The Last Frontier

by Alistair MacLean

  ‘There’s something I want to do, and I want to do it alone,’ he said slowly. ‘I want to find a train. I want to find the train that’s –’

  ‘Don’t we all!’ the Count shouted. He smashed a gloved hand down on the steering-wheel with a force that nearly broke it, and his thin face was alive with a grin of sheer delight. ‘Don’t we all, my boy! Look at Jansci there – he’s been thinking of nothing else for the past ten minutes.’

  Reynolds looked sharply at the Count, then more slowly at Jansci. It had been the beginnings of a smile that he had seen on Jansci’s face, he realized now, and even as he watched the smile widened as Jansci turned towards him.

  ‘I know this country like the back of my hand.’ The tone was almost apologetic. ‘It was about five kilometres back that I noticed that the Count was headed due south. I do not imagine,’ Jansci added dryly, ‘that very much of a welcome awaits us across the border of Yugoslavia.’

  ‘It’s no good.’ Reynolds shook his head stubbornly. ‘Just me, only me. Everything I’ve touched yet has gone wrong, just one more step towards the concentration camps. Next time there’ll be no Count turning up with an AVO truck. What train is the professor on?’

  ‘You will do this alone?’ Jansci asked.

  ‘Yes. I must.’

  ‘The man’s mad,’ the Count announced.

  ‘I can’t.’ Jansci shook his white head. ‘I can’t let you do it. Put yourself in my position, and admit that you may be selfish. I have, unfortunately, a conscience to live with, and I would not care to face it every waking night for the rest of my life.’ He stared forward through the windscreen. ‘Even worse, I would not care to face my daughter for the rest of my life.’

  ‘I don’t understand –’

  ‘Of course you don’t.’ It was the Count interrupting, and he sounded almost jovial. ‘Your all-exclusive devotion to your job may be admirable – to be frank, I don’t think it is – but it also tends to blind you to things that are dazzlingly clear to your elders. However, we argue, and uselessly. Colonel Hidas is even now having a fit in our worthy commandant’s office. Jansci?’ He was asking for a decision, and Reynolds knew it.

  ‘You know all we need to know?’ Jansci asked the Count.

  ‘Naturally.’ The Count was hurt. ‘I had four minutes to wait while the – ah – prisoners were being produced. I did not waste those minutes.’

  ‘Very well, then. There it is, Meechail. The information in exchange for our help.’

  ‘I don’t appear to have much option,’ Reynolds said bitterly.

  ‘The sign of an intelligent man – he knows when he has lost an argument.’ The Count was almost purring. He jammed on the brakes, pulled a map from his pocket, made sure that Sandor and the Cossack could see it from the observation hatch behind and jabbed at it with his finger. ‘Here is Cece – this is where the professor is being put aboard the train to-day – or, rather, has already been put aboard the train. Special wagon tacked on to the end.’

  ‘The commandant mentioned something like that,’ Jansci said. ‘A number of high-ranking scientists –’

  ‘Pah! Scientists? High-ranking criminals bound for the Siberian taiga, and it’s where they deserve to go. Nor is Dr Jennings getting any special treatment – it’s a convict coach, pure and simple, a front-loading cattle truck: the commandant made no bones about it.’ His finger traced the railway line down to the point where it intersected with the main road due south from Budapest at the town of Szekszárd, sixty kilometres north of the Yugoslavian border. ‘The train will stop here. Then it follows the main road due south to Bataszek – it goes straight through there – then turns west for Pécs, leaving the main road completely. It will have to be somewhere between Szekszárd and Pécs, gentlemen, and it presents quite a problem. There are plenty of trains I would derail, but not one carrying hundreds of my adopted countrymen. This is just a regular service train.’

  ‘May I see that map, please?’ Reynolds asked. It was a very large scale map, a road map but also a physical map showing rivers and hills, and as he studied it his excitement mounted, and his mind went back fourteen years to the days when he had been the youngest subaltern in the S.O.E. It was a crazy idea now, but it had been a crazy idea then … He pointed to a spot on the map, not far north of Pécs, where the roads from Szekszárd, after cutting for almost forty kilometres across country, again paralleled the railway line, then looked across at the Count.

  ‘Can you get the truck there before the train arrives?’

  ‘With luck, with the roads not being blocked and, above all, with Sandor to lift me out of a ditch if I go into one – yes, I think I can.’

  ‘Very well. Here is what I propose.’ Quickly, succinctly, Reynolds outlined his plan and at the end of it he looked at the others. ‘Well?’

  Jansci shook his head slowly, but it was the Count who spoke.

  ‘Impossible.’ He was very definite. ‘It cannot be done.’

  ‘It’s been done before. In the Vosges mountains, 1944. An ammunition dump went up as a result. I know, because I was there … What alternative do you propose?’

  There was a short period of silence, then Reynolds spoke again.

  ‘Exactly. As the Count said, it is an intelligent man who knows when he has lost an argument. We’re wasting time.’

  ‘We are.’ Jansci had already made up his mind, and the Count nodded agreement. ‘We can but try.’

