The stone was tugging away more strongly now—he had to use both hands to hold on to it, bracing himself with his feet—and he told himself that it would soon be repelled with such force that even if he wedged it against the floor it would drag the jeep to a wheel-spinning halt.
I have to let it go, he thought with cautious satisfaction—nobody can blame me. I do thank you for the kind intention, Siamand Barakat Khan! but—
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 Cortés 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—
—suddenly a blinding flare of white light ahead of him burned the silhouettes of McNally and the jeep’s windscreen frame into Hale’s retinas, and an instant later the night was shattered by the stuttering crash of gunfire.
Hale’s hands were on the jeep’s fender, and even through his numb fingers he felt hammering impacts against the vehicle’s steel body in the instant before he dropped to his knees in the icy mud on the side away from the gorge’s south wall. The sustained, deafening noise made it hard for him to unsling his rifle, and before he had got it into his hands he saw, by the razory-clear black-and-white illumination of the magnesium flare on the road ahead, the body of McNally tumble to the snowy mud by the right-front wheel of the jeep, his eyes wide and his throat punched open.
Black blood jetted from the wound—and Hale’s mind keened in pure fear to see the glistening black drops move slowly in mid-air, like obsidian beads falling through clear glycerine.
He was still hearing his own voice ask, Where is the blood?
A gust of wind from the north knocked Hale against the muddy rear wheel, and his nostrils flared at the smell of metallic, rancid oil.
His balance was gone, and thinking that another earthquake was shaking the mountain, he raised the gun to shade his eyes from the flare light and squinted up at the overhanging masses of snow on the gorge crests—but it was the sky that made him bare his teeth in dismay. Even through the glare-haze he could see that the world-spanning black vault of stars was spinning ponderously, and the whole gorge seemed to be reciprocally turning the opposite way, with slow but increasing force.
And a voice like a volcano tolled down from the stony heights of Ararat then, exploding his thoughts away in all directions like frightened birds—its slow, throbbing syllables were in Arabic, and among them he caught the word for brothers—and his left hand closed on the canvas bag strung around his neck, with no more conscious volition than a frightened bug scuttling for cover. With his right hand he clumsily fumbled out the iron ankh.
The ankh seemed hot in his cold fist, and it served as an anchor for his thoughts: Wave it, push them back—
But when he pushed the iron cross up through the icy resisting air, it was abruptly snatched away upward, tearing the skin of his palm.
At the same time McNally’s body had sat up in the white light, and now its arms flopped and then stood straight up over the lolling head; in the next moment the body had been yanked up onto its toes, and then right off its feet, so that it dangled unsupported in the air.
I should have held on to the Khan’s stone, Hale thought despairingly.
And then his chest was suddenly constricted as if between a giant thumb and finger, and he was forcibly lifted up by an invisible strength, and just for a moment he was suspended in a half-kneeling posture, facing the jeep, with his knees off the ground and his toes in the mud. McNally’s body fell away above him into the revolving sky, and Hale knew that he himself was about to follow the body up—