the columns of living sunlight.

Hale felt his mouth drop open, and he could feel Philby’s mouth opening in the same moment, though Philby was twenty feet behind him; and now the welcoming towers of light had overlapped and entwined to become a figure whose brightness was nearly intolerable to human retinas—in the corona of glare, Hale could make out molten golden shoulders, a chest as deep as the Ahora Gorge, a vast face shining with challenge—

Hale felt Philby’s knees buckle, and so Hale was kneeling too, helplessly, his kneecaps thudding against the pebbled ice. The golden angel was tall, leaning down over them because it would crack the sky if it stood up to its full height—

If he had not withstood the stressful attention of djinn many times before, Hale’s identity would simply have imploded under the psychic weight, dimly grateful for the escape into oblivion; as it was, he was able to hold on to his diminished self, but the urge to surrender to this nearly divine being, this higher order, was over-whelming. To oppose his will to this force would simply be to shatter his will, shatter his very reason. I will give in to it was his concussed thought; live in the kingdoms in the clouds, learn their secrets, share their power over men—

But his mouth was suddenly sour with the taste of the imaginary bread he had eaten with the king of Wabar in 1948, and with the taste of the dish he had refused then but had helplessly shared with the djinn in the Ahora Gorge three months later—

—blood and khaki, the SAS men he had led up to their deaths—

Hale’s identity recoiled from the memory, and for one teetering moment his self was his own. He hastily made the sign of the cross, clanking the derringer barrel against his snow-goggles as he shouted, “In the name of the Father!” out into air that was incapable now of carrying any merely human voice—and then he pointed the blunt little steel barrel up at the angel—

And he pulled the trigger.

Even as he did it, his mind screamed in protesting grief and loss. What you might have had—!

In slow motion his fist moved up with the recoil, and a churning smear of fire hung in the air. He thought he heard a groaning wail from far behind him—it might have been Mammalian’s voice, Dopplered down to a bass register.

Slow as a flight of arrows the shot pattern was spreading out as it rushed up into the sky, its pattern rotating to the right as it expanded. The light of the towering figure became the enormous flare of an explosion, but Hale levered back the hammer of the little gun and fired the second shell. Again the shot sped visibly through the billowing air, like an expanding wheel turning.

Then with a shearing scream the hot shock-wave punched him over backward, and he was sliding north, skating on the barrel of his slung Kalashnikov, toward the edge of the abyss. He was lying on his back, and he spasmodically arched his body to press his weight down onto the crampons laced to his boots. The grating of the points in the ice vibrated in his shinbones, and in seconds he had bumped to a halt against someone’s legs.

The air was agonizingly shrill with the prolonged whistling scream. Hale’s ribs and legs were being hammered with stony missiles, and his exposed face stung with abrading sand; the lenses of his goggles had been cracked into star-patterns by the blast, and he clawed them off before these ferocious gusts could punch the glass wedges into his eyes.

He rolled over to protect his face from the flying debris—perhaps an avalanche had crashed down into the grotto, though he couldn’t see why it should keep on bursting this way—and his hand closed on the upright head of an ice-axe imbedded in the ice. Philby had arrested his own slide, and Hale’s too, by unslinging the axe and driving its point into the surface of the frozen lake.

Balls were rolling and clicking around on the ice by Hale’s hand, and he picked up a golf-ball-sized one and squinted at it in the dimmed daylight—the thing was made of ice, and egg-shaped. It was the shape of djinn death.

Hale hunched around under the battering rain of ice, and saw that Philby’s face was bloody—one of the flying hailstones had apparently struck him. Hale grabbed the carabiner at Philby’s belt and began tugging him back toward the tumbled stones at the east edge of the lake. But Philby was clinging to the shaft of the ice-axe, and Hale had to get up onto his knees in the shotgun wind and throw his weight onto the shaft to rock it loose from the ice; and when Philby’s anchor had tumbled flat to the ice, unmoored now, Philby turned his goggles toward Hale and then appeared to comprehend Hale’s gestures.

The two of them began crawling back across the ice. Hale was grateful for the flat surface, because his balance was gone—from moment to moment he felt that the frozen lake was tilting out over the void, or folding in the middle to spill him down into the black abyss where Death still waited for him, but he forced himself to judge his position only by what he could see between his hands below his face, and he could see that he was not sliding across the ice surface. The razory whistling seemed to be the shrieks of predatory birds.

