• • • • •
She silently slipped through the darkening jungle on a path that was nothing more than a small ridge on the side of a green canopy covered mountainside; innocently oblivious to the steep drop off only inches away from her tiny body; confident in herself like a cat moving on two legs.
The little dark-haired girl was only six, but she wasn’t afraid of the jungle or the mountains.
And as far as she was concerned, these mountains, which belonged to her older cousin, were nothing compared to the mountains where she came from. The jungle where she lived held temples and Mayan pyramids that had never been explored by modern archaeologists. But she and her friends had explored them. They’d found as many as they could, and for the past year, they had been climbing all over and sometimes inside of them. But then her family had to take this trip to visit her cousin in Guatemala. And that’s how she ended up here; running around in the jungle pretending to chase her cousin, who she didn’t really like all that much.
The little dark-haired girl had been here for over a week exploring the mountainous jungle near her cousin’s village and hadn’t found anything of interest other than trees, rocks, and snakes. Today, she and her cousin decided to play hide-and-seek on the other side of the valley ridge. They had been playing since lunch, but then the sun started getting low in the sky making long dark patches in the jungle where she had been looking for him. The side of the mountain wasn’t as steep in this area as it had been in the places they were playing this morning. But she still had to be careful as she climbed up through the rocks and debris of the heavily jungled slopes.
The little black-haired girl knew one thing. The most enjoyable absolute wonderful time she had ever experienced in her six whole years on this planet was spent in the jungle. Nothing made her happier than looking to see if anything or anyone from the ancient past of her people had left behind something she could find and explore. This internal drive to uncover things that had been long lost would only grow as she matured. Someday, it would become the major quest in her life. And she would become world renowned in her field.
But she didn’t know that right now.
All she knew was that she was tired of pretending to look for her cousin. So she climbed as quickly as she could to the top of the first ridge and then headed back down into the deep part of the jungle, to start back to the village, where her cousin already was.
She had gotten pretty good at walking quietly through the jungle. It was easy for a six-year-old girl to do, because she didn’t have much mass and body weight. The problem with walking quietly through the jungle was that you tended to walk up on things that were not expecting you to be there. On more than one occasion, she had walked up on something that was not expecting to find a six-year-old girl walking up behind it. One time, she even walked up behind a jaguar. She froze in her steps when she looked up and saw the big cat, which was as tall as she was. It turned around and stared at her eye to eye, but neither of them moved or flinched. Then, according to the little girl, the jaguar smiled at her. Then he leapt into the deep jungle beside the trail and disappeared.
Many experiences like the one with the jaguar had already shaped the life of this little girl. And so many more experiences, after the one she was about to have, would determine the type of person she became.
Up ahead of her, in the quickly darkening jungle, was the next life-experience which would affect the rest of her days.
• • •
The young brown-haired Lieutenant looked back over his team and silently gave hand signals to them. He knew the bad guys he had been following for over a week were somewhere in these mountain ranges. He had personally chased them out of Panama, and he knew where they were going. The bad guys had only one thing to do. That was to get rid of the drug shipment they were hauling through the jungles of Central America into Mexico bound for the United States. He also knew the person leading that drug smuggling team was the number two most-wanted on his list of personal assassination targets. When Special Forces Command found out the number two man under Pablo Escobar was leading this shipment himself out of Panama, they brought in the Lieutenant and his team to do what they did best; hunt down bad guys and kill them.
In the six years it had been since the Lieutenant joined the Army as a lowly seventeen-year-old buck Private, he had rapidly moved up the ranks of advancement. First, he aced Bootcamp and was sent to Officer Candidate School immediately after. As a newly minted Second Lieutenant, he volunteered for Airborne training followed by Air Assault training. But before he could volunteer for more training, came the conflict in Grenada; where he promptly earned a Bronze Star. What caused this remains Classified. But it got him the attention of the Green Berets. And then his personal drive and physical prowess allowed him to move up into the ranks of the U.S. Special Forces. Now a member of the most secret elite military unit in existence, the young Lieutenant will have a remarkable career ahead of him.
