The Last Place God Made

Jack Higgins
The Last Place God Made

Dedication

And this one is for my sister-in-law,

Babs Hewitt, who is absolutely certain

it’s about time…

PUBLISHER’S NOTE

The Last Place God Made was first published in the UK by William Collins Sons & Co. Ltd in 1971 and later by Signet in 1997. This amazing novel has been out of print for some years, and in 2009, it seemed to the author and his publishers that it was a pity to leave such a good story languishing on his shelves. So we are delighted to be able to bring back The Last Place God Made for the pleasure of the vast majority of us who never had a chance to read the earlier editions.

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Dedication

Publisher’s Note

Foreword

1 Ceiling Zero

2 Maria of the Angels

3 The Immelmann Turn

4 Landro

5 The Killing Ground

6 The Scarlet Flower

7 Sister of Pity

8 The Tree of Life

9 Drumbeat

10 Just One of those Things

11 Showdown

12 Hell on Earth

13 Balsero

14 Up the River of Death

15 The Last Show

16 Downriver

About the Author

Other Books by Jack Higgins

Credits

Copyright

About the Publisher

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 in 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.

1
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 over use.

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 Tefé and I managed to raise three police posts on the way on my radio although things were quiet as the grave at Tefé 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 Tefé, 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 was wholly unreliable, but the Rio Negro did lie a hundred and fifty miles due east of Tefé, that was fact, and I had the sun to guide me in a sky so crystal clear that the horizon seemed to stretch to infinity.

Falling oil pressure was the first of my woes although I didn’t worry too much about that to start with for the Oil Pressure Gauge, like most of the instruments, frequently didn’t work at all and was at best, less than reliable.

And then, unbelievably, the horizon broke into a series of jagged peaks almost before my eyes, something else about which I couldn’t really complain for on the map, that particular section was merely a blank space.

Not that they were the Andes exactly, but high enough, considering the Vega’s general condition, although the altimeter packed in at four thousand feet, so everything after that was guesswork.

The sensible way of doing things would have been to stay far enough from them to be out of harm’s way and then to gain the correct height to cross the range by flying round and round in upward spirals for as long as may be. But I didn’t have time enough for that, by which I mean fuel and simply eased back the stick and went in on the run.

I don’t suppose there was more than four or five hundred feet in it as I started across the first great shoulder that lifted in a hog’s back out of the dark green of the rain forest. Beyond, I faced a scattering of jagged peaks and not too much time for decisions.

I took a chance, aimed for the gap between the two largest and flew on over a landscape so barren that it might have been the moon. I dropped sickeningly in an air pocket, the Vega protesting with every fibre of its being and I eased back the stick again as the ground rose to meet me.

For a while it began to look as if I’d made a bad mistake for the pass through which I was flying narrowed considerably so that at one point, there seemed every chance of the wing-tips brushing the rock face. And then, quite suddenly, I lifted over a great, fissured ridge with no more than a hundred feet to spare and found myself flying across an enormous valley, mist rising to engulf me like steam from a boiling pot.

Suddenly, it was a lot colder and rain drifted across the windshield in a fine spray and then the horizon of things crackled with electricity as rain swept in from the east in a great cloud to engulf me.

Violent tropical storms of that type were one of the daily hazards of flying in the area. Frequent and usually short-lived, they could wreak an incredible amount of damage and the particular danger was the lightning associated with them. It was usually best to climb over them, but the Vega was already as high as she was going to go considering the state she was in so I really had no other choice than to hang on and hope for the best.

I didn’t think of dying, I was too involved in keeping the plane in the air to have time for anything else. The Vega was made of wood. Cantilevered wings and streamlined wooden skin fuselage, manufactured in two halves and glued together like a child’s toy and now, the toy was tearing itself to pieces.

Outside, it was almost completely dark and water cascaded in through every strained seam in the fuselage as we rocked in the turbulence. Rain streamed from the wings, lightning flickering at their tips and pieces of fuselage started to flake away.

I felt a kind of exultation more than anything else at the sheer involvement of trying to control that dying plane and actually laughed out loud at one point when a section of the roof went and water cascaded in over my head.

I came out into bright sunlight of the late afternoon and saw the river on the horizon immediately. It had to be the Negro and I pushed the Vega towards it, ignoring the stench of burning oil, the rattling of the wings.

