The Last Frontier

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, opened 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.

And this time he almost bumped into them as he closed the toilet door behind him. They had been hurrying, he could see, and the relief on the face of the shorter man showed clearly as he saw Reynolds emerging. The tall, pale man’s expressionless face did not change, but his reaction showed in so sudden a shortening of step that the other bumped into him. Both men slowed down, then stopped a couple of feet away from Reynolds. Reynolds himself made no move, he just leaned into a corner to brace his body against the violent shaking of the train and to leave both his hands free for use should the need arise. The pale man saw this and his dark, flat eyes narrowed fractionally before he brought a packet of cigarettes from his pocket and smiled with a smile that never got any farther than the corner of his lips.

‘Have you a match, comrade?’

‘Certainly. Help yourself.’ Reynolds fished out a box of matches with his left hand and held them out at arm’s length. At the same time his other hand moved slightly in his pocket, and the mouth of his gun sharply limned its circular outline through the thin gaberdine of his trench-coat. The pale man caught the slight movement and looked down, but Reynolds’ eyes never left his face. After a moment the pale man looked up, regarded Reynolds unwinkingly over the flame of the cigarette, slowly handed back the matches, nodded his thanks and continued on his way. Unfortunate, Reynolds thought, looking after them, but quite unavoidable; it had just been a silent challenge, a kite flown to see whether or not he had been armed: and if he hadn’t convinced them, Reynolds felt sure, they would have nailed him there and then.

He looked at his watch for the tenth time. Three minutes to go, four at the most: he could feel the train’s speed perceptibly easing as it started its gentle climb, and he could have sworn that he had just had his first glimpse of a road outside, almost paralleling the railway track. He wondered what the chances were of the Count and the others having made it there in time, he wondered what chances there were that they could make it at all. He could hear the wind now, clearly hear its high-pitched ululation above the rattle and the roar of the train, could see the almost solid wall of driving whiteness that limited visibility to only a few feet, and unconsciously shook his head. In this almost Arctic weather, a train on rails and a truck on tyres were two vastly different propositions altogether, and it was all too easy to visualize the strained face of the Count peering through the ever-narrowing arcs before him as the wipers struggled vainly to clear the snow battering against the windscreen.

But he had to depend on it, Reynolds knew that. He had to treat a remote possibility as a certainty. He took a last glance at his watch, let himself into the toilet once more, filled a big earthenware jug with water, put it in the cupboard, picked up the piece of shaped wood he had left there, took it outside, opened the leeward door again and jammed the wood into the bolt-hole, knocking it in firmly with the butt of his gun. He closed the door again, letting the latch gently into the wooden plug, and tested it carefully: the latch was clear of the bolt, but held firmly enough by the wood. Thirty pounds pressure, maybe forty, would be required to tear the wood away.

He walked towards the rear of the train, quickly and softly. One carriage away two men appeared from a dark corner and followed silently after him, but he ignored them. He knew they would try nothing while they were opposite the compartments with people in them, and when he came to the end of a coach Reynolds ran as quickly as possible through the concertina connection into the next. And then he was in the second last carriage, walking slowly, head straight on his shoulders so as to deceive the men behind, but his eyes to one side and searching the compartments.

Jansci was in the third compartment. Reynolds stopped abruptly, catching his shadows on the wrong foot, stood stiffly to one side to let them pass, waited till they were about ten feet away, nodded to Jansci then ran back the way he had come praying that he would not bump into anyone: a portly man blocking the corridors just then could have been the end of everything.

He could hear the footsteps pounding behind him, increased his speed and that was almost his undoing: he slipped on a wet corner, struck his head against a window bar, fell, but forced himself to his feet, ignoring the sharp, almost stunning pain and the bright lights that flashed in front of his eyes, and ran on again. Two carriages, three carriages, four and this was his: he rounded a corner sharply, dodged into the toilet, banged the door shut behind him as loudly as possible — he didn’t want his pursuers to be in a moment’s doubt as to where he had gone — and locked it.

Once inside he wasted no time. He picked up the big earthenware jar of water, stuffed a dirty towel into the top to retain as much of the water as possible, took a step backwards and flung the jar with all his strength through the window. The crash was all that he had hoped for and more, the noise almost deafening in that confined space, and the sound of the shattering glass was still in his ears when he took the gun from his pocket, caught it by the barrel, switched off the light, softly eased the lock and stepped into the corridor.

