"I'll free the other rope," called Hale. "Don't shoot me." Hale flapped his arms and flexed his constricted fingers, then began climbing up toward the point from which he would be able to reach the snagged rope; he quickly caught the trick of leaning forward to give the Prusik knot slack when he wanted to pull himself up and then leaning away from the rock when he wanted it to belay him.
When he had grabbed the other rope, he pulled the whole length of it across to him, coiling it loosely over his lap, and he saw that several of the Prusik-knotted cords were hung along the last yard of it; but before he let it all drop down to where Philby waited, he unsnapped the front of his parka to reach into an inner pocket. Very carefully he pulled out a box of.410 shot shells, and he gripped the brass of two of them between his teeth and pulled them out as he closed the box and tucked it away; then he reached into the outer pocket and drew the derringer. He pushed the button behind the exposed trigger and swiveled the locking lever around in a half-circle and swung the hinged barrels up away from the frame. He pushed up the extractor and lifted the spent shells out of the barrels, then took the fresh shells from between his teeth and fitted them into the barrels. At last he closed the gun and locked it and replaced it in his pocket, along with the two spent shells.
"Here!" he yelled, letting the rope spill off his legs to hang slack down the rock face a yard to his left. He peered down past his legs at Philby's upturned face.
"Is it long enough?" shouted Hale.
"Yes!" came Philby's call from below.
Thank God. Hale had not wanted to try cutting and splicing it. "Fit the bight of a knot into your snap-link!"
"Aye aye," shouted Philby.
Within ten minutes they were both sitting cross-legged, panting, on the wind-swept crest of the Parrot glacier. They had pulled up one of the ropes and freed it from its piton, and now it lay coiled beside Hale. It was an unwieldy pile. He had unslung his Kalashnikov and fitted a fresh magazine into the receiver in case the helicopter might reappear, but the racing wind had not abated since he had shot the djinn by the Black Ark, and he didn't think the aircraft would dare approach the mountain now.
Philby swung his frosted, blood-blackened face toward Hale, and his eyes were invisible behind the sky glare on the goggle lenses. "Shoot the other rope," he said, loudly to be heard over the wind.
Hale thought of Hakob Mammalian, conceivably still alive down there on the northern face, making his wounded way to the ledge and finding both the static lines gone. "No," he called back to Philby, wearily standing up and slinging his gun. He bent down to pick up the coil of rope, then straightened with it and began plodding up the crest, toward the windward side of the glacier. "Come on, the sun's past noon."
From behind him he heard Philby say, "D-damn you! Then I'll d-do it."
Hale spun clumsily around, his crampons grating on the ice as he dropped the coiled rope, and Philby was standing, and had already unslung his own Kalashnikov and was lifting it to his shoulder.
The derringer felt extraordinarily heavy in Hale's right hand as he drew it and raised it to point it at Philby's back, and cocking the hammer against its tight spring seemed to take all of his remaining strength.
Am I my brother's keeper?
Philby was aiming, and had not fired yet.
Hale touched the derringer's trigger with his forefinger, and the little gun flared and hammered back hard into his palm.
Then his knees hit the snow, and Hale was simply too exhausted to try to re-cock the derringer or raise the barrel of his machine gun.
Through watering eyes he peered past the retinal glare at the silhouette of Philby.
The man had fallen to one knee, and his head was down, and he was making a noise, a flat monotone wail. The voice of thy brother's blood crieth unto me from the ground, thought Hale, fearful that he might have been standing too close to him. How wide would the shot pattern have spread in twelve feet?
"Are you dying?" Hale croaked. He blinked around at the infinity of snow. He could melt some between his palms. "I can baptize you.">Hale felt Philby's knees buckle, and so Hale was kneeling too, helplessly, his kneecaps thudding against the pebbled ice. The golden angel was tall, leaning down over them because it would crack the sky if it stood up to its full height-
If he had not withstood the stressful attention of djinn many times before, Hale's identity would simply have imploded under the psychic weight, dimly grateful for the escape into oblivion; as it was, he was able to hold on to his diminished self, but the urge to surrender to this nearly divine being, this higher order, was overwhelming. To oppose his will to this force would simply be to shatter his will, shatter his very reason. I will give in to it was his concussed thought; live in the kingdoms in the clouds, learn their secrets, share their power over men-
But his mouth was suddenly sour with the taste of the imaginary bread he had eaten with the king of Wabar in 1948, and with the taste of the dish he had refused then but had helplessly shared with the djinn in the Ahora Gorge three months later-
- blood and khaki, the SAS men he had led up to their deaths-
Hale's identity recoiled from the memory, and for one teetering moment his self was his own. He hastily made the sign of the cross, clanking the derringer barrel against his snow-goggles as he shouted, "In the name of the Father!" out into air that was incapable now of carrying any merely human voice-and then he pointed the blunt little steel barrel up at the angel-
And he pulled the trigger.
Even as he did it, his mind screamed in protesting grief and loss. What you might have had-!
In slow motion his fist moved up with the recoil, and a churning smear of fire hung in the air. He thought he heard a groaning wail from far behind him-it might have been Mammalian's voice, Dopplered down to a bass register.
Slow as a flight of arrows the shot pattern was spreading out as it rushed up into the sky, its pattern rotating to the right as it expanded. The light of the towering figure became the enormous flare of an explosion, but Hale levered back the hammer of the little gun and fired the second shell. Again the shot sped visibly through the billowing air, like an expanding wheel turning.
Then with a shearing scream the hot shock-wave punched him over backward, and he was sliding north, skating on the barrel of his slung Kalashnikov, toward the edge of the abyss. He was lying on his back, and he spasmodically arched his body to press his weight down onto the crampons laced to his boots. The grating of the points in the ice vibrated in his shinbones, and in seconds he had bumped to a halt against someone's legs.
The air was agonizingly shrill with the prolonged whistling scream. Hale's ribs and legs were being hammered with stony missiles, and his exposed face stung with abrading sand; the lenses of his goggles had been cracked into star-patterns by the blast, and he clawed them off before these ferocious gusts could punch the glass wedges into his eyes.