Tim Powers - Declare

The sun was setting over the Arabian desert on the other side of the plane, lighting the seats and overheads in window-fragmented orange. In other years, on other flights, Hale had looked out through a Perspex window at the shadow of his airplane cast by a dawning sun onto the surfaces of close white clouds, and the silhouette of the plane, growing and shrinking abruptly as the cloud contours moved past, had always in those moments been at the center of a complete rainbow, a perfect prismatic circle unbroken by any horizon; but this evening the clouds at the eastern nadir seemed to be half a world away, towering gods carved out of the old ivory sky by a supernatural Rodin. Where the Viscount’s shadow would be, and it would be far too tiny to see at this infinite distance, a golden cumulus column filled an eighth of the sky, and world-spanning beams and fans of shadow radiated as dark as nicotine from the heart of it.

Soon the Saudi coastline was nearly invisible in the darkness below, and the lights of El Qatif or Qasr es Sabh were hardly more than clusters and strings of yellow light-points. Under the purple sky-vault the eastern horizon was ringed with the tall clouds, lit from within by flashes as continuous as a barrage-Hale saw no arcs of lightning, just the glaring bright flares inside the clouds, sometimes nearly simultaneously rushing from south to north like a relay sequence of timed charges.

Hale shivered and wondered how the storm sounded to any luckless sailors who might be out on the gulf tonight-and how the light might be seen to move over the water.

He couldn’t pry his gaze away from those towering, incandescing sentinels on the edge of the world; and though he resisted it, and even waved his emptied glass at the stewardess for yet another refill of Scotch, the thought muscled its way into his consciousness: They can see me, they know I’ve come back.

He didn’t sleep through the remaining hour of the flight, and when the Viscount touched down at the new Al-Kuwait international airport, he was among the first to exit the plane and climb down the aluminum stair to the tarmac.

It was not raining tonight in Kuwait. The well-remembered Shamal wind was blowing cold from the Iraqi marshes below the Tigris and Euphrates Valley to the northwest, and Hale knew he would have to buy an overcoat at the first opportunity; but he knew too that by morning the wind would have shifted to come more bearably from the west. And just being back in Kuwait again, even after nearly fifteen years, gave him again the Bedu’s instinctive gratitude for winter winds; the hot Suhaili winds would not start up until April, and along with the drying up of the desert grasses they signaled the onset of the murderous summer, when the Bedu would be deprived of grazing and would have to camp miserably on their wells until the appearance of Canopus in the southern night sky in September. On the very next day after Canopus was finally sighted, as he recalled, the summer heat was palpably broken, and water-skins left out that night would be cold by morning.

Tonight, as he hurried into the spotlit terminal building and patted the angularity in his coat pocket that was his Andrew Hale passport, he thought that any such water-skins would be jangling with frost by morning.

After a routine procession past the Customs desks-as Theodora had promised, Hale’s name and passport number clearly had not been flagged yet-a quick cab ride took him to the new Kuwait-Sheraton, which as best he could estimate stood where the crumbling old mud wall had once defined the southwestern corner of the city. Now, from the balcony of his sixth-floor room, he could see bright-lit highways and shopping arcades stretching away in every direction, and all the buildings seemed to be modern concrete and glass.

He struck a match to a cigarette, wishing for a drink.

During the last hour of his flight, he had wondered whether or not to register at a hotel. It was a move calculated to make it easier for the very secret Soviet service to track him, of course, but eventually he decided that it was in character as well. According to his cover story, he wouldn’t have had time to acquire a contemporary forged passport in England, and so the airline and Customs records would clearly indicate that Andrew Hale had fled to Kuwait in any case; and checking into a hotel showed a confident knowledge of the workings of SIS-his imminent status as a “person to be detained” might have got him arrested at Customs, but would not quickly provoke a canvassing of local hotels by the Kuwait Head of Station.

And it made sense that he would not try to look up his old contacts in the changed city immediately upon his arrival, like a desperate fugitive. Obligations of hospitality and protection were taken with religious seriousness among the Arabs, but Hale’s relationship with his contacts had been as an agent-runner, and he had not been dealing exclusively with the most honorable citizens in those old days…and he remembered the Arab proverb: When the camel kneels down in exhaustion, out come the knives.

Before stepping back inside, he glanced to the west, now as dark as the rest of the sky. Far away in that direction, out beyond the Syrian desert and past Damascus, on the eastern shore of the Mediterranean, Philby awaited him unaware in Beirut. What would the man’s response be, on being approached and threatened by a retired agent of the disbanded SOE?

Hale remembered the lines from Cymbeline that Philby had quoted in the bomb shelter below Ararat: 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…

And Elena was in Beirut too-she had apparently been there last night, at least, and had not then succeeded in killing Philby. How soon would it be until she heard Hale’s cover story, got the scripted news that he had treacherously shot old Cassagnac? If Hale were to meet her, he could not tell her the absolving truth about that; wherever her loyalties lay now, clearly her plans were at radical odds with Operation Declare. And Hale did desperately need to complete the long-delayed assault on Ararat, needed to justify the deaths and broken minds of the five men he had led up that terrible road in 1948. And so Elena must be allowed to believe that Hale had shot and perhaps killed their loyal old friend, who had saved their lives in Berlin.

According to Theodora, Malo Año was the slip of paper she had picked yesterday morning in Istanbul.

In these past fourteen years Hale had often dreamed about his brief times of intimacy with Elena in Paris and Berlin; and even during his wakeful hours, as he had graded test papers or trudged across the green lawns of the University College, Weybridge, he had imagined somehow meeting her one more time, imagined himself impossibly convincing her to marry him at last, in spite of their histories, in spite of their last words on the Ahora Gorge road in 1948. He had never married, and he had liked to imagine that in the unguessed course of her life she had not either.

The captain of a ship can perform marriages, Cassagnac had said with exhausted merriment on that Berlin night in 1945-the three of them had been crouched below the gunwales of a makeshift Ark on the bed of an American truck just east of the Brandenburg Gate, and though each of them had held a loaded pistol it had seemed likely that all three would be killed within minutes- and so I hereby pronounce you two man and wife. Kiss the bride quick, Andrew, before you die.

Hale had kissed her, tasting blood from her cut lip, and then she had kissed Cassagnac too.

Hale now flicked the cigarette out past the hotel balcony rail, over the broad new streets of the Kuwait that was no longer the city he remembered, and he watched the coal arc away through the night like a tiny shooting star.