Pieces were breaking away from the fuselage constantly now and the Vega was losing height steadily. God alone knows what was keeping the engine going. It was really quite extraordinary. Any minute now, and the damn thing might pack up altogether and a crash landing in that impenetrable rain forest below was not something I could reasonably hope to survive.

A voice crackled in my earphone. ‘Heh, Vega, your wings are flapping so much I thought you were a bird. What’s keeping you up?’

He came up from nowhere and levelled out off my port wing, a Hayley monoplane in scarlet and silver trim, no more than four or five years old from the look of it. The voice was American and with a distinctive harshness to it that gave it its own flavour in spite of the static that was trying to drown it.

‘Who are you?’

‘Neil Mallory,’ I said. ‘Iquitos for Belem by way of Manaus.’

‘Jesus.’ He laughed harshly. ‘I thought it was Lindberg they called the flying fool. Manaus is just on a hundred miles downriver from here. Can you stay afloat that long?’

Another hour at least. I checked the fuel gauge and air-speed indicator and faced the inevitable. ‘Not a chance. Speed’s falling all the time and my tank’s nearly dry.’

‘No use jumping for it in this kind of country,’ he said. ‘You’d never be seen again. Can you hold her together for another ten minutes?’

‘I can try.’

‘There’s a patch of campo ten or fifteen miles downstream. Give you a chance to land that thing if you’re good enough.’

I didn’t reply because the fuselage actually started to tear away in a great strip from the port wing and the wing, as if in pain, moved up and down more frantically than ever.

I was about a thousand feet up as we reached the Negro and turned downstream, drifting gradually and inevitably towards the ground like a falling leaf. There was sweat on my face in spite of the wind rushing in through the holes in the fuselage and my hands were cramped tight on the stick for it was taking all my strength to hold her.

‘Easy, kid, easy.’ That strange, harsh voice crackled through the static. ‘Not long now. A mile downstream on your left. I’d tell you to start losing height only you’re falling like a stone as it is.’

‘I love you too,’ I said and clamped my teeth hard together and held on as the Vega lurched violently to starboard.

The campo blossomed in the jungle a quarter of a mile in front of me, a couple of hundred yards of grassland beside the river. The wind seemed to be in the right direction although in the state the Vega was in, there wasn’t much I could have done about it if it hadn’t been. I hardly needed to throttle back to reduce airspeed for my approach – the engine had almost stopped anyway – but I got the tail trimmer adjusted and dropped the flaps as I floated in across the tree-tops.

It took all my sterngth to hold her, stamping on the rudder to pull her back in line as she veered to starboard. It almost worked. I plunged down, with a final burst of power to level out for my landing and the engine chose that precise moment to die on me.

It was like running slap into an invisible wall. The Vega seemed to hang there in the air a hundred feet above the ground for a moment, then swooped.

I left the undercarriage in the branches of the trees at the west end of the campo. In fact I think, in the final analysis, that was what saved me for the braking effect on the plane as she barged through the top of the trees was considerable. She simply flopped down on her belly on the campo and ploughed forward through the six-foot-high grass, leaving both wings behind her on the way and came to a dead halt perhaps twenty yards from the bank of the river.

I unstrapped my seat belt, kicked open the door, threw out the mail bags and followed them through, just in case. But there was no need and the fact that she hadn’t gone up like a torch on impact wasn’t luck. It was simply that there wasn’t anything left in the tanks to burn.

I sat down very carefully on one of the mail sacks. My hands were trembling slightly – not much, but enough – and my heart was pounding like a trip-hammer. The Hayley swooped low overhead. I waved without looking up, then unzipped my flying jacket and found a tin of Balkan Sobranie cigarettes, last of a carton I’d bought on the black market in Lima the previous month. I don’t think anything in life to that moment had ever tasted as good.

After a while, I stood up and turned in time to see the Hayley bank and drop in over the trees on the far side of the campo. He made it look easy and it was far from that, for the wreckage of the Vega and the position where its wings had come to rest in its wake left him very little margin for error. There couldn’t have been more than a dozen yards between the tip of his port wing and the edge of the trees.

I sat down on one of the mail sacks again, mainly because my legs suddenly felt very weak and lit another Sobranie. I could hear him ploughing towards me through the long grass, and once he called my name. God knows why I didn’t answer. Some kind of shock. I suppose. I simply sat there, the cigarette slack between my lips and stared beyond the wreck of the Vega to the river, taking in every sight and sound in minute detail as if to prove I was alive.

‘By God, you can fly, boy. I’ll say that for you.’

