Tim Powers - Declare

Hale was sobbing again as he shoved the.45 back into its holster and released the brake and clanked the gear-shift back into first gear. He saw no more men on the slow drive back down to the plain, and he did not see the horse.

A cold rain began to fall as he drove the jeep across the dark miles of marshy road toward the spot where the Bristol Sycamore helicopter had landed. In the cloud-filtered moonlight he could see nothing on either side of the road except the grim boulders, and he had come to the conclusion that the pilot had flown the helicopter away and that he would have to drive twenty-five miles around the mountain to the town of Dogubayezit in the southwest, over God-knew-what sort of roads-when out of the corner of his left eye he caught a vertical thread of yellow glow in the night.

He stamped on the brake and peered in that direction, but he didn’t see the glow again; he backed the jeep in a wide arc onto the south shoulder of the path, to sweep the area on the opposite side with the headlamp beam-and he caught a gleam of reflected light on metal.

He rocked the gear-shift into first gear and drove slowly forward across the road, and soon recognized the stack of unused bicycles. The helicopter was indeed gone. But though he had not seen the vertical glow again, he knew that it must have shone from the Anderson bomb shelter in the field beyond.

Instantly he switched off the light and the engine; and he hefted the.45 revolver and swung his legs stiffly down out of the jeep and stood up on the muddy grass. As he stole silently toward what he believed was the black hump of the bomb shelter, he saw again the gleam of yellow light, and he realized that it was lamplight inside the shelter, escaping through the gap at the hinge side of the door.

A British voice from the darkness startled him so badly that he nearly pulled the trigger of the revolver: “Drop the g-gun, I’ve got you in my sights. I’ve h-heard you c-coming for the last t-t-ten m-miles.”

Hale didn’t move. “Philby,” he said, trying to speak levelly.

“Is it Andrew hay-hay-Hale?”

“Yes.”

“Are you alone?”

“Yes.”

“Ah, g-good. I’ve only got enough l-l-liquor for two m-men to get properly d-drunk tonight, while w-we w-wait for dawn. The road to dog-dog- Dogubayezit would be impossible at n-night, t-trust me.”

Hale heard footsteps swishing laterally across the grass then, and a moment later the bomb shelter door was pulled open, spilling lamplight out across the wet grass.

“D-d-do step in, my b-boy-you m-must be f-fruh-freezing.”

Hale saw a figure in Kurd jacket and trousers crouch to step into the shelter, but he caught a glimpse of the face, and it was Philby’s pouchy, humorous eyes that glanced back at him.

Hale shoved the gun back into its holster and hurried out of the cold night into the glowing shelter.

The bomb shelter wasn’t tall enough to stand up in, and Philby was already sitting cross-legged against the corrugated steel wall at the back, with the paraffin lantern by his right elbow on a low shelf. A tan woolen Army blanket had been spread over the five-foot width of the floor, and Hale sat down on it after he had pulled the door closed behind him and pushed the bolt through the hasp.

Several more blankets were folded and stacked on a shelf under the curved-over metal ceiling; Hale reached up and pulled one down, and then tugged off the soaked Kurdish vest and wrapped himself snugly in the dry wool. The rain was coming down harder now outside, drumming on the steel roof over his head.

He leaned back against the bolted door, but even at this opposite end of the shelter he was only six feet away from Philby’s knees.

Philby was smiling as he twisted a cork into a nearly full bottle of Macallan Scotch and then rolled it across the floor toward Hale. Hale’s numb fingers managed to grab it, but he used his teeth to pull out the cork and spit it onto the blanket by his boots. He tilted the bottle up, and the cold golden liquor seemed to boom like an organ chord in his chest, spreading heat and blessed looseness through his cramped muscles. Dried blood, he noticed now, spotted his knuckles and the backs of his hands. He lowered the bottle to take a breath, then lifted it again for another solid swallow, impatient for the sense of forgiveness he knew was alcohol’s to bestow.

“Are all y-your SAS men d-dead?” Philby asked.

Hale wondered how Philby knew that an SAS patrol had been involved. “I thought the SAS was disbanded after the war,” he whispered, exhaling richly volatile Scotch fumes.

“Like the SOE.” Philby sighed, and recited, almost to himself, “‘When as a lion’s whelp shall to himself unknown, without seeking find, and be embraced by a piece of tender air; and when from a stately cedar shall be lopped branches, which being dead many years, shall after revive, be jointed to the old stock, and freshly grow; then shall the posthumous end their miseries, Britain be fortunate, and flourish in peace and plenty.’” For a moment he was glaring furiously at Hale. “‘Read, and declare the meaning.’”

Hale blinked at him in genuine bewilderment, careful to show no response to the word declare.

Philby hooded his eyes in a smile. “Sorry-Shakespeare, the prominent B-British playwright- Cymbeline, Act Five. Do you th-think that didn’t…b-b- bother me, as a child? ‘A lion’s whelp,’ ‘without seeking find’? What were you all d-d- doing up there? I am the Head of Station in T-T-Turkey. First a commotion on the So-So-Soviet border down by Sadarak, and th-then a thousand rounds of ammunition f-fired off in the ha-ha-Ahora G-Gorge!” He was still smiling, but Hale had blinked the exhausted blurriness out of his eyes, and he thought Philby looked desolated, as if by some enormous disappointment.

“I-heard it,” said Hale. “I drove around up there, but I wasn’t able to find out what was going on. Shooting, evidently, as you say.” He wondered what Philby would say when he got a look at the bullet-riddled jeep.

For the first time it occurred to him that his career, SIS or SOE, was probably over, after the disaster this operation had been. He took another sip of the Scotch, and then his hands had loosened up enough for him to shove the cork into the bottle and roll it back to Philby.

Philby opened his mouth to speak, then appeared to think better of it. “‘A lion’s whelp,’” he said again, catching the bottle and uncorking it for a liberal swallow. “My f-father is Harry St. John f-f-Philby-have you h-heard of him?”

Author of The Empty Quarter, thought Hale. “Noted Arabist, I believe.”

“Who was your ff-f-father?”

“A Catholic priest, according to the village gossip.”

Philby nodded owlishly at him. “Have you ever h-heard of Rudyard Kipling?”

Hale sighed. “He wrote a book called Kim . I have read it.”

“Ah! Well, my f-father gave me that n-nickname, because I reminded him of the b-b-boy in that very book. I was b-born in Ambala-that’s in-in-in India , Andrew!-in 1912. I spoke H-Hindi before I learned hig-ig-English. When and where were you born?”

“ 1922, in Chipping Campden, in the Cotswolds.”

“Or possibly in polly-p-p-Palestine, as your SIS records c-claim. Were you khh-chriss- baptized in the J-Jordan River? My f-father t-took me along with him on a t-t-trip to collect s-samples of Jordan w-water, the year after your b-birth.”

“I certainly don’t recall.”

“Y-you were in Berlin thruh-three years ago, and n-now here you are at rahrah-Arararah-Agri Dag, damn it.” He raised his eyebrows. “Do you have queer d-dreams on New Year’s Eve?”