PROLOGUE. Mount Ararat, 1948
…from behind that craggy steep till then The horizon’s bound, a huge peak, black and huge, As if with voluntary power instinct, Upreared its head. I struck and struck again, And growing still in stature the grim shape Towered up between me and the stars, and still, For so it seemed, with purpose of its own And measured motion like a living thing, Strode after me.
– William Wordsworth, The Prelude, 381-389
The young captain’s hands were sticky with blood on the steering wheel as he cautiously backed the jeep in a tight turn off the rutted mud track onto a patch of level snow that shone in the intermittent moonlight on the edge of the gorge, and then his left hand seemed to freeze onto the gear-shift knob after he reached down to clank the lever up into first gear. He had been inching down the mountain path in reverse for an hour, peering over his shoulder at the dark trail, but the looming peak of Mount Ararat had not receded at all, still eclipsed half of the night sky above him, and more than anything else he needed to get away from it.
He flexed his cold-numbed fingers off the gear-shift knob and switched on the headlamps-only one came on, but the sudden blaze was dazzling, and he squinted through the shattered windscreen at the rock wall of the gorge and the tire tracks in the mud as he pulled the wheel around to drive straight down the narrow shepherds’ path. He was still panting, his breath bursting out of his open mouth in plumes of steam. He was able to drive a little faster now, moving forward-the jeep was rocking on its abused springs and the four-cylinder engine roared in first gear, no longer in danger of lugging to a stall.
He was fairly sure that nine men had fled down the path an hour ago. Desperately he hoped that as many as four of them might be survivors of the SAS group he had led up the gorge, and that they might somehow still be sane.
But his face was stiff with dried tears, and he wasn’t sure if he were still sane himself-and unlike his men, he had been somewhat prepared for what had awaited them; to his aching shame now, he had at least known how to evade it.
In the glow reflected back from the rock wall at his right, he could see bright, bare steel around the bullet holes in the jeep’s bonnet; and he knew the doors and fenders were riddled with similar holes. The wobbling fuel gauge needle showed half a tank of petrol, so at least the tank had not been punctured.
Within a minute he saw three upright figures a hundred feet ahead of him on the path, and they didn’t turn around into the glow of the single headlamp. At this distance he couldn’t tell if they were British or Russian. He had lost his Sten gun somewhere on the high slopes, but he pulled the chunky.45 revolver out of his shoulder holster-even if these survivors were British, he might need it.
But he glanced fearfully back over his shoulder, at the looming mountain-the unsubdued power in the night was back there, up among the craggy high fastnesses of Mount Ararat.
He turned back to the frail beam of light that stretched down the slope ahead of him to light the three stumbling figures, and he increased the pressure of his foot on the accelerator, and he wished he dared to pray.
He didn’t look again at the mountain. Though in years to come he would try to dismiss it from his mind, in that moment he was bleakly sure that he would one day see it again, would again climb this cold track.