Declare

own weight, would be required. Under all his clothing he could feel sweat on his chest, and suddenly his mittens seemed as clumsy as the fins of a fish. Was one supposed to take them off?—they were thonged together through a loop at his collar.
    But when Mammalian went flexing and reaching away up the face, Hale saw that although the man was climbing, he was at the same time giving some of his weight to the rope, which was being tugged up from the top—and his mittens were off, swinging loosely behind his belt. I can do that much, Hale thought, shucking off his own and flexing his hands in the liner gloves; and when Mammalian had disappeared over the cornice and even Philby was halfway up the face, puffing and grunting and scrabbling with his crampon spikes at the ice, Hale stepped gamely up to the face and found that it was not difficult. With the rope taking his weight at his waist and tugging upward, he even found several times that he had to pause before stepping up to the next hand-hold to allow the rope to come taut again.
    Then he had rocked over the lip in the cornice gap and was crawling across snow, the drogue stone swinging below his chin. Only one of the Russian commandos was hauling the rope up now, and the others were squatting on this new slope.
    They were on the Abich I glacier now. It was more steeply inclined from south down to north than the Cehennem Dere had been, and it was mostly bare ice, with pockets of snow clinging to the face only where cracked, compacted sections of ice had been pushed up to make steps.
    The air stung the inside of Hale’s nose, too cold at this height to carry any smells except a faint tingle like sulfur. Hale pulled his mittens back onto his aching, numbed hands, and the exposed patches of his face stung as if with a burn. He shifted around to look southward up the mounting slope to the peak, still three thousand feet above, and he quailed at the lunar remoteness of it, and of the white streamers of snow that trailed away from the peak across the gray sky.
    Mammalian was standing by the slack rope beside him, looking down toward his boots. Hale followed the direction of his gaze and saw a smoothly oval two-inch hole cut into the ice.
    “A borehole,” said Mammalian, speaking loudly to be heard over the static-like roar of the wind, “from one of the scientific expeditions. Round, originally—the glacier flow has made it elliptical.”
    Hale just nodded. Hartsik had said that the djinn had no problem with elliptical holes . Well, Hale had brought some elliptical solids , a few thousand of them, packed tight for now in .410 shot shells.
    Too soon the Spetsnaz were all on their feet again, and then one by one, as if through an invisible bottleneck, they were moving out in single-file across the glacier face. In less than a minute it was Mammalian’s turn to start forward, and then Philby’s, and then Hale was plodding out onto the glacier, his crampon spikes clashing on the ice.
    They were walking up a convex slope. The surface was bumpy and cracked, but it seemed solid enough, and the few yards-wide gaping crevasses they skirted were conspicuous. If I could kill the man behind me with one round , Hale thought with a sort of dazed abstractness, I could probably catch the other nine with a couple of careful bursts—they’re all within a ten or twelve degree wedge in front of me. Twenty-nine bullets for nine men; well, ten men, I suppose, counting Mammalian.
    But he didn’t know how much mountaineering skill would still be required before they reached the Ark; and if even one of the Spetsnaz was not killed outright, Hale would find himself the target of very professional return fire; and anyway he knew he could not shoot men in the back. Especially not Hakob Mammalian.
    The rubbing-alcohol wind was stinging his cheeks and forming ice crystals around his nostrils. I can at least put the load of birdshot into Philby’s back, he thought despairingly—and as long as I don’t kill him, as long as he can still flee to Moscow, that will have turned over the hourglass on the Moscow ghula , Russia’s guardian angel, Machikha Nash. She’ll die shortly after Philby does, and he’s already fifty-one; and the Soviet Union should collapse within only a couple of years after that; assuming Declare’s math is right, now. And I should be able to fire at least one shell into the djinn too, before the Spetsnaz cut me down.
    Play out the hand.
    He was light-headed, almost