AllFreeNovel
Share Us
Then he had rocked over the lip in the cornice gap and was crawling across snow, the drogue stone swinging below his chin. Only one of the Russian commandos was hauling the rope up now, and the others were squatting on this new slope.
They were on the Abich I glacier now. It was more steeply inclined from south down to north than the Cehennem Dere had been, and it was mostly bare ice, with pockets of snow clinging to the face only where cracked, compacted sections of ice had been pushed up to make steps.
The air stung the inside of Hale's nose, too cold at this height to carry any smells except a faint tingle like sulfur. Hale pulled his mittens back onto his aching, numbed hands, and the exposed patches of his face stung as if with a burn. He shifted around to look southward up the mounting slope to the peak, still three thousand feet above, and he quailed at the lunar remoteness of it, and of the white streamers of snow that trailed away from the peak across the gray sky.
Mammalian was standing by the slack rope beside him, looking down toward his boots. Hale followed the direction of his gaze and saw a smoothly oval two-inch hole cut into the ice.
"A borehole," said Mammalian, speaking loudly to be heard over the static-like roar of the wind, "from one of the scientific expeditions. Round, originally-the glacier flow has made it elliptical."
Hale just nodded. Hartsik had said that the djinn had no problem with elliptical holes. Well, Hale had brought some elliptical solids, a few thousand of them, packed tight for now in.410 shot shells.
Too soon the Spetsnaz were all on their feet again, and then one by one, as if through an invisible bottleneck, they were moving out in single-file across the glacier face. In less than a minute it was Mammalian's turn to start forward, and then Philby's, and then Hale was plodding out onto the glacier, his crampon spikes clashing on the ice.
They were walking up a convex slope. The surface was bumpy and cracked, but it seemed solid enough, and the few yards-wide gaping crevasses they skirted were conspicuous. If I could kill the man behind me with one round, Hale thought with a sort of dazed abstractness, I could probably catch the other nine with a couple of careful bursts-they're all within a ten or twelve degree wedge in front of me. Twenty-nine bullets for nine men; well, ten men, I suppose, counting Mammalian.
But he didn't know how much mountaineering skill would still be required before they reached the Ark; and if even one of the Spetsnaz was not killed outright, Hale would find himself the target of very professional return fire; and anyway he knew he could not shoot men in the back. Especially not Hakob Mammalian.
The rubbing-alcohol wind was stinging his cheeks and forming ice crystals around his nostrils. I can at least put the load of birdshot into Philby's back, he thought despairingly-and as long as I don't kill him, as long as he can still flee to Moscow, that will have turned over the hourglass on the Moscow ghula, Russia's guardian angel, Machikha Nash. She'll die shortly after Philby does, and he's already fifty-one; and the Soviet Union should collapse within only a couple of years after that; assuming Declare's math is right, now. And I should be able to fire at least one shell into the djinn too, before the Spetsnaz cut me down.
Play out the hand.
He was light-headed, almost drunk, and he watched his alternating boots scrape the ice as if they were images on a movie screen. He had not seen Elena again after that late afternoon three weeks ago when he had stood in the doorway of the Normandy Hotel bar and watched her kiss Philby. He had had no clear chance to ask Philby about her, and truthfully he hadn't tried to make a chance-she had presumably been part of the SDECE team with plans to exfiltrate Philby, back when Philby had still believed he had the luxury of considering a defection offer, and in any case Philby would assuredly not have told Hale anything that could have been helpful to her; and Hale was bleakly sure that her only response to the sight of Andrew Hale now would be to try to kill him.
At least she didn't look up and see me, that afternoon at the Normandy bar, he thought now, bitterly. At least she didn't see me. That's warming consolation to take with me to...to "the house whence no one issues."
At least the Babylonian myths hadn't said anything about it being cold there! The tightness in his chest, a feeling like the useless urge to breathe underwater against a resolutely closed throat, was stronger.