If he can manage to stay alive.
His team had already come under sporadic but consistent attack since Panama. Apparently, the drug smugglers had soldiers posted in villages all along the route they were using from Panama to Mexico. Everywhere the Americans went, they were considered the enemy. In almost every place they went, they were fired upon. In almost every place they went, they were not allowed to fire back.
It was those sort of stupid orders that were beginning to piss-off the brown-haired young Lieutenant.
But he was a soldier, and he followed his orders.
He and his team were getting ready to hike down from the top of the ridge heading for the last known location of the smugglers, when he heard something coming around a small trail that was running parallel in the brush just below his team. It was moving very quietly; so quietly that his trained ears barely detected it. He stopped his team instantly with his arm and made them crouch back down out of sight. Then he gave orders through hand signals that no one should move. The point man was farther ahead on the side of the ridge, and the sound was coming up from behind the team on the trail below. So the Lieutenant had no way of knowing what was there. The soldiers bringing up the rear were higher on the ridge, and the jungle brush was too thick to see what was walking up the trail. Everyone just had to squat and wait.
The brown-haired Lieutenant was a little bit nervous. It had only been an hour since they had taken fire from what appeared to be a friendly village. They did not return fire as they escaped into the jungle and ran to the other side of the ridge to where they were now. He had just gotten his bearings on where they should go next when the sound approached them from the rear of his team. Everyone on the team now had their rifles aimed directly at the blackening path on the jungle mountainside. The brown-haired Lieutenant had told his men earlier they were free to shoot. But only if they knew for a fact it was an enemy they were firing at.
He also told them that under no other circumstances could they pull that trigger.
Suddenly, everyone in the team saw what was making the noise. A small dark-haired girl was walking down the dark path in the fading jungle light. She was remarkably quiet; almost moving stealthily. But she was looking down and not paying attention to where she was going. The young brown-haired Lieutenant instantly ordered his team to drop their weapons without saying a word; although he never took his eyes off the little girl on the path.
The team was sitting in the side of the jungle, farther above the small ridge where the trail passed by. The Lieutenant was closest to the trail, and he could clearly see her in the twilight as she approached with her head down. The girl was about to walk past the brown-haired Lieutenant, when suddenly, he jumped out of the bushes. He landed about seven feet in front of the girl in a squatting position just about eye-level with her. The girl stopped, and her eyes were wide with fear, but she did not move. The brown-haired soldier slowly reached up with his finger and placed it across his lips. But he never made the ‘shhhhhh’ sound. He hoped this was a universal sign for, “
be quiet.”
It worked because the frightened girl never made a whisper. She stood perfectly still staring at the face of the brown-haired Lieutenant with wide-open dark eyes. Slowly, the brown-haired Lieutenant picked up his camouflaged carbine and aimed it at the girl’s head. As the Lieutenant squeezed gently on the trigger, the laser sighting beam came on, and a bright red dot popped right in the middle of her forehead. The girl still didn’t move. She kept staring at the brown-haired young Lieutenant as he slowly stood up just inches above her head and fired one shot.
The shot whizzed noiselessly out of the silencer, just millimeters above her beautiful black hair, and landed twenty meters back directly between the eyes of the drug soldier who was holding an active grenade in his hands. He was just about to throw the grenade over the ridge onto the Lieutenant’s team. The grenade fell from the dead man’s hand and hit the ground before he did. With his brain scrambled to mush from the high-velocity rifle bullet, the smuggler’s body collapsed in a heap beside the grenade. The twitching dead body of the drug soldier had only seconds remaining before the shrapnel grenade exploded.
