Tim Powers - Declare

The pilot had immediately killed the engine, and now he pulled off the headphones as the unpowered rotor blades began to clatter around more slowly.

“We’re still three miles short of the gorge,” the pilot said in a thick Yorkshire accent, “but I can’t promise you the Russians didn’t hear the motor.”

“The Russians are up there? Is the stone even up in the gorge yet?” asked Hale as he levered open the door and stepped down to the solid, grassy dirt. The wind from the east was colder now, and he wished his felt Kurd vest had sleeves.

“Talk to him,” the pilot said, nodding over Hale’s shoulder.

Hale turned around quickly-and jumped, for a man in a gray windbreaker was standing only two yards away from him. And now Hale could see by the cloud-filtered moonlight that there were four men standing behind this one, and that what had appeared to be a low hillock was now revealed to be two camouflage-painted Willys jeeps and a stack of bicycles, with a tarpaulin settling to the ground behind them. All five of the men carried slung Sten guns, the characteristic horizontal magazines standing out from behind them like longsword hilts.

“I’m Lieutenant Colonel Shannon, Captain Hale,” said the nearest man, without irony. “The Russian party came across the border about half an hour ago, dressed as Kurdish shepherds; we almost missed them-the pogranichniki staged a big crisis four miles south, with spotlights and gunfire, while this lot just walked across in the dark, through a hole in the wire, right under a watchtower that had its lights out; clear Soviet complicity. And the Turk soldiers at that point had conveniently been ordered to drive south to where the commotion was, as reinforcements. The Russians were met on this side by a party with a lorry; they all drove away up the gorge with their headlamps out.”

Hale made a mental note to find out later who had ordered the Turk guards to leave their post. “And the Shihab stone, the iron meteorite?”

“We placed your stone high up in the Ahora Gorge late this afternoon, sir-it’s been scored, incised, so as to fragment widely, and it’s got two Lewes bombs tucked under it, delayed-action charges ready to be set. We were going to bring up the war-surplus Anderson bomb shelter, but there’s clearly no time for that now-we’ll leave it here.” He nodded beyond the jeeps, and Hale noticed out in the dark field the curved corrugated-steel roof, like an American-frontier covered wagon, that had been such a familiar sight in the bombed lots of London four years ago.

The moonlight was bright enough for Hale to see the paler spot on the front of the man’s beret, in the shield shape of the SAS cap-badge. Hale recalled that the SAS insignia had been a winged dagger over the motto WHO DARES WINS-and he recalled hearing that the shape of the wings had been modeled on ancient Egyptian drawings of scarab beetles. Maybe, Hale thought forlornly, these men won’t be too skeptical about the ankhs.

The SAS had done deadly effective covert demolition work in North Africa during the war, as well as in Germany and Italy. Their only failures had reportedly been operations that had been planned by other agencies-and Hale hoped that this Ararat expedition, planned by the SOE, would not be another.

“Have you got the blood?” asked Hale-gruffly, for he was embarrassed to be speaking of the filthy uses of magic with these hard-bitten professional soldiers. “Medical supply bags?”

Shannon ’s voice was stoic as he said, “We have, sir-it’s in the water bottle pouch of a set of ’37 webbing, which you’ll wear.” He coughed and spat. “We can drive,” he went on more easily, “and be up there pretty quick and noisy, or ride bicycles. A bit of hiking involved either way, where it eventually gets too steep for wheels. Nothing taxing.”

Drive, Hale thought fretfully, or ride bicycles? “I hope you didn’t score through all the bubble holes on the stone,” he said, almost absently, as he pondered the choice. He wished he had time to brief these men properly, as Theodora had said he would have.

“The incised lines are zigzag, sir. We were told not to saw into any of the bubbles.”

Hale was aware of the weight of the cut-down.45 revolver in the shoulder holster under his vest, but its two-inch barrel would be of little use for accurate shooting over any distance. “I believe you were instructed to bring a spare gun, for me,” he said.

One of the men by the nearest jeep reached into the bed of it and hiked up another Sten gun, its skeletal stock making it look to Hale for a moment like some kind of modern orthopedic crutch.

“Right.” Hale took a deep breath and let it out. “I think the sound of a jeep’s motor would-”

He paused, for over the wind he could now hear the buzz of a distant motor, and from the sound and the cadence of gear-shifts he believed that in fact it was a jeep, somewhere out on the marshy plain to the south.

Exactly, he thought; you can hear the bloody thing for miles.

And then he heard a rumbling from the mountain-and even in the moonlight he could see the valley floor to the west rippling, in waves of shadow that were rushing across the grasslands toward him.

“Earthquake!” he said, crouching, even as the ground under his feet began to heave up and down like the bed of a speeding truck; and in spite of his stance, Hale sat down heavily on the jumping ground. The helicopter creaked on its wheels and the springs on the jeeps were squeaking as the vehicles rocked. The helicopter’s six-foot rotors had stopped spinning, but were bobbing up and down now.

When the ground had steadied and the rumble had rolled away to the cloudy east, Hale rocked forward onto his hands and knees and looked back up at the mountain. The sharp outlines of the gorge were blurred by clouds like smoke, and he knew they were dust or snow, shaken up from the crags.

And he remembered the earthquake that had jolted the rubbled lot in Berlin, in the instant when the weather balloon over the Arabian boat had been engulfed by the living whirlwind.

“They’ve started,” he said breathlessly, getting to his feet and stepping toward the nearest jeep, which had a spare set of suspension springs roped across the grille like an incongruously smiling mouth. “The djinn are awake now, they’ve opened their gates.” He took a deep breath. “They’re-goddammit, they’re genies, right?-up there. Monsters, like earth elementals-no joke. Use the anchors, the iron crosses, as a shield, to force them back-the way they do with crucifixes to Dracula in the movies. Your lives depend on this.” He was panting and sweating; the faces he could see were skeptical and noncommittal. “We’ve got to drive-and fast. To hell with the noise, there’s already a jeep banging around out here tonight.”

“McNally,” snapped Shannon, “you drive Captain Hale, behind the rest of us.”

Shannon and three of his men sprinted to the other jeep as Hale vaulted over the rear fender of the nearer one and crouched in the gritty ridged-steel bed, snatching up the Sten gun. “Did you understand me,” Hale nearly wailed, “about the anchors?”

Over the brief screeches of the jeep engines starting up, he could hear the men in the other jeep reply in the affirmative.

“Understood, sir,” loudly echoed the man in the driver’s seat of Hale’s jeep, whose name apparently was McNally.

The headlamps were not switched on, but abrupt acceleration threw Hale back against the tailgate. “And you do understand,” he added in a yell, “that this operation will involve the-the supernatural?”

“We have been told that, sir,” shouted McNally over the roar of the engine. “And we’ll believe it when we see it.”