He had been daydreaming, and he only realized that he had passed the crest of the glacier and was now plodding through calf-deep snow on the lee side when a hard yank at the waist of his harness webbing snapped his head back and pulled him forward off his feet; he jerked his head back down and saw that he was falling toward snow, but the snow surface was breaking up in chunks and tumbling away below him into deep shadow, and the rope was a tight line slanting steeply down.
Hale landed with his knees on snow-padded ice but his chest out across the rope, over a black abyss; and an instant later his hands had clamped like vises onto the rope's taut length. He was hanging over the pit of a bottomless-looking crevasse, and he was stable as long as he didn't move: he was a downward-pointing triangle, with his solidly braced knees being the two secure points of it. He had hit the rope with his face, and his snow-goggles had been knocked down over his chin-his eyes were stinging in the sudden cold.
From behind him he could hear a rapid metallic hammering, and from far away ahead, on the other side of the abyss, he could hear Mammalian shouting English words at him; but most of Hale's weight was on the rope, and he was squinting straight down into the darkness, watching the diminishing fragments of white snowpack fade into the black.
Hale didn't breathe, or think. Coils of intenser blackness were moving, far away down there, like gleams of reflected absence-of-light on vast shoulders and ribs and thighs. The mountain wasn't tall enough to encompass the downward distance Hale's gaze seemed to be plumbing-he must be looking down into the heart of the earth. He became aware of two spots of a blackness so absolute that he had to look away, dazzled, fearing that he would blind himself by staring straight into them; and then he was glad that he had looked away, and he clung even more tightly to the quivering rope, for he realized that the two astronomically distant orbs of blackness were eyes.
Wisps of radiant vapor flicked up past his face, but he knew they indicated no heat below-he guessed they were simply the chunks of ice and snow that had fallen in, twisted by tidal forces until their very molecules had been wrung apart and the atoms dispelled in all directions.
Hale's own eyes were blinded by frozen tears. Even though he was not looking down into the pit, he could feel the attention of the thing down there stretching his identity.
What was down there would unmake him, though afterward the stuff that had been him would fly away into the sky here, into the upper air, perhaps to trouble radio broadcasts with idiot recitations of nursery rhymes.
Pot's right, no more bets, showdown.
The Destroyer of Delights, the Sunderer of Companies, "he who layeth waste the palaces and peopleth the tombs"-call it Death, call it the Devil who had brought Death to Adam and Eve. I was afraid because I was naked, and I hid myself. He would never be found, if he hid here. He needn't fire the derringer at all.
Lay down your losing hand, he told himself, and forfeit everything.
A line from Rupert Brooke echoed in his head: And I should sleep, and I should sleep. How much longer could he have been expected to keep on being Andrew Hale, alone?
It would be easy to free himself from the rope and plummet down to what waited; and in this vertiginous instant it seemed to be inevitable. I've lost my father, I've lost Elena-I can save Theodora the trouble of verifying me, and lose myself, at last. Already one of his hands, without his volition, had shucked its mitten and crawled to his waist, and was clutching the carabiner snap-ring. One squeeze of the spring-loaded gate, and then all he would have to do would be shift his weight to one side or the other.
He had been aware of Mammalian's voice shouting at him, as if from the other side of the sky, but now he heard a phrase-for God's sake, man!
And it seemed as if he could hear him because Hale had surfaced from deep, cold water. His throat could now open at last in surrender to the insistence of his lungs, and he was breathing in great gasps while his lips formed unvoiced syllables; and when he made himself listen to what he was saying, he heard, hallowed be Thy name, Thy kingdom come, Thy will be done...
Hale strained to raise his head, blinking and squinting to see around the frozen tears. He was just able to lift his head high enough to make out Mammalian, sitting twenty feet away in the snow on the far side of the fissure. "What?" shouted Hale to him, in a rusty voice.
"Do you want to live, or die? Please be honest."
