Declare (32 page)

Hale stared back at the blank face sculpted on the steaming and uncollapsing water out there. He didn’t flinch, for he had been up close to this sort of creature before, but he was suddenly so dizzy that he wanted to jump down from the saddle and fall to his knees for sheer steadiness: the mere
fact
of this phenomenon was so incongruous and
wrong
that the landscape around it seemed to fade to a colorless two-dimensional sheet, with no reliable horizontal.

Ishmael muttered, “
Ikh! Khrr, khrr
,” to his camel and tapped her neck with his stick, and the mare obediently folded down onto her knees, lowered her hindquarters to the sand, and then shuffled her knees forward until she was sitting as comfortably as a big cat. Clearly nothing so far had struck the beast as alarming.
Look to dogs, camels don’t react.

Hale’s mount too was calm, and sat down with a leisurely shifting of weight when he had tapped her neck and huskily given her the “
Khrr, khrr
” command.

Ishmael stepped down from the saddle to the sand. His hand brushed the rifle stock that swung by his hip, but he left the weapon slung over his shoulder.

Hale noted the instinctive gesture and bared his teeth behind the flap of his
kaffiyeh
. The rifle could be of no use against something made of water and wind. The makeshift tinfoil ankh would have been a comfort—but he told himself that this djinn was apparently confined to this water, and probably diminished in power.

Ishmael had plodded several steps down the sand slope from the crest, and his robe was suddenly flapping as he stepped into the localized whirlwind. He scowled back over his shoulder at Hale. “Come over here!” he snapped in Arabic.

Hale took a deep breath. “Aye aye,” he said hoarsely in English, boosting himself down from his saddle. The crusty sand was jagged under the soles of his bare feet, and he walked carefully down the
slope to halt beside the old man. He was squinting now against the flying sand.

With a crash that almost made him jump back, the crudely formed eyes and lips broke apart into spray like wave-tops sheared by a gale, and for several seconds the space for ten feet above the pool was blackly opaque with whirling water; it looked like glittering smoke and hissed and crackled like a heavy rainstorm.

The separating and reforming sheets of black water were whipping past only a few yards in front of Hale’s face, and the reek of sulfur filled his head. His knees were shaking—it was a moment-by-moment struggle for him not to break and run away.

Beside him, Ishmael called out in Arabic, “O Fish, are you constant to the old covenant?” Though loud, his voice was thin against the wind.

Abruptly the spray fell back, and the black water was a rushing whirlpool now, with a column of steam spinning above a tapering hole in the center. And from the wobbling hole echoed a deep oily voice like shale plates sliding in a cave:
“Return, and we return,”
it said in Arabic. The funnel of water shook as the steam was sucked down into it, and then the voice said,
“Keep faith, and so will we.”

Hale’s heart was thudding in his chest, and he knew that it was fear that had narrowed his vision and made his fingertips tingle, but with an electric exhilaration he knew too that there was no place on earth where he would rather be right now. He was sure that after this was over he would forget, as he had forgotten before—but in these rare moments of confronting the supernatural he always surprised in himself a craving to
get farther in
, to participate knowledgeably in this perilous, vertiginous,
most-secret
world.

Irregular ridges like spokes whirled around the gleaming hole now, giving the pool the appearance of a rapidly turning black glass wheel. Again the big voice rang the air:
“Is this… the son?”

Ishmael croaked, “You tell me, O Djinn.”

With another crash the water exploded as if something big had plummeted into it, and when it had fallen back like glittering coal it smoothed out into the crude amphibian-like head again, veiled with hissing bursts of steam. In the silt-streaked swell the two gleaming
black domes stared straight into Hale’s eyes, with nothing but fixed attention. While the thing was focusing on him in this way, Hale’s thoughts were a fluttering scatter of speculation and alarm and excitement, like a radio receiver picking up too many bands at once.

The two lip-like ridges separated with a splash, and from the yard-wide gap between them the
basso profundo
voice sang to Hale,
“O man, I believe you are the son.”
White clouds of steam blasted away into the blue sky with each syllable.