He emerged from the grass and stood looking at me, hands on hips in what I was to learn was an inimitable gesture. He was physically very big indeed and wore a leather top-coat, breeches, knee-length boots, a leather helmet, goggles pushed up high on the forehead and there was a .45 Colt automatic in a holster on his right thigh.

I put out my hand and when I spoke, the voice seemed to belong to someone else. ‘Mallory – Neil Mallory.’

‘You already told me that – remember?’ He grinned. ‘My name’s Hannah – Sam Hannah. Anything worth salvaging in there besides the mail?’

As I discovered later, he was forty-five years of age at that time, but he could have been older or younger if judged on appearance alone for he had one of those curiously ageless faces, tanned to almost the same colour as his leather coat.

He had the rather hard, self-possessed, competent look of a man who had been places and done things, survived against odds on occasions and yet, even from the first, there seemed a flaw in him. He made too perfect a picture standing there in his flying kit, gun on hip, like some R.F.C. pilot waiting to take off on a dawn patrol across the trenches, yet more like a man playing the part than the actuality. And the eyes were wrong – a sort of pale, washed blue that never gave anything away.

I told him about the mining machinery and he climbed inside the Vega to look for himself. He reappeared after a while holding a canvas grip.

‘This yours?’ I nodded and he threw it down. ‘Those crates are out of the question. Too heavy for the Hayley anyway. Anything else you want?’

I shook my head and then remembered. ‘Oh yes, there’s a revolver in the map compartment.’

He found it with no difficulty and pushed it across, together with a box of cartridges, a Webley .38 which I shoved away in one of the pockets of my flying jacket.

‘Then if you’re ready, we’ll get out of here.’ He picked up the three mail sacks with no visible effort. ‘The Indians in these parts are Jicaros. There were around five thousand of them till last year when some doctor acting for one of the land companies infected them with smallpox instead of vaccinating them against it. The survivors have developed the unfortunate habit of skinning alive any white man they can lay hands on.’

But such tales had long lost the power to move me for they were commonplace along the Amazon at a time when most settlers or prospectors regarded the Indians as something other than human. Vermin to be ruthlessly stamped out and any means were looked upon as fair.

I stumbled along behind Hannah who kept up a running conversation, cursing freely as great clouds of grasshoppers and insects of various kinds rose in clouds as we disturbed them.

‘What a bloody country. The last place God made. As far as I’m concerned, the Jicaros can have it and welcome.’

‘Then why stay?’ I asked him.

We had reached the Haley by then and he heaved the mail bags inside and turned, a curious glitter in his eyes. ‘Not from choice, boy, I can tell you that.’

He gave me a push up into the cabin. It wasn’t as large as the Vega. Seats for four passengers and a freight compartment behind, but everything was in apple-pie order and not just because she wasn’t all that old. This was a plane that enjoyed regular, loving care. Something I found faintly surprising because it didn’t seem to fit with Hannah.

I strapped myself in beside him and he closed the door. ‘A hundred and eighty this baby does at full stretch. You’ll be wallowing in a hot bath before you know it.’ He grinned. ‘All right, tepid, if I know my Manaus plumbing.’

Suddenly I was very tired. It was marvellous just to sit there, strapped comfortably into my seat and let someone else do the work and as I’ve said, he was good. Really good. There wasn’t going to be more than a few feet in it as far as those trees were concerned at the far end of the campo and yet I hadn’t a qualm as he turned the Hayley into the wind and opened the throttle.

He kept her going straight into that green wall, refusing to sacrifice power for height, waiting until the last possible moment, pulling the stick back into his stomach and lifting us up over the tops of the trees with ten feet to spare.

He laughed out loud and slapped the bulkhead with one hand. ‘You know what’s the most important thing in life, Mallory? Luck – and I’ve got a bucket full of the stuff. I’m going to live to be a hundred and one.’

‘Good luck to you,’ I said.

Strange, but he was like a man with drink taken. Not drunk, but unable to stop talking. For the life of me, I can’t remember what he said, for gradually my eyes closed and his voice dwindled until it was one with the engine itself and then, that too faded and there was only the quiet darkness.

2
Maria of the Angels

I had hoped to be on my way in a matter of hours, certainly no later than the following day for in spite of the fact that Manaus was passing through hard times, there was usually a boat of some description or another leaving for the coast most days.

Things started to go wrong from the beginning. To start with, there was the police in the person of the comandante himself who insisted on giving me a personal examination regarding the crash, noting my every word in his own hand which took up a remarkable amount of time.

