A Warrior's Return (5 page)

I paused for a moment and then said, “Here I
am today a whore.”

After a moment I looked up curious to see
what he thought of my story and I gasped slightly. In the dim light
of the window I saw a brighter reflection of a shiny streak of
moisture coming down his cheek.

No one had ever cried for me before. I knew
in that moment that I loved this man, who was still virtually a
stranger to me. He stood up pulling me up along with him. He held
me. He didn’t say anything he just held me and that said over a
thousand words by just doing that.

He drew back eventually, “We need to get you
to bed. Its been a long day.”

I let him push me to my bed, but I stopped
and turned around and slowly stepped toward him. His hand flat
against my upper chest stopped me.

“You’re emotional and you’ve been through a
lot today.” He said softly.

“I want to repay you for everything you’ve
done for us, but the only thing I have to give is my body. Won’t
you let me at least please you? I want to!” I said imploringly.

“Evangelina everything I’ve given you or
done for you was a gift and does not need to be repaid.”

There was a pause and I pressed harder
against his hand, but he didn’t budge.

Sounding stressed he said, “I very much want
what you’re offering, but not like this. Good night
Evangelina.”

Clark turned and left the room shutting the
door. He went to the countertop and gripped its edge regretting and
proud of his decision all at the same time.

Meanwhile a little boy closed his eyes after
having seen words put into actions. For the first time in his life
he’d found a man worth emulating in every way.

I sat eating breakfast trying not to make
eye contact with Clark. My emotions of the previous evening, my
offer, and the feelings I was beginning to feel for this man had
all left me feeling rather exposed.

He stood up and came to stand near me, but I
kept my eyes glued to my plate and the process of eating even
though I wasn’t hungry.

“I’m going to be gone for several days.”

His words hit me like a bomb and I felt
something contract painfully inside of me. He reached out and
placed something in front of me. It was money.

It was more money than I could make in a
good year or maybe even two years. I looked up at him shocked.

“In case I don’t make it back.” He said
simply.

I swallowed hard, “When are you going?”

“Now.” He touched my shoulder briefly before
heading for the door.

I got up quickly and nervously brushed the
hair back out of my face, “Is it dangerous? Where you’re going I
mean?”

He stopped and looked back, “Yes, I believe
it will be.”

He opened the door.

“Clark!”

“What?”

“Please be safe!”

He nodded and closed the door. I looked from
the closed door to the pile of money on the table and then back to
the door. I wanted him more than the pursuit of money I had lost
all my self-respect for, but was such a thing possible?

Clark went down the stairs and out into the
humid air of the city. Within an hour he reached the parking garage
in a more influential area of the city. Minutes later he drove a
Range Rover out and into the busy streets.

In another two hours he was driving eighty
miles an hour along the dirt roads gripping the steering wheel hard
and wondering how life could get so complicated and at the same
time grateful that it had.

He drove all night and all the next day only
stopping to refill the SUV out of the gas cans in the back. The
third day the muddy dirt roads turned to goat paths.

Finding a safe looking spot he pulled the
SUV off the road into a shallow wooded depression and covered it
with a camo net. To complete the camouflage he broke off several
native vegetation branches and placed them artfully on the netting.
Satisfied he grabbed up his pack and started into the thick
vegetation of the jungle.

His abilities, as a natural woodsman came
out and the affectations of a city person quickly faded away. He
glided swiftly over the uneven terrain swinging in and around the
trees and obstacles of the forest.

He made barely a sound, as he slipped
through the wilderness, clearly in his natural element. His long
strides ate up distance that would have tested the endurance of the
greatest of athletes and yet his passage forward was paved in
quietness.

It paid to be quiet in the jungle, because
there were still native people roaming the shadowed understory, who
hunted their prey with the poisoned blow dart and they didn’t
really care what they ate just so long as they ate.

Clark waded through several small streams
running high with floodwater. His progress through the jungle was
mostly uneventful, once a bushmaster snake had made a strike at
him, only to find its head swiped off mid strike by the machete
Clark held.

A jaguar gave up following the narrow game
trail Clark traveled. He skirted around to the side giving space to
a bigger predator than even he was. He rumbled bad naturedly, as
Clark passed by, not happy with his self imposed subservience, but
he wasn’t willing to press the issue either.

Nightfall fell and Clark confident that he
was alone made a fire. He laid out his bedroll after dinner and
starred into the small fire. Something he never did as it took
night vision away temporarily. He wasn’t really staring at the fire
in his mind’s eye though. He was seeing Evangelina’s black flashing
eyes, her sensually long hair and tawny brown skin.

The memory of her wonderfully curvaceous
body was a living torment. He groaned and turned over onto his
back. Daydreaming like that wasn’t going to get him any rest. Still
if he had to be kept awake he wouldn’t want it to be for any other
reason.

Life had gotten complicated and he had
bigger more important things to be thinking of, but all he could
think of was the girl he’d left behind. He had never seen her
smile. He wanted to see her smile and be the one that had made her
full lips curl in happiness. He hoped she was safe and that she
would use the money wisely.

Above all he prayed that she didn’t do
anything intimate with any other man other than him for the rest of
her life. He registered how far his thinking towards her had gone,
but he didn’t question it. His mother would never approve of such a
girl, but she was the one he wanted.

When he had seen her at the night club he’d
been entranced by her like every other man in the place initially,
but delving deeper he had determined her performance was entirely
faked and it had intrigued him all the more. Over the last week he
had unveiled another whole side to her.

