Declare (75 page)

According to protocol, she would also need authorization from the Quai d’Orsay to kill Hale—if she proposed doing it in Beirut. But the counter-Ararat operation had already been approved, and it included a provision that
all
members of the Rabkrin team might be killed, if they made it onto the slopes of Mount Ararat.

Elena had requested the Alouette III, with specific modifications, and she told the SDECE to get the French diplomatic corps to work on calling in favors from the Iranian Pahlavi government—the helicopter needed to be trucked to some remote spot in the northwest corner of Iran, near the eastern Turkish border.

The Iranian government had been hard to convince—a national election was scheduled for the twenty-sixth, and the progressive White Revolution party didn’t want to provide any excuses for anti-Western sentiments—and so the helicopter, and the peculiar warheads in its four-nozzle 70-millimeter rockets, had not been ready and in place until the twenty-second; and on the very next night the Rabkrin team had surreptitiously left Beirut.

From the rain-swept deck of the yacht, Elena had actually seen one member evacuated.

Beirut had been a neon blur through the sweeping veils of rain on that night, and from the crackling speaker of her radio in the main cabin she listened to her surveillance agents out there in the city complaining about stalled cars and flooded intersections. They had lost Philby, but hoped to regain contact at a dinner he was going to that night at the house of the First Secretary of the British Embassy. Immediately after that transmission she had heard a motorboat laboring through the storm surf outside, and she had snatched up her binoculars, unlocked the cabin door and gone swaying out onto the deck.

She had barely been able to see the boat through the rain. It had
been a flat-bottom inflatable Bombard rescue-craft with an outboard motor at the stern, and it was showing no lights. As she watched, the ponderous rubber boat rocked over the low waves and slid up the beach below the Normandy Hotel.

The Normandy was where the Rabkrin team had been staying.

Dimly in the reflected glow from the hotel windows she had seen two figures waiting on the beach; one of them got into the boat, and then it was pushed away, back into the whirling surf.

She had gone back inside and picked up the radio microphone. “I think your target won’t show up at the dinner,” she told the surveillance team. “I think he’s bolted. I think they all have.”

She had poured herself a glass of brandy then, for the Rabkrin team appeared to be on its way, after all, to Mount Ararat. The SDECE force had failed to stop the Soviet operation in Beirut, and she had not turned Philby—but the Alouette III was at last in place in Khvoy, and within a couple of days Philby and Hale would both be on the mountain.

She wondered if she had meant things to work out this way all along.

The Rabkrin party would climb to Noah’s Ark—and then all of the witnesses of her shames would be together in one place: the djinn with whom she had participated in the deaths of her men in the Ahora Gorge in 1948, Kim Philby who had heard her secrets and been permitted into her bed, and Andrew Hale, whom she had loved.

The 70-millimeter rockets in the seven-tube rocket launchers were cyclotol explosive packed in shells lathed from Shihab meteoric steel. A barrage of them should take care of everyone.

In her earphones now she heard the helicopter pilot say,
“Une dizaine minutes.” Ten minutes or so to target
. Out the port windows she could see through the ground mists the white south shoulder of Ararat, still twenty miles away. She threw her cigarette onto the helicopter deck and ground it out under the toe of her boot; then she turned to the armament control panel and clicked up the switch that armed the rocket launchers. The green
STANDBY
light went out, and the red
ARMED
light was now glowing, right next to the red that light
had all along been indicating that the gun-firing solenoids of the .50-caliber machine guns were activated.

“Montrez-moi,”
she said into the microphone by her chin.
Show me.

Mount Ararat, 1963

This is a tale of those old fears, even of those emptied hells,
And none but you shall understand the true thing that it tells—
Of what colossal gods of shame could cow men and yet crash,
Of what huge devils hid the stars, yet fell at a pistol flash.

—G. K. Chesterton,
To Edmund Clerihew Bentley

One of the Spetsnaz commandos had taken an end of static rope down the lee face of the Parrot glacier slope in a controlled
glissade
, using the butt end of his ice-axe as a rudder while he slid down the convex snow surface. When he reached the house-sized chunks of tumbled ice at the glacier’s next broad step, fifty yards below, he plowed to a halt and began climbing over the broken serac toward the east, away from the supposed Ark site, while the men up at the top of the slope slowly fed out more rope and the slope between them grew steeper. Hale estimated that the Spetsnaz paid out thirty feet more of the rope. At last the man below waved, indicating that he had found a good place from which to proceed, and the Spetsnaz at the crest walked to a point over him and hammered pitons into the ice for mooring two descending static lines.

Two of the Spetsnaz immediately crouched and lashed themselves to the ropes somehow, and then hopped backward and began descending the ice slope in long, descending bounds.

Mammalian and Philby and Hale were to descend separately. Hale was to go first, and one of the Russian commandos knelt down in the snow with Hale and tied a yard-long looped cord to Hale’s
harness carabiner and then tied the free end to the descending rope in a fist-like Prusik knot; and he made Hale practice yanking on the knot and then flicking it upward, to show Hale that the knot would slide down the rope if it was loose but would grip the rope tightly if weight were put on it.

The man gestured down the slope. The wind from the peak was flinging spirals of dry snow against them with increasing force, and it was easy for Hale to lift the cord and slide back and down. His legs slid out from under him in the snow and the cord tightened as he fell to his knees, but a moment later he had got his spiked boots under himself and had done it again, descending a good three yards and landing upright and balanced.

