Declare

speed of a hundred miles per hour. Below his left elbow he could see the bright-dotted line of the torches flickering past like slow tracer bullets.
    The pilot was wearing khakis, and a beret that seemed in the darkness to be the same color. The wartime Special Air Service commandos had worn a beige beret, but the SAS had been disbanded right after the war; the War Office had subsequently created an SAS regiment within the old Territorial Army regiment known as the Artists’ Rifles, but Hale understood that they wore a maroon beret. Had the old SAS survived, covertly? Was this Ararat operation to be a joint effort between the fugitive SOE and the fugitive SAS?
    The black shoulder of the mountain had eclipsed the purple western sky when the helicopter began descending, and though the pilot was showing no lights and Hale couldn’t distinguish any features on the ground, the aircraft settled smoothly to a flexing halt on a level field of grass beside a dirt track. In the waxing moonlight Hale could see that this plain below the mountain was studded with angular boulders, and though he knew that they were just the rubble that had tumbled down the mountain out of the Ahora Gorge in one of the nineteenth-century earthquakes, he remembered the stone ghosts that had risen out of the dead wells of Wabar, and he gripped the Khan’s black rock firmly.
    The pilot had immediately killed the engine, and now he pulled off the headphones as the unpowered rotor blades began to clatter around more slowly.
    “We’re still three miles short of the gorge,” the pilot said in a thick Yorkshire accent, “but I can’t promise you the Russians didn’t hear the motor.”
    “The Russians are up there? Is the stone even up in the gorge yet?” asked Hale as he levered open the door and stepped down to the solid, grassy dirt. The wind from the east was colder now, and he wished his felt Kurd vest had sleeves.
    “Talk to him,” the pilot said, nodding over Hale’s shoulder.
    Hale turned around quickly—and jumped, for a man in a gray windbreaker was standing only two yards away from him. And now Hale could see by the cloud-filtered moonlight that there were four men standing behind this one, and that what had appeared to be a low hillock was now revealed to be two camouflage-painted Willys jeeps and a stack of bicycles, with a tarpaulin settling to the ground behind them. All five of the men carried slung Sten guns, the characteristic horizontal magazines standing out from behind them like longsword hilts.
    “I’m Lieutenant Colonel Shannon, Captain Hale,” said the nearest man, without irony. “The Russian party came across the border about half an hour ago, dressed as Kurdish shepherds; we almost missed them—the pogranichniki staged a big crisis four miles south, with spotlights and gunfire, while this lot just walked across in the dark, through a hole in the wire, right under a watchtower that had its lights out; clear Soviet complicity. And the Turk soldiers at that point had conveniently been ordered to drive south to where the commotion was, as reinforcements. The Russians were met on this side by a party with a lorry; they all drove away up the gorge with their headlamps out.”
    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 capbadge. 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