Алистер Маклин: The Last Frontier

The job on hand. Always the job on hand. In spite of himself, Reynolds grimaced as he lay there waiting for his breathing to return to normal. There never had been more than one chance in a hundred, and now the odds had lengthened astronomically. But the job was still there, Jennings and all his priceless knowledge must be reached and brought out and that was all that mattered. But if he, Reynolds, failed in this, then he had failed and that was all there was to it. He might even fail to-night, on his first day of the assignment after eighteen months of the most rigorous and ruthless specialist training aimed at the accomplishment of this task alone, but that made no difference whatsoever.

Reynolds was superbly fit – he had to be, all the colonel’s specialist handful of men had to be – and his breathing was again as near normal as made no difference. As for the police mounting the road-block – there must be half a dozen of them, he had caught a glimpse of several others emerging from the hut just as he had rounded the bend – he would have to take a chance on them: there was nothing else he could do. Possibly they had only been stopping and searching eastbound trucks for contraband, and had no interest in panic-stricken passengers who fled away into the night – although it seemed likely enough that the two policemen he had left groaning in the snow might take a rather more personal interest in him. As for the immediate future he couldn’t lie there indefinitely to freeze in the snow or risk discovery by the sharp-eyed drivers of passing cars or trucks.

He would have to make for Budapest on foot – for the first part of the journey, at least. Three or four miles’ heavy trudging through the fields and then regain the road – that, at least, he would need to take him well clear of the road-block before he dared try a lift. The road to the east curved left before the block, and it would be easier for him to go to the left also, to short-circuit the bend of the road across the base of the triangle. But to the left, the north, that was, lay the Danube at no great distance, and he baulked from finding himself trapped in a narrow strip of land between river and road. There was nothing for it but to strike off to the south and round the apex of the triangle at a discreet distance – and on a clear night like that, a discreet distance meant a very considerable distance indeed. The detour would take hours to complete.

Teeth again chattering violently – he had removed the handkerchief to draw in the great, gasping breaths of air his lungs had demanded – chilled to the bone and with his hands and feet useless and empty of all feeling, Reynolds pushed himself shakily to his feet and began to brush the frozen snow off his clothes, glancing down the road in the direction of the police road-block. A second later he was once more flat on his face in the snow-filled ditch, his heart thumping heavily in his chest, his right hand struggling desperately to free his gun from the pocket in his coat where he had stuck it after his fight with the police.

He could understand now why the police had taken their time in looking for him – they could afford to. What he could not understand was his own folly in supposing that discovery could result only from some betraying movement or incautious sound made by himself. He had forgotten that there was such a thing as a sense of smell – he had forgotten all about the dogs. And there had been no mistaking the identity of the leading dog as it nosed eagerly along the road, not even in the semi-darkness: a bloodhound was unmistakable where there was any light at all.

With the sudden shout from one of the approaching men and the excited jabber of voices, he was on his feet again, reaching the grove of trees behind him in three short steps: it had been too much to hope that he hadn’t been spotted against that vast backcloth of white. He himself, in turn, had seen in that last quick glimpse that there were four men, each with a dog on leash: the other three dogs weren’t bloodhounds, he was sure of that.

He drew in behind the bole of the tree whose branches had lately given him such brief and treacherous refuge, freed the gun from his pocket and looked down at it. A specially made, beautifully machined version of a Belgian 6.35 automatic, it was a precise and deadly little gun and with it he could hit a target smaller than a man’s hand, at twenty paces, ten times out of ten. To-night, he knew, he would have difficulty even in hitting a man at half that distance, so unresponsive to the mind’s demands had his numbed and shaking hands become. Then some instinct made him lift the gun up before his eyes, and his mouth tightened: even in the faint starlight he could see that the barrel of the gun was blocked with frozen slush and snow.

He took off his hat, held it by the brim, and about shoulder height, jutting out from one side of the tree, waited a couple of seconds, then stooped as low as he could and risked a quick glance round the others. Fifty paces away now, if that, the four men were walking along in line abreast, the dogs still straining on their leashes. Reynolds straightened, dug out a Biro pen from his inside pocket and quickly, but without haste, began to free the barrel of the automatic of the frozen slush. But his numbed hands betrayed him, and when the Biro slipped from his fumbling fingers and disappeared point downwards in the deep snow, he knew it was useless to search for it, too late for anything more.

He could hear the brittle-soft crunch of steel-shod boots on the hard-packed snow of the road. Thirty paces, perhaps even less. He slid a white, pinched forefinger through the trigger guard, placed the inside of his wrist against the hard rough bark of the tree, ready to slide it round the trunk – he would have to press hard against the bole to keep his shaking hand even reasonably steady – and with his left hand fumbled at his belt to release the knife with its spring-loaded blade. The gun was for the men, the knife for the dogs, the chances about even, for the policemen were advancing towards him shoulder to shoulder across the width of the road, rifles dangling loose in the crooks of their arms, unskilled amateurs who knew what neither war nor death was. Or, rather, the chances would have been about even, but for the gun in his hand: the first shot might clear the blocked barrel, it might equally well blow his hand off. On balance, then, the chances were heavily against him, but then, on a mission such as this, the chances would always be against him: the job on hand was still on hand, and its accomplishment justified all risks short of the suicidal.

The knife spring clicked loudly and released the blade, a five-inch sliver of double-edged blued steel that gleamed evilly in the starlight as Reynolds edged round the bole of the tree and lined up his automatic on the nearest of the advancing policemen. His trigger finger tightened, held, slackened and a moment later he was back behind the tree trunk. Another and fresh tremor had seized his hand, and his mouth had gone suddenly dry: for the first time he had recognized the other three dogs for what they were.

Untrained country policemen, however armed, he could deal with: bloodhounds, too, he could handle, and with a fair chance of success: but only a madman would try conclusions with three trained Dobermann pinschers, the most vicious and terrible fighting dogs in the world. Fast as a wolf, powerful as an Alsatian and a ruthless killer utterly without fear, only death could stop a Dobermann. Reynolds didn’t even hesitate. The chance he had been about to take was no longer a chance but a certain way to suicide. The job on hand was still all that mattered. Alive, though a prisoner, there was always hope: with his throat torn out by a Dobermann pinscher, neither Jennings nor all the old man’s secrets would ever come home again.