After signing my statement I had to wait outside his office while he got Hannah’s version of the affair. They seemed to be old and close friends from the laughter echoing faintly through the closed door and when they finally emerged, Hannah had an arm round the comandante’s shoulder.

‘Ah, Senhor Mallory.’ The comandante nodded graciously. ‘I have spoken to Captain Hannah on this matter and am happy to say that he confirms your story in every detail. You are free to go.’

Which was nice of him. He went back into his office and Hannah said, ‘That’s all right, then.’ He frowned as if concerned and put a hand on my shoulder. ‘I’ve got things to do, but you look like the dead walking. Grab a cab downstairs and get the driver to take you to the Palace Hotel. Ask for Senhor Juca. Tell him I sent you. Five or six hours’ sleep and you’ll be fine. I’ll catch up with you this evening. We’ll have something to eat. Hit the high spots together.’

‘In Manaus?’ I said.

‘They still have their fair share of sin if you know where to look.’ He grinned crookedly. ‘I’ll see you later.’

He returned to the comandante’s office, opening the door without knocking and I went downstairs and out through the cracked marble pillars at the entrance.

I didn’t go to the hotel straight away. Instead, I took one of the horse-drawn cabs that waited at the bottom of the steps and gave the driver the address of the local agent of the mining company for whom I’d contracted to deliver the Vega to Belem.

In its day during the great rubber boom at the end of the nineteeth century, Manaus had been the original hell-hole, millionaires walking the streets ten-a-penny, baroque palaces, an opera house to rival Paris itself. No sin too great, no wickedness too evil. Sodom and Gomorrah rolled into one and set down on the banks of the Negro, a thousand miles up the Amazon.

I had never cared much for the place. There was a suggestion of corruption, a kind of general decay. A feeling that the jungle was gradually creeping back in and that none of us had any right to be there.

I felt restless and ill-at-ease, reaction to stress, I suppose, and wanted nothing so much as to be on my way, looking back on this place over the sternrail of a riverboat for the last time.

I found the agent in the office of a substantial warehouse on the waterfront. He was tall, cadaverous, with the haunted eyes of a man who knows he has not got long to live and he coughed repeatedly into a large, soiled handkerchief which was already stained with blood.

He gave thanks to Our Lady for my deliverance to the extent of crossing himself and in the same breath pointed out that under the terms of my contract, I only got paid on safe delivery of the Vega to Belem. Which was exactly what I had expected and I left him in a state of near collapse across his desk doing his level best to bring up what was left of his lungs and went outside.

My cab still waited for me, the driver dozing in the heat of the day, his straw sombrero tilted over his eyes. I walked across to the edge of the wharf to see what was going on in the basin which wasn’t much, but there was a stern-wheeler up at the next wharf loading green bananas.

I found the captain in a canvas chair under an awning on the bridge and he surfaced for as long as it took to tell me he was leaving at nine the following morning for Belem and that the trip would take six days. If I didn’t fancy a hammock on deck with his more impoverished customers, I could have the spare bunk in the mate’s cabin with all found for a hundred cruzeiros. I assured him I would be there on time and he closed his eyes with complete indifference and returned to more important matters.

I had just over a thousand cruzeiros in my wallet, around a hundred and fifty pounds sterling at that time which meant that even allowing for the trip down-river and incidental expenses, I would have ample in hand to buy myself a passage to England from Belem on some cargo boat or other.

I was going home. After two and a half years of the worst that South America could offer, I was on my way and it felt marvellous. Definitely one of life’s great moments and all tiredness left me as I turned and hurried back to the cab.

I had expected the worst of the hotel but the Palace was a pleasant surprise. Certainly it had seen better days, but it had a kind of baroque dignity to it, a faded charm that was very appealing, and Hannah’s name had a magic effect on the Senhor Juca he had mentioned, an old, white-haired man in an alpaca jacket who sat behind the desk reading a newspaper.

He took me upstairs personally and ushered me into a room with its own little ironwork terrace overlooking the river. The whole place was a superb example of late Victoriana, caught for all time like a fly in amber from the brass bed to the heavy, mahogany furniture.

An Indian woman in a black bombazine dress appeared with clean sheets and the old man showed me, with some pride, the bathroom next door of which I could have sole use, although regrettably it would be necessary to ring for hot water. I thanked him for his courtesy, but he waved his hands deprecatingly and assured me, with some eloquence, that nothing was too much trouble for a friend of Captain Hannah’s.

