Free Jungle of Deceit by Maureen A. Miller Page A

all-out run at this point and she could feel the dogged heat on her tail. In that maelstrom of smoke and flames, the jungle life screeched a tumult of warnings and Alex’ heart broke at the sound.
    As she ran she tried to tally up the head count of her men. Beside her, Wes stumbled across a kapok buttress, and ahead, brief glimpses of Chuck’s shirt looked like an exotic bird performing aerial maneuvers through the branches. Nowhere could she locate Mitch, though. She had to assume he had corralled some of her men. She knew little about him, but some facets could be judged immediately, and she considered Mitch Hasslet a man of responsibility−and a leader.
    Chuck drew up short and Wes slammed into him, the momentum knocking them both forward. The herd of men halted, many with their hands on their knees as they sucked in air.
    Alex moved up alongside Chuck and Wes.
    “ We can’t stay still,” she gasped.
    Chuck’s face was black with soot. Combined with the dark hair and brown eyes he looked like a covert militant, except for his ridiculously bright tee shirt.
    “ Look,” he nodded.
    The jungle thinned to reveal a concrete barricade as vast and impenetrable as the Great Wall of China. At the sight, only one thought crossed Alex’s mind. A fire wall .
    “ Where’s the front gate?”
    “ We’re going in there?” Wes asked, incredulous.
    “ Do we have a choice?”
    Peeking over her shoulder, the intensity of the heat burned her face. The flames were only fifty yards away and closing. “Get the group. Hug the wall. There is a good ten foot circumference of dirt at the baseline. These people knew what they were doing. They built this place to be impervious to forest fires,” she gasped again. “Hug it till we find the gate.”
    There was no time for debate. She motioned to the young men with panic in their eyes and took the lead, moving up beside the concrete barricade, scraping her bare arm against the façade because it felt cool to the touch.
    The inferno reached for them with smoldering fingers and hissing cat calls as the group progressed in single file until Alex halted them with a lifted hand. Chuck and Wes fell in beside her. The entrance was a ghoulish adaptation of the gates of Oz, where the solid panel was large enough that a man-sized door had been installed in the bottom corner.
    With one hasty look at her ensemble, Alex felt a nagging concern when she could not locate Mitch in the crowd. But there was no time to focus on the roving photographer who had just embraced her and allowed her a frenzied moment of weakness in his arms. She stepped forward and banged her fist against the aluminum-plated gate, feeling the sting of heat from the alloy. From the dull thud she elicited, Alex guessed the gate to be thicker than anticipated. Hoisting up a rock from the ground, she clamped her fingers around the solid chunk of limestone.
    “ What the hell, Doc?” Chuck shouted.
    Alex disregarded him and ignored the bite of the searing rock. Lifting it to the gate, she banged three times before caving into the cough that beset her throat. Trying to reach up one more time, her chest felt as if it had inhaled sand. Wes pried the rock from her fist and hammered it against the gate, producing a staccato to compete with the roar of death behind them.
    They jolted when the door at the bottom of the gate opened by a three inch span, and the barrel of an Uzi slipped out like a heat-seeking missile. Another muzzle emerged in that small gap and someone cried out in K’iche dialect, “ Back off .”
    Desperate, Alex paid no heed to the guns. She stepped up to the door and shouted in a frenzied blend of Spanish and English.
    “ Fuego . Fire. Please let us in. We are trapped. We will die out here.”
    Her words had no impact on the trajectory of the guns. Alex started again, her throat scratching and her eyes watering. “We have no money, but if you help us we can get some once we get back to Ramonez. Your generosity will