Tears were freezing on his face, and he had to keep rocking around to look over his shoulder, to be sure Philby was still crawling along behind him through the rain of ice and gravel.

In heavy gusts Hale had to pause and brush aside the tumbling eggs to see the surface of the ice under him; after one burst that nearly knocked him over onto his side, Hale saw that some of the skittering balls were marbled red-and-yellow, and broke in red smears across the ice when he brushed them aside, and he knew that the body of at least one of the Rabkrin party had shared in the expression of djinn death.

At last Hale climbed up over the tumbled ice chunks at the eastern end of the lake, and when he had pulled Philby through the narrow gap onto the slanted ledge, they were protected from most of the grapeshot barrage of ice. Hale banged the barrel of his Kalashnikov against the rock and shook snow and ice out of the muzzle.

The air was still shaking with a shrill infinity of whistling and crashing, and Hale had to lean down and shout into Philby’s face: “Back to the ropes!”

Philby’s eyes were invisible behind the snow-goggles and his face was a mask of frozen blood, but he nodded.

A flash of white glare threw Hale’s shadow across the slanted ice ahead of them, and an instant later the mountain shook under his knees and a whiplash of stone fragments abraded the exposed surfaces. Hale’s eyes were stung, and he fell back against the bulk of Philby, and in his mind he was again curled up in a London gutter in 1944 when a V-1 rocket had struck nearby.

The helicopter must have come back for a second sweep, and fired the rockets this time.

Calling on the last reserves of his strength now, Hale straightened up and tugged Philby up onto his hands and knees and then dragged the man along the ledge toward where the static ropes hung. Hale’s eyes were watering and burning, and he peered forward with his eyelids nearly shut.

The ledge narrowed and the wind from behind was a fluttering airflow pressure between Hale and the rock wall he was trying to hug, and he had to let go of Philby’s collar and hope the man would crawl along behind him. At last Hale scuffed around the last outcrop on his right and saw one of the swaying ropes ahead.

Two of the Spetsnaz commandos were crouched against the wind on the ledge by the rope, holding their Kalashnikovs across their knees, and at the sight of Hale one of them straightened up and began firing from the hip.

The shock-wave of the shots thudded in Hale’s ears and he saw stone fragments bursting from the rock wall to his right—and in the old Bedu reflex he yanked up the barrel of his own gun and squeezed the trigger.

His burst blew the front of the man’s parka into a haze of flying kapok shreds, and Hale immediately edged the vibrating barrel over to cover the second man, who spun away in another cloud of white lint. Both bodies tumbled out away from the rock wall and disappeared below, toward God-knew-what glacier or moraine. The gun had stopped jumping in his hands, the magazine emptied, and he uncramped his finger from the trigger. Ejected brass shell-casings rolled on the ledge.

Apparently some recognition signal had been required, and Hale had not given it.

Hale looked back. Philby had managed to unsling his own white Kalashnikov, and he had it pointed at Hale’s back; but as Hale watched, he lowered it and then pulled the sling over his head, with the white rifle barrel poking up over his left shoulder. He spread his hands.

Hale nodded and then sidled over to the ledge below the rope. Both ropes were still there, but one of them had been blown up by the wind and was now looped over a stone spur twenty feet overhead and to the left; the end of the other one swayed at the level of Hale’s eyes. He gripped the end with both hands and tugged, but he knew he didn’t have the strength to pull himself up hand over hand.

He squinted at the bumpy stone wall, trying to look for hand and footholds and to ignore the lines of red drops, which had already frozen over; and at last, not roped to anything, he fitted his left foot into a crack in the rock face and then kicked himself up to grip an outcrop with his left hand. He scuffed his right foot against the stone, trying to find a purchase for the front point of his crampons, and then he felt Philby take hold of his calf and lift his foot to a solid projection. Hale straightened his right leg, and now he was high enough to reach out with his right hand and catch the rope.

His Prusik knot—or somebody’s—still hung on the rope, down at the level of his thigh; he hiked his hand down the length of the rope until he was able to grab the knotted cord, and he was careful to slide it back up the rope gently, so that it would not tighten. The icy wind battered against his face and his unprotected eyes. When he had worked the knotted cord up to a point level with the carabiner at the front of his harness, he pulled the rope in and with numbed fingers held it against the snap-link while he thumbed open the spring-loaded gate.

