Declare

the angels as the bodies were torn apart—and the two frail sparks had no choice but to concede that it was only in wide-flying dismemberment that the men, in death, achieved something like coherent meaning.
    Not all of the men in the gorge had been taken up into the sky— some had been killed and left to lie in the mud, and Hale was aware of three-squared that bent and unbent their autistic shapes to move down toward the plain, out of the mountain; but even the geometric patterns they formed as they moved were without conscious meaning, and along with the will of the skies he ignored them.
    He found himself looking upward instead.
    The highest of the moon-silvered clouds formed sweeping stair-ways to lattices and balconies among the stars, and the music was complete and comprehensible now with the base line of infrared radiation in the earth and the skirling arpeggios of the solar wind and ionized particles scattering in the vast halls of the upper atmosphere—the dance was eternal, defiant and endlessly fascinating, fast as a horizon-spanning arc of lightning and as slow as the shifting of the basalt-footed continents.
    The knot of identity that was consciously Hale had to be careful not to flex away with the angels into the sky or into the stony heart of the mountain—he was diminishing as he held back from these seven-league steps—and after some period of time he realized that he was alone and small and discrete, and that he was Andrew Hale, Captain Andrew Hale of the fugitive SOE, twenty-six years old and… profoundly unhappy.
    He was kneeling in the mud beside the shredded rear tire of the jeep, and the magnesium flare had gone out, leaving the gorge in darkness. Only the whistle of frigid wind against high stone cliffs intruded now on the mountain silence, and as Hale got shakily to his feet he knew that there would be no use in calling out to his SAS companions—they had either been killed in the ambush, or taken up alive into the sky, or had fled down the path.
    Then he heard a scuffle only a few yards away, and a moment later a shrill neigh and the wet clop of hooves in the mud—apparently at least one of the horses had survived, and someone had succeeded in mounting it.
    Hale had lurched quickly backward at the unexpected noise, and now Elena’s voice called harshly, in French, “Who is there?”
    Hale was ashamed to speak, after the horror of their shared experience, but he made himself croak, “Elena—it’s me, Andrew.”
    “Ach! Stay away from me— cannibale.”
    He glimpsed a rushing shape in the darkness and then the horse had galloped past him, its hooves thudding away down the invisible slope.
    He wanted to shout the plural down after her— cannibales! —but he could only despairingly agree with her assessment of him. His earlier question rang in his head again— Where is the blood? —and he knew that the blood was on his hands… on his very lips, morally if not literally.
    Elena had apparently taken the only remaining horse, but the other jeep was still here; and when Hale limped stiffly across the mud to it, he could make it out clearly enough to know from its stance that its tires were still inflated. Feeling immensely old and bad and sad, Hale climbed wearily into the driver’s seat and forced his frozen fingers to press the starter—and when the engine roared into hot life, he clanked the gear-shift sideways into reverse and, hunching around in the seat to peer downhill through the steaming plume of his breath, began inching the vehicle back down.
    After a few yards he realized that his panting had become sobbing.
    Surely some of the SAS men had survived—they would know the jeep by its sound, and then they would recognize him in the dimness, if they looked closely. McNally is dead, Hale told himself, but the other four might still be alive—they’d have had a moment to dive for cover between the blaze of the flare and the start of the gunfire—they wouldn’t know that I—participated in the deaths, some of the deaths, helplessly—
    But he remembered the sustained full-automatic fire that had raked the jeeps, and he quailed. It had to have been Russians who had ambushed them—but how had Russians known to be waiting there, beside the south wall? Had the SAS men been observed planting the stone, or had they been betrayed by someone in the West?
    After no less than an hour of rocking down the slope in reverse, frequently braking and shifting to low gear to climb