Алистер Маклин: The Last Frontier

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.

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.