The Last Frontier

by Alistair MacLean

  He cradled the phone in his hand, and turned to face both the professor and Jansci, holding out a hand to stop their protestations and the professor’s futile efforts to take the phone from him.

  ‘Rest easy, gentlemen, and reassure yourselves. Noble self-sacrifice has little appeal for me: in fact, not to put too fine a point on it, it has none at all … Ah, Colonel Hidas … Ah, so, I feared as much … A blow to my self-esteem, but then I am, I suppose, only a little fish … Then the professor it must be … Yes, he is more than willing … He will not go back to Budapest for the transfer, Colonel Hidas … Do you think we are mad? If we go there, then you have all three, so if you insist on Budapest then Dr Jennings crosses the border to-night, and nothing you or any man in Hungary can do can prevent that. You know that better than – aha, I thought you would see reason – you always were so reasonable a man, were you not? Then listen carefully.

  ‘About three kilometres north of this house – the General’s daughter will show you the way here if you cannot find it easily – a side road branches off to the left. Follow this road – it ends about eight kilometres farther on at a small ferry across a tributary of the Raab. Remain there. About three kilometres to the north there is a wooden bridge over the same stream. We are going to cross that, destroy it so that you will not be tempted to follow it, and make our way south to the ferryman’s house opposite which you will arrive. There is a small, rope-operated boat there which we will use to effect the transfer of prisoners. All this is clear to you?’

  There was a long pause, the faintly metallic, indistinguishable murmur of Hidas’ voice was the only sound in the silence of the room, then the Count said, ‘Wait a moment,’ covered the mouthpiece with his hand and turned to the others.

  ‘He says he must have an hour’s delay – they must have government permission. It’s quite likely. It’s also more than likely that, in normal circumstances, our dear friend would use that hour to call up the army to surround us or the air force to drop a few well-chosen bombs down the chimney.’

  ‘Impossible.’ Jansci shook his head. ‘The nearest army units are at Kaposvar, south of Balaton, and we know from the radio that they must be completely bogged down.’

  ‘And the nearest air force bases are up at the Czech border.’ The Count glanced through the window at the grey world of driving snow. ‘Even if they aren’t unserviceable or closed in, no aircraft could ever find us in this weather. We take a chance?’

  ‘We take a chance,’ Jansci echoed.

  ‘You have your hour, Colonel Hidas.’ The Count had removed his hand from the mouthpiece. ‘Call us a minute late, and you’ll find us gone. One other thing. You will come by way of the village of Vylok, and by no other way – we do not wish to have our escape route cut off, and you know the size of our organization –we will have every other road north of Szombathely covered, and if a car or truck as much as stirs along these roads, you will arrive here to find us gone. Until we meet then, my dear Colonel … In about three hours, you would say? Au revoir.’

  He replaced the phone and turned to the others.

  ‘You see how it is, gentlemen – I get all the kudos and reputation for chivalry and self-sacrificing gallantry, without any of the distressing risks customarily associated with these things. Missiles mean more than revenge, and they want the professor. We have three hours.’

  Three hours, and now one of them was almost gone. It was an hour that should have been spent in sleep, they were all exhausted and desperately in need of sleep, but the thought of sleep occurred to none. It could not occur to Jansci, dazed though he was with joy at the thought of seeing Catherine again, because he was at the same time unhappy, consumed with anxiety and remorse, and still in his heart blindly determined that the professor should not go: it could not occur to the professor, for he had no wish to spend his last few hours of freedom in sleep, and it did not occur to the Cossack, because he was again at his interminable practice with his whip, readying himself for glorious battle against the accursed AVO. Sandor never thought of it, he had just walked up and down in the bitter cold outside by Jansci’s shoulder, because he would not leave him at this hour. And the Count was drinking, heavily, steadily, as if he would never see a bottle of brandy again. Reynolds watched him in silent wonder as he opened a third bottle of brandy – and the Count had already consumed more than half of the others. He might have been drinking water, for all the apparent effects.

  ‘You think I drink too much, my friend?’ He smiled at Reynolds. ‘You do not conceal your thoughts.’

