Thunder of Heaven

Chapter One ;Those who know call that part of the jungle the hellhole of creation for good reason. And they call the Indians who live there the fiercest humans on earth for even better reason. It's why no one wants to go there. It's why no one does go there. It's why those who do rarely come out alive. ;Which is also why the lone American girl who ran through the jungle really had no business being there. At least according to those who know. ;Tanya Vandervan jogged to a halt atop a cleared knoll and tried to still her heavy breathing. She'd run most of the way from her parents' mission station, hidden by trees a mile behind, and in this heat, a mile's run tended to stretch the lungs. ;She stood still, her chest rising and falling, hands on hips, her deep blue eyes sparkling like sapphires through long blond hair. The rugged hiking boots she wore rose to clearly defined calves. Today she had donned denim shorts and a red tank top that brightened her tanned skin. ;Still drawing hard but through her nose now, she lifted her eyes to the screeching calls of red-and-blue parrots flapping from the trees to her left. Long trunks rose from the forest floor to the canopy, like dark Greek columns supporting tangled wads of foliage. Vines dripped from the canopy-the jungle's version of silly string. Tanya watched a howler monkey swing suspended by a single arm, whether provoking or protesting the parrots' sudden departure, she could not tell. She smiled as the brown mammal reached a flimsy arm out and nabbed a purple passionfruit from a vine before arching back into the branches above. ;A gunshot suddenly echoed through the valley and she jerked toward the plantation. Shannon! ;An image of him filled Tanya's mind and she ran down the knoll, her heart thumping steady again. ;To her right, the clearing butted against hills that rose to a black cliff, looming a mile to the plantation's north. The Richtersons' large two-story white house sat still in the midday air, white like a marshmallow on a sea of green. ;On Tanya's left grew fifty acres of the plantation's exotic crop: Cavash coffee beans, commonly regarded among connoisseurs as the finest coffee in the world. Shannon could be there working the fields, but she doubted it-he'd never taken much interest in his father's farming. ;His father, Jergen, had fled Denmark and carved out this living because of his hatred toward the west. The west is trampling out the earth's soul, he would say in his booming voice. And Washington's leading the charge. One of these days America will wake up and their world will be different. Someone will teach them a lesson and then they might listen. They were just words, nothing else. Jergen was a coffee farmer, not a revolutionary. ;Shannon spouted his father's rhetoric on occasion, but really, it was love, not hate, that drove his world. Love for the jungle. ;And love for Tanya. ;The thunder of gunfire boomed again. Tanya smiled and broke to her left, sprinting around the fields toward the firing range. ;Tanya saw them when she cleared the last coffee bush-three blond Scandinavian heads bent over a rifle with their backs to her. Shannon's father, Jergen, stood on the left, dressed in khaki green. The visiting uncle, Christian, stood to the right, a brother look-alike. ;The bare-chested young man between them was Shannon. ;Tanya's heart jumped at the sight and she pulled up, stepping lightly. ;Shannon stood tall for eighteen, over six feet, and wrapped in muscles that seemed to grow larger each day. Countless hours in the sun had darkened his skin and lightenDekker, Ted is the author of 'Thunder of Heaven', published 2002 under ISBN 9780849942921 and ISBN 0849942926.