The Last Place God Made - Jack Higgins [0]
Jack Higgins
Open Road Integrated Media
New York
And this one for my sister-in-law, Babs Hewitt
Who is absolutely certain it's about time . . .
CONTENTS
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
A Biography of Jack Higgins
Foreword
Small planes feature in many of my books. I can't fly them myself, but I travel in them a great deal. My wife, Denise, is a qualified pilot, and she provides any expertise I need about flying. The Last Place God Made concerns a First World War Bristol fighter being used on the Amazon in 1939 to fly mail. When I was a young man in Leeds, a close friend's father used to tell us of his experiences flying a Bristol in Russia in 1919. He was awarded the DFC while serving with an RAF squadron in Archangel, helping the White Russians against what were then known as the Reds. His exciting stories sparked my interest in flying.
ONE
Ceiling Zero
When the port wing began to flap I knew I was in trouble, not that I hadn't been for some little time. Oil pressure mainly plus a disturbing miss in the beat of the old Pratt and Whitney Wasp engine that put me uncomfortably in mind of the rattle in a dying man's throat.
The Vega had been good enough in its day. Typical of that sudden rush of small high-winged, single-engined airliners that appeared in the mid-1920s. Built to carry mail and half a dozen passengers at a hundred or so miles an hour.
The one I was trying to keep in the air at that precise moment in time had been built in 1927 which made it eleven years old. Eleven years of flying mail in every kind of weather. Of inadequate servicing. Of overuse.
She'd been put together again after no fewer than three crash landings and that was only what was officially entered in the log. God alone knows what had been missed out.
Kansas, Mexico, Panama, Peru, sinking a little lower with each move, finding it that much more difficult to turn in her best performance, like a good horse being worked to death. Now, she was breaking up around me in the air and there wasn't much I could do about it.
From Iquitos in Peru, the Amazon river twists like a brown snake through two thousand miles of some of the worst jungle in the world, its final destination Belem on the Atlantic coast of Brazil with Manaus at the junction with the Rio Negro, the halfway point and my present destination.
For most of the way, I'd followed the river which at least made for easy navigation, alone with three sacks of mail and a couple of crates of some kind of mining machinery. Six long, hard hours to Tefe and I managed to raise three police posts on the way on my radio although things were quiet as the grave at Tefe itself.
From there, the river drifted away in a great, wide loop and to have followed it would have made the run to Manaus another four hundred miles and the Vega just didn't have that kind of fuel in reserve.
From Tefe, then, I struck out due east across virgin jungle, aiming for the Rio Negro a hundred and fifty miles farther on where a turn downstream would bring me to Manaus.
It had been a crazy venture from the first, a flight that to my knowledge no one had accomplished at that time and yet at twenty-three, with the sap rising, a man tends to think himself capable of most things and Belem was, after all, two thousand miles closer to England than the point from which I'd started and a passage home at the end of it.
Yet I see now, looking back on it all after so many years, how much in the whole affair was the product of chance, that element quite beyond calculation in a man's affairs.
To start with, my bold plunge across such a wide stretch of virgin jungle was not quite as insane as it might appear. True, any attempt at dead reckoning was ruled out by the simple fact that my drift indicator was not working and the magnetic compass