The Last Place God Made

The Last Place God Made
Jack Higgins

Ebook version of the timeless Higgins classic.In 1930's Brazil, Neil Mallory works as a courier flying mail and machine parts around the Amazonian rain forest. On a routine day his plane falls in a terrifying and potentially fatal crash; his life saved by the bravery of the enigmatic Captain Sam Hannah.In need of a partner, Hannah recruits Mallory as his right-hand-man in travelling to the deepest and darkest heart of the jungle, coming up against indigenous peoples, and a beautiful woman with secrets to hide.As Mallory and Hannah's friendship turns them into adversaries, the game is set for competitive bravery and a battle of wills as they oppose each other in one of the most hidden and remote places on Earth.

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 (#ulink_9f8e4c47-5e3c-50a7-9a56-3d4300ebfd57)

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.