The Last Frontier

by Alistair MacLean

  ‘And that’s what they are trying – I mean, they think we’re in there?’ There was a tremor in Dr Jennings’ voice, and his horror showed in his pale face.

  ‘They’re not just amusing themselves by having target practice,’ the Count said roughly. ‘Of course they think we’re there. And Hidas has his terriers stationed all round the house, in case the rats should try to bolt from their hole.’

  ‘I see.’ Jennings’ voice was steadier now. ‘It would appear that I have overestimated the value of my services to the Russians.’

  ‘No,’ the Count lied. ‘No you haven’t. They want you all right – but I suspect they want Major-General Illyurin – and myself – even more. Jansci is Communist Hungary’s enemy No. 1, and they know this chance would never come their way again. They couldn’t pass it up – and they were prepared to sacrifice even you to make the most of this chance.’

  Reynolds felt a slow stirring within him – a stirring of anger and admiration – anger for the way the Count was hiding the truth from Jennings, for letting him think that they could still trade him without any danger to himself, admiration for the ready skill with which he had invented so plausible an explanation.

  ‘They’re fiends – they’re inhuman fiends,’ Jennings was saying in wonder.

  ‘It is certainly difficult to think of them as anything else at times,’ Jansci said heavily. ‘Did – did anyone see them?’ There was no need to ask who he meant by ‘them,’ the mute head-shakings showed that all had understood. ‘No? Then perhaps we had better call our friend up there. The phone connection is under the gable. It shouldn’t have been damaged yet.’

  And it hadn’t. There was a lull in the firing, and in the still, frosty air it was quite easy for them to hear the ringing of the bell inside the house as Jansci cranked the handle of the field telephone, easy, too, to hear a shouted order and see the man who ran round the corner of the house, waving a signal to the gunners in the half-track: almost at once the big rifle dipped to one side. Another order, and the crouching soldiers round the house broke quickly from their hiding-places, some running towards the front of the house, some towards the back. At the front, the watchers could see the AVO men stooping low along the gaping ruin that was all that remained of the wall, then jumping up and poking their carbines through the shattered windows, while a couple of men kicked the front door back off its broken hinges and passed inside. Even at that distance there was no mistaking the first of the two men who had gone inside, there was no mistaking the giant, gorilla-like figure of Coco anywhere.

  ‘You begin to understand, perhaps, why the worthy Colonel Hidas has survived so long?’ The Count murmured. ‘One could hardly accuse him of taking unnecessary chances.’

  Coco and the other AVO men reappeared at the front door, and at a word from the giant the other men watching at the windows relaxed, while one of them disappeared round the corner of the house. He reappeared almost at once, followed by another who went straight inside the house, and that this other could only have been Colonel Hidas was obvious when they heard his voice coming tinnily through the field phone’s head set seconds later: Jansci had only one of the receivers to his ear and the voice came clearly enough through the second for all the others to hear.

  ‘Major-General Illyurin, I presume?’ Hidas’ voice was calm, composed, and only the Count knew it well enough to detect the faint edge of anger underneath.

  ‘Yes. Is this the way the gentlemen of the AVO keep their bargains, Colonel Hidas?’

  ‘There is no room for childish recrimination between the two of us,’ Hidas replied. ‘Where are you speaking from, may I inquire?’

  ‘That, too, is irrelevant. You have brought my wife and daughter?’

  ‘There was a long pause, while the receiver went dead, then Hidas’s voice came again. ‘Naturally. I said I would.’

  ‘May I see them, please?’

  ‘You do not trust me?’

  ‘A superfluous question, Colonel Hidas. Let me see them.’

  ‘I must think.’ Again the phone went dead, and the Count said urgently:

  ‘He’s not thinking, that fox never requires to think. He’s stalling for time. He knows we must be somewhere we can see him – so he knows he can see us. That was what his first pause was for – he was telling his men to –’

  A shout from the house brought confirmation of the Count’s guess, even before he had made it in words, and a moment later a man came rushing out of the front door and ran down pell-mell towards the half-track.

  ‘He’s seen us,’ said the Count softly. ‘Us or the truck behind us. And now guess what?’

