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The rainforest canopy of the Annamite Mountains of Southeast Laos reached as high as one-hundred feet above the ground. As Ethan's machete chopped at the lianas; green ferns; red leaves of poinsettias; pink, white and purple rhododendrons, and exotic flowers and evergreen plants he'd never seen before, Ortega's leering face haunted him.
Ortega was a threat to the woman he loved, and Ethan briefly imagined splitting the man's skull with his machete. Knowing such distractions could get him and the others on the six-man team injured or killed, he forced his attention back to the mission.
He stepped over a slender, fallen tree, its trunk crumbling from rot and termites. All but one recon Marine in front of him was out of sight in the steep, lush rainforest terrain. His father had enjoyed taking him and his siblings hiking in the forests northwest of Chicago, but never in anything like this where there were few, if any, trails.
The humidity was a thick, smothering blanket, and Ethan's jungle fatigues were drenched with sweat and rain. Chicago received less than half the annual rainfall that fell here.
He wondered if the downed Navy pilot they were looking for still lived. Pilots from Nakhon Air Force Base inside Thailand had given the rescue their best effort, and one of their Douglas Skyraider pilots had been shot down and killed before they gave up.
Recon teams disappeared on missions like this never to be heard from again. Ethan remembered a team where one man had appeared after going missing for weeks. The expression carved into the man's face said he had been to hell and back.
Shaking a drop of sweat from his nose, Ethan swung his machete at a thick, stubborn liana. A thousand welcome sounds from animals, birds, and insects surrounded him and told him they were probably alone—silence was not a good sign. But in the rainforest, the enemy could be anywhere.
A bright red butterfly with yellow spotted wings fluttered around his head, while wiggling green leeches reached from the wide leaves of plants demanding blood.
Ethan moved like a phantom through the gloomy twilight of the rainforest with its thick odors of moist decay. Water squirted from the spongy masses of soft, green moss when he put his weight on them. Ortega's threats intruded again, and he almost missed the hand signal from the Marine in front of him.
When he saw it, he dropped to one knee. There was no one to signal behind him. It bothered him that he was allowing that CIA bastard to get to him like this.
In the upper canopy of the rainforest, the harsh, loud cry of a bird sounded.
A noise of a different sort caught his attention, and Ethan's hands tightened on his submachine gun as he twisted his head to take in the rainforest around him.
Then he saw the monkey sailing effortlessly from tree to tree, its brown face framed with white fur.
He watched it paused to slip a hand into a hole in the side of a tree then cram something into its mouth. It stopped chewing when it saw Ethan. With a flick of its tail, it leaped to a higher branch disappearing in a blur of movement toward the sky.
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§ “Running with the Enemy” was awarded an Honorable Mention in General Fiction at the 2103 San Francisco Book Festival
§ Discover a new world of Publishing–-the 2013 San Francisco Book Festival Event held on May 18.