  ‘Into the back and change.’ The Count had made up his mind. ‘I’m on my way. The train is due in Szekszárd in twenty minutes. I’ll be there in fifteen.’

  ‘Just so long as the AVO aren’t there in ten,’ Reynolds said sombrely.

  Involuntarily, almost, the Count glanced over his shoulder. ‘Impossible. No signs of Hidas yet.’

  ‘There are such things as telephones.’

  ‘There were.’ It was Sandor speaking for the first time for minutes, and he showed Reynolds the pair of pliers in his huge hand. ‘Six cables – six snips. The Szarháza is completely cut off from the outside world.’

  ‘I,’ said the Count modestly, ‘think of everything.’

  TEN

  The ancient train rocked and swayed alarmingly along the ill-maintained track, shuddering and straining whenever a snow-laden gust of wind from the south-east caught it broadside on along its entire length and threatened for a heart-stopping moment, that was only one of a never-ending series of such moments, to topple it off the track. The carriage wheels, transmitting a teeth-rattling vibration through a suspension that had long since given up an unequal battle with the years, screeched and grated in a shrilly metallic cacophony as they jarred and leapt across the uneven intersection of the rails. The wind and the snow whistled icily through a hundred cracks in ill-made doors and windows, the wooden coachwork and seats creaked and protested like a ship working in a heavy seaway, but the ancient train battered on steadily through the white blindness of that late afternoon in mid-winter, sometimes slowing down unexpectedly on a straight stretch of track, at other times increasing speed round seemingly dangerous curves: the driver, one hand almost constantly on the steam whistle that whispered and died to a muffled extinction only a hundred yards away in the driving snow, was a man, obviously, with complete confidence in himself, the capacities of his train and his knowledge of the track ahead.

  Reynolds, lurching and staggering down the wildly swaying length of a coach corridor, shared none of the engine driver’s obvious confidence, not in the safety of the train, which was the least of Reynolds’ worries, but in his own capacity to carry out the task that lay ahead of him. When he had broached the plan first of all to the others, it had been with the memory in his mind of a soft starlit summer’s night and a train puffing gently along between the wooded hills of the Vosges: now, just ten minutes after he and Jansci had bought their tickets and boarded the train at Szekszárd without let or hindrance, what he had to do, what he must do, assumed the proportions of a nightmare impossibility.

  What
he had to do was simply enough stated. He had to free the professor, and to free the professor he had to separate the convict coach from the rest of the train, and this could only be done by stopping the train and easing the tension on the coupling securing the convict’s coach to the guard’s van. One way or another he had to reach the locomotive, which, at the moment, seemed impossibility enough, and then prevail upon the footplate crew to bring their engine to a halt when and where he told them. ‘Prevail’ was right, Reynolds thought grimly. Perhaps he could persuade them, if they were half-way friendly. Perhaps he could frighten them, but what was certain enough was that he couldn’t force them. All they would have to do was to refuse to obey, and he would have been helpless. The control cabin of a locomotive was a complete mystery to him, and not even for the professor could he shoot or knock out engineer and fireman and place hundreds of innocent passengers in danger of death or disfigurement. Even as he thought of these things, Reynolds could almost feel the physical sensation of cold, dull despair flooding into his mind, and he thrust these thoughts ruthlessly aside. One evil at a time. First of all, he had to get there.

  He was rounding the corner of the coach, supported only by the one hand that clung to the window-bar – his other was deep in his coat pocket supporting the weight of, and concealing, the suspicious bulge by the heavy hammer and torch there – when he bumped into Jansci. The older man muttered an apology, glanced at him briefly and without recognition, stepped forward till he could see the entire length of the corridor from which Reynolds had just emerged, stepped back, opened the door of the adjacent toilet to check that it was empty, then spoke softly.

  ‘Well?’

  ‘Not so well. They’re on to me already.’

  ‘They?’

  ‘Two men. Civilian clothes, belted trench-coats, no hats. They followed me up front and back again. Discreetly. If I hadn’t been looking for it, I wouldn’t have noticed it.’

  ‘Stand out in the corridor. Let me know –’

  ‘They’re coming now,’ Reynolds murmured.

  He glanced briefly at the two men lurching towards him as Jansci slid quietly inside the toilet pulling the door till only a tiny crack was left. The man in the lead, a tall man with a dead-white face and black eyes, looked at Reynolds incuriously as he passed, but the other ignored him completely.

  ‘They’re on to you, all right.’ Jansci had waited till they were out of sight. ‘Worse still, they know you’re on to them. We should have remembered that every train in and out of Budapest is being watched for the duration of this conference.’

  ‘Know them?’

  ‘I’m afraid so. That man with the pale face is AVO – one of Hidas’ hatchet-men. As dangerous as a snake. I don’t know the other.’

  ‘But it’s an obvious assumption that he’s AVO also. Surely the Szarháza –’

  ‘They don’t know about that yet. They can’t. But your description has been out for a couple of days to every AVO man in Hungary.’