The shadows had the window down and were peering out, leaning as far as possible, crowding each other in their eagerness to see what had happened, where Reynolds had gone: they would have been less than human to have done anything else. Reynolds didn’t even break step as he came through the door: one long stride, a leap propelled by all the strength of his legs, his feet stiffly in front of him smashing into the back of the nearest man and the door burst open, one of the men catapulting out into the driving snow and the gloom before he had even time to cry out. The other, the pale-faced man, twisted impossibly in mid-air, caught the inside edge of the door with one hand, his face contorted with venom and fear as he fought like a wild-cat to pull himself inside. But the whole struggle lasted perhaps only two seconds, and Reynolds was merciless, his downward clubbing pistol, aimed at the snarling face, changing direction in the last moment as the man’s free hand came up in instinctive protection. The butt struck the fingers clinging to the doorway with a force that jarred Reynolds’ arm to the elbow, and then there was no man in the doorway, only the gathering darkness of the night and a thin, high scream lost in the thunder of the wheels and the high threnody of the wind.

It took Reynolds seconds only to work the already loosened piece of wood free of the bolt-hole and shut the door securely. Then he stuffed his gun into his pocket, retrieved the hammer and the torch from the toilet and moved across to the opposite door of the coach, on the windward side.

It was here that he had his first setback, and one that all but defeated him before he had even started. The train was now angling due south-west towards Pécs, the gale of wind and snow out of the south-east was blowing directly on the beam, and it seemed as if an even stronger man than himself were pushing against him on the other side. Twice, three times he heaved with all his strength, but the door gave no more than an inch.

Little enough time was left — seven minutes perhaps, eight at the most. He reached up, caught the metal grip at the top of the window, brought it right down in one convulsive jerk and had he not dropped to the floor, the blast of wind and snow that shrieked in through the open window would have blown him clear across to the other side of the coach. It was even worse than he had imagined it would be, he could understand now that the driver was slowing up not because of the incline but because he wanted to keep his train on the rails, and for one bad moment Reynolds was tempted to give up the whole suicidal project. Then he thought of the professor sitting alone in the last wagon among a pack of hardened criminals, of Jansci and all the others who were depending on him, of the girl who had turned her back on him when he had made to say good-bye, and the next moment he was on his feet, gasping as the bulleting snow lashed cruelly across his exposed face and sucked the breath from his lungs. He heaved with all his strength, once, twice, three times, unmindful of the fact that a sudden lull in the wind would have pitched him helplessly out into the snow, and on the fourth attempt managed to get the sole of his shoe stuck in the opening. He got his forearm into the crack, then his shoulder and finally half his body, pressed outwards with all the strength of his arms, reached down with a groping right foot until he found the snow-encrusted running-board, and brought his left foot into the gap of the door. It was then that the hammer and torch in his inside pocket caught on the inside jamb of the door and he stood there for almost a minute, a minute that seemed an eternity, jammed between door and side of the coach, struggling frantically to free himself, fearing that at any moment someone might come along the corridor to investigate the source of the snow-laden gale that was whistling the length of the carriage. And then, suddenly, with a ripping of buttons and tearing of cloth, he was free, freed with a jerk that caused his right foot to slip off the running-board, and he hung there for a moment supported only by his left hand and the left foot still jammed in the doorway. Then he hauled himself slowly, painfully upright — he could get no purchase anywhere for his right hand — regained his footing on the board, stood there for a moment until he had regained control of himself, got his left hand out, hooked it round the inside of the open window and jerked his left sole free. The door shut with a crash, and he was now completely outside, supported only by the already numbing fingers of his left hand and the pressure of the wind pinning him against the carriage side.

It was dusk now, but though there was still enough light to see by he could not see, for with the driving snow he was a blind man groping in a blind world. He was, he knew, at the very end of the coach, and the corner was only a foot from where he stood, but though he could reach his right arm almost two feet round the corner he could find not the smallest projection to give him purchase of any kind. At the fullest stretch of his left arm he tried with his right foot, and found the narrow lateral steel member that housed the bumpers, but it was at far too acute an angle to serve his purpose: he tried to find the bumper, but it eluded him.