  ‘No need to guess.’ Jansci dropped the field set. ‘The half-track. Take cover! Will it blast us from there – or will it come to seek us out? That’s the only question.’

  ‘It’ll come for us,’ Reynolds was certain. ‘Shells are useless in a wood.’

  He was right. Even as he was speaking, the big Diesel of the half-track had growled into life, and now it was lumbering up to the clear space in front of the house, stopping and going into reverse.

  ‘He’s coming all right,’ Jansci nodded. ‘They didn’t have to move to fire from there – that rifle turret can traverse through 360 degrees.’ He moved out from the cover of his tree, jumped over the snow-filled ditch on to the road and held both arms, just touching, high above his head – the agreed signal to the hidden, waiting Sandor that he was to press the plunger.

  No one was prepared for what happened, not even the Count, who had underestimated how desperate Hidas had become. Faintly, through the field telephone lying on the ground, he heard Hidas shouting ‘Fire!’ and before the Count had time even to call out a warning, several automatic carbines had opened up from the house and they leapt back behind tree-trunks to escape the whistling hail of rifle fire that smashed into the wood around them, some shells striking into the boles with solid hammer blows, others ricocheting off and whining away evilly to bury their misshapen metal in tree-trunks still deeper in the wood, and yet others just breaking off branches and twigs to bring tiny flurries of frozen snow sifting down gently to the ground. But Jansci had had no time, no chance and no warning and he toppled and swayed and crashed heavily to the road as might one of the trees behind him when the feller’s axe had struck the last blow at its base. Reynolds straightened from his shelter and had just taken his first plunging step towards the road when he was grabbed from behind and hauled roughly behind the tree he had just left.

  ‘Do you want to get yourself killed, too?’ The Count’s voice was savage, but the savagery was not directed at Reynolds. ‘I don’t think he’s dead – you can see his foot moving.’

  ‘They’ll fire again,’ Reynolds protested. The crackling of the carbines had ended as abruptly as it had begun. ‘They can riddle him lying there.’

  ‘All the more reason why you shouldn’t commit suicide.’

  ‘But Sandor’s waiting! He hadn’t time to see the signal –’

  ‘Sandor’s nobody’s fool. He doesn’t require any signal.’ The Count edged an eye round a corner of his sheltering tree, saw the half-track rumbling down the dirt road towards the bridge. ‘If that bridge goes up now that damn tank can stop and pulverize us from where it stands: worse, it can reverse and cross the ditch, tracks first, on to the main road. Sandor knows it. Watch!’

  Reynolds watched. The half-track was almost on the bridge now. Ten yards, five yards, it was climbing up the far hump of the bridge. Sandor had left it too late, Reynolds knew he had left it too late, then there came a sudden flash of light, a low dull roar nothing like so loud as Reynolds had expected, followed first by the rumbling of falling masonry then a grinding metallic screeching and a crash which shook the ground almost as much as the explosion had done as the half-track plunged nose first into the bed of the stream and the far abutment of the bridge, its long rifle smashing against what was left of the wall of the bridge, fracturing and bending sharply upwards at a crazy angle as if it had been made of c
ardboard.

  ‘Our friend has a superb sense of timing,’ the Count murmured. The dry, ironic tone accorded ill with the set, bitter mouth, the fury barely in check. He picked up the field phone, cranked the handle viciously and waited.

  ‘Hidas? … Howarth here.’ The Count bit each word out separately. ‘You mad, crazy fool! Do you know who you’ve shot?’

  ‘How should I know? Why should I care?’ The easy suavity had gone from Hidas’ voice, the loss of his half-track had shaken him badly.

  ‘I’ll tell you why you should care.’ The Count had his control back again, and his voice was silky with menace. ‘That was Jansci you shot, and if he’s dead you will be well advised to accompany us when we cross the border into Austria to-night.’

  ‘Fool! Have you taken leave of your senses?’