  ‘Wrong. Why shouldn’t you?’

  ‘Why not indeed? I like the stuff.’

  ‘But –’

  ‘But what, my friend?’

  Reynolds shrugged. ‘That’s not why you drink.’

  ‘No?’ The Count raised an eyebrow. ‘To drown my many sorrows, perhaps?’

  ‘To drown Jansci’s sorrows, I think,’ Reynolds said slowly. Then he had a moment of acute, unusual perception. ‘No, I think I know. You know, how you can be sure I do not know, but you are sure that Jansci will see his Catherine and Julia again. His sorrow is gone, but yours remains, and yours was the same as his, but now you have to bear yours alone, so you feel it with redoubled effect.’

  ‘Jansci has been talking to you?’

  ‘He has said nothing to me.’

  ‘I believe you.’ The Count regarded him thoughtfully. ‘You know, you have aged ten years in a few days, my friend. You will never be the same again. You are, of course, leaving your intelligence service?’

  ‘This is my last mission. No more.’

  ‘And going to marry the fair Julia?’

  ‘Good God!’ Reynolds stared at him. ‘Is it – is it as obvious as that?’

  ‘You were the last to see it. It was obvious to everyone else.’

  ‘Well, then, yes. Of course.’ He frowned in surprise. ‘I haven’t asked her yet.’

  ‘No need. I know women.’ The Count waved a lackadaisical hand. ‘She probably has faint hopes of making something of you.’

  ‘I hope she has.’ Reynolds paused, hesitated, then looked directly at the Count. ‘You put me off beautifully, there, didn’t you?’

  ‘Yes, I did. It was unfair – I was personal, and you had the grace not to rebuff me. Sometimes I think pride is a damnable thing.’ The Count poured a half-tumbler full of brandy, drank from it, chain-lit another Russian cigarette, then went on abruptly, ‘Jansci was looking for his wife, I for my little boy. Little boy! He would be twenty next month – maybe he is twenty. I don’t know, I don’t know. I hope he lived.’

  ‘He was not your only child?’

  ‘I had five children, and the children had a mother and grandfather and uncles, but I do not worry about them, they are all safe.’

  Reynolds said nothing, there was no need to say anything. He knew from what Jansci had said that the Count had lost everything and everybody in the world – except his little boy.

  ‘They took me away when he was only three years old,’ the Count went on softly. ‘I can still see him standing there in the snow, wondering, not understanding. I have thought of him since, every night, every day of my life. Did he survive? Who looked after him? Had he clothes to keep the cold out, has he still clothes to keep the cold out? Does he get enough to eat, or is he thin and wasted? Perhaps no one wanted him, but surely to God – he was such a little boy, Mr Reynolds. I wonder what he looks like, I always wondered what he looked like. I wondered how he smiled and laughed and played and ran, I wanted all the time to be by his side, to see him every day of my life, to see all the wonderful things you see when your child is growing up, but I have missed it all, all the wonderful years are gone, and it is too late now. Yesterday, all our yesterdays, can never come again. He was all that I have lived for, but to every man there comes a moment of truth, and mine came this morning. I shall never see him again. May God look after my little boy.’

  ‘I’m sorry I asked,’ murmured Reynolds. I’m terribly sorry.
’ He paused then he said: ‘That’s not true, I don’t know why I said that. I’m glad I asked.’

  ‘It’s strange, but I’m glad I told you.’ The Count drained his glass, refilled it, glanced at his watch and when he spoke again he was the old Count, his voice brisk and assertive and ironic. ‘Barack brings self-pity, but it also dispels it. Time we were moving, my friend. The hour is almost up. We cannot stay here – only a madman would trust Hidas.’

  ‘So Jennings must go?’

  ‘Jennings must go. If they don’t get him, then Catherine and Julia …’

  ‘Finish. Is that it?’

  ‘I’m sorry.’

  ‘Hidas must want him badly.’