Hale couldn’t think of anything to say—but he was able to recall the old rule,
Never startle them, never reason with them
—and so he simply echoed Ishmael. “You tell me, O Djinn.”

Ishmael was speaking again, desperately: “We think he is. He will tonight be flying west over the sands, to the western sea. Your brothers and sisters are awake, but they will not approach him—”

The black globes collapsed and then bulged up from the convex surface again, and when they had cleared of silt they were palpably focused on the old man, and Hale was once more able to think. Whose son did they believe he was? Did they mean it literally? Could the Rabkrin, and this elemental creature, know something of Hale’s actual father?—but a moment later he was distracted by the flat crack of a rifle shot behind him; and as he turned to look back he heard two more shots.

The five mounted Bedu were looking away from the spring, toward the southeast, and Hale saw that bin Jalawi had the BAR rifle in his hands. Looking beyond them, Hale was able to see on that horizon a cluster of moving dots that were mounted men, not mirage.

If the strangers were friendly, they would soon be waving their head-cloths in the air and then dismounting to toss up handfuls of sand.

So far they were not doing it. “

’Al-Murra?” asked Hale nervously, unable to keep himself from glancing back at the pool. The bulbous approximations of eyes and lips had broken up into churning random shapes below the curls of vapor. “Manasir?”

“As much as our party is Mutair, probably,” Ishmael said in a flat
voice. “But they’re KGB—or conceivably Mossad, or the French SDECE. We have no time.” He tugged back the fluttering flap of his
kaffiyeh
, and his exposed face was gray. “Bin Jalawi!” the old man shouted.

Hale’s friend looked away from the unknown riders, toward the pool, and goaded his camel into a fast walk this way when Ishmael beckoned.

Ishmael’s raised arm swept down with surprising weight onto Hale’s shoulder, turning him back around to face the djinn in the pool.

“Say ‘I break it now,’ ” the old man hissed in Hale’s ear.

Hale crouched, clawing the sand and digging in with his toes— for an instant he thought he was about to fall into the pool—and then he realized that the nearest ten-foot quadrant of it had tilted up more than forty-five degrees, like a slanted glass bunker wall. Steaming black spray was fringing away along the rounded top and sides of the raised section of water, and as he watched, the smoothly convex surface began churning in a dozen concave vortices.

Hale straightened up dizzily, but Ishmael’s hand was bearing down on his shoulder.

“Kneel,” said Ishmael’s voice urgently.

The vortices deepened into holes like clarinet bells, and as steam puffed out of the deep chambers, a dozen deep voices in unison said,
“My name is Legion. Worship us.”
Two, then three of the holes combined into a bigger one.

Break it now
, Hale thought as his heart thudded like a hammer in his chest. You’ve been coat-trailing for the opposition, and it’s worked, they’ve been fooled so far, they’ve picked you up. They’ve at least provisionally bought into your role as a renegade ex-Declare agent. Live your role, “Know, not think it.” And…

And it would be membership, initiation, a way to get leagues
farther in!
What on earth—or above it or under it!—might you not learn, and become able to do, if you obey this creature or cluster of creatures and kneel to it, prostrate yourself before it? What kingdoms in the clouds…

To his own surprise Hale realized that he had not even shifted the
weight on his bare feet; and a moment later he knew coldly that he was not going to obey.

Ishmael had stepped back, to Hale’s right, and at a glimpsed glint of silver in the old man’s hand Hale turned toward him. Ishmael was holding an American .45 Army Colt automatic pistol pointed straight at his face.

“Kneel, damn you,” Ishmael snarled.

Don’t worry about anything
, C had told him in 1929, when Andrew Hale had been seven years old.
You’re on our rolls.
And that had been the very day of Hale’s first Holy Communion, when he had consumed the body and blood of God.

Steam like sulfurous breath touched his left cheek, but from the corner of his eye he could see that the black wall was holding its position for now, ten feet away down the slope.

It had been a .45 for Cassagnac, at the end, out of a revolver. Hale had seen men hit by the .45 slug. It had knocked them right down, breathless and pale and dying.

I am the Lord thy God; thou shalt not have strange gods before Me.