His left forearm was beginning to ache with the strain of supporting his weight, and his fingers were now so numbed that he had no means of knowing whether they were slipping or not. He hauled himself upright outside the carriage door window again, changed arms, cursed himself for his stupidity as he suddenly thought of his torch, changed hands again and once more leaned back and as far round the corner as he could, this time with the beam of the powerful torch probing through the gloom and the snow. It took him only two seconds to see all he wanted to see and memorize the relative positions of the lateral steel member at the back of the coach, the concertina coupling and the steel bumper that seemed to leap uncontrollably from side to side as every jolting sway of the train caused a violent change in position relative to the opposing bumper on the next carriage. He pulled himself quickly upright, thrust the torch back in his pocket, and didn’t hesitate, because he was dimly aware, without admitting it to himself, that if he as much as paused to consider the near certainty of a miss, a slip and being crushed to instant death under the wheels, he could never have brought himself to do what he now did at once without any thought for the consequences. He moved both feet along till they were at the very edge of the running-board, released his grip with his left hand, stood there held against the outcurving side of the carriage by wind pressure alone, then lifted his right foot into blind space, his body curving far over to the left as he did so. For an instant of time he was poised there in mid-air, the toe of his left shoe the only contact he had left with the train, and then, in the very moment of that toe slipping off the frozen running-board the wind caught him and he flung himself forward into the darkness.

He landed with one knee on the lateral member, the shin of the other leg striking cruelly across the bumper even as his outstretched hands struck against the stiffly yielding side of the concertina coupling. Such was his momentum that his right leg slipped at once across the frozen metal of the bumper, but he tightened his leg muscles convulsively and hooked his instep round the narrowest part of the bumper as his knees pointed down to the track rushing by beneath. For a few seconds he hung there, supported only by the counteracting pressures of his arms and one shin, wondering vaguely whether his leg had been broken, then he felt his hands, for all the maximum pressure he was exerting against them, begin to slip helplessly down the smooth, snow-covered material of the coupling. Despairingly, he flung out his left hand, struck it painfully against the back of the carriage he had just left, pushed it forward and felt his stiffened, outstretched fingers slide in the narrow gap between the carriage and its coupling. He clutched the rough edge of the toughened, rubberized fabric as if he were seeking to drive his hooking fingers clear through it, and three seconds later he was standing upright on the lateral member, securely anchored by his left hand, and trembling uncontrollably from the reaction of his effort.

But the trembling was from the reaction only. Reynolds, afraid only moments ago as he had never been afraid before, had crossed that nebulous frontier between fear and that strange world of uncaring and selfless indifference that lies beyond. With his right hand he felt for his spring knife, clicked open the blade and thrust the dagger point into the material about waist-height: there could have been a dozen people streaming through the inside of the concertina coupling at that instant for all he cared. A few seconds’ vigorous sawing with the blade’s razor edges and he had a hole cut in the material, large enough to accommodate the toe of one foot, and at head-height he cut another for a hand-grip. Then he thrust his right toe into the first hole, his left hand into the second, pushed and heaved upwards and drove the blade into the hilt through the top of the coupling to give him a secure hand-hold. And then he was on top, clinging desperately to the handle of the knife as the full force of the wind caught him and sought to blow him over the other side of the wildly vibrating coupling.

The first carriage — the fourth from the front, that was — proved to be relatively easy. The narrow metal sheathing for the ventilation louvres ran the entire length of the carriage along the top, and it took him less than half a minute, lying on the leeward side of the roof with his face bowed against the knifing blizzard and overhanding himself along the sheathing, to reach the far end. All the way along his feet had hung out over the edge, but he could do nothing about this: he should have been able to get some purchase with his toes on the guttering, but it was blocked and smooth with frozen snow.

