Free The Last Frontier by Alistair MacLean

want their own tanks used against them.'

'Thirty-six hours!' Reynolds stared at Jansci. 'And he lived?'

'He he didn't a mark on him, he still hasn't. It was Sandor who got him out -- that was how they met for the first time. He got a crowbar and broke down the wall of the house from the inside -- I saw him do it, and he was flinging 200-pound blocks of masonry around as if they were pebbles. We took him into a nearby house, left him, and when we returned the house was a huge pile of rubble: some resistance fighters had taken up position there and a Mongolian tank commander had pulverised the bottom story until the whole house fell down. But we got him out again, still without a scratch. He was very ill for a long time -- for months -- but he's much better now.'

'Sandor and yourself both fought in the rising?'

'Sandor did. He was foreman electrician in the Dunapentele steel works, and he put his knowledge to good use. To see him handling high-tension wires with nothing but a couple of wooden battens held in his bare hands would make your blood freeze, Mr. Reynolds.'

'Against the tanks?'

'Electrocution,' Jansci nodded. 'The crews of three tanks. And I've been told he destroyed even more down in Csepel. He killed an infantryman, stole his flame-thrower, sprayed through the driver's visor then dropped a Molotov cocktail -- just bottles of ordinary petrol with bits of burning cotton stuffed into the necks -- through the hatch when they opened it to get some air. Then he would shut the hatch, and when Sandor shuts a hatch and sits on it, the hatch stays shut.'

'I can imagine,' Reynolds said dryly. Unconsciously, almost, he rubbed his still aching arms, then a sudden thought occurred to him. 'Sandor took part, you said. And yourself?'

'Nothing.' Jansci spread his scarred, misshapen hands, palms upwards, and now Reynolds could see that the crucifixion marks indeed went right through. 'I took no part in it. I tried all I could to stop it.'

Reynolds looked at him in silence, trying to read the expression of the faded grey eyes enmeshed in those spider webs of wrinkles. Finally he said, 'I'm afraid I don't believe you.'

'I'm afraid you must.'

Silence fell on the room, a long, cold silence: Reynolds could hear the far-off tinkle of dishes in a distant kitchen as the girl prepared the meal. Finally, he looked directly at Jansci.

'You let the others fight; fight for you?' He made no attempt to conceal his disappointment, the near-hostility in his tone. 'But why? Why did you not help, not do something!'

'Why? I'll tell you Why.' Jansci smiled faintly and reached up and touched his white hair. 'I am not as old as the snow on my head would have you think, my boy, but I am still far too old for the suicidal, the futile act of the grand but empty gesture. I leave that for the children of this world, the reckless and the unthinking, the romanticists who do not stop to count the cost; I leave it to the righteous indignation that cannot see beyond the justice of its cause, to the splendid anger that is blinded by its own shining splendour. I leave it to the poets and the dreamers, to those who look back to the glorious gallantry, the imperishable chivalry of a bygone world, to those whose vision carries them forward to the golden age that lies beyond tomorrow. But I can only see today.' He shrugged. 'The charge of the Light Brigade -- my father's father fought in that -- you remember the charge of the Light Brigade and the famous commentary on that charge? "It's magnificent, but it's not war." So it was with our October Revolution.'

'Fine words,' Reynolds said coldly. 'These are fine words. I'm sure a Hungarian boy with a Russian bayonet in his stomach would have taken great comfort from them.'

'I am also too old to take offence,' Jansci said sadly. 'I am also too old to believe in violence, except as a last resort, the final fling of desperation when every hope is gone, and even then it is only a resort to hopelessness: besides, Mr.