I thought about that as I undressed. Whatever else you could say about him, Hannah obviously enjoyed considerable standing in Manaus which was interesting, considering he was a foreigner.

I needed that bath badly, but suddenly, sitting there on the edge of the bed after getting my boots off, I was overwhelmed with tiredness. I climbed between the sheets and was almost instantly asleep.

I surfaced to the mosquito net billowing above me like a pale, white flower in the breeze from the open window and beyond, a face floated disembodied in the diffused yellow glow of an oil lamp.

Old Juca blinked sad, moist eyes. ‘Captain Hannah was here earlier, senhor. He asked me to wake you at nine o’clock.’

It took its own time in getting through to me. ‘Nine o’clock?’

‘He asks you to meet him, senhor, at The Little Boat. He wishes you to dine with him. I have a cab waiting to take you there, senhor. Everything is arranged.’

‘That’s nice of him,’ I said, but any iron in my voice was obviously lost on him.

‘Your bath is waiting, senhor. Hot water is provided.’

He put the lamp down carefully on the table, the door closed with a gentle sigh behind him, the mosquito net fluttered in the eddy like some great moth, then settled again.

Hannah certainly took a lot for granted. I got up, feeling vaguely irritated at the way things were being managed for me and padded across to the open window. Quite suddenly, my whole mood changed for it was pleasantly cool after the heat of the day, the breeze perfumed with flowers. Lights glowed down there on the river and music echoed faintly, the freedom from the sound of it, pulsating through the night, filling me with a vague, irrational excitement.

When I turned back to the room I made another discovery. My canvas grip had been unpacked and my old linen suit had been washed and pressed and hung neatly from the back of a chair waiting for me. There was really nothing I could do, the pressures were too great, so I gave in gracefully, found a towel and went along the corridor to have my bath.

Although the main rainy season was over, rainfall always tends to be heavy in the upper Amazon basin area and sudden, violent downpours are common, especially at night.

I left the hotel to just such a rush of rain and hurried down the steps to the cab which was waiting for me, escorted by Juca who insisted on holding an ancient black umbrella over my head. The driver had raised the leather hood which kept out most of the rain if not all and drove away at once.

The streets were deserted, washed clean of people by the rain and from the moment we left the hotel until we reached our destination, I don’t think we saw more than half a dozen people, particularly when we moved through the back streets towards the river.

We emerged on the waterfront at a place where there were a considerable number of houseboats of various kinds for a great many people actually lived on the river this way. We finally came to a halt at the end of a long pier.

‘This way, senhor.’

The cabby insisted on placing his old oilskin coat about my shoulders and escorted me to the end of the pier where a lantern hung from a pole above a rack festooned with fishing nets.

An old riverboat was moored out there in the darkness, lights gleaming, laughter and music drifting across the water. He leaned down and lifted a large, wooden trapdoor and the light from the lamp flooded in to reveal a flight of wooden steps. He went down and I followed without hesitation. I had, after all, no reason to expect foul play and in any event, the Webley .38 which I’d had the forethought to slip into my right-hand coat pocket was as good an insurance as any.

A kind of boardwalk stretched out through the darkness towards the riverboat, constructed over a series of canoes and it dipped alarmingly as we moved across.

When we reached the other end the cabby smiled and slapped the hull with the flat of his palm. ‘The Little Boat, senhor. Good appetite in all things but in food and women most of all.’

It was a Brazilian saying and well intended. I reached for my wallet and he raised a hand. ‘It is not necessary, senhor. The good captain has seen to it all.’

Hannah again. I watched him negotiate the swaying catwalk successfully as far as the pier then turned and went up some iron steps which took me to the deck. A giant of a man moved from the shadows beside a lighted doorway, a Negro with a ring in one ear and a heavy, curly beard.

‘Senhor?’ he said.

‘I’m looking for Captain Hannah,’ I told him. ‘He’s expecting me.’

The teeth gleamed in the darkness. Another friend of Hannah’s. This was really beginning to get monotonous. He didn’t say anything, simply opened the door for me and I passed inside.

I suppose it must have been the main saloon in the old days. Now it was crowded with tables, people crammed together like sardines. There was a permanent curtain of smoke that, allied to the subdued lighting, made visibility a problem, but I managed to detect a bar in one corner on the other side of the small, packed dance floor. A five-piece rumba band was banging out a carioca and most of the crowd seemed to be singing along with it.