  ‘That’s it.’ Reynolds nodded slowly. ‘Of course … How are things with you?’

  ‘Three soldiers in the guard’s van – there’ll be no one in the wagon behind – they never travel in the same wagons as the prisoners. They’re sitting with the guard round a red-hot wood stove, and there’s a wine bottle circulating.’

  ‘Will you manage?’

  ‘I think so. But how –’ ‘Get back!’ Reynolds hissed.

  He was leaning against the window, both hands in his pockets, and gazing down at the ground when the same two men returned. He glanced up indifferently, raised an eyebrow fractionally as he saw who it was, glanced down again and then sideways as he watched them stagger up the length of the corridor and then out of sight.

  ‘Psychological warfare,’ Jansci murmured. ‘A problem.’

  ‘And not the only one. I can’t get into the first three coaches.’

  Jansci glanced sharply at him, but said nothing.

  ‘The military,’ Reynolds explained. ‘The third carriage from the front is a mid-aisle coach, and full of troops. An officer turned me back. Anyway, it’s no good: I tried an outside door handle when I turned my back to him, and it was locked.’

  ‘From the outside,’ Jansci nodded. ‘Conscripts, and the army is trying to discourage a premature return to civilian life. Any hope at all, Meechail? Communication cords?’

  ‘Not one in the whole length of the train. I’ll manage – I’ve damn well got to. You have a seat?’

  ‘Second last carriage.’

  ‘I’ll give you the tip off ten minutes beforehand. I’d better go. They’ll be back any second.’

  ‘Right. Bataszek in five minutes. Remember, if the train stops there it means that Hidas has guessed and got through to them. Jump out of the blind side and run for it.’

  ‘They’re coming,’ Reynolds murmured. He levered himself off the window and walked forward, passing the two men. This time both men looked at him with expressionless eyes and Reynolds wondered how much more time they would allow to elapse before making their pounce. He lurched forward the length of another two coaches, went into the toilet at the end of the fourth coach, hid his hammer and torch in the tiny triangular cupboard that supported the cracked tin wash-basin, transferred his gun to his right pocket and closed his hand round it before moving out to the corridor. It wasn’t his own Belgian pistol, which had been taken from him, it was the Count’s, it had no silencer on it and it was the last thing he wanted to use. But, to live, he might be compelled to use it: it all depended on the two men who were shadowing his every movement.

  They were running through the outskirts of Bataszek now and Reynolds realized, all at once, that their speed had slackened perceptibly, and even as the realization came he had to brace himself from sliding forwards as the air brakes came on. He could feel the curious tingling in the finger-tips of the hand that held the gun. He left the toilet, moved into the middle of the passage between the two opposite doors – he had no idea on which side the station platform was going to be – made sure that the safety-catch was off his gun, and waited tensely, his heart hammering heavily, slowly in his chest. They were still slowing down, he had to steady himself as the train battered violently across a set of points, then, so suddenly that the change of motion caught him off balance, the air brakes hissed off, the locomotive’s whistle shrilled once, briefly, as the train started to accelerate again, and Bataszek station was only a confused memory of a flickering row of palely-blurred lights lost in the moment of seeing in this greyish-white curtain of driving snow.

  Reynolds’ grip on his gun eased. Despite the bitter cold of that coach corridor, he could feel the neck-band of his collar wet with sweat. So, too, he realized, was his gun-hand, and as he moved across to the left-hand door he withdrew it and wiped it up and down the outside of his coat.

  He pulled the door window down a few inches, jammed it up a second later and stepped back, gasping, to clear his eyes of the whistling blizzard that had lashed whiplike across his forehead and blinded him just in an instant of time. He leant back against the wood behind him, lit a cigarette and his hands were unsteady.

  It was hopeless, he told himself, worse than hopeless. With a steadily increasing wind gusting up to forty, perhaps even fifty miles per hour and the train doing the same speed diagonally into it, the combined total strength of that now howling wind outside was that of a whole gale, maybe a little more – and a whole gale that was no gale at all, just a screaming white wall of almost horizontally driving snow and ice. Even a split second of it on a tiny part of his body while standing in the relative warmth and security of the train had been too much. God only knew what it would be like outside for minutes on end, with his whole life depending just …

  Relentlessly, he pushed the thought to one side. He moved swiftly through the concertina coupling leading to the next carriage and glanced quickly down the corridor. No sign yet of the two men returning. He went back to where he had been, across to the door on the leeward side, opene
d it cautiously so as not to be dragged out of the train by the vacuum suction on that side, gauged the size of the bolt-hole in the jamb that engaged the door catch, closed the door, checked that the window worked easily then returned to the toilet. Here he used his knife to cut a small piece of wood off the small door below the basin and in a couple of minutes he had it trimmed to a shape and size just a fraction larger than that of the bolt-hole. Then, as soon as he was finished, he moved out into the corridor again. It was essential that he be seen, and keep on being seen by his two shadows: if they missed him, the hunt would be up the length of the train – and there were a hundred maybe two hundred soldiers in the leading coaches that could be called upon to help them.