No one had immediate suggestions to make. Jansci sat looking straight ahead, the lined face beneath the thick white hair calm and unworried, and Reynolds could almost have sworn that a slight smile was touching the corners of his mouth. He himself had never felt less like smiling and as the truck roared steadily on from the whitely opaque world of snow behind to the whitely opaque world of snow ahead, he made a mental catalogue of his own successes and failures since he had entered Hungary only four days previously. The catalogue was not one that he could contemplate with either pleasure or pride. On the credit side, there could only be reckoned the contacts he had made, with Jansci and his men in the first place, and then with the professor — and he could derive no real satisfaction from these, without the Count and Jansci even these would have been impossible. On the debit side — he winced as he realised the length of the list on the debit side: being captured immediately after arriving in the country, making the AVO a gratis presentation of a tape recording that had ruined everything, walking into Hidas’ trap and having to be rescued by Jansci and his men, having to be saved by Jansci from succumbing to the effects of the drug in the Szarhaza, almost betraying his friends and himself when his astonishment had overcome him at the sight of the Count in the commandant’s room. He writhed in his seat as he thought of it. In short, he had lost the professor, split up the professor’s family beyond recovery, been responsible for the Count losing the position that alone enabled Jansci’s organisation to work smoothly — and, as bitter as anything, he had lost any hope he might have had that Jansci’s daughter might look kindly on him again. It was the first time that Reynolds had admitted, even to himself, that he ever had any such hope, and he was lost for a long, long moment at the wonder of it. With physical effort, almost, he shook off all thought of it, and when he spoke he knew there was only one thing he could say.
‘There’s something I want to do, and I want to do it alone,’ he said slowly. ‘I want to find a train. I want to find the train that’s — ‘
‘Don’t we all!’ the Count Shouted. He smashed a gloved hand down on the steering-wheel with a force that nearly broke it, and his thin face was alive with a grin of sheer delight. ‘Don’t we all, my boy! Look at Jansci there — he’s been thinking of nothing else for the past ten minutes.’
Reynolds looked sharply at the Count, then more slowly at Jansci. It had been the beginnings of a smile that he had seen on Jansci’s face, he realised now, and even as he watched the smile widened as Jansci turned towards him.
‘1 know this country like the back of my hand.’ The tone was almost apologetic. ‘It was about five kilometres back that I noticed that the Count was headed due south. I do not imagine,’ Jansci added dryly, ‘that very much of a. welcome awaits us across the border of Yugoslavia.’
‘It’s no good.’ Reynolds shook his head stubbornly. ‘Just me, only me. Everything I’ve touched yet has gone ‘wrong, just one more step towards the concentration camps. Next time there’ll be no Count turning up with an AVO truck. What train is the professor on?’
‘You will do this alone?’ Jansci asked.
‘Yes. I must.’
‘The man’s mad,’ the Count announced.
‘I can’t.’ Jansci shook his white head. ‘I can’t let you do it. Put yourself in my position, and admit that you may be selfish. I have, unfortunately, a conscience to live with, and I would not care to face it every waking night for the rest of my life.’ He stared forward through the windscreen. ‘Even worse, I would not care to face my daughter for the rest of my life.’
‘I don’t understand — ‘
‘Of course you don’t.’ It was the Count interrupting, and he sounded almost jovial. ‘Your all-exclusive devotion to your job may be admirable — to be frank, I don’t think it is — but it also tends to blind you to things that are dazzlingly clear to your elders. However, we argue, and uselessly. Colonel Hidas is even now having a fit in our worthy commandant’s office. Jansci?’ He was asking for a decision, and Reynolds knew it.
‘You know all we need to know?’ Jansci asked the Count.
‘Naturally.’ The Count was hurt. ‘I had four minutes to wait while the — ah — prisoners were being produced. I did not waste those minutes.’
‘Very well, then. There it is, Meechail. The information in exchange for our help.’
‘I don’t appear to have much option,’ Reynolds said bitterly.
‘The sign of an intelligent man — he knows when he has lost an argument.’ The Count was almost purring. He jammed on the brakes, pulled a map from his pocket, made sure that Sandor and the Cossack could see it from the observation hatch behind and jabbed at it with his finger. ‘Here is Cece — this is where the professor is being put aboard the train today — or, rather, has already been put aboard the train. Special wagon tacked on to the end.’
‘The commandant mentioned something like that,’ Jansci said. ‘A number of high-ranking scientists — ‘
‘Pah! Scientists? High-ranking criminals bound for the Siberian taiga, and it’s where they deserve to go. Nor is Dr. Jennings getting any special treatment — it’s a convict coach, pure and simple, a front-loading cattle truck: the commandant made no bones about it.’ His finger traced the railway line down to the point where it intersected with the main road due south from Budapest at the town of Szekszard, sixty kilometres north of the Yugoslavian border. ‘The train will stop here. Then it follows the main road due south to Bataszek — it goes straight through there — then turns west for Pecs, leaving the main road completely. It will have to be somewhere between Szekszard and Pecs, gentlemen, and it presents quite a problem. There are plenty of trains I would derail, but not one carrying hundreds of my adopted countrymen. This is just a regular service train.”
‘May I see that map, please?’ Reynolds asked. It was a very large scale map, a road map but also a physical map showing rivers and hills, and as he studied it his excitement mounted, and his mind went back fourteen years to the days when he had been the youngest subaltern in the S.O.E. It was a crazy idea now, but it had been a crazy idea then. . . . He pointed to a spot on the map, not far north of Pecs, where the roads from Szekszard, after cutting for almost forty kilometres across country, again paralleled the railway line, then looked across at the Count.
‘Can you get the truck there before the train arrives?’
‘With luck, with the roads not being blocked and, above all, with Sandor to lift me out of a ditch if I go into one — yes, I think I can.’
‘Very well. Here is what I propose.’ Quickly, succinctly, Reynolds outlined his plan and at the end of it he looked at the others. ‘Well?’
Jansci shook his head slowly, but it was the Count who spoke.
‘Impossible.’ He was very definite. ‘It cannot be done.’
‘It’s been done before. In the Vosges mountains, 1944. An ammunition dump went up as a result. I know, because I was there. . . . What alternative do you propose?’
There was a short period of silence, then Reynolds spoke again.
‘Exactly. As the Count said, it is an intelligent man who knows when he has lost an argument. We’re wasting time.’
‘We are.’ Jansci had already made up his mind, and the Count nodded agreement. ‘We can but try.’
‘Into the back and change.” The Count had made up his mind. I’m on my way. The train is due in Szekszard in twenty minutes. 1*11 be there in fifteen.’
‘Just so long as the AVO aren’t there in ten,’ Reynolds said sombrely.
Involuntarily, almost, the Count glanced over his shoulder. ‘Impossible. No signs of Hidas yet.’
‘There are such things as telephones.’
‘There were.’ It was Sandor speaking for the first time for minutes, and he showed Reynolds the pair of pliers in his huge hand. ‘Six cables — six snips. The Szarhaza is completely cut off from the outside world.’
‘I,’ said the Count modestly, ‘think of everything.’
CHAPTER 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 die 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.