After a full minute of fumbling and cursing into the wind and trying to blink past the ice that was frozen onto his eyelashes, while the fingers of his numbed left hand cramped and stung as they gripped the rock outcrop behind him, he got the loop of the Prusik knot into the carabiner link, and then he let his weight sag against the rope, bracing himself on the rock wall with his crampons and letting his aching arms hang.

“D-damn you!” shouted Philby from below him. “What about m-m-me?”

“I’ll free the other rope,” called Hale. “Don’t shoot me.” Hale flapped his arms and flexed his constricted fingers, then began climbing up toward the point from which he would be able to reach the snagged rope; he quickly caught the trick of leaning forward to give the Prusik knot slack when he wanted to pull himself up and then leaning away from the rock when he wanted it to belay him.

When he had grabbed the other rope, he pulled the whole length of it across to him, coiling it loosely over his lap, and he saw that several of the Prusik-knotted cords were hung along the last yard of it; but before he let it all drop down to where Philby waited, he unsnapped the front of his parka to reach into an inner pocket. Very carefully he pulled out a box of .410 shot shells, and he gripped the brass of two of them between his teeth and pulled them out as he closed the box and tucked it away; then he reached into the outer pocket and drew the derringer. He pushed the button behind the exposed trigger and swiveled the locking lever around in a half-circle and swung the hinged barrels up away from the frame. He pushed up the extractor and lifted the spent shells out of the barrels, then took the fresh shells from between his teeth and fitted them into the barrels. At last he closed the gun and locked it and replaced it in his pocket, along with the two spent shells.

“Here!” he yelled, letting the rope spill off his legs to hang slack down the rock face a yard to his left. He peered down past his legs at Philby’s upturned face.

“Is it long enough?” shouted Hale.

“Yes!” came Philby’s call from below.

Thank God. Hale had not wanted to try cutting and splicing it. “Fit the bight of a knot into your snap-link!”

“Aye aye,” shouted Philby.

Within ten minutes they were both sitting cross-legged, panting, on the wind-swept crest of the Parrot glacier. They had pulled up one of the ropes and freed it from its piton, and now it lay coiled beside Hale. It was an unwieldy pile. He had unslung his Kalashnikov and fitted a fresh magazine into the receiver in case the helicopter might reappear, but the racing wind had not abated since he had shot the djinn by the Black Ark, and he didn’t think the aircraft would dare approach the mountain now.

Philby swung his frosted, blood-blackened face toward Hale, and his eyes were invisible behind the sky glare on the goggle lenses. “Shoot the other rope,” he said, loudly to be heard over the wind.

Hale thought of Hakob Mammalian, conceivably still alive down there on the northern face, making his wounded way to the ledge and finding both the static lines gone. “No,” he called back to Philby, wearily standing up and slinging his gun. He bent down to pick up the coil of rope, then straightened with it and began plodding up the crest, toward the windward side of the glacier. “Come on, the sun’s past noon.”

From behind him he heard Philby say, “D-damn you! Then I’ll d-do it.”

Hale spun clumsily around, his crampons grating on the ice as he dropped the coiled rope, and Philby was standing, and had already unslung his own Kalashnikov and was lifting it to his shoulder.

The derringer felt extraordinarily heavy in Hale’s right hand as he drew it and raised it to point it at Philby’s back, and cocking the hammer against its tight spring seemed to take all of his remaining strength.

Am I my brother’s keeper?

Philby was aiming, and had not fired yet.

Hale touched the derringer’s trigger with his forefinger, and the little gun flared and hammered back hard into his palm.

Then his knees hit the snow, and Hale was simply too exhausted to try to re-cock the derringer or raise the barrel of his machine gun.

Through watering eyes he peered past the retinal glare at the silhouette of Philby.

The man had fallen to one knee, and his head was down, and he was making a noise, a flat monotone wail. The voice of thy brother’s blood crieth unto me from the ground, thought Hale, fearful that he might have been standing too close to him. How wide would the shot pattern have spread in twelve feet?

“Are you dying?” Hale croaked. He blinked around at the infinity of snow. He could melt some between his palms. “I can baptize you.”

Then with a shout of pain Philby had straightened up and turned, and Hale saw that the muzzle of Philby’s Kalashnikov, though wobbling, was pointed straight at him.