And now he was reaching out gingerly on top of the corrugations of the next carriage coupling, and had no sooner let go of the security of the ventilation sheathing that he realized the mistake he had made: he should have launched himself across in a dive for the other side, instead of exposing himself to that shrieking wind that was beginning to gust most dangerously now, one moment all but blowing him clear over the far side of the furiously vibrating coupling, the next easing so unexpectedly that he had to hang on grimly to prevent himself toppling off into the wind: but by flattening himself as low as possible and working his hand-grip from corrugation to corrugation he safely reached the end of the third carriage. It was again a relatively easy matter to traverse this, and when he reached the front he sat up, swung his legs over on to the next coupling, bent low and launched himself across the intervening space, barking one of his knees badly as it struck the sheeting on the second carriage, but getting a secure grip at the time. Seconds later only, it seemed, he was at the front end of the second carriage and it was then as he swung his legs out on to the coupling that he saw it: the wavering dipping beams of headlights, vanishing and reappearing through swirling flurries of snow, on a road that paralleled the railway track not twenty yards away. The elation that swept through Reynolds banished for the moment all thought of exhaustion and cold, and numbed senseless hands that could not serve him very much longer: it could have been anyone, of course, driving that vehicle out there in the blinding snow, but Reynolds was oddly certain it wasn’t. He stooped again, poised on his toes and launched himself across on to the roof of the first carriage: it wasn’t until he arrived there and was skidding along helplessly on his face that he realized that this carriage, unlike the others, had no ventilation sheathing running along the top.

For a moment panic returned again, and he scrabbled furiously on the ice-smooth, slippery surface of the roof seeking for a handhold — any handhold. Then he forced himself to be calm, for that frantic threshing of legs and arms was exactly what was required to destroy what little friction coefficient there was between himself and the train and send him sliding helplessly over the side to his death. There must, he told himself desperately, be ventilators of some kind or other, and suddenly he knew what they must be — those little top-hatted chimneys spaced three or four to a coach and it was just at that moment he realized something else: the train was curving round sharply into the wind and the centrifugal force was sending him sliding slowly, remorselessly, towards the edge.

He was sliding feet first, face down, and his toes beat a furious tattoo on the carriage roof as he sought to crack the frozen snow that filled up the guttering and gain at least a toehold. But the snow was frozen into ice, he smashed against it in vain, and the first he knew that he had failed was when his shins struck painfully against the edge of the carriage roof. And still the train kept curving round that interminable corner.

His knees now rested on the edge of the roof and his nails were breaking off as his fingers, hooked into rigid talons, furrowed through the smooth ice on the carriage top. He knew nothing could save him, and he could never afterwards explain what strange, subconscious instinct — for in that moment of approaching death his mind had ceased to work altogether — had caused him to jerk out his knife, press the release catch and bury the blade in the roof just before his hips reached the side and he had passed the point of no return.

How long he lay there at the full stretch of his knife he did not know. It could have been only seconds. Gradually he became aware that the track beneath him had straightened out again, that centrifugal force no longer had him in its murderous grip and that he was free to move once more, although with infinite caution. Inch by inch he slowly pulled his legs back on to the roof again, freed the knife, stabbed it in farther up and gradually hauled himself on to the top. A moment later, still using his knife as his sole support, he found the first circular ventilator and clutched it as if he would never let it go. But he had to let it go, there could only be two or three minutes left. He had to reach the next ventilator. He reached out in its direction, raised the knife and stabbed it down: but it struck some metal, probably a bolt head, with a jarring shock, and when he brought it up to his eyes he saw that the blade had been snapped off cleanly at the hilt. He flung the handle away, braced his feet against the ventilator and pushed off along the roof, colliding heavily with the next ventilator, perhaps only six feet away. Seconds later, again using his feet to propel him forward from one ventilator to the next, he had reached the third one, and then the fourth: and then he had realized he did not know how long the carriage was, whether there were any more ventilators, whether or not another push along the top of the carriage would send him skidding helplessly over the front of the carriage to fall to his death under the wheels of the train. He decided to risk it, placed his feet against the ventilator and was on the point of pushing off when the thought struck him that with any height at all he should be able to see from there into the cab of the locomotive and see limned against its brightness, perhaps, the edge of that coach, for the snow was beginning to ease at last.

He knelt upright, the ventilator clutched tightly between his thighs, and his heart turned slowly over as he saw the edge of the carriage, silhouetted clearly against the red glow from the locomotive’s open firebox, a bare four feet away. In the cab itself, through the flurries of snow, he caught a glimpse of the engineer, and of his fireman turning and stooping as he shovelled coal from the tender into the firebox. And he could see something that had no right to be there, but which he might have expected — a soldier armed with a carbine, crouched for protection from the cold close into the gaping red maw of the firebox.

