Jack Higgins - Last Place God Made

by Last Place God Made [lit]

  "What about reinforcements?"

  "There aren't any. They're having trouble with the Civa along the Xingu again and the Jicaro are making things more than difficult along their stretch of the Negro. My orders are to come to some sort of terms with the Huna, then to abandon Santa Helena. I've just sent the mission launch down to Landro with everything on board worth saving."

  "And why am I here?"

  "I want you to fly to this Huna village with Hannah. Drop in a couple of sackfuls of trade goods of various kinds, as a gesture of goodwill. Then I'll send in this man who's been living with them to try and arrange a meeting for me."

  He reached for a clean glass as the sergeant started to ban-dage his leg, half-filled it with brandy and passed it across to me. I didn't really want it, but took it out of politeness.

  He said, "I've been making inquiries about you, Mallory. You were friendly with that madman Buber when you were on the Xingu. Probably know more about Indians than I do. What kind of chance do you think my plan has of working?"

  "Not a hope," I said. "If you want the truth, that is."

  "I agree entirely." He toasted me then emptied his glass. "But at least I'll have made the kind of positive step to do something that even Headquarters won't be able to quarrel with."

  I tried the brandy which tasted as if someone had made it in the bath. I placed the glass down carefully. "I'll be off then. Pre-sumably Hannah is straining at the leash."

  "He isn't too pleased, I can tell you that" Alberto reached across and picked up my glass. "Safe journey."

  I left him there and went out into bright sunlight again. The heat was terrific, dust rising from the dry earth with each step, and the jungle was already beginning to creep in at the back of the hospital, lianas trailing in across the roof from the trees. It didn't take long. People came and went, but the forest endured, covering the scars they left as if they had never existed.

  The dinghy was waiting and had me back across at the land-ing strip in a quarter of an hour. I found Hannah lying in the shade of the Hayley's port wing, studying a map. He was as bad-tempered and morose as ever.

  "Well, what do you think?" he demanded impatiently. "A waste of time."

  "Exactly what I told him, but he will have it" He got to his feet. "Have a look at that. I've marked a course although the bloody place probably won't exist when we get there."

  "You want me to fly her?"

  "That's what I pay you for, isn't it?"

  He turned and climbed up into the cabin. Strange, in view of what happened afterwards, but I think it was at that precise moment in time that I started to actively dislike him.

  I flew at a thousand feet and conditions were excellent, the sun so bright that I had to wear dark glasses. Hannah was directly behind me in the front passenger seat beside the rear door. He didn't say a word, simply sat there scanning the jungle below with a pair of binoculars.

  Not that it was really necessary. No more than fifteen minutes after leaving the airstrip we passed over a large clearing and I went down to five hundred and circled it a couple of times.

  "Wild banana plantation," Hannah said "We're dead on course. Must be."

  Most forest Indians engaged in a crude form of husbandry when clearings such as the one below allowed it and it was an infallible sign that we were close to a large village.

  I flew on, staying at five hundred feet and almost immedi-ately felt Hannah's hand on my shoulder. "We're here."

  The clearing seemed to flower out of the jungle beneath my port wing. It was larger than I had expected, fifty yards in diameter at least, the thatched long huts arranged in a neat circle around a central space with some sort of tribal totem in the centre.

  There must have been two hundred people down there, per-haps three, scurrying from the huts like brown ants, faces turned up as I went in across the clearing at three hundred feet. No one ran for the forest for they were familiar enough with aeroplanes, I suppose, to realise we couldn't land. Many of the warriors actually loosed off arrows at us.

  "Stupid bastards. Would you look at that now?" Hannah laughed harshly. "Okay, kid, let's get it over with. Take her in at a hundred feet, slow as you like."

  I banked to starboard, throttled back and went down across the trees. Hannah had the door open, I was aware of the wind and then the village was directly in front, faces upturned, arrows arching up towards us impotently.

  I eased back the stick to climb, glancing over my shoulder in time to see a ball of fire explode in the centre of the crowd closely followed by another.

  I saw worse things in the war that was to come, far worse, and yet it haunts me still.

  I should have known, I suppose, expected it at least, yet it's easy to be wise after the event He was laughing like a mad-man as I took the Hayley round again and went in through the smoke.

  There were bodies everywhere, dozens of them, a large cen-tral crater and the thatched roofs of several of the long-huts had caught fire.

  I glanced over my shoulder. Hannah was leaning out of the open door and laughed out loud again. "How do you like that, you bastards?" he yelled.

  I struck out wildly at him backwards with one hand. The Hayley lurched to one side, faltered, then the nose went down. We grabbed at the stick together, pulling her out with no more than three hundred feet in it and it took the two of us to do it

  I levelled off and started to climb. He took his hands off mine and dropped back into his seat. Neither of us said a word and as I turned back across the clearing for the flames blossomed into a scarlet flower in the clear air.

