The Last Frontier

by Alistair MacLean

  ‘On your feet, Colonel Hidas.’

  Hidas rose and stood facing him, his hands hanging by his sides, and stared down at the gun.

  ‘Clean and quick, Colonel Hidas, eh?’

  ‘As you wish.’ His eyes lifted from Reynolds’ whitening trigger finger and found his face. ‘I would not beg for myself what had been denied so many of my victims.’

  For a fraction of a second longer Reynolds continued to increase the pressure on the trigger, then, almost as if something had snapped inside him, he relaxed and took one pace back. The white flame of anger still burnt within him, burnt as brightly as ever, but with these last words, the words of a man quite unafraid to die, he had felt the bitterness of defeat welling in him so powerfully that he could taste it in his mouth. When he spoke his voice was strained and hoarse, he scarcely recognized it as his own.

  ‘Turn round!’

  ‘Thank you, but no. I prefer to die this way.’

  ‘Turn round,’ Reynolds said savagely, ‘or I’ll smash both your kneecaps and turn you round myself.’

  Hidas looked at his face, saw the implacability, shrugged to the inevitable, turned away and collapsed without a sound across his desk as the butt of the rifle caught him behind the ear. For a long moment Reynolds stared down at the fallen man, swore in a bitter fury that was directed not against the man at his feet but at himself, turned and left the caravan.

  There was a feeling of emptiness, almost of despair, in Reynolds’ mind as he descended the steps. He was no longer particularly careful to conceal his presence, that fury within him had still not found its outlet, and though he would not have admitted it, even to himself, he would have welcomed the chance to turn his automatic carbine on the armed AVO men within that other truck, cut them down without compunction as they came pouring out the door silhouetted against the light behind, just as they had cut down Jansci’s wife silhouetted in the light of the door of the ferryman’s cottage. And then suddenly he broke step and stood still, stood very still indeed: he had just realized something that he should have realized minutes ago had he not been so bent on his reckoning with Colonel Hidas. The brown lorry was not only quiet: it was far too quiet to be true.

  In three steps he had reached the side of the truck and pressed his ear against it. There was nothing to be heard, just nothing at all. He ran round to the back, flung open a door and peered inside. He could see nothing, it was pitch dark inside, but he did not need to see anything: the truck was empty, and no one moved or even breathed inside.

  The truth struck with such suddenness, such savage force, that he was for the moment numbed, incapable of all action, capable of nothing but the realization of the enormity of his blunder, the thoroughness, the appalling ease with which he had been deceived. He might have known, he might have guessed – the Count had been suspicious of it even at the beginning – that Colonel Hidas would never have accepted defeat, never have given up, far less given up with such submissive ease. The Count would never have fallen for it, never. Hidas’ men must have been on their way to make the crossing of the river to the south even when the flare had been fired, and both he and the Cossack had blindly accepted as genuine the noisily faked withdrawal through the woods. They would be there by now, they were bound to be there by now, and he, Reynolds, was missing at the very moment his friends needed him as they had never done before – and, to crown the folly of his night’s work, he had sent Sandor, the one man who might have saved them, to collect the truck. Jansci had only the boy and the old man to help him – and Julia was there. When he thought of Julia, when he thought of her and the leering gargoyle face of the giant Coco, something snapped inside Reynolds’ mind and released him from his motionless thrall.

  Two hundred metres lay between him and the bank of the river, two hundred metres covered in deep, frozen snow, he was exhausted from sleeplessness and privations and weighed down by heavy boots and saturated clothes, but he covered the distance in less time than he had ever done before. It was not anger now – although it was still there – that lent wings to his heels, and kicked the flying gouts of snow head-high as he pounded along, it was not anger, it was fear, fear such as he had never known before.

  But it was not numbing, paralyzing fear, but a fear, instead, that seemed to sharpen all his senses and lend him an abnormal clarity of mind. He braked suddenly, arms windmilling violently, as he approached the bank of the river, slid noiselessly over the edge on to the shingle, cat-footed down to the water’s edge and pushed himself out into the icy current without even the tiniest splash. He was almost half-way across, swimming smoothly and powerfully, one arm holding the carbine far above his head, when he heard the first shot from the ferryman’s cottage, followed immediately afterwards by another and another.

