The Last Place God Made - Jack Higgins [14]
The din was terrific, a feature of the engine at low speeds. Hannah moved out of the way and I taxied away from the hangars towards the leeward boundary of the field and turned into the wind.
I pulled down my goggles, checked the sky to make sure I wasn't threatened by anything else coming in to land and opened the throttle. Up came the tail as I pushed the stick forward just a touch, gathering speed. As she yawed to starboard in a slight cross-wind, I applied a little rudder correction. A hundred and fifty yards, a slight backward pressure on the stick and she was airborne.
At two hundred feet, I eased back the throttle to her climbing speed which was all of sixty-five miles an hour, banked steeply at five hundred feet and swooped back across the airfield.
I could see Hannah quite plainly, hands shading his eyes from the sun as he gazed up at me. What happened then was entirely spontaneous: produced by the sheer exhilaration of being at the controls of that magnificent plane as much as by any desire to impress him.
The great German ace, Max Immelmann, came up with a brilliant ploy that gave him two shots at an enemy in a dogfight for the price of one and without losing height. The famous Immelmann Turn, biblical knowledge for any fighter pilot.
I tried it now, diving in on Hannah, pulled up in a half-loop, rolled out on top and came back over his head at fifty feet.
He didn't move a muscle, simply stood there, shaking a fist at me. I waved back, took the Bristol low over the trees and turned up-river.
*
You don't need to keep your hands on a Bristol's controls at cruising speed. If you want an easy time of it, all you have to do is adjust the tailplane incidence control and sit back, but that wasn't for me. I was enjoying being in control, being at one with the machine if you like. Someone once said the Bristol was like a thoroughbred hunter with a delicate mouth and a stout heart and that afternoon over the Negro, I knew exactly what he meant.
On either side, the jungle, gigantic walls of bamboo and liana which even the sun couldn't get through. Below, the river, clouds of scarlet ibis scattering at my approach.
This was flying - how flying was meant to be and I went down to a couple of hundred feet, remembering that at that height it was possible to get maximum speed out of her. One hundred and twenty-five miles an hour. I sat back, hands steady on the stick and concentrated on getting to Landro before Hannah.
*
I almost made it, banking across the army post of Forte Franco at the mouth of the Rio das Mortes an hour and a quarter after leaving Manaus.
I was ten miles upstream, pushing her hard at two hundred feet when a thunderbolt descended. I didn't even know the Hayley was there until he dived on my tail, pulled up in a half-loop, rolled out on top in a perfect Immelmann Turn and roared, towards me head-on. I held the Bristol on course and he pulled up above my head.
'Bang, you're dead.' His voice crackled in my earphones. 'I was doing Immelmanns for real when you were still breastfeeding, kid. See you in Landro.'
He banked away across the jungle where he had told me not to go and roared into the distance. For a wild moment, I wondered if he might be challenging me to follow, but resisted the impulse. He'd lost two pilots already on the Mortes. No sense in making it three unless I had to.
I throttled back and continued up-river at a leisurely hundred miles an hour, whistling softly between my teeth.
FOUR
Landro
I came to Landro, dark clouds chasing after me, the horizon closing in - another of those sudden tropical rainstorms in the offing.
It was exactly as I had expected - a clearing in the jungle at the edge of the river. A crumbling jetty, piroques drawn up on the beach beside it, a church surrounded by a scattering of wooden houses and not much else. In other words, a typical up-river settlement.
The landing strip was at the north end of the place, a stretch of campo at least three hundred yards long by a hundred across. There was a windsock on a crude pole,