  ‘He wants him desperately. The Communists are mortally afraid that if he escapes to the west and talks – and that would be a blow from which they would not recover for a long time – the damage would be irreparable. That is why I phoned and offered myself. I knew how badly they wanted me, I wanted to find out how badly they wanted Jennings. As I said, they want him desperately.’

  ‘Why?’ Reynolds’ voice was strained.

  ‘He will never work for them again,’ the Count answered obliquely. ‘They know that.’

  ‘What you mean is –’ ‘What I mean is that they only want his everlasting silence,’ the Count said harshly. ‘There is only one way you can ensure that.’

  ‘God above!’ Reynolds cried. ‘We can’t let him go, we can’t let him walk to his death and not do –’

  ‘You forget about Julia,’ the Count said softly.

  Reynolds buried his face in his hands, too confused, too dazed to think any more. Half a minute passed, perhaps a minute, then he jerked upright as the harsh, strident ring of the telephone bell cut through the silence of the room. The Count had the receiver off its rest within two seconds.

  ‘Howarth here. Colonel Hidas?’

  Again the listeners – Jansci and Sandor had just hurried in through the doorway, heads and shoulders matted with snow – could hear the metallic murmur of the voices in the earpiece, but were unable to distinguish anything. All they could do was watch the Count as he leaned negligently against the wall, his eyes moving idly, unseeingly around the room. Suddenly he straightened off the wall, the contracting muscles of his eyebrows etching a deep, vertical line on his forehead.

  ‘Impossible! I said an hour, Colonel Hidas. We cannot wait any longer. Do you think we are madmen to sit here till you can take us at your leisure?’

  He paused as the voice at the other end interrupted him, listened for a few moments to the urgent, staccato chatter, stiffened as he heard the click of a receiver being replaced, looked for a moment at the lifeless phone, then slowly returned it to his hook. His right thumb, as he turned to face the others, was rubbing slowly, gratingly against the side of his forefinger and his lower lip was caught between his teeth.

  ‘Something’s wrong.’ The voice reflected the anxiety in his face. ‘Something’s very wrong. Hidas says the minister responsible is at his country retreat, the telephone lines are down, they’ve had to send a car to fetch him and it might be another half-hour, or possibly – you damned idiot!’

  ‘What do you mean?’ Jansci demanded. ‘Who –’

  ‘Me.’ The uncertainty had vanished from the Count’s face, and the low controlled voice was alive with a desperate urgency that Reynolds had never heard before. ‘Sandor, start the truck – now. Grenades, ammonium nitrate to take care of that little bridge at the foot of the road and the field telephone. Hurry, all of you. For God’s sake, hurry!’

  No one stopped to question the Count. Ten seconds later they were all outside in the heavily falling snow, piling equipment into the truck, and within a minute the truck was jolting down the bumpy path towards the road. Jansci turned to the Count, one eyebrow raised in mute interrogation.

  ‘That last call came from a call-box,’ the Count said quietly. ‘Criminal negligence on my part not to catch on to it right away. Why is Colonel Hidas of the AVO telephoning from a call-box? Because he’s no longer in his Budapest office. It’s a hundred to one that the previous call wasn’t from Budapest either, but from our divisional H.Q. in Györ. Hidas has been on his way here all the time, desperately trying to delay us, to keep us here with these bogus phone calls. The minister, government permission, broken phone lines – lies, all lies. My God, to think that we fell for that sort of thing! Budapest – Hidas left Budapest hours ago! I’ll wager he’s no more than five miles from here at this very moment. Another fifteen minutes and he would have nailed us all, six good little flies waiting patiently in the spider’s parlour.’

  TWELVE

  They waited at the foot of the telephone pole by the side of the wood, peering through the momentarily thinning snow and shivering almost continuously. Too little sleep, too much exhaustion and the treacherous, quickly-evaporating warmth of the brandy were no fit preparation for even so brief a vigil in the bitter cold.