“If,” grated Philby, “I t-try again to shoot the r-rope, will you—” He inhaled with a near shriek. “Will you sh-shoot me, again?”

Hale stared through a red haze of exhaustion into the ring of the wavering muzzle. He took a deep breath, wondering if Elena might have been aboard the French helicopter. “Yes,” he said.

Philby’s answering howl was lost in the battering roar of the machine gun, but Hale could see that the muzzle flare was slanted away to the left side of him; and after three deafening seconds the gun stuttered to a ringing halt, its thirty-round magazine emptied.

Then Philby was on his knees in front of Hale, shaking him weakly by the shoulders, and the mouth opened in the frosted black face and Philby was screaming, “I would n-not shoot my own f-family!” The wind was strengthening, flinging clouds of obscuring snow over them and down the slope behind them. Philby fell back, his hands clasped across his chest in evident pain. “C-can we!” he said loudly. “Get down off th-this, to the Cehennem Dere?”

Hale nodded. He recalled that the Spetsnaz had left the piton in the edge of this glacier, between the cornices over the level where the tents had been. He would find the little iron ring, if he had to crawl the whole length of the glacier edge.

The south sides of the tents were nearly buried in fresh snowdrifts, and Hale and Philby had blundered a dozen yards past them in the flying white haze before Hale happened to look back and see the rectangular shapes. He waved to catch Philby’s attention, and pointed back.

Philby had to walk stiffly around in a circle to look back; and then he didn’t nod, but waved his left hand weakly, and began trudging heavily in that direction, leaning into the snowy wind.

Hale tugged his machine gun forward, into the Bedu position— God knew what the response of the two Turks would be to the return of only two of the thirteen men who had gone up the mountain. Ahead of him, Philby laboriously unslung his own machine gun and limped forward carrying it.

Hale peered through nearly blinded eyes at Philby’s back; he thought he could see a couple of the tiny pin-holes where the bird-shot had penetrated, but of course there was no blood visible on this outermost layer of clothing.

“Fuad!” roared Philby as he stepped up to the tent entrance. “Umit! Open up in the n-name of the KGB!”

The wall of the tent fluttered, and then snow was being punched away from the tent entrance from the inside; at last Hale saw yellow lamplight through a vertical slit between rubberized canvas flaps, and a gun muzzle pointed out.

“You m-mad sod,” shouted Philby, “p-put that down. Who d-do you sup-suppose it is out h-here that knows your n-names?”

Enough snow had been shoved away so that the flap could be pulled open, and Philby was a shaggy silhouette against the lamp-light as he blundered inside. Hale pulled his numb feet quickly through the snowdrifts to enter right behind him.

The still air of the tent burned on Hale’s face as he let himself collapse into a sitting position. One of the Turks was at the tent opening, but the other seemed to be closer. Philby fell heavily to his knees and demanded the bottle of arak, and Hale rocked his head in an emphatic nod. Philby had brought his flasks with him onto the mountain, but of course there was the risk that the liquor in them might by now be far below the freezing temperature of water, though still liquid, so that one mouthful would freeze teeth and tongue and throat.

Through his watering, ice-crusted eyes Hale could see only blurry silhouettes and a yellow glow that was the paraffin lamp, but he could make out the shape of one of the Turks standing over him.

“Where are the others?” the Turk asked, his voice ringing in Hale’s ears.

“C-close the tent,” rasped Philby. “Where’s the arak? The others are all d-dead.”

“Dead!” said the Turk, and his suspicious tone made Hale sure that it was Fuad. “Did you kill them?”

“Of course, F-F-Fuad, t-two middle-aged Englishmen k-killed ten spit-spit—fucking—Spetsnaz. The elite so-so-Soviet commandos. You fool.”

Hale could blurrily see the bottle in Philby’s hand—it appeared to have been uncorked, but Philby was simply holding it.

Hale bit off the mitten and liner glove from his right hand, and then reached out clumsily. “Infirm of purpose,” he said hoarsely, “give me the liquor.”

Philby tipped the bottle up to his lips first, and Hale heard gurgling; then the bottle was in Hale’s hand, and he lifted it and swallowed several mouthfuls of the warm, stinging, licorice liquor.

“A F-French helicopter,” said Philby, exhaling, “strafed us, f-fired explosive rah-rah-rockets.” Hale could feel his gaze, and then Philby added, “I c-caught some shrapnel, in my b-back. I’ll w-want medical attention.”

