Declare (59 page)

“Ach! Stay away from me—
cannibale.”

He glimpsed a rushing shape in the darkness and then the horse had galloped past him, its hooves thudding away down the invisible slope.

He wanted to shout the plural down after her—
cannibales!
—but he could only despairingly agree with her assessment of him. His earlier question rang in his head again—
Where is the blood?
—and he knew that the blood was on his hands… on his very lips, morally if not literally.

Elena had apparently taken the only remaining horse, but the other jeep was still here; and when Hale limped stiffly across the mud to it, he could make it out clearly enough to know from its stance that its tires were still inflated. Feeling immensely old and bad and sad, Hale climbed wearily into the driver’s seat and forced his frozen fingers to press the starter—and when the engine roared into hot life, he clanked the gear-shift sideways into reverse and, hunching around in the seat to peer downhill through the steaming plume of his breath, began inching the vehicle back down.

After a few yards he realized that his panting had become sobbing.

Surely some of the SAS men had survived—they would know the jeep by its sound, and then they would recognize him in the dimness, if they looked closely. McNally is dead, Hale told himself, but the other four might still be alive—they’d have had a moment to dive for cover between the blaze of the flare and the start of the gunfire—they wouldn’t know that I—participated in the deaths, some of the deaths, helplessly—

But he remembered the sustained full-automatic fire that had
raked the jeeps, and he quailed. It had to have been Russians who had ambushed them—but how had Russians known to be waiting there, beside the south wall? Had the SAS men been observed planting the stone, or had they been betrayed by someone in the West?

After no less than an hour of rocking down the slope in reverse, frequently braking and shifting to low gear to climb back up when the right side of the jeep seemed to be tilting into the gorge, Hale found a wider clearing in which he was able to turn the jeep around and drive forward; and he switched on the one remaining headlamp as he drove, peering through the shattered windscreen at the surface of the mud track ahead.

And soon he saw the upright shapes of three men in the headlamp glare, plodding and limping down the rutted path. Two wore the dark windbreakers the SAS men had been wearing, and one had on the turban and baggy trousers of a Kurd. None of them turned around at the sound of the engine or the illumination of the headlamps.

His heart thumping, Hale slowed the jeep a few yards behind them. The Sten gun was long gone, but he fumbled the chunky .45 revolver out of his shoulder holster—and then he called hoarsely through the broken windscreen, “Get in the vehicle! I’ll drive us down.”

They had ignored the light and the engine noise, but Hale’s voice seemed to galvanize them. The man in Kurdish clothing dove forward in a flailing cartwheel that carried him right off the path, and though the two SAS men stayed on the road, they were clearly insane—one began semaphoring wildly, hopping to use alternate legs as well as his arms and head, and the other turned toward the headlamps and dug his fingers into his face and tugged outward, as if trying to pull his head apart.

When Hale shifted the gearbox into neutral and ratcheted up the brake, intending to step out and try to grab them, they both went bounding away into the darkness, leaping high into the air at every step; to Hale they appeared to be trying to fly. In seconds they were lost to his sight.

Hale was sobbing again as he shoved the .45 back into its holster
and released the brake and clanked the gear-shift back into first gear. He saw no more men on the slow drive back down to the plain, and he did not see the horse.

A cold rain began to fall as he drove the jeep across the dark miles of marshy road toward the spot where the Bristol Sycamore helicopter had landed. In the cloud-filtered moonlight he could see nothing on either side of the road except the grim boulders, and he had come to the conclusion that the pilot had flown the helicopter away and that he would have to drive twenty-five miles around the mountain to the town of Dogubayezit in the southwest, over God-knew-what sort of roads—when out of the corner of his left eye he caught a vertical thread of yellow glow in the night.

He stamped on the brake and peered in that direction, but he didn’t see the glow again; he backed the jeep in a wide arc onto the south shoulder of the path, to sweep the area on the opposite side with the headlamp beam—and he caught a gleam of reflected light on metal.

He rocked the gear-shift into first gear and drove slowly forward across the road, and soon recognized the stack of unused bicycles. The helicopter was indeed gone. But though he had not seen the vertical glow again, he knew that it must have shone from the Anderson bomb shelter in the field beyond.