  The time for caution was gone – if ever there had been such a time. Churning the water madly, Reynolds reached the far side in a few seconds, touched bottom, scrambled up the far shore with his driving feet slipping desperately on the sliding shingle, swarmed over the bank, clicked over the carbine switch from automatic to single shot firing – a machine-gun was less than useless, it was positively dangerous, if friend and enemy were fighting in the same confined space – and ran, crouching, through the pale oblong of light that was the ferryman’s front door. Ten minutes, at the most, had elapsed since he had walked out through that door.

  Jansci’s wife was no longer in the corridor, but the corridor was not empty. An AVO man, carbine in hand, had just come out of the living-room and was shutting the door behind him, and even at that moment Reynolds realized that that could mean only one thing – the fight inside, if there had been a fight and not just a massacre, was over. The AVO man saw him, tried to bring his gun up, realized he could not make it in time and the warning shout died in his throat as the stock of Reynolds’ carbine caught him terribly across the head and side of the face.

  Carbine again reversed in his hands, Reynolds gently toed open the door. One swift, all-encompassing glance at the tableau before him and he knew that the fight was indeed over. Six AVO men Reynolds could see inside the room, four of them still alive: one lay almost at his feet in that strangely crumpled relaxation that only the dead can achieve, another by the wall on the right-hand side, not far from where Jennings was sitting with his head almost on his knees as he shook it slowly from side to side. In one far corner a man held a carbine on a bleeding Jansci while another bound his hands to the chair on which he was sitting, while in the other corner the Cossack, lying on his back, was struggling desperately with the man who, lying on top of him, was bludgeoning him with short arm blows to the head: but the Cossack fought on, and Reynolds could see how he was fighting: he was pulling with all his strength on the stock of his whip whose sixteen-foot length was wrapped round and round the throat of the man above, inexorably turning his face a strange bluish colour and slowly strangling him. Near the centre of the room stood the giant Coco, contemptuously ignoring the girl who struggled so futilely in the crook of one great arm, grinning with wolfish expectation as the AVO man fighting with the Cossack stopped belabouring him, reached back with his right hand, fumbled with his belt and came clear with a sheath knife.

  Reynolds had been trained, and ruthlessly trained by wartime professionals who had survived similar situations a score of times, and survived by neither demanding surrender nor wasting the tiniest fraction of a second in unnecessary announcement of their presence. Those who kicked open a door and said, ‘Good evening, gentlemen,’ never lived to talk about it. The door was still swinging gently on its hinges when he fired the first of three deliberate, spaced, carefully-aimed shots. The first pitched the Cossack’s assailant into the corner of the room, the knife falling from his upraised hand and clattering to the floor, the second took the man who held the gun on Jansci, the third the man who had been tying Jansci’s hands. Reynolds was just lining up for the fourth shot, sighting for Coco’s head with an almost inhuman lack of haste – the giant AVO had swung the girl round in front of
his body for protection – when a rifle barrel smashed across his carbine and left forearm, sending his gun clattering heavily on the floor. Yet another AVO man had been behind the door as it had opened, and been completely hidden: he must have thought it had been the man who had just left returning, until Reynolds had fired his first shot.

  ‘Don’t shoot him, don’t shoot him!’ The quick hoarse order had come from Coco. With a careless shove he sent the girl across the room to land heavily on the couch, and stood there with his hands on his hips, while his fury at what had just happened and his elation at seeing Reynolds powerless before him fought for supremacy in the darkly evil face. The struggle didn’t last long, lives, even the lives of his comrades, mattered little to Coco, and a grin of unholy anticipation spread across the brutalized face.

  ‘See if our friend is armed,’ he commanded.

  The other man searched Reynolds briefly, hands running up and down the outside of the clothes, then shook his head.

  ‘Excellent. Catch this.’ Coco threw his carbine across to the other, and drew his open palms slowly up and down across the front of his tunic. ‘I have an account to settle with you, Captain Reynolds. Or perhaps you have forgotten.’

