ALISTAIR MACLEAN
The Last Frontier
Harper
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First published in Great Britain by Collins 1959
Copyright © HarperCollinsPublishers 1959
Alistair MacLean asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work
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Source ISBN: 9780006157496
Ebook Edition © JANUARY 2014 ISBN: 9780007289455
Version: 2018-05-17
To Gilleasburg
Contents
The wind blew steadily out of the north and the night air was bitterly chill. Nothing moved across the snow. Under the high cold stars the frozen plain empty, desolate, stretched endlessly away on every side until it vanished into the blurred distance of an empty horizon. Over everything lay the silence of death.
But the emptiness, Reynolds knew, was illusion. So was the desolation and the silence. Only the snow was real, the snow and that bone-deep, sub-zero cold that shrouded him from head to toe in a blanket of ice and continuously shook his entire body in violent, uncontrollable spasms of shivering, like a man suffering from ague. Perhaps that feeling of drowsiness that was beginning to creep over him was only an illusion also, but he was aware that it, too, was no illusion, it was real and he knew only too well the meaning it carried with it. Resolutely, desperately almost, he crushed down all thought of the cold, the snow and sleep, and concentrated on the problem of survival.
Slowly, painstakingly, careful to make not the slightest unnecessary sound or movement, he slid one frozen hand under the lapels of his trench-coat, fumbled his handkerchief out of his breast pocket, rolled it into a crushed ball and stuffed it into his mouth: betrayal of his position could come only by sight or sound, and the folds of the handkerchief would break up the heavy condensation of his breath in the frosty air and muffle the chattering of his teeth. Then he twisted round cautiously in the deep, snow-filled ditch by the roadside into which he had fallen, reached out an exploratory hand – now curiously mottled blue and white by the cold – for the trilby hat that had been knocked from his head when he had tumbled off the overhanging branch of the tree above him, found it and inched it slowly towards him. As thoroughly as his numbed, now almost useless fingers would permit, he covered crown and brim with a thick layer of snow, crammed the trilby deep over the giveaway black thatch of his head and lifted head and shoulders in almost grotesque slow motion until first the hat brim and then the eyes cleared the level of the ditch.
In spite of its violent shivering, his whole body was as taut as a bow-string as he waited, in tense, sickening expectation, for the shout that betokened discovery, or the shot or the numbing crash that carried oblivion with it as a bullet found the exposed target of his head. But there was no sound, no shot and his awareness only heightened with the passing of every moment. His first quick scanning of the circuit of the horizon was now complete, and there could be no doubt about it: there was no one there, at least close at hand, either to see or to be seen.
Moving just as carefully, just as slowly, but with a long drawn-out easing of his pent-up breath, Reynolds straightened until he was kneeling upright in the ditch. He was cold and shivering still, but was no longer aware of it, and the sleepiness had vanished as if it had been a dream. Once again his gaze travelled in a full circle around the horizon, but slowly, probingly, this time, the keen brown eyes missing nothing, and once more the answer was the same. There was nobody to be seen. There was nothing to be seen, nothing at all but the icy twinkle of the stars in the dark velvet of the sky, the level white plain, a few small isolated