Instantly he switched off the light and the engine; and he hefted the .45 revolver and swung his legs stiffly down out of the jeep and stood up on the muddy grass. As he stole silently toward what he believed was the black hump of the bomb shelter, he saw again the gleam of yellow light, and he realized that it was lamplight inside the shelter, escaping through the gap at the hinge side of the door.

A British voice from the darkness startled him so badly that he nearly pulled the trigger of the revolver: “Drop the g-gun, I’ve got you in my sights. I’ve h-heard you c-coming for the last t-t-ten m-miles.”

Hale didn’t move. “Philby,” he said, trying to speak levelly.

“Is it Andrew hay-hay-Hale?”

“Yes.”

“Are you alone?”

“Yes.”

“Ah, g-good. I’ve only got enough l-l-liquor for
two
m-men to get properly d-drunk tonight, while w-we w-wait for dawn. The road to dog-dog-
Dogubayezit
would be impossible at n-night, t-trust me.” Hale heard footsteps swishing laterally across the grass then, and a moment later the bomb shelter door was pulled open, spilling lamplight out across the wet grass.

“D-d-do step in, my b-boy—you m-must be f-fruh-freezing.”

Hale saw a figure in Kurd jacket and trousers crouch to step into the shelter, but he caught a glimpse of the face, and it was Philby’s pouchy, humorous eyes that glanced back at him.

Hale shoved the gun back into its holster and hurried out of the cold night into the glowing shelter.

The bomb shelter wasn’t tall enough to stand up in, and Philby was already sitting cross-legged against the corrugated steel wall at the back, with the paraffin lantern by his right elbow on a low shelf. A tan woolen Army blanket had been spread over the five-foot width of the floor, and Hale sat down on it after he had pulled the door closed behind him and pushed the bolt through the hasp.

Several more blankets were folded and stacked on a shelf under the curved-over metal ceiling; Hale reached up and pulled one down, and then tugged off the soaked Kurdish vest and wrapped himself snugly in the dry wool. The rain was coming down harder now outside, drumming on the steel roof over his head.

He leaned back against the bolted door, but even at this opposite end of the shelter he was only six feet away from Philby’s knees.

Philby was smiling as he twisted a cork into a nearly full bottle of Macallan Scotch and then rolled it across the floor toward Hale. Hale’s numb fingers managed to grab it, but he used his teeth to pull out the cork and spit it onto the blanket by his boots. He tilted the bottle up, and the cold golden liquor seemed to boom like an organ chord in his chest, spreading heat and blessed looseness through his cramped muscles. Dried blood, he noticed now, spotted his knuckles and the backs of his hands. He lowered the bottle to take a breath, then lifted it again for another solid swallow,
impatient for the sense of forgiveness he knew was alcohol’s to bestow.

“Are all y-your SAS men d-dead?” Philby asked.

Hale wondered how Philby knew that an SAS patrol had been involved. “I thought the SAS was disbanded after the war,” he whispered, exhaling richly volatile Scotch fumes.

“Like the SOE.” Philby sighed, and recited, almost to himself, “ ‘When as a lion’s whelp shall to himself unknown, without seeking find, and be embraced by a piece of tender air; and 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; then shall the posthumous end their miseries, Britain be fortunate, and flourish in peace and plenty.’ ” For a moment he was glaring furiously at Hale. “ ‘Read, and declare the meaning.’ ”

Hale blinked at him in genuine bewilderment, careful to show no response to the word
declare.

Philby hooded his eyes in a smile. “Sorry—Shakespeare, the prominent B-British playwright—
Cymbeline
, Act Five. Do you th-think that didn’t… b-b-
bother
me, as a child? ‘A lion’s whelp,’ ‘without seeking find’? What were you all d-d-
doing
up there? I
am
the Head of Station in T-T-Turkey. First a commotion on the So-So-Soviet border down by Sadarak, and th-then a thousand rounds of ammunition f-fired off in the ha-ha-Ahora G-Gorge!” He was still smiling, but Hale had blinked the exhausted blurriness out of his eyes, and he thought Philby looked desolated, as if by some enormous disappointment.