  And it had been a brief vigil, so far. A scant fifteen minutes had elapsed since they had left the house, driven down the dirt-track across the little hump-backed bridge then turned west along the main road till they had come to this wood, perhaps two hundred yards from the turn-off, with its hiding-place for the truck. The Count and Sandor had been dropped at the bridge, to place the charges of ammonium nitrate, while Reynolds and the professor had run into the wood, improvised rough and ready switches from dead branches, hurried back to the bridge and helped the Count and Sandor to conceal their tyre tracks and the wiring which led from the nitrate to the wood where Sandor was now in hiding with the plunger in his hand. By the time the others had returned to the truck Jansci and the Cossack, the latter agile as a monkey on any pole or tree, had already connected up their field set to the overhead telephone wires leading to the house.

  Another ten minutes passed, twenty, then half an hour, the snow still fell thinly, the cold reached deeper for the marrow of their bones, and both Jansci and the Count, with the AVO now long overdue, had become suspicious and anxious. It was not like the AVO to be late, especially when such a prize was at stake, it was most unlike Colonel Hidas, the Count declared, to be late at any time. Perhaps they were being held up by bad or impassable roads. Perhaps Hidas had disregarded instructions, perhaps his men were at that very moment sealing off every road to the frontier and encircling them from the rear, but the Count thought it highly unlikely: he knew that Hidas was under the impression that Jansci had a large and far-reaching organization, and that Jansci should neglect the obvious precaution of posting lookouts on the roads for miles around would probably never even cross his mind. But that Hidas had some stratagem in mind, the Count was now convinced: Hidas was a formidable adversary at any time, and the concentration camps held all too many people who had underrated the astuteness and persistence of that thin and embittered Jew. Hidas was up to something.

  And, it became immediately plain when Hidas did finally turn up, he had indeed been up to something. He came from the east, and he came in a big, green, closed-in truck which, the Count said, was his mobile H.Q.-cum-caravan, accompanied by another, small brown truck, almost certainly with some of his AVO killers inside. So much Jansci and the Count had expected. But what they had not expected, and what amply accounted for the AVO’s delay in arriving, was the presence of the third vehicle in the convoy, a big, lumbering, heavily-armoured half-track, equipped with a vicious looking high-velocity anti-tank rifle, almost half the length of the vehicle itself. The watchers by the telephone pole at the woodside stared at each other in perplexity, at the loss to discover any possible reason for this display of armed might: they were not left to wonder long.

  Hidas knew exactly what he was doing – he must have learned from Julia that Jansci’s house had two blind gable end walls – for he didn’t hesitate, not even for a moment; he had his men well briefed and trained, and the manoeuvre was executed with smooth and effortless efficiency. A few hundred yards distant from the track leading off the road to the house the two
trucks accelerated, leaving the half-track behind, then changed down almost in perfect unison, braked, swerved off the road and across the little hump-backed bridge, raced up to the house and fanned out, one on either side of it, coming to rest opposite and several yards distant from either of the blind gable walls. Immediately the trucks had stopped, armed men leapt out and took up crouching positions behind the trucks and behind the little outbuildings and some of the trees that bordered the back of the house.

  Even before the last man had taken up position, the big half-track had swung off the road, scraped between the low walls of the hump bridge with the snout of its long gun pointing grotesquely skywards, plunged down the other side and ground to a halt about fifty yards away from the front of the house. A second elapsed, then another, then there came a flat, whiplash crack as the big gun fired and a roar and erupton of smoke and flying débris as the shell exploded in the wall of the house, just below the ground-floor windows. A few more seconds passed, the dust from the first explosion hadn’t even had time to settle, when the next shell smashed into the house, perhaps a yard away from the first, then another and another and another, and already a hole almost ten feet in length had been torn in the masonry of the front wall.

  ‘The treacherous, murderous swine,’ the Count whispered. His face was quite expressionless. ‘I knew I couldn’t trust him, but I didn’t know till now just how much I couldn’t trust him.’ He broke off as the big gun fired again, and waited until the rolling echoes had died away. ‘I’ve seen this a hundred times – this is the technique that the Germans first perfected in Warsaw. If you want to bring a house down without blocking the streets, you just knock the bottom out and the house falls in upon itself. They also discovered, just by way of an extra dividend, that everyone hiding in such a house would be crushed to death at the same time.’