  Coco meant to kill him, Reynolds knew, meant to have the joy of killing him with his bare hands. His own left arm was useless, it felt as if it had been broken, and useless it would remain for some time to come. Deep inside him he knew that he had no chance in the world, that he couldn’t hold Coco off for more than a few seconds, but he told himself that if ever he was to have a chance it was now, before the fight had started, while the element of surprise still existed as a possibility, and even with the thought he was hurling himself across the room, his legs jack-knifing open as his feet reached for the giant’s chest. Coco was almost taken by surprise – almost, but not quite. He was moving away even as the feet struck him, making him grunt with the pain, and one of his flailing arms caught Reynolds behind the head so that he all but somersaulted, his back striking painfully against the wall by the couch with a force that drove all the breath from his body with an explosive gasp. For a moment he lay quite still, then, badly winded and aching though he was, he forced himself to struggle to his feet again – if Coco’s feet reached him while he was still on the floor, Reynolds knew that he would never rise again – moved to meet the advancing giant and struck out with all that remained of his strength at the sneering face before him, felt his fist strike home jarringly against solid bone and flesh, then coughed in agony as Coco contemptuously ignored the blow and struck him with tremendous force in the middle of the body.

  Reynolds had never been hit so hard, he had never imagined any person could have been capable of hitting so hard. The man had the strength of an ox. In spite of the sea of pain below his chest, in spite of his rubbery legs and the wave of nausea that threatened to choke him, he was still on his feet, but only because his splayed hands were supporting him from the wall against which he had been hurled. He thought he could hear the girl calling his name, but he couldn’t be sure, he seemed to have become suddenly deaf. His vision, too, was blurred and dimmed, he could just vaguely distinguish Jansci struggling frantically with the ropes that secured him, when he saw Coco coming at him again. Hopelessly, despairingly, Reynolds flung himself forward in a last futile attempt to lash out at his tormentor, but Coco just sidestepped, laughed, placed the flat of his hand against Reynolds’ back and sent him reeling crazily across the room to crash into the jamb of the open door and slide slowly down to the floor.

  For a few brief moments consciousness left him, then slowly returned, and he shook his head dazedly. Coco was still in the middle of the room, arms akimbo, triumph in every line of the seamed and evil face, the lips drawn back in wolfish anticipation of pleasure yet to come. Coco meant him to die, Reynolds realized dimly, but he meant him to die slowly. Well, at this rate, it would not be much longer. He had no strength left, he had to fight for every gasping breath he took and his legs were almost gone.

  Weakly, dizzily, he pushed himself somehow to his feet and stood there swaying, conscious of nothing but the reeling room, the fire of his body, the salt taste of blood on his lips and his indestructible enemy standing there laughing in the middle of the floor. Once more, Reynolds told himself dully, once more, he can only kill me once, and he was reaching his hands behind to launch himself on his last tottering run when he saw the expression on Coco’s face change and an iron arm reached across his chest and pinned him to the corner as Sandor walked slowly into the room.

  Reynolds would never afterwards forget how Sandor looked at that moment, like something that belonged not to this world but to the ice-halls of Scandinavian mythology. Fifteen minutes, perhaps twenty, had elapsed since Sandor had plunged into that freezing river, and most of the time since then he had spent out in the sub-zero cold. He was coated now with ice, coated almost from head to foot, and the falling snow had clung to him and turned to ice also: in the light from the ferryman’s oil lamp, he glistened and glittered in that rigid, crackling suit of ice like some eerie visitor from another and alien world.

  The AVO man by the door stood open-mouthed in shock, recovered with a visible effort, dropped one of the two carbines – his own and Coco’s – that were encumbering him and tried to line the other up on Sandor, but he was too late. Sandor caught the rifle with one hand, tore it from the man’s grasp as one would take a stick from a little child and pushed the man back against the wall with his free hand. The man swore, took two running steps and leapt snarling at him, but Sandor just plucked him out of the air, whirled round in a complete circle, then flung him across the room with dreadful force to smash high up against a wall, where he hung grotesquely for a moment as if held there by invisible hands, then fell to the floor like a broken, crumpled doll.