“I—heard it,” said Hale. “I drove around up there, but I wasn’t able to find out what was going on. Shooting, evidently, as you say.” He wondered what Philby would say when he got a look at the bullet-riddled jeep.

For the first time it occurred to him that his career, SIS or SOE, was probably over, after the disaster this operation had been. He took another sip of the Scotch, and then his hands had loosened up enough for him to shove the cork into the bottle and roll it back to Philby.

Philby opened his mouth to speak, then appeared to think better
of it. “ ‘A lion’s whelp,’ ” he said again, catching the bottle and uncorking it for a liberal swallow.
“My
f-father is Harry St. John f-f-Philby—have you h-heard of him?”

Author of
The Empty Quarter
, thought Hale. “Noted Arabist, I believe.”

“Who was
your
ff-f-father?”

“A Catholic priest, according to the village gossip.”

Philby nodded owlishly at him. “Have you ever h-heard of Rudyard Kipling?”

Hale sighed. “He wrote a book called
Kim
. I have read it.”

“Ah! Well, my f-father gave me that n-nickname, because I reminded him of the b-b-boy in that very book. I was b-born in Ambala—that’s in-in—in
India
, Andrew!—in 1912. I spoke H-Hindi before I learned hig-ig-English. When and where were you born?”

“1922, in Chipping Campden, in the Cotswolds.”

“Or possibly in polly-p-p-Palestine, as your SIS records c-claim. Were you khh—chriss—
baptized
in the J-Jordan River? My f-father t-took me along with him on a t-t-trip to collect s-samples of Jordan w-water, the year after your b-birth.”

“I certainly don’t recall.”

“Y-you were in Berlin thruh-three years ago, and n-now here you are at rahrah—Arararah—Agri Dag, damn it.” He raised his eyebrows. “Do you have queer d-dreams on New Year’s Eve?”

Hale forced down his alarm and made himself smile quizzically. “I suppose so. And then wake up with a hangover.”

Philby nodded. “Let’s pass the t-time with a game of c-cards,” he said. He tipped the bottle up for another mouthful and set it down carefully, and then dug a pack of playing cards out from under his blue Kurd ish robe. Hale noticed for the first time that the man’s robe was nearly as soaked as Hale’s vest. “Poker,” Philby said as he opened the box and spilled the red-backed cards into his hand.

Hale laughed mechanically. “With promissory notes?” he said. “I’m afraid I left my notecase at the hotel in Kars.”

“And I b-brought a j-jewel, but I’m afraid I s-s-
swallowed
it. D-Did you know that poker d-derives from an old purr-Persian card
game, known as As-Nas? It was an ancestor of the F-F-French Ambigu as well. We can play for
her
.”

Hale could feel the Scotch beginning to do its good work. He blinked at Philby in the lamplight. “Her? Who, this Ambigu?”

Philby pouted his lips and shook his head. “You know who I m-mean. She appears to f-fancy b-both of us, so the l-loser of this hand will agree to stay-stay out of the other m-man’s
way
, fair enough? Elena Ceniza-Bendiga.”

Hale’s face burned with suddenly renewed humiliation—
Cannibale!
—and he wished the bottle was up at his end. “I won’t play,” he muttered. He recalled Elena’s headlong gallop down the lightless mountain path. “She may be dead, in any case.”

“Then it’s p-probably academic, isn’t it?” Philby’s face was heavy and expressionless, his lower lip hanging away from his teeth; Hale was reminded of the gargoyles on Notre-Dame. “We can play for her,” Philby repeated, in a voice that made Hale think of heavy clay.

Dimly Hale realized that this was a moral choice, possibly an important one. But there was no God, and Elena loathed him; and through his mind flickered a bit of Swinburne’s verse:
We thank, with brief thanksgiving, whatever gods may be, that no life lives for ever; that dead men rise up never; that even the weariest river winds somewhere safe to sea.
No resurrection, no judgment. The bottle rolled across the blanket and rapped his knuckles, and he picked it up. “Very well,” he said hoarsely. “Five-card draw?”