Hale made a mental note to find out later who had ordered the Turk guards to leave their post. “And the Shihab stone, the iron meteorite?”
“We placed your stone high up in the Ahora Gorge late this afternoon, sir-it’s been scored, incised, so as to fragment widely, and it’s got two Lewes bombs tucked under it, delayed-action charges ready to be set. We were going to bring up the war-surplus Anderson bomb shelter, but there’s clearly no time for that now-we’ll leave it here.” He nodded beyond the jeeps, and Hale noticed out in the dark field the curved corrugated-steel roof, like an American-frontier covered wagon, that had been such a familiar sight in the bombed lots of London four years ago.
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.
And then he heard a rumbling from the mountain-and even in the moonlight he could see the valley floor to the west rippling, in waves of shadow that were rushing across the grasslands toward him.
“Earthquake!” he said, crouching, even as the ground under his feet began to heave up and down like the bed of a speeding truck; and in spite of his stance, Hale sat down heavily on the jumping ground. The helicopter creaked on its wheels and the springs on the jeeps were squeaking as the vehicles rocked. The helicopter’s six-foot rotors had stopped spinning, but were bobbing up and down now.
When the ground had steadied and the rumble had rolled away to the cloudy east, Hale rocked forward onto his hands and knees and looked back up at the mountain. The sharp outlines of the gorge were blurred by clouds like smoke, and he knew they were dust or snow, shaken up from the crags.
And he remembered the earthquake that had jolted the rubbled lot in Berlin, in the instant when the weather balloon over the Arabian boat had been engulfed by the living whirlwind.
“They’ve started,” he said breathlessly, getting to his feet and stepping toward the nearest jeep, which had a spare set of suspension springs roped across the grille like an incongruously smiling mouth. “The djinn are awake now, they’ve opened their gates.” He took a deep breath. “They’re-goddammit, they’re genies, right?-up there. Monsters, like earth elementals-no joke. Use the anchors, the iron crosses, as a shield, to force them back-the way they do with crucifixes to Dracula in the movies. Your lives depend on this.” He was panting and sweating; the faces he could see were skeptical and noncommittal. “We’ve got to drive-and fast. To hell with the noise, there’s already a jeep banging around out here tonight.”
“McNally,” snapped Shannon, “you drive Captain Hale, behind the rest of us.”
Shannon and three of his men sprinted to the other jeep as Hale vaulted over the rear fender of the nearer one and crouched in the gritty ridged-steel bed, snatching up the Sten gun. “Did you understand me,” Hale nearly wailed, “about the anchors?”
Over the brief screeches of the jeep engines starting up, he could hear the men in the other jeep reply in the affirmative.
“Understood, sir,” loudly echoed the man in the driver’s seat of Hale’s jeep, whose name apparently was McNally.
The headlamps were not switched on, but abrupt acceleration threw Hale back against the tailgate. “And you do understand,” he added in a yell, “that this operation will involve the-the supernatural?”
“We have been told that, sir,” shouted McNally over the roar of the engine. “And we’ll believe it when we see it.”
The other jeep was in the lead as they sped up the steep dirt track in the moonlight, and Hale hung on and tried to watch the looming mountain through the dust. He could not yet see any whirlwinds, or patches of refracted starlight in the sky, but he was bleakly sure that the driver would be seeing some sort of “it” very soon.
Hale reached under his shirt to pull free the canvas bag that contained his own ankh; the bag hung on a twine loop around his neck, and he let it bounce on the front of his vest like a heavy scapular, easy to reach. Then he remembered to pull back the cocking handle on the machine gun in his lap and let it snap forward, and to check the change lever to be sure the gun was set for full-automatic fire. He held the weapon ready, but kept his finger away from the oversized trigger.
Within a minute the two Willys jeeps had begun the ascent up into the gorge, both audibly shifting down into low gear. The road was muddy now, and the windscreen of Hale’s jeep was soon spattered and smeared; the two drivers still hadn’t switched on the headlamps, and Hale couldn’t imagine how McNally could see to steer. Hale noticed that even the brake lights of the vehicle ahead didn’t flash, when it occasionally slowed.
A cluster of mud huts sat squarely on the delta slope of the gorge, one of them half-collapsed now under its spilled thatched roof, and beyond them the dirt road divided, one track slanting away south to trace the foot of the southern cliffs and the other proceeding more directly to the north wall of the valley. The surface of the northern path was freshly imprinted with the tire tracks of a heavy lorry, but the driver of the lead jeep steered his vehicle up onto the south road, at no less than fifty kilometers per hour, and the one Hale rode in rocked and bounced along right behind it.