  ‘Listen, and judge who is sane. If Jansci is dead, we have no further interest in either his wife or daughter. You may do what you like with them. If he is dead, we will be across the border by midnight and within twenty-four hours Professor Jennings’ story will be splashed in banner headlines across the front page of every newspaper in Western Europe and America, every paper in the free world. The fury of your masters in Budapest and Moscow will know no bounds – and I shall take great care that every paper will publish a full account of our escape and the part you played in it, Colonel Hidas. For you, the Black Sea Canal if you’re lucky, perhaps Siberia, but almost certainly just a disappearance, shall we say. If Jansci dies, you die also – and no one knows it better than you do, Colonel Hidas.’

  There was a long silence, and when Hidas finally spoke his voice was no more than a husky whisper.

  ‘Perhaps he is not dead, Major Howarth.’

  ‘You can but pray. We shall see – I’m going to see now. If you value your life, call off these murderous hounds of yours!’

  ‘I shall give the orders immediately.’

  The Count replaced the phone, to find Reynolds staring at him.

  ‘Did you mean that? Would you have turned Julia and her mother over –?’

  ‘My God, what do you think I am? … Sorry, boy, didn’t mean to bite. I must have sounded convincing, eh? I’m bluffing, but Hidas doesn’t know I am, and even if he wasn’t more scared right now than he has ever been in his life before and realized that perhaps I was bluffing, he wouldn’t even dare to try to call the bluff. We have him by the hip. Come, he should have called his dogs off by this time.’

  Together they ran out on the road and stooped to examine Jansci. He was lying on his back, his limbs outflung and relaxed, but he was breathing steadily and evenly. There was no need to search for the injury – the welling red blood from the long wound that stretched from the temple back past the ear was in shocking contrast to the snow-white hair. The Count stooped low, examined him briefly then straightened.

  ‘No one could expect Jansci to die as easily as that.’ The wide grin on the Count’s face was eloquent of his relief. ‘He’s been creased and concussed, but I don’t even think that the bone has been chipped. He’ll be all right, perhaps in a couple of hours. Come, give me a hand to lift him.’

  ‘I will take him.’ It was Sandor speaking, he had just emerged from the wood behind and he brushed them gently aside. He stooped, caught Jansci under the body and legs and lifted him with the ease one would have lifted a little child. ‘He is badly hurt?’

  ‘Thank you, Sandor. No, just a glancing blow … That was a splendid job down by the bridge. Take him into the back of the truck and make him comfortable, will you? Cossack, a pair of pliers, up that telephone pole and wait till I give you the word, Mr Reynolds, you might start the engine, if you please. She may be cold.’

  The Count picked up the phone, and smiled thinly. He could hear the anxious breathing of Hidas at the other end.

  ‘Your time has not yet come, Colonel Hidas. Jansci is badly hurt, shot through the head, but he will live. Now listen carefully. It is painfully obvious that you are not to be trusted – although that, I may say, is no recent discovery on my part. We cannot and will not carry out the exchange here – there is no guarantee that you will keep your word, every possibility that you won’t. Drive along the field for about half a kilometre – it will be difficult in the snow, but you have the men and it will give us time to be on our way – and you will come to a plank bridge that will take you on to the road again. Then drive straight to the ferry. This is clear?’

  ‘It is clear.’ Some of the confidence was back in Hidas’ voice. ‘We will be there as soon as possible.’

  ‘You will be there an hour from now. No more. We do not wish to make you a present of the time to send for reinforcements and cut off escape routes to the west. Incidentally, do not waste precious time in attempting to summon help by this telephone. I am about to cut all the wires now, and shall cut them again about five kilometres north of here.’

  ‘But in an hour!’ Dismay was back in Hidas’ voice. ‘To clear these fields so deep in snow – and who knows what this side road to the river you speak of is like. If we are not there in an hour –’

  ‘Then you will find us gone.’ The Count hung up the receiver, gestured to the Cossack to cut the wires, looked into the back of the truck to see if Jansci was comfortable, then hurried round to the cab. Reynolds had the engine running, moved over to make room for the Count behind the wheel, and within seconds they were bumping out of the wood, on to the main road, and off into the north-east where the first dusky fingers of twilight were beginning to touch the snow-capped hills under a dark and leaden sky.

