“This person found treasure, Dad.”
Mouton pivoted in the boat and tossed the doubloons as far as he could into the water. He turned to his son, whose mouth had dropped open. “Sometimes what you think is treasure isn’t really treasure at all. There’s a curse on that gold. And this person found both the gold and the curse.”
“I don’t understand, Dad.”
Mouton pointed toward the corpse. “That could’ve been me, Danny. Before you were born I was a treasure hunter. I looked for Jean Lafitte’s treasure every chance I got. I was obsessed about finding it. Your mom almost left me over it. But then you were born and God took away the obsession.”
Danny stared at the corpse for a long time, then turned and looked at him. “Dad, is there something about gold that makes some people go crazy?”
Mouton nodded. “Gold is a unique precious metal. You can pound it, twist it, roll it and melt it, but it can’t be destroyed. It’s almost like gold is eternal, like it’s a piece of heaven. Mortal people have a hard time understanding eternal things.”
“Dad, I’m glad you’re not obsessed with gold anymore.”
“I am too, Danny. But you know what? I’m still a treasure hunter in a way. I’ve acquired quite a bit of treasure over the years, and I’ve hidden it in a safe spot.” Mouton watched his son’s eyes grow big.
“What kind of treasure do you have? And where have you hidden it? Does Mom know?”
Mouton placed a finger on his son’s chest. He drew an invisible square on Danny’s shirt, right above his heart. “This is your treasure box, Danny. Every human has one. Whatever is most important to us is what we put into our treasure box.”
“What is in your treasure box, Dad?”
Mouton smiled. “You are in my treasure box, and so is your mom. My parents and my grandparents, my siblings, my aunts and uncles and cousins are in there as well. I’ve also put friends from work and church into my treasure box. God treasures people more than anything He’s created. So we should do the same. And sometimes we need to put strangers into our treasure box. Not all strangers are bad, Danny. But above all else you should save room for Jesus in your treasure box. Jesus is the greatest treasure.”
Mouton pulled a GPS unit from his carpenter jeans. He saved their coordinates to give to law enforcement, and then lifted his trolling motor out from the water. Mouton started the bigger outboard motor. “We need to go, Danny.” He patted the gator in the boat. “We need to get this big boy to the market. And we need to call Sheriff Tubbs and tell him what we’ve found. That corpse is someone’s loved one, and every person deserves a proper burial.”
Mouton grabbed the tiller and they sped off through the swamp, away from Arcadias and the treasure that cost him everything, including his life.
The End
Thank you for reading this book. I hope you enjoyed it. I have another series—the Battle Series—that you may also enjoy. Battle Scream and Battle Storm are fantasy novels set in the end times. I’ve included the first few chapters of Battle Scream with this book for you to sample. You’ll find them on the next page.
Battle Scream
By Mark Romang
Copyright © Mark Romang 2013
Kindle Edition
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead is entirely coincidental.
Cover design by Robin Ludwig, Inc.
Author’s Note
A human cannot physically fight a demon. The only way to defend against a demonic attack is to put on the full armor of God as described in Ephesians 6:10-18, and to pray. Submit yourselves, then, to God. Resist the devil, and he will flee from you. James 4:7. But for the sake of writing an action-packed suspense novel, I temporarily altered the rules of engagement. I hope you understand and forgive me.
Prologue
Eastern Afghanistan
Date: Classified
“This mountain presents challenges like no other peak in the Hindu Kush. Even the Pashtuns avoid it. They think Allah has cursed it,” Navy Lieutenant Commander Jonathon Stoltzman told his SEALS earlier at the mission briefing.
Petty Officer First Class Andrew Maddix didn’t believe in curses until today.
Bleak and forbidding, the windswept mountain would never grace a postcard or calendar. Its towering spires poked into the clouds like deformed fingers reaching up from a collapsed grave. Swift and sudden death often visited this glacier-carved mountain, and only a few hardy goat herders ventured out onto its lonely ramparts.
Inside the mountain’s belly, a manmade tunnel snaked westward for nearly ten miles. Equipped with electricity, a fifty watt light bulb hung from the low ceiling every one-hundred paces and provided murky illumination. Maddix and his SEAL fire team penetrated the cavern using deliberate movements designed more for stealth than speed. Step, stop, listen, and repeat. They didn’t want to betray their presence. The Taliban warlord patrolling this hardscrabble region in the Hindu Kush dispensed cruelty at the tiniest provocation.
Maddix pulled rear security for the four-man team. Ahead of him two SEALS covered left and right flanks, while First Lieutenant Damon Kirkland served as lead man of the diamond formation.
Not wanting to risk a cave-in, Maddix and his teammates carried silencer-equipped M11 handguns as their primary defense weapon, caching their M4 assault rifles among the rock piles outside the cave entrance.
Maddix positioned his back to the other team members as he skulked inside the manmade cave. He kept his eyes glued to the entrance from which they came, on the lookout for Taliban fighters setting an ambush. Every three steps he looked behind him to make sure he didn’t trip.
Maddix allowed his eyes to drift periodically along the cave walls and floor. The metamorphic rock glowed phosphorescent green beyond his night-vision goggles. He crept like a ghost, his boots treading lightly on a dirt floor imprinted by dozer tracks and other heavy mining equipment.
Intelligence gathered from the raid on Osama Bin Laden’s compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan led to the whereabouts of this mammoth cave, long suspected to be used by the Taliban to travel undetected back and forth from Afghanistan to Pakistan. The tunnel was a mindboggling engineering feat. But more amazing was how the Taliban transported a tunnel boring machine up the mountain without being photographed by keyhole satellites. Intelligence analysts will be unraveling this mystery for many years to come, Maddix thought.
He focused his eyes onto a spot on the cave floor. He thought he spotted an anomaly jutting up from the silvery-brown mixture of dirt and schist two steps to his left at 9 o’clock. He went over to that area and squatted down. “Checking out something on the cave floor, guys. Looks suspicious,” Maddix whispered into the boom mike attached to his helmet.