Tim Powers - Declare

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 buckled, 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 midwinter. 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 backdrop 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.