  I was numb, I suppose, from the horror of it all for the next coherent thing I remember is coming in to land at the airstrip at Santa Helena. I wasn't aware of anything very much except the Bristol at the south end. I went in that way which gave me the whole of the strip to play with and rolled to a halt about forty yards from the trees.

  I sat there in the silence after cutting the engine, my hands shaking, mouth dry, teeth clenched together in a kind of rictus, aware that Hannah had opened the rear door and had got out. When I opened mine, he was standing below lighting a cigarette in cupped hands.

  He looked up and grinned, "It's always rough the first time, kid."

  The grin was a mistake. I jumped straight at him and put my fist into it at the same time. We milled around there on the floor for a while, my hands at his throat and in spite of his enor-mous strength, I didn't do too badly, mainly because surprise was on my side. I was aware of voices shouting, men running and then several different hands grabbed me at once and dragged me off him.

  They clammed me hard up against the side of the Hayley, a sergeant holding the barrel of a revolver under my chin and then Colonel Alberto arrived. He waved the man with the re-volver away and looked me straight in the eye.

  "It would pain me to have to arrest you, Senhor Mallory, but I will do so if necessary. You will please remember that military law only applies in this area. I am in sole command."

  "God damn you!" I said. 'Don't you realise what this swine's just done? He's killed at least fifty people and I helped him do it."

  Alberto turned to Hannah and produced a cigarette case from his tunic pocket which he offered to him. "It worked then?"

  "Like a charm," Hannah told him, and took a cigarette.

  Alberto actually offered me one. I took it mechanically. "You know?"

  "I was in a difficult situation, Senhor Mallory. I needed both of you to do the thing successfully and it did not seem likely, in view of the sentiments you expressed at our last meeting, that you would give your services willingly."

  "You've made me an accessory to murder."

  He shook his head and answered gravely, "A military opera-tion from start to finish and fully authorised by my superiors."

  "You lied to me,' I said. 'About wanting to talk with the Huna."

  "Not at all. Only now, having shown that we mean business, that we can Mt them hard when we want to, I can talk from a position of strength.
You and Captain Hannah may very well prove to have been instrumental in bringing an end to this whole sorry business."

  "By butchering poor, bloody savages with high explosives dropped from the air."

  They stood around me in a semi-circle, the soldiers, few of them understanding for we spoke in English.

  Hannah was quieter now, his face white and strained. "For God's sake, Mallory, what about the nuns? Look what they did to Father Conte. They ate his heart, Mallory. They cut out his heart and ate it."

  My voice seemed to come from outside me and I was some-one else inside my head, listening to me talking. I said patiently, genuinely wanting him to understand, or so it seemed to me, "And what good does it do to act just as barbarically in return?"

  It was Alberto who answered. "You have a strange morality, Senhor Mallory. For the Huna to rape and butcher the nuns, to roast men over a fire is acceptable. For my men to die in am-bush out there hi the forest is all part of some game for which you apparently can accept rules."

  "Now you're twisting it. Making it something else."

  "I don't think so. You would allow us to shoot them in a skirmish in the bush, but to kill them with dynamite from the air is different...."

  I couldn't think of anything to say for by then, reaction had set in and I was hopelessly confused.

  "A bullet in the belly, an arrow in the back, a stick of dyna-mite from the air." He shook his head. "There are no rules, Senhor Mallory. This is a dirty business. War has always been thus and this is war, believe me...."

  I turned and walked away from them towards the Bristol. When I reached it, I leaned on the lower port wing for a while, then I took my flying helmet and goggles from one pocket of my leather jacket and put them on.

  When I turned, I found Hannah standing watching me. I said, "I'm getting out as soon as I get back. You can find some-one else."

  He said tonelessly, "We've got a contract, kid, with your sig-nature on the bottom under mine and legally enforceable."

  I didn't say anything, simply climbed in and went through the fifteen checks, then I wound the starting magneto. Hannah pulled the propeller over, the engine clattered into life and I started to move forward so quickly that he had to duck under the lower port wing.

  His face was very white, I remember that and his mouth opening and closing as he shouted to me, but his words were drowned by the roar of the Falcon engine and I didn't wait to hear, didn't care if I never clapped eyes on him again.

  I was not really aware of having been asleep, only of being shaken roughly awake. I lay there staring up through the mosquito net at the pressure lamp on its hook in the ceiling, moths clustering thickly around it. The hand shook me again, I turned and found Mannie at my side.

  "What time is it?" I asked him.

  "Just after midnight." He was wearing his yellow oilskin coat and sou'wester and they ran with moisture. "You'll have to help me with Sam, Neil."