The young brown-haired Lieutenant jumped forward in one giant leap and scooped up the tiny girl in his massive arms. Then planting his foot and pouncing into the air, he leapt into the side of the jungle with the girl wrapped under his body just as the concussion from the explosion slammed through the air over his back. The shrapnel from the grenade spread out in a blinding white sphere piercing everything around it in the jungle canopy. Shards of metal landed just inches above the team and the young brown-haired Lieutenant where he covered the young shivering black-haired girl with his muscular body. As soon as the explosion was finished, his team reacted immediately jumping down on the side of the ridge and running back into the area. A short muzzle-suppressed firefight ensued.
And then silence.
During these few moments of time, the brown-haired Lieutenant never moved from covering the girl with his body. As soon as he heard the almost silent firefight die out, he lifted himself up and looked at the tiny child. He roughly grabbed her face and turned it side to side and then checked her arms and legs to see that she was okay. Then he picked her up and jumped back down onto the ridge-side trail.
When he squatted down in front of her, he looked at her in the eyes. Then he put his fingers across his lips, again.
“Shhhhhh.”
He said it slowly and quietly. Then he smiled at her as he reached into his pocket and pulled out a small piece of chocolate. He peeled back the foil on the chunky bar of sweet cocoa and made the gesture for eating. Then he winked at her and placed it in her tiny hand.
He held her hand for just a second after he closed her palm over the almost gooey chocolate. He looked deep into her eyes, and she returned the gaze. He wanted to see if she was old enough to really know what just happened. She didn’t see anything other than him, and he probably scared the hell out of her. He wanted to try and make up for that. But as he looked at her looking back at him, something happened. The little girl with the black hair felt it, too. They both smiled for an authentic affectionate moment. Then, the young brown-haired Lieutenant turned her around on the path the way she had been heading. He pointed with his arm then patted her on her butt as he pushed her down the now moonlit trail.
The little black-haired girl took one look back, never knowing at that moment she had just met the man who would be responsible for her destiny.
She took off running down the trail clutching the piece of cherished chocolate, and she never looked back, again. She never stopped running, either. She didn’t stop at the bottom of the jungle mountain. She didn’t stop when she crossed the stream and ran into the village. She didn’t stop until she got inside her uncle’s house. Then she ran up to her father and threw her little six-year-old arms around his neck.
Her father would never know why he was the lucky recipient of this sudden but welcome outburst of emotion from his precocious and gifted young daughter. But he hugged her back, anyway.
• • •
The young brown-haired Lieutenant watched as the little black-haired girl ran into the darkness of the moonlit night. After he was sure she was not going to stop and come back, he returned up the trail to his men who were securing a perimeter.
The young brown-haired Lieutenant silently gathered his team and counted the victims. The drug soldier who tried to toss the grenade was blown up well past halfway on his body. He had fallen right beside the live grenade. His body absorbed much of the side-shrapnel and had actually saved three members of the young brown-haired Lieutenant’s team from receiving minor wounds. The grenade blew the left side of the unlucky smuggler off. Only his right arm and leg, half of his torso, and a flap of skin which held his right ear remained. They took fingerprints of the right thumb and index finger of the headless and one-sided grenadier. They took fingerprints and used a dark-green ruggedized camera to take headshot photos of the other members in the unsuccessful ambush attack.
The Lieutenant discovered the man he was after wasn’t there.
They tossed the bodies down the side of the mountain into the jungle brush below the ridge-line path. They would feed lots of things with their decomposing bodies. The bodies of the drug soldiers would never be found; only bones here and there.
The young brown-haired Lieutenant pulled his men together and prepared to move out. After what just happened with the little girl and the attempted ambush, he was more resolved now than ever before. He was going to find who he was hunting and complete his mission. He always found who he was hunting. He always completed his mission.
He would make Captain in less than a year. No one would ever know why that happened, either.
The young Lieutenant also never knew that he just met the person who would someday help him fulfill his destiny. She would also watch him die.
Although neither one knew it at the time, twenty-three years later, they would come together again.
And when they did, it would be to rescue the God in the Clear Rock.