‘Why?’ Reynolds’ voice was strained.
‘He will never work for them again,’ the Count answered obliquely. ‘They know that.’
‘What you mean is — ‘
‘What I mean is that they only want his everlasting silence,’ the Count said harshly. ‘There is only one way you can ensure that.’
‘God above!’ Reynolds cried. ‘We can’t let him go, we can’t let him walk to his death and not do — ‘
‘You forget about Julia,’ the Count said softly.
Reynolds buried his face in his hands, too confused, too dazed to think any more. Half a minute passed, perhaps a minute, then he jerked upright as the harsh, strident ring of the telephone bell cut through the silence of the room. The Count had the receiver off its rest within two seconds.
‘Howarth here. Colonel Hidas?’
Again the listeners — Jansci and Sandor had just hurried in through the doorway, heads and shoulders matted with snow — could hear the metallic murmur of the voices in the earpiece, but were unable to distinguish anything. All they could do was watch the Count as he leaned negligently against the wall, his eyes moving idly, unseeingly around the room. Suddenly he straightened off the wall, the contracting muscles of his eyebrows etching a deep, vertical line on his forehead.
‘Impossible! I said an hour, Colonel Hidas. We cannot wait any longer. Do you think we are madmen to sit here till you can take us at your leisure?’
He paused as the voice at the other end interrupted him, listened for a few moments to the urgent, staccato chatter, stiffened as he heard the click of a receiver being replaced, looked for a moment at the lifeless phone, then slowly returned it to his hook. His right thumb, as he turned to face the others, was rubbing slowly, gratingly against the side of his forefinger and his lower lip was caught between his teeth.
‘Something’s wrong.’ The voice reflected the anxiety in his face. ‘Something’s very wrong. Hidas says the minister responsible is at his country retreat, the telephone lines are down, they’ve had to send a car to fetch him and it might be another half-hour, or possibly — you damned idiot!’
‘What do you mean?’ Jansci demanded. ‘Who — ‘
‘Me.’ The uncertainty had vanished from the Count’s face, and the low controlled voice was alive with a desperate urgency that Reynolds had never heard before. ‘Sandor, start the truck — now. Grenades, ammonium nitrate to take care of that little bridge at the foot of the road and the field telephone. Hurry, all of you. For God’s sake, hurry!’
No one stopped to question the Count. Ten seconds later they were all outside in the heavily falling snow, piling equipment into the truck, and within a minute the truck was jolting down the bumpy path towards the road. Jansci turned to the Count, one eyebrow raised in mute interrogation.
‘That last call came from a call-box,’ the Count said quietly. ‘Criminal negligence on my part not to catch on to it right away. Why is Colonel Hidas of the AVO telephoning from a call-box? Because he’s no longer in his Budapest office. It’s a hundred to one that the previous call wasn’t from Budapest either, but from our divisional H.Q. in Gyor. Hidas has been on his way here all the time, desperately trying to delay us, to keep us here with these bogus phone calls. The minister, government permission, broken phone lines — lies, all lies. My God, to think that we Ml for that sort of thing! Budapest — Hidas left Budapest hours ago! I’ll wager he’s no more than five miles from here at this very moment. Another fifteen minutes and he would have nailed us all, six good little flies waiting patiently in the spider’s parlour.’
CHAPTER TWELVE
They waited at the foot of the telephone pole by the side of the wood, peering through the momentarily thinning snow and shivering almost continuously. Too little sleep, too much exhaustion and the treacherous, quickly-evaporating warmth of the brandy were no fit preparation for even so brief a vigil in the bitter cold.
And it had been a brief vigil, so far. A scant fifteen minutes had elapsed since they had left the house, driven down the dirt-track across the little hump-backed bridge then turned west along the main road till they had come to this wood, perhaps two hundred yards from the turn-off, with its hiding-place for the truck. The Count and Sandor had been dropped at the bridge, to place the charges of ammonium nitrate, while Reynolds and the professor had run into the wood, improvised rough and ready switches from dead branches, hurried back to the bridge and helped the Count and Sandor to conceal their tyre tracks and the wiring which led from the nitrate to the wood where Sandor was now in hiding with the plunger in his hand. By the time the others had returned to the truck Jansci and the Cossack, the latter agile as a monkey on any pole or tree, had already connected up their field set to the overhead telephone wires leading to the house.
Another ten minutes passed, twenty, then half an hour, the snow still fell thinly, the cold reached deeper for the marrow of their bones, and both Jansci and the Count, with the AVO now long overdue, had become suspicious and anxious. It was not like the AVO to be late, especially when such a prize was at stake, it was most unlike Colonel Hidas, the Count declared, to ‘be late at any time. Perhaps they were being held up by bad or impassable roads. Perhaps Hidas had disregarded instructions, perhaps his men were at that very moment sealing off every road to the frontier and encircling them from the rear, but the Count thought it highly unlikely: he knew that Hidas was under the impression that Jansci had a large and far-reaching organisation, and that Jansci should neglect the obvious precaution of posting lookouts on the roads for miles around would probably never even cross his mind. But that Hidas had some stratagem in mind, the Count was now convinced: Hidas was a formidable adversary at any time, and the concentration camps held all too many people who had underrated the astuteness and persistence of that thin and embittered Jew. Hidas was up-to something.
And, it became immediately plain when Hidas did finally turn up, he had indeed been up to something. He came from the east, and he came in a big, green, closed-in truck which, the Count said, was his mobile H.Q.-cum-caravan, accompanied by another, small brown truck, almost certainly with some of his AVO killers inside. So much Jansci and the Count had expected. But what they had not expected, and what amply accounted for the AVO’s delay in arriving, was the presence of the third vehicle in the convoy, a big, lumbering, heavily-armoured half-track, equipped with a vicious looking high-velocity anti-tank rifle, almost half the length of the vehicle itself. The watchers by the telephone pole at the woodside stared at each other in perplexity, at the loss to discover any possible reason for this display of armed might: they were not left to wonder long.
Hidas knew exactly What he was doing — he must have learned from Julia that Jansci’s house had two blind gable end walls — for he didn’t hesitate, not even for a moment: he had his men well briefed ‘and trained, and the manoeuvre was executed with smooth and effortless efficiency. A few hundred yards distant from the track leading off the road to the house the two trucks accelerated, leaving the half-track behind, then changed down almost in perfect unison, braked, swerved off the road and across the little hump-backed bridge, raced up to the house and fanned out, one on either side of it, coming to rest opposite and several yards distant from either of the blind gable walls. Immediately the trucks had stopped, armed men leapt out and took up crouching positions behind the trucks and behind the little outbuildings and some of the trees that bordered the back of the house.
Even before the last man had taken up position, the big half-track had swung off the road, scraped between the low walls of the hump bridge with the snout of its long gun pointing grotesquely skywards, plunged down the other side and ground to a hart about fifty yards away from the front of the house. A second elapsed, then another, then there came a flat, whiplash crack as the big gun fired and a roar and eruption of smoke and flying debris as the shell exploded in the wall of the house, just below the ground-floor windows. A few more seconds passed, the dust from the first explosion hadn’t even had time to settle, when the next shell smashed into the house, perhaps a yard away from the first, then another and another and another, and already a hole almost ten feet in length had been torn in the masonry of the front wall.