Declare

way they do.”
    “Da!” yelled Hale obediently. But when he pulled the sling off over his head and then put it on again, the rifle barrel was pointed down, so that one yank on the barrel would bring it back to the Bedu position. The Spetsnaz seemed to be satisfied.
    West of the tents the white slope climbed toward the tumbled chunks of ice at the foot of the Abich I glacier wall, and down here at the level of the tents one of the Russian commandos had begun axing out a square, yard-wide step in the snowpack. Another was lashing three snap-link carabiners at fifteen-foot intervals on a long white rope, and when he had finished he beckoned to Philby, Hale, and Mammalian.
    He clicked the carabiners one by one onto similar links at the fronts of their climbing harnesses, so that the three men were attached to the rope.
    The Russian muttered something, and Mammalian laughed and translated: “Our borscht-blooded friend says we are three babies that must be leashed.”
    Neither Philby nor Hale had any funny rejoinders.
    The Russian who had chopped out the step in the slope was now crouched in front of it, digging at the vertical wall of snow he had exposed. When he stood up and began speaking to one of his fellows, Hale could tell by the man’s tone that he was not happy. Hale peered at the exposed surface of snow, and saw that the Spetsnaz had scooped loose snow and ice out of several horizontal layers—apparently the snowpack was not uniformly dense.
    Hale was the last man on the rope, and he walked up to where Philby stood, dragging the slack behind him. “Is that bad, do you suppose?” he whispered to Philby.
    “This is all bad,” Philby muttered. “Our father has doomed us both.”
    The Russian was speaking, and Mammalian waved backward at the two Englishmen; then he turned and said, “The ice is subject to shearing, sliding. Avalanche is a—real possibility.”
    “Well, we knew that , for heaven’s sake,” snapped Philby.
    “Uh,” Mammalian went on, translating, “it will be more dangerous when we are moving across the slope, above—rather than straight up it, as here. Make no noise—tread lightly, not stomping— and—don’t speak.”
    One of the Spetsnaz, whose white machine gun was equipped with a folding stock and a collapsible bipod at the muzzle, walked downhill past Hale and knotted a lighter line onto the trailing end of the rope and clicked his own harness carabiner onto the bight of the knot. The three amateurs were now bracketed at either end. The rest of the Spetsnaz had attached their harnesses along the far half of the long rope with similar knots, and now the procession had begun to move up the white slope, in single file.
    After Mammalian and then Philby had begun plodding forward, Hale took up the pace, hearing the crunch of the Spetsnaz’s boots start up behind him.
    Hale could feel the grade of the hill in his calves, for with the crampon-spiked boots it was not possible to walk on his toes; but the mild ache was pleasant for now.
    Soon the men at the front of the rope had stopped at the foot of the thirty-foot glacier wall, and after Mammalian and Philby and Hale had walked close enough for the rope to lie slack on the ground between them they halted too. The Abich I glacier was gray-white in cross-section, and Hale was staring up at the overhanging cornices of snow and ice when he noticed that the leader had begun to climb the bumpy, gullied wall.
    The man moved upward in a contorting but graceful series of moves, like slow-motion bullfighting; at one point he would stretch out a leg to hook an outcrop with his instep, at another he would wedge his forearm or elbow into a gap in order to reach higher with the other hand, and once he simply pulled his whole weight up a yard like a man doing chin-ups. He paused near the top to hang a loop of slung rope on the face, and then after climbing up another yard he stopped below a gap in the overhanging cornice, unslinging his ice-axe to reach up and prod the surface with the pointed butt end of it.
    At last he climbed up to the gap and jackknifed through it and out of sight; and a moment later another man was moving up the face, in rapid scrambles, and the line had begun moving again.
    Hale was dizzy at the thought of making that ascent himself. There wasn’t enough slack between himself and Philby for him to hope that the men at the crest could simply lift them up like sacks of coal—clearly some climbing , some supporting of his