“I’m sure they’ll be ready to treat injuries,” said Hale, “at the air base in Erivan.” You’re crossing the border, remember, Hale thought—you’re defecting now, not going back to Beirut. “You’ve got a flare pistol?”

“In the back!” sneered Fuad. “You did not run as fast as the shrapnel, quite, eh?”

Philby was silent for several seconds, and when he spoke it was to answer Hale. “There’s a f-flare piss-piss- pistol in the tent, y-yes.” Hale heard him shift, and then the bottle was taken out of Hale’s hand. “You w-wouldn’t care to—c-come along? Hero’s w-welcome.”

“In the Workers’ Paradise,” said Hale. The ice was melting off of his eyelids, and he was blinking around to assure himself that he could still see. “No, thank you. I was hired help for this enterprise. This failed enterprise.”

“We c-can’t fire the fluh-flare yet,” said Philby. “Snowstorm. W-wait until they can s-s-see it.”

“I need a pair of snow-goggles,” Hale said.

“The helicopter w-will l-land right here,” said Philby. “Twenty p-paces from the t-tent.”

“And I’ll be gone by then,” said Hale. “If I was to go to Erivan with you, I might not ever get back across. And if I wait here, the Soviet agents might not care to let me just walk away. Which,” he added, “I am going to do as soon as I’ve rested here. Oh, and I’ll want the key to one of the trucks.”

“No spare goggles,” said Fuad with satisfaction.

Philby had pulled back his furred hood and tugged his goggles down below his chin; the top half of his face seemed bone-white in contrast to his blackened mouth and jaw. Now he reached up with both hands and pulled the snow-goggles off over the top of his head; and there was wry humor in his pouchy exhausted eyes as he held the goggles out toward Hale.

“I won’t need them,” he said. “Umit—give him the keys to the Dodge.”

Hale saw Fuad open his mouth to object, then shrug.

Umit crouched by a tin box on the rubber floor and opened it, and when Fuad nodded he tossed a ring to Hale.

“A waste,” said Fuad. “You will surely die before you reach the truck, if you leave now.” His glittering eyes fixed on Hale. “A waste of the truck key, I meant.”

Hale groped for the key, and when he had closed his stinging fingers on it, he carefully dropped it into the pocket with the derringer.

“Let’s put it to the test,” he said.

Philby was smiling sourly at him. “They’ll k-kill you, you know,” he said softly. “Don’t l-look for g-gratitude.”

Fuad and Umit would suppose he referred to the KGB, or the GRU; but Hale knew he meant the SIS, the secret SOE—he meant Jimmie Theodora.

“That had occurred to me,” Hale said. He fitted the snow-goggles over his eyes and the bridge of his nose and began pulling his gloves back on. “I suppose we won’t meet again,” he said to Philby.

“In this world or the next,” Philby agreed. “I can’t say I’m sorry.”

“Certainly not.”

Hale struggled to his feet and pulled the parka hood forward over his head. He reached for the white Kalashnikov, but Fuad was suddenly pointing a revolver at him.

“The machine gun stays here,” said Fuad. “Do you think I would hesitate killing you?”

“I th-think he would n- not hesitate,” said Philby thoughtfully. “Do p-put it to the t-test, if you like.”

After a moment Hale straightened, his hand still empty. “Fair enough,” he said.

He shambled to the tent opening and climbed through, over the mounded snow that still half-blocked it. The wind outside instantly leached out of him all the scanty warmth he had absorbed in the tent, and it was all he could do not to shout with the shock of it.

His course was easy—downhill. The climb back down to the Ahora Gorge would be over broken serac, and should be easy enough if he took it slowly. After that would be just the long walk back down the gorge path, on the other side of the gorge from the path down which he had driven a jeep in reverse in 1948; but this time he would be leaving behind him avenged ghosts.

The snowstorm had faltered to a silent halt before he was out of the gorge, and the wind had shifted around to the north by the time he stumbled up through knee-high green grass to the three trucks on the plain; and when he had climbed into the cab of the Dodge truck and started the engine, he simply sat in the cab with the motor running and the heater blowing hot air at him. After a while he unsnapped his parka and contorted on the seat to pull the heavy garment off, but he did not rouse himself to clank the gear-shift into reverse until he saw, faintly over the high white shoulder of the mountain, the luminous chalk-line of the flare against the gray sky.

