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Karl was a threat to Marcus’s life? I couldn’t bring myself to believe that. Karl had been fond of Marcus; he would never harm him.

‘On the morning of the sixteenth day the flight they had promised me took off at nine in the morning and landed in Trinidad, a town in the interior, an hour later. I waited there until the afternoon, when the pilot of the rescue plane informed me that the weather was horrible and he couldn’t take off. I was asked to come back the next morning.

‘I was at the air force headquarters early the next day, but the unpaved runway at the airport was still wet from the previous night’s rain. The plane still couldn’t take off through all the puddles. The pilot kept telling me there was simply no way anyone could survive seventeen days in the jungle. Especially not in this kind of weather. And especially not a gringo. He didn’t come right out and say, “Your friend is dead,” but he might as well have.

‘Once we were finally up in the air, the pilot told me that an order is an order, so he would fly over the river as he had been told to, but that there was absolutely no point to it, that it was all a dreadful waste of fuel.

‘At first we flew at a reasonable altitude over the river and followed its course, but the mountains soon forced us to go higher. From up there we couldn’t see anything but trees, and the pilot was not careful to follow the crooked path of the river. He flew a straight course over it, and I realised