  Darkness was almost upon them, and the snow was beginning to fall more heavily again, with the chill promise of still more to come, when the Count swung the truck off the river road, drove a couple of hundred jolting yards up a narrow dirt track and stopped at the bottom of a small, abandoned stone quarry. Reynolds started out of his deep reverie and looked at him in surprise.

  ‘The ferryman’s house – you’ve left the river?’

  ‘Yes. Just about another three hundred metres from here – the ferry, I mean. Leaving the truck in plain view of Hidas when he arrives on the other side would be too much of a temptation altogether.’

  Reynolds nodded and said nothing – he had spoken barely a dozen words since they had left Jansci’s house, had sat in silence beside the Count all the way, had hardly exchanged a word with Sandor as he had helped him to destroy the bridge they had so lately crossed. His mind was confused, he was torn by conflicting emotions, consumed by a torturing anxiety that made all previous anxieties fade into insignificance. The most damnable part of it all was that old Jennings had now become talkative and positively cheerful as he had never been since Reynolds had first known him, and was trying all he could to raise the flagging spirits of the others – and Reynolds suspected, without in any way having reason for his suspicion, that the old professor knew, in spite of what the Count had said, that he was going to his death. It was intolerable, it was unthinkable, that such a gallant old man should be allowed to die like that. But if he didn’t, nothing was more certain than that Julia would die. Reynolds sat there in the gathering darkness, his fists clenched till his forearms ached, but far at the back of his mind he knew, without in any way consciously admitting his decision to himself, that there could be only one answer.

  ‘How is Jansci, Sandor?’ The Count had slid open the inspection hatch at the back of the cab.

  ‘He stirs.’ Sandor’s voice was deep and gentle. ‘And he is muttering to himself.’

  ‘Excellent. It takes more than a bullet in the head to account for Jansci.’ The Count paused a moment, then continued. ‘We cannot leave him here – it is altogether too cold, and I don’t want him to wake up not knowing where he is, not knowing where we are. I think –’

  ‘I will carry him to the house.’

  Five minutes later they reached the ferryman’s house, a small white stone building between the road and the heavily shingled, sloping bank of the river. The river here was perhaps forty feet
wide, and very sluggish, and even in the near darkness it looked as if it might be very deep at that particular spot. Leaving the others at the door of the ferryman’s house – the door faced on to the river – the Count and Reynolds jumped from the steep bank on to the shingle and went down to the water’s edge.

  The boat was double-ended, perhaps twelve feet long, without either engine or oars, the sole means of propulsion being provided by a rope stretched tight between concrete embedded iron posts on either side of the river. This rope passed through screwed pulleys, one at either end of the boat and one on a raised amidships block, and passengers simply crossed from one bank to the other by overhanding themselves along the rope. It was a type of ferry Reynolds had never seen before, but he had to admit that, for a couple of women who probably knew nothing whatsoever about boats, it was a foolproof system. The Count echoed his thoughts.

  ‘Satisfactory, Mr Reynolds, very satisfactory. And so is the lay of the land on the other side of the river.’ He gestured at the far bank, at the curving half-moon of trees that swept back from either bank enclosing a smooth treeless expanse of snow unbroken but for the bisecting road that reached down to the water’s edge. ‘A terrain which might have been specifically designed to discourage our good friend Colonel Hidas, who is no doubt at this very moment entertaining pleasant visions of his men lurking at the water’s edge with their hands full of machine-guns. It would have been difficult – I say it with modesty – for anyone to have chosen a better spot for effecting the transfer … Come, let us call upon the ferryman, who is about to enjoy some unexpected and, no doubt, unwonted exercise.’

  The ferryman was just opening the door as the Count raised his hand to knock. He stared first at the Count’s high-peaked hat, then at the wallet in the Count’s hand, then licked suddenly dry lips. In Hungary it was not necessary to have a bad conscience to tremble at the sight of the AVO.

  ‘You are alone in this house?’ the Count demanded.

  ‘Yes, yes, I am alone. What – what is it, comrade?’ He made an attempt to pull himself together. ‘I have done nothing, comrade, nothing!’