The glacier grew steeper as he progressed downward, and when he was halfway to the bottom, he felt a thrumming in the rope. He looked up and saw that one of the Spetsnaz was leaping and sliding down above him, and Hale began to spring farther out from the ice slope with each jump and to let more of the rope buzz through the Prusik knot before reaching out with his toes to slow down and put weight on it.

At last he was hanging with his boot-spikes dangling a yard above a patch of snow between two truck-sized ice-boulders. One of the Russian commandos standing below him took hold of his boots and pushed him upward, and Hale used the slack to slip the loop of cord right out of his carabiner; then he waved, and when the man let go of his boots Hale dropped and sat down, jamming the barrel of his slung machine gun into the snow.

He got up and stepped away from the rope, trying to peer through his ice-clotted snow-goggles. From the shadows on the west side, another of the Spetsnaz reached out and caught Hale’s hand and drew him along the narrow, back-slanting ledge to a sheltered hollow under an ice cornice. Hale swiped a mitten across his goggle lenses.

The close landscape was all enormous surfaces of black stone and white ice tumbled together at slanting angles, with the wind whistling through it all as if the whole mountain were rushing up into space; there was no ground, and Hale was belatedly nauseated
at the thought of having unsnapped himself from the rope to drop the last yard. The empty vault of gray northern sky in front of him was somehow obviously a high-altitude view, and he held on to the carabiner at the front of his harness, automatically blinking around for something to snap it onto.

The Spetsnaz who had led him into the shelter now tugged him farther along the ledge; and mercifully it widened out as it slanted to the left, and after a few scuffing steps for which he had to brace himself with his hands against the stone walls, Hale stepped forward past the Rus sian and hopped down onto the flat ice of a long frozen lake, its surface littered with gravel and chunks of ice like bomb-shattered concrete. The steep mountain shoulder stood up from the ice-lake fifty yards in front of him, with the Parrot glacier blocking the sky ahead of him and to his left; twenty or thirty feet behind him was the margin of the lake and then the infinite void.

He let his gaze rise from the ice-flat to the cliffs that were the body of the mountain, fifty yards away—and then through the veils of snow he saw the black wooden structure that loomed out from the glacier and shadowed that side of the frozen lake, and the only thing that kept him from falling to his knees was the recollection that this was not in fact Noah’s Ark.

The thing was huge, probably six stories tall, and rectangular— more like a long building imbedded in the ice than like any kind of ship. It hung above him out there, viewed almost end-on, and he could see that the underside was flat; the roof, which extended out past the high walls, was nearly flat, with a low peak at the center. The blacker squares of windows fretted the top edge, and a rickety wooden staircase, clearly of newer origin, had been erected across the flat front face and down to the ice.

Snow whirled in dust-devil arabesques across the lifeless ice of the lake below the thing, and in the atonal whistle of the dry wind Hale was sure he heard familiar chords, as if the mountain were a vast Aeolian harp, wringing music from currents that came down raw from the stars. Under it all throbbed an alliance of subsonic tones that resonated unpleasantly in the tiny pulsing focus of Hale’s ribs and made connected thought difficult.

Derringer,
he told himself as he stumbled out across the ice; then, in terrified derision and self-contempt,
Derringer? I’d do them more harm throwing it at them.

His balance was going—he had to keep glancing at the surface under his boots to assure himself that he was still vertical—and he sat down hard on the ice, resolved at least not to kneel. He clutched the drogue stone that hung in front of him, glad of the cross cut in its face.

From over the shoulder of the mountain, on the side by the Abich I glacier, he heard booming and cracking; and then the earthbound thunder sounded to his right, and he saw that it was the noise of avalanches, galleries and valleys of snow moving down from the heights and separating into fragments, then tumbling and exploding into jagged bursts of white against the remote gray sky before they disappeared below his view.

The cracks and thunders made syllables in the depleted air, but they didn’t seem to be in Arabic. Hale guessed that they were of a language much older, the uncompromised speech of mountain conversing with mountain and lightning and cloud, seeming random only to creatures like himself whose withered verbs and nouns had grown apart from the things they described.

The music was nearly inaudible to Hale’s physical eardrums, but in his spine he could feel that it was mounting toward some sustained note for which
tragedy
or
grandeur
would be nearly appropriate words.

Silently in the vault far overhead the clouds broke, and tall columns of glowing, whirling snow-dust stood now around the black vessel, motionless; Hale reflected that it must be noon, for the shining columns were vertical. The mountain and the lake and the very air were suddenly darker in comparison.

The columns of light were alive, the fields of their attentions palpably sweeping across the ice and the glacier face and the mountain, momentarily clarifying into sharp focus anything they touched; for just a moment Hale could see with hallucinatory clarity the woven cuffs of his sleeves.

Angels,
Hale thought, looking away in shuddering awe. These
beings on this mountain are older than the world, and once looked God in the face.

Which they will never do again, he told himself, and which I may, God willing. Against this spectacle he mentally held up his remembered view of Sainte-Chapelle in Paris, especially as he had seen it in a dream, in which the cathedral had been the prow of a ship laboring through a black ocean.

He rocked forward on the gravel-strewn surface, and by pushing downward with his hands he was able to stand up, shakily.