  It took a moment for it to sink in. I said, "You've got to be joking," and turned over.

  He had me half-up by the front of the cotton shirt I was wearing with a grip of surprising strength. "When I left he was just finishing his second bottle of brandy and calling for number three. He'll kill himself unless we help him."

  "And you really expect me to give a damn after what he did to me today?"

  "Now that's interesting. You said what he did to you, not what he did to those poor bloody savages out there in the bush. Which is most important?"

  It almost made my hair stand up on my head in horror at what he was suggesting. I said, "For God's sake, Mannie."

  "All right, you want him to die, then?"

  I got out of bed and started to dress. I'd gone through the whole sorry story with Mannie as soon as I'd got back. Had to get it off my chest before I went mad. What I was looking for, I think, was the reassurance which would come from finding someone else who was just as horrified as I was myself.

  His attitude hadn't been entirely satisfactory and he'd seemed to see rather more in Colonel Alberto's argument than I was prepared to accept myself. The strange thing was that he seemed worried about Hannah who had avoided me completely since he'd flown in.

  I'd washed my hands of both of them, had helped myself to far more of Hannah's Scotch than was good for me and my head ached from it all as I went up the main street through the rain at Mannie's side.

  I could hear music from the hotel as we approached and light filtered out through the shutters in golden bars. There was the sound of a glass breaking and someone called out.

  We paused on the veranda and I said, "If he decides to go berserk, he could probably break the two of us in his bare hands. I hope you realise that."

  "You're the devil himself for looking on the black side of things." He smiled and put a hand on my arm for a moment. "Now let's have him out of here while there's still hope."

  There were two or three people at the far end of the room, Figueiredo behind the bar and Hannah propped up against it in front of him. An old phonograph was playingValse Triste, Figueiredo's wife standing beside it.

  "More, more!" Hannah shouted, pounding on the bar with the flat of his hand as the music started to run down.

  She wound the handle vigorously and Hannah reached for the half-empty bottle of brandy and tried to fill the tumbler at his elbow, sending a couple of dirty glasses crashing to the floor at the same moment.

  He failed to notice our approach until Mannie reached over and firmly took the bottle from his hand. "Enough is enough, Sam. Now I think we go home."

  "Good old Mannie." Hannah patted him on the cheek then turned to empty his glass and saw me. God, he was drunk, his face swollen with the stuff, the hands shaking and the look in his eyes....

  He took me by the front of the coat and said wildly, "You think I wanted to do that back there? You think it was easy?"

  The man was in hell or so it seemed to me then. Certainly enough to make me feel sorry for him. I pulled free and said gently, "Let's get you to bed then, Sam."

  Behind me the door opened, there was a burst of careless laughter, then silence. Hannah's eyes widened and hot rage flared. He brushed me aside and plunged forward and I turned in time to see him give Avila his fist full in the mouth.

  "I'll teach you, you bastard," he yelled and pushed Avila back across a table with one hand while he pounded away at him with the other.

  Avila's friends were already running into darkness which left Mannie and me. God knows, it took everything we had for I think it was himself Hannah was trying to beat to death there across the table and his strength was incredible.

  As we got him out through the door, he turned and grabbed at me again. "You won't leave me, kid, will you? We've got a contract. You gave me your word. It means everything - every-thing I've got in the world."

  I didn't need the look on Mannie's face, but it helped. I said soothingly, "How can I leave, Sam? I've got the mail run to Manaus at nine a.m."

  He broke down completely at that, great sobs racking his body as we took him down the steps between us into the rain and started home.

  SEVEN

  Sister of Pity

  I didn't see anything of Hannah on the following morning. When I took off for Manaus at nine, he was still dead to the world and Mondays were usually busy so I didn't have time to hang around.

  There was not only the mail but a parcel of diamonds from Figueiredo in the usual sealed canvas bag to be handed over to the government agent in Manaus. After that, I had two con-tract runs down-river for mining companies delivering mail and various bits and pieces.

  It added up to a pretty full day and I arrived back at Manaus in the early evening with the intention of spending the night at the Palace and the prospect of a hot bath, a change of clothes, a decent meal, perhaps even a visit toThe Little Boat, was more than attractive.

  There wasn't much activity at the airstrip when I landed al-though on some days, you could find two or three planes parked by the hangars, in from down-river or
the coast There were still a couple of mechanics on duty and they helped me get the Bristol under cover for the night, then one of them gave me a lift into town in the company truck, an ancient Crossley tender.

  When I entered the hotel, there was no sign of Juca behind the desk. In fact there was no one around at all so I went through the door on the left into the bar.

  There seemed to be no one there either except for a rather romantic, or disreputable-looking figure, depending on your point of view, who stared at me from the full-length mirror at the other end.