The Soviet helicopter would be rushing overhead within minutes. Hale backed the truck around, then shifted into first gear and began steering the truck along a shepherds’ track that stretched away to the east, away from the mountain and Dogubayezit and all of civilization. The Soviet border lay twenty miles ahead, but he did not intend to drive quite that far.

The red sun was hovering over the distant peak of Ararat in his rear-view mirrors when Hale regretfully abandoned the truck in a snow-drift halfway up one of the narrow horse-cart tracks; he got back into his damp parka, climbed down from the heated cab, and proceeded up the steep track on foot, hoping to find the shelter he sought before dark. And though the sun had set by the time he reached the village in the Zagros Mountains, the gray sky was still bright enough for him to recognize the two-story stone house on the narrow main street, and his nostrils flared at the remembered smells of mutton and hot coffee on the icy wind.

Exhaustion robbed his vision of depth, and he stumbled on the cobblestones; but he didn’t fall until he had at last reached the very gate.

He might actually have lost consciousness for a few moments; when he opened his eyes he was lying on his back on the stones, and a white-bearded man in baggy blue woolen trousers and a quilted felt vest was staring down at him. The old man hadn’t unslung the rifle that rode on his back, but one brown hand was on the stock.

“Howkar Zeid,” said Hale hoarsely. In English he added, “How are you?”

“It is Hale Beg!” said the old man wonderingly in the same language. He took his hand from the rifle and crouched to slide one arm under Hale’s shoulders, and then he had effortlessly straightened up, hauling Hale back up onto his feet. “How are you? Where have you come from? How are your children?”

Hale knew that the questions were unthinking formalities, but he said, “I am—tired to death. I’ve come from—Hell, I think. My family is all lost. All lost.” He sighed, though the effort of it nearly cost him his consciousness again. “Siamand Khan said I might come back.” It had been nearly fifteen years ago, but Hale had at last fulfilled the Khan’s request. “I’m early,” Hale added. “He said to come back in the spring.”

Howkar Zeid led Hale through the remembered shadowy hallway to the same broad whitewashed stone room in which Hale had dined with the Khan so long ago. Red and purple rugs shone in the yellow paraffin lamplight, and Hale sat down heavily to unsnap his soggy boots and tug them off before he stood up again and stepped across the dirt-floor threshold.

Siamand Khan was dressed in the same sort of trousers and vest as Howkar Zeid this evening. Hale remembered him as he had looked fifteen years ago, in a Western business suit and an orange scarf around his neck instead of a tie; but Siamand Khan still wore the knitted cap, and his stride was still graceful as he stood up from the long bench that spanned the far wall, and his brown face behind the white moustache was as ferociously cheerful as ever.

“My friend, sit!” he said, taking Hale by the hand and leading him to the middle section of the bench, on which lay so many cushions that Hale was able to rest his arms on them when he had sat down. To Howkar Zeid, the Khan called, “Coffee and cigarettes for our guest! A dish of pears from the cellar!”

Hale’s vision was flickering. “I have just come down from Agri Dag,” he said, his voice just a rasping whisper now. “The angels are killed. The amomon will bloom this spring. If I could—eat, and sleep here tonight—”

“You are nearly used up, my friend,” said the Khan gent ly. “You will stay with us until your strength returns—indeed you will stay until spring. You and I will be able to go hiking in the mountains after all.”

Hale had to keep focusing his eyes to remember where he had come to. When his vision blurred, he seemed again to be dozing over his one-time pads in the janitor’s room on the roof of the house in the Rue le Regrattier, dimly aware that there was an emergency and that he should hurry down the stairs to Elena’s room and awaken her; and he imagined that Jimmie Theodora, black-haired and somehow younger than Hale now, was giving him instructions he should be paying attention to, in the office in Whitehall Court with the candlestick telephones on the wall and the models of airplanes and submarines serving as bookends in the cluttered shelves on the wall; and finally the murmur of the Khan’s words blurred away into the remembered voices of his grandfather and his mother, quarreling about some troubling passage in Scripture, and—in the moments before consciousness left him—he was weakly resolved to climb the narrow old stairs of the house in Chipping Campden and crawl into the old eighteenth-century box bed, and abandon himself at long last to dreamless sleep.