Reynolds fumbled for his gun, but all the feeling had left his hands, he couldn’t even get his frozen forefinger through the trigger-guard. He thrust it back in his pocket and rose quickly to his feet, leaning far into the wind, the ventilator still locked between his legs. It was all or nothing now. He took one short step, the sole of his right shoe found the edge of the carriage with the second step, he was in mid-air, then he was sliding and slithering down the sloping, crumbling coal of the tender to land on his shoulder and side, temporarily winded, at the back of the footplate.

They turned to stare at him — all three, engineer, stoker and soldier turned to stare at him, their faces almost comical in bewilderment and disbelief. Perhaps five seconds elapsed, five precious seconds that enabled Reynolds partially to regain his breath, before the soldier abruptly recovered from his astonishment, unslung his rifle, swept the butt high in the air and leapt towards the prostrate Reynolds. Reynolds grasped a lump of coal, the first thing that came to hand, and flung it despairingly at the advancing man, but his fingers were too numb, and as the soldier ducked low the coal flew high over his head, missing him completely. But the fireman didn’t miss, and the soldier collapsed on to the footplate as the flat of the shovel caught him on the back of the head.

Reynolds scrambled to his feet. With the torn clothes and bleeding, frost-whitened hands and face streaked with coal dust, he was an incredible spectacle, but at that moment quite oblivious of the fact. He stared at the fireman, a big, curly-haired youngster with his shirt sleeves rolled far up in defiance of the bitter cold, then transferred his gaze to the soldier at his feet.

‘The heat.’ The youngster was grinning. ‘He was suddenly overcome.’

‘But why—’

‘Look, friend, I don’t know who you’re for, but I know who I’m against.’ He leaned on his shovel. ‘Can we help you?’

‘You certainly can!’ Reynolds rapidly explained, and the two men looked at each other. The older man, the driver, hesitated.

‘We have to think of ourselves—’

‘Look!’ Reynolds ripped his coat open. ‘A rope. Take it off, will you — my hands are about gone. You can tie each other’s wrists. That should—’

‘Of course!’ The younger man grinned even as the driver reached for the air-brake lever. ‘We were held up. Five or six men at least. Safe home, my friend.’

Reynolds hardly stopped to thank the men who helped him so casually, with so little thought for themselves. The train was slowing down quickly on that incline, and he had to get to the back wagon before it stopped altogether and the tightening of the coupling made it impossible to free it. He jumped out from the lowest cab step, tumbled head over heels, regained his feet and started running back. The train was almost stopped now as the guard’s van crawled past him, and he had a momentary, heart-warming glimpse of Jansci standing in the open door at the rear of the van, a gun rock-steady in his hand.

Then the buffers were banging and rattling together as the locomotive up front came to a halt, Reynolds had his torch switched on and was lifting the towing links clear and knocking off the air-brake flange coupling with his hammer. He looked briefly for a steam coupling, but there was none — convicts didn’t need heat — he had severed all connections between the last wagon and the train. All the carriages were now jolting backwards under the impetus of the releasing pressure of the compressed buffer springs, Jansci, a bunch of keys swinging in one hand and the levelled gun still in the other, was stepping across from the guard’s van to the cattle truck, and Reynolds himself was just grabbing hold of the handrail when the guard’s van bumped violently into the truck and gave it its initial impetus for the run down the long, gentle hill they had just climbed.

The big brake wheel was on the outside of the wagon and Reynolds was beginning to turn this, perhaps a mile after they had left the main train, when Jansci finally found the right key for the wagon, kicked the door open and flashed his torch inside. Half a mile farther on Reynolds was just giving the wheel its final lock and bringing the coach to a gentle standstill, watched by a smiling Jansci and a Dr Jennings who had been at first dazed then unbelieving but now as wildly excited as any schoolboy. And they had barely left the wagon and were striking out for the west where they knew the road lay when they heard a cry and saw a figure floundering towards them through the deep snow. It was the Count, all aristocratic reserve gone, yelling and shouting and waving his arms like a madman.