Алистер Маклин - The Last Frontier

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.