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He moved his head well to the side and then let go of the stone, and it went silently cannonballing away into the night behind them.
Hale brushed his palms on his vest and hiked himself forward again. He was committed to this now, like Ulysses tied to the mast, like Cortes after burning the ships on the Mexican shore.
And he realized that these five men were committed too. He glanced back, but of course the stone was lost in the darkness-perhaps it would tumble all the long way back to Wabar.
Suddenly McNally yelled something that sounded like, "Bloody horses?"
The jeep in front had slewed to a stop in front of a jagged white mound of snow that blocked the way, and when Hale heard McNally stamp on the brake pedal he grabbed the back of the passenger seat to keep from falling forward as his jeep halted.
And Hale's chest went cold in sudden fright when a man's voice rang out of the darkness ahead, speaking loudly in Turkish over the rumble of the idling engines-Hale didn't understand the words, but he thought he recognized the skewed vowels of a French accent; and at the same moment he saw the horses McNally had referred to: two four-legged silhouettes standing off to the right, dimly visible against the gray of the snow.
McNally had leaned sideways below the dashboard to unsling his rifle, and Hale knew that the four other SAS men must have done the same, and must be aiming their weapons toward the voice.
"Qui etes vous?" shouted Hale desperately. Who are you?
He could just make out the muzzle of his Sten gun in front of him, wobbling as the jeep engine chugged on in neutral.
The voice from the darkness was strained as it spoke again, in fluent French now: "Drop your weapons. Do you have shovels? Our companions are buried under this avalanche."
"Don't shoot," called Hale in English to the SAS men; then he took a deep breath and yelled, in French, "Is Elena with you?"-for clearly this must be the SDECE team from Dogubayezit, and he needed to know right away that Elena was not one of the people who were under the snow and certainly dead.
And sweat of relief sprang out on his forehead when he heard Elena's well-remembered voice cry, "Don't shoot them! Andrew Hale, is it you?"
"They're SDECE," Hale shouted in English, "French-allies. Elena! Yes!"
"Bloody hell," growled one of the men in the other jeep.
McNally had straightened up, and now he switched off the engine and began climbing out of the vehicle with his rifle still in his hands. "We hike now," he told Hale quietly, "a bit farther than we planned. Even those horses would be no use from here on up. Now you've got a webbing to put on, with your-medical supplies in it."
The other engine had been turned off too now, and in the sudden echoing silence Hale could hear the rippling clatter of a waterfall somewhere in the darkness far ahead. The air was cold and thin in his nostrils, but seemed resonant as if with some subsonic tone, and he was humiliated to find that he had to force himself to let go of the familiar seat-back and climb down out of the jeep to the slushy alien ground, slinging his rifle. He could feel his knees shaking, and his hands were numb with cold.
"Andrew!" shouted Elena's voice. "Have you got entrenching tools? Help us dig!"
McNally was a blur in the darkness. "The stone is about a hundred yards up the slope, sir," he said, "up by the waterfall you hear."
Hale nodded tightly, though the gesture couldn't be seen. I can't, Elena, he thought. I can't even order any of these men to. Why in hell did you have to come up here tonight? "Where is the blood?" he asked McNally-
- and in Hale's head the question seemed to go on ringing, as->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.
