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PROLOGUE

Mount Ararat, 1948

froy 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 see 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 intere, and then his left hand seeear-shift knob after he reached down to clank the lever up into first gear He had been inching down theover his shoulder at the dark trail, but the loo peak of Mount Ararat had not receded at all, still eclipsed half of the night sky above hiet away from it

He flexed his cold-nuear-shift knob and switched on the headla, and he squinted through the shattered windscreen at the rock wall of the gorge and the tire tracks in the ht down the narrow shepherds' path He was still panting, his breath bursting out of his open mouth in plu 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 o Desperately he hoped that as roup he had led up the gorge, and that they ht 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 so shame now, he had at least kno to evade it

In the glow reflected back froht, bare steel around the bullet holes in the jeep's bonnet; and he knew the doors and fenders were riddled with sie needle showed half a tank of petrol, so at least the tank had not been punctured

Within a ures a hundred feet ahead of hilow of the single headlamp At this distance he couldn't tell if they were British or Russian He had lost his Sten gun soh slopes, but he pulled the chunky45 revolver out of his shoulder holster-even if these survivors were British, he ht need it

But he glanced fearfully back over his shoulder, at the looht was back there, up ah fastnesses of Mount Ararat

He turned back to the frail beaht the three stuures, 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 h in years to come he would try to dismiss it from his mind, in that ain, would again climb this cold track

BOOK ONE Learn, Not Speak

London, 1963