But you don’t
believe
in God anymore! he told himself tensely. You kneel to check the air pressure in a tire, or to open a low dresser drawer—why can’t you kneel here? Finish Operation Declare, redeem the deaths on Ararat, save your own life—

He could hear the hooves of bin Jalawi’s camel, and he heard the stamp-and-slither as bin Jalawi must have seen the uptilted section of the black pool and frantically reined in the camel.

Speak you of the wrath of God?
bin Jalawi had asked angrily on the drive down to Magwa.

Hale glanced to his left, squinting down the slope against the sandy whirlwind. All the holes had merged into one yard-wide mouth, and a ring of jagged rocks whirled around its circumference like a wheel of wet tan teeth.

A deep, inorganic voice groaned out of the black-water mouth: “
Adore—us,”
it tolled,
“bin Hajji.”

Hale was still able to think. Bin Hajji meant
son of a pilgrim
, son of a devout Moslem who has made the pilgrimage to Mecca.
Perhaps it was a taunt, a challenge. At the Ham Common camp in ’42, Philby had said,
Our Hajji which art in Amman…

Finally, it was simply impossible to prostrate himself before this unnatural thing in the sight of his old Bedu friend, Soviet tool though the old friend might be.

“I—won’t do it,” Hale said, exhaling. The old man was just a few paces too far away for Hale to have any hope of springing at him and grabbing the gun before it would be fired; and to dive to Ishmael’s right, forcing the old man to swing the barrel out to the side, would be to jump down the slope and right into the spinning mouth. Better to stand still and only
perhaps
die. He looked past Ishmael and the monster, at the infinite extent of the Arabian desert, and he was oddly contented with the possibility that he had come back here at the age of forty to be killed. Elena was long lost to him. “Who is my father?” he asked curiously.

“This is the son,”
groaned the spinning hole in the wall of black water. The whole surface was quivering, and the fringe of steamy spray was flying away, beading up in the sky or kicking up splashes and sand below it, as if flung by centrifugal force.
“This is the Nazrani son.”

Abruptly Ishmael surprised Hale by throwing the gun to him, and then the old man reached inside his robe and pulled out a walkie-talkie-sized radio and yanked up the telescoping antenna.

Hale had caught the gun carefully by the grip, and he half-tossed it to grasp it firmly, his finger outside the trigger guard. He realized that he had been holding his breath, and he began panting. It was all he could do not to point the muzzle, uselessly, at the turbulent wall of water.

“Kill Salim bin Jalawi,” Ishmael snapped. “That’s an order, a condition of employment, a proof of your sincerity.” He twisted a dial on the radio and then cupped his hand around the microphone and began to speak into it quickly in Russian, his eyes on the no-longer-distant riders.

Bin Jalawi knelt atop his camel fifteen paces across the sand toward the south; his voice now was loud and steady, and it must have required courage for the Bedu to speak at all in the terrible
presence of the djinn: “Will you shoot me, bin Sikkah?”

Ishmael gave Hale a fierce nod. For the first time, he seemed more frightened than irritable. Peripherally Hale could see that the ring of stones was spinning more rapidly in the steaming mouth.

Hale laughed dizzily, still doubtful that any of them would live to leave this place. “No, my friend,” he called over the whistling wind to bin Jalawi. And I do wonder if
you
would not shoot
me
, if our positions were reversed, old friend.

Ishmael stared at Hale, then after a moment of open-mouthed hesitation pronounced some flat, clear Russian syllables into the radio, after which he dropped it onto the sand. “There is a ship off the Ras Khabji headland”—he spat out the words in English— “and a helicopter from it is now heading this way, fast, tracing the Al-Maqta stream. It is Rabkrin, get aboard it.” He stepped side-ways to face Hale squarely. “Kill
me
, then,” he said. “I have told them on the radio that you are genuine—the devil confirms your identity, and certainly no SOE infiltrator would have perversely refused my orders—my part of the task is finished. The things of the water demand a life in exchange for their testimony, and we cannot possibly offend any ambassadors of theirs right now—kill me.”