Declare (76 page)

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.