Out of Captivity : Surviving 1,967 Days in the Colombian Jungle

PROLOGUEA Place to CrashKEITH“That, sir, is an engine failure.”From our pilot Tommy Janis’s tone, you wouldn’t have knownthat anything serious was wrong. He had f lown all kinds of aircraftall around the world. Tommy J. was a real larger-than-life guy withmore stories to tell than I have hairs on my head—and I’ve as full andthick a mane as anybody. His response wasn’t borderline sarcastic; itcame from a place about as deep into irony country as we were intoColombia.The “that” he was referring to wasn’t so much a thing as it wasan absence of a thing—the steady throbbing pulse of the single 675-horsepower Pratt and Whitney turboprop engine that until a few secondsbefore had been powering our Cessna Grand Caravan. It didn’ttake someone like me, a guy who’d been in avionics and aircraft main-