  Even as the AVO man had leapt at Sandor, Julia had slid off the couch and thrown herself at Coco’s back, flinging her arms round him, trying to delay him if only for a second. But her hands could not even meet round his chest, he had broken her grip as if it were cotton and pushed her to one side without as much as looking at her, and had already fallen upon an off-balance Sandor, bludgeoning him with great swinging sledge-hammer blows, so that Sandor fell heavily to the floor with Coco on top of him, his great hands already round Sandor’s throat. There was no grin on Coco’s face now, no gleam of anticipation in the small black eyes: he was fighting for his life, and he knew it.

  For a moment Sandor lay motionless, while Coco’s iron fingers tightened inexorably round his throat, the massive shoulders hunching as he put all his great strength into the effort. Then Sandor stirred, reached up his hands and caught Coco round the wrists.

  Reynolds, still weak and barely able to stand upright, Julia beside him now and clutching his arms, stared in fascination. Reynolds’ entire body seemed a sea of pain, but even through that pain he seemed to feel again something of the agony he had felt when Sandor had once caught him by the forearms and squeezed – and squeezed with the flat of his fingers and not as he was now doing, with his hooked fingertips digging deep into the tendons on the inside of Coco’s wrists.

  Shock it was that showed first in Coco’s face, the shock of unbelief, then pain, then fear as his wrists were crushed in the vice of Sandor’s grip and his fingers round Sandor’s throat slowly forced to open. Still holding Coco’s wrists, Sandor pushed him to one side, rose to his feet, pulled Coco after him so that the AVO giant towered high above him, swiftly released the wrists and had his arms locked round Coco’s chest before Coco had had time to appreciate what was happening. Reynolds thought at first that Sandor meant to throw the other, and from the momentary relief on Coco’s face it seemed that he had thought so also, but if he had so thought the disillusionment and the pain and the fear came soon and all in an instant as Sandor buried his head deep into Coco’s chest, lifted his shoulders high and began to crush the giant in a murderous bear hug which Coco must have known in a sudden flash of certainty he would never live to feel
relaxing, for the fear in his expression gave way to contorted terror as his face turned bluish-red from the lack of oxygen, as he moaned deep in his throat while his starving lungs fought for air and his fists hammered in frantic madness against Sandor’s back and shoulders with as much effect as if he were beating them against a rock of granite. But the memory of that moment that Reynolds took with him was not of Coco’s threshing panic and darkening, pain-contorted features, not even of Sandor’s expressionless face with the still gentle eyes, but of the steady crackling of ice as Sandor crushed ever more tightly, more remorselessly, and of the horror on Julia’s face as he caught her to him and tried to shut out from her ears as best he could the hoarse, horrible scream that filled the room then slowly faded and died.

  FIFTEEN

  It was just after four o’clock in the morning when Jansci halted them in the centre of a thick clump of head-high reeds, turned and waited until the others had caught up with him. They came in single file, Julia, Reynolds, the Cossack and Dr Jennings with Sandor beside him, half-helping, half-carrying him across the frozen marshes, all with their heads bent low, all except Sandor with the trudging, stumbling gait of those very close to exhaustion.

  They had reason, and more than reason, for their exhaustion. Two hours and three miles lay between them and where they had left the truck, two hours of winding in and out between the frozen reeds that snapped and crackled at the lightest touch, two hours of interminable stumbling and crunching through the thin ice of freezing marshes, ice just not strong enough to bear their weight, but more than strong enough to impede their progress, compelling them to lift each foot high to clear it before moving on to the next step, where they would sink down again through ice and frozen mud, often beyond their knees. But that same ice was their salvation that night, the dogs of the border guards would have found the conditions hopeless for operation and could only have floundered along, helplessly out of their depth. Not that they had seen or heard either dogs or guards once in those three miles: on a night such as this even the fanatical guards of the AVO huddled high in their stilted border towers round the warmth of a stove, and let who would pass by.