He wished that she didn’t have the
background material that she did, but he could wish the same
concerning himself for that matter in all fairness. Troubled he
slipped a book out of a pocket in the pack he carried. When he was
in search of an answer sometimes opening the Bible helped find an
answer to the problem at hand.

It was surprising how often he found an
answer with this method. He opened it and began to read. He
completed one segment of a story from the Old Testament, but there
was nothing conclusive in terms of an answer to his question. He
tried it again and landed in the New Testament and read. He almost
missed it. Re-reading it he shook his head at the item of knowledge
he had not picked up on before.

Closing God’s Word he stared up at the
canopy above that blocked off the light of the stars and said,
“Point taken.”

He went to sleep fully assured of the
rightness of his actions and thoughts.

The terrain was more rugged and rocky the
next day with less vegetation to slow him down. Clark had gained
several thousand feet in elevation. He was getting close.

It was midday of the next day that he saw
the tell tale remnants of the ruins that he was in search of. The
dense growth of the forest disguised them well. There were no
standing structures, just piles of hand worked stone here and
there. These ruins dated back farther than any Inca ruins in the
area.

In the humid air of the ancient place,
overgrown by the forest, Clark took his pack off and pulled
something out of an inner pocket of the pack. It looked as if he
held a flat stone in his hands. It was three inches by five inches
and two inches in depth.

One side of the object was covered in a
scrollwork of tiny symbols intricately carved into the stone in a
seemingly random pattern. The tablet was not made of stone; in fact
nobody knew what it was made of. It was an element not on the
periodic table charts. Even more odd was that it emitted a low
level frequency of power.

The strange symbols on its front were also
unrecognizable to any ancient symbols previously recorded. The
device had been discovered over a year ago quite by accident. It
was found of all places in a coal strip mine.

A pit loader operator had been inspecting
his loader for hydraulic oil leaks when he happened to look down
and see the tablet sticking out of the stony matrix of black rock
on top of the coal seam. Yanking it free he realized something of
the enormity of the find and reported it to his foreman. The
company had an archaeologist come to examine it and he made the
first discovery of the artifacts uniqueness, in that it emitted a
power wave of some kind. Electrical or battery operated equipment
malfunctioned, when in close proximity to the artifact, was another
discovery made.

The local media got wind of the ‘alien’
device and soon it became a national news release. The scientific
community stepped in and by the use of specially tuned sensors they
searched for more of the unique power radiation let off by the
artifact. Two more devices were found in close proximity to the
first one. The government seized the devices declaring the
situation and occurrence of the ‘alien’ devices to be too serious
of a matter to be handled and studied by the private sector
alone.

Amid a worldwide outcry the government,
after a lengthy series of concession talks and agreements, agreed
to release the artifacts to the broader scientific community with
an agreement that any discoveries that were made were to be shared
by all remaining world powers. One device went to the Northern
European Coalition, another device went to the Asian Alliance and
the last one went to the Southern Alliance of South America, based
in Brazil.

During the initial testing of the one sent
to Asia something triggered a reaction within the device to cause a
subatomic explosion that not only destroyed the underground
facility it was housed in, but sent shockwaves outward that
measured a nine point five on the Richter scale and caused
widespread destruction in the heavily populated area on the
surface.

There were over seventy thousand casualties
from the incident, with another two hundred thousand wounded. The
city was almost virtually destroyed.

Work was temporarily halted on studying the
remaining two devices, at least in the Southern Alliance it was. It
was agreed that the artifact should be sent to a more remote area
for testing. Which is when a group of underworld businessmen that
headed up several multinational dummy corporations hatched a plan
to steal the device from the Southern Alliance.

The device had already proven its ability
for destructive capabilities, which alone was a marketable
commodity. They could become insanely wealthy men if they could
unlock the secrets of the device for their own benefit. The one
problem that stood in their way to acquiring it was the heavy
transport security, which is when Victor Uchenko came into the
picture. Russian secret police ex-patriot now turned drug runner,
arms dealer, human trafficker and general all around bad guy.

For an exorbitant fee he masterminded the
hijack of the device and the slaughter of over three hundred
security personnel. Realizing what he had he reneged on his
agreed-upon fee and demanded a king’s ransom for the device.

The businessman balked at the sum of money
and Victor put it up for sale on the black market. He’d gotten a
buyer for it, only Clark tipped by off by some of his contacts, as
to the devices whereabouts and armed with Evangelina’s knowledge of
Victor’s mansion had stolen it first.

One test result the Asian lab had found
before the accident was that the element of the tablet, while of
primary mineral makeup, also had biological attributes.

There was a slight depression in one corner
of the tablet and Clark was pretty sure that was the key to the
device. Years before Clark had been in this area of the forest on a
covert mission. He’d spent some time with a tribe of forest
dwellers, who had nursed him back to health from an injury he had
suffered during the mission. In particular the headman of the tribe
and Clark had formed a close friendship.

The native people’s lack of written work was
more than made up for by their oral history lessons passed down
from father to son through the years. There oral traditions went
all the way back to when their people had first come to these hot
humid jungles.

They had not been the first to discover the
land. There were bare traces left over of a people who had been
here before them. It may have been traces of this earlier people’s
advanced reasoning found in scattered ruins and on stones that had
led to the early progression of the native peoples in the arts of
math and science, as evidenced by the Mayans and the Incas.

Perhaps they had also learned their penchant
for grisly sacrifice and blood offerings from the old ruins to.
Clark had asked, if the people from before, had a name and the old
man had been hesitant to say anything further, but after more
pressing by Clark the old man had confessed that there had been a
name, Orleanaki; or more properly translated as Orlandian.