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.
He looked back toward the gap he had climbed out through, and saw two unsteady figures step down onto the ice-one had a snow-whitened beard, and he knew they were Mammalian and Philby.
A new, louder note grew out of the mountain's resonance, and resolved itself, incongruously, into the whine of a turbine engine. The sound was droning from the void behind him, and Hale rocked around to look northwest-and he was disoriented to see the nose and glittering edge-on rotor disk of a helicopter hanging out there in the sky. It was growing in apparent size, clearly speeding toward the Rabkrin position.
Even as he watched, two spots of fluttering white glare appeared below the onrushing cabin; but only a moment later the craft was climbing and banking to the east, and the machine-gun slugs blew a vertical series of bursts of white spray from the glacier face and then expended themselves away among the higher ravines as the helicopter, its guns still chattering in the thin air, disappeared with a roar over the mountain shoulder.
It had been one of the new French Aerospatiale Alouettes, and before it disappeared Hale had seen the fasces tubes of rocket launchers slung under the fuselage.
Why hadn't they fired the rockets?
Probably they would on their next pass.
In her earphones the pilot was angrily demanding an explanation for Elena's abrupt order to veer east.
She ignored him and clung to a stanchion on the port bulkhead, staring through eyes blinded with tears at the two accusing red lights on the armament control panel.
She had switched on the machine guns as the aircraft had climbed up for a sweep, and her finger had been poised over the button that would have sent a volley of rockets into the grotto where the obscene black structure protruded from the glacier and the tiny figures of the men were so conveniently clustered; but one lone figure had been out on the frozen lake, struggling to its feet-and she had somehow recognized the posture.
It had been Andrew Hale, and in another moment the shattering tracks of the machine-gun patterns would have stitched right over him.
Into her head had flashed an image of his bloody hand outside the garret window in Paris, when the Gestapo had been within seconds of breaking down the door, and she had heard again his voice in Berlin saying, I will not say good-bye ever.
And reflexively she had ordered the pilot to veer hard east. The move had required that they climb steeply, and in a moment the aircraft had flown right up over the glacier. But she believed the tracks of the bullets had missed Andrew Hale.
Out the starboard window she watched the clouds keep wheeling past-clearly the pilot was coming around for another pass.
And she remembered that the pilot too had an armament control panel on his instrument board.
Mammalian was shouting, but his voice barely reached Hale. "The angels must think the helicopter was ours! Approach them, quickly!"
Philby, propelled by a push from Mammalian, was lurching blindly out across the ice toward Hale. And Hale could feel the man's approach in his mind, could feel the agitation of Philby's fears and jangled memories aligning themselves with his own to form some bigger, other mind.
Father, where are you? I'm your son-we're your sons, we're your son-
The inhuman music of the sky seemed to respond, and the dust-devils of snow were dancing over the ice. The smell of metallic oil on the icy air was exotic, exciting.
I will not have this, Hale made himself think. I will not be the restored half of Kim Philby. God help me. Hale bit the mitten off of his right hand and thrust his hand into the deep pocket of his parka.
Behind him sounded the abrupt ripping roar of full-automatic gunfire. Hale spun on the ice, crouching and blinking through the frosted lenses of his goggles-but the gunfire was not aimed out toward himself and Philby. Mammalian was shooting at the Spetsnaz commandos.
Hale choked out an involuntary whimper as he turned back to face the Black Ark on the far side of the ice.
And it wasn't a black wooden structure overhanging the ice now. The stone flank of the mountains was soaring obsidian arches and columns, and the ice cornices against the sky were gone, replaced by minarets shining in the sun, and the clouds were higher terraces and balconies of milky crystal, mounting away to the zenith. The towers of light stood in parallel out on the broad ice-paved square, each one wide as a house and taller than the mountain's peak, and the crescendo of their inorganic singing was shaking clouds of snow from the high glacier crest and calling up answering verses in the mind that was Hale and Philby.
A cold white light was shining out of the high windows of the black structure, flowing out of it, to join the columns of living sunlight.