Sergeant Bell stopped and held up a fist.  Melissa stopped along with the rest of the unit.  He made a few more gestures with his hands and the team splintered off the trail.  Each team member hid far enough away from the trail to be completely invisible in the deep Columbian jungle.

Melissa looked around and finally heard the voices that had alerted the Sergeant.  She was the newest member of the unit and had the least experience in the jungles of South America.

Despite her lack of experience in the jungle, Melissa had proven herself a very capable warrior.  Her duty record was littered with honors and recommendations from every unit commander that she had served under.  She rose quickly through the ranks and was offered a position in the coveted U.S. Army's 1st Special Forces Operational Detachment-Delta.

Melissa accepted with enthusiasm her assignment in the famed Delta Force and was commissioned to South America.  Their primary task: hunt down and apprehend drug lords in Columbia.

Melissa reported for duty three weeks ago and informed the Sergeant about her qualifications and the skills that she brought to his command.

Sergeant Bell didn’t seem to care about any of that.  The next newest member of the unit had been serving with Bell for two years.  Melissa felt very out of place with this group of jungle warriors.  They were a tight clique and she was kept an outsider by everyone in the unit.

The voices moved closer.  Melissa watched the trail through the thick jungle brush.  Five men passed by.  They spoke in Spanish about their latest football strategies and held their Kalashnikov AK-47 assault rifles casually as they walked.  The men continued down the path with no knowledge that they were being watched.

Melissa looked through the foliage and located the Sergeant.  She watched him for the signal to move in.  Sergeant Bell let the Columbian guerrillas continue down the path until their careless conversations could barely be heard.  Bell stood up and returned to the trail.

Melissa ran to catch up with the Sergeant.

“Why didn’t we stop them?”  Melissa shifted the weight on her backpack.

“Did you see any drugs on them?”

“No, I…”

Sergeant Bell stopped abruptly.  Melissa almost slammed into him.

“What is our purpose here?”  Bell pulled a cigar from his pocket and stuck it in his mouth.  He had stopped smoking over four years earlier, but never gave up the desire to have a hand rolled cigar in his mouth.  Nobody ever mentioned to him that it was probably an even more disgusting habit to slowly eat the cigar rather than smoke it.  They wouldn't dare.

“We are on assignment to identify, target, disrupt and dismantle any and all drug manufacturing and trafficking”

“I say again.  Did you see any drugs on them?”

“No.”  Melissa looked at the ground.

“You’re new here, so I’m going to allow you a little time to make a few errors in judgment.  That time is now over.  You screw up out here, we all die.  Do you understand me?”

“Yes.”

“I’m sorry, I didn’t hear you.”  Bell put a finger to his ear and bent it forward.

“Yes, sir!”

“If you question my actions again, you will be reassigned to KP duty in San Diego.  Now, get back into position.”  Sergeant Bell’s eyes burned deep into Melissa.

Melissa stepped out of the trail and let the team pass.  She took up the final position as they moved slowly through the jungle.

Two hours later, Sergeant Bell stopped the Delta Force team just outside a small town.  The team circled around Bell who pocketed the remnants of the chewed cigar stub into his tactical vest.

“I will go in and meet our contact.  Ace and Beverly come with me.  Stone, you stay here.  Wallace and Hooch stay with her and keep her out of trouble.”

Melissa watched Bell walk into town with his two most-trusted members.  Melissa slung her M4A1 Carbine over her shoulder.

“What are you doing?”  Hooch grabbed for her M4.

“The paramilitary groups don’t operate this close to towns.”  Melissa pulled back away from the reaching hand of Hooch.  “And if you reach for my gun again, Wallace here will have to pre-chew your food.”

Hooch glared at her and Wallace laughed out loud.

Melissa walked a few feet away from the two Delta operators.  She had been walking through the jungle for three weeks and still had yet to see any action.  She was beginning to wonder if this unit was even trying to achieve their objective.

In another week they would be stopping at a NATO re-supply station.  Melissa decided to report that the current Delta Force unit was ineffective.  She would request a transfer to any other Delta Unit in the world.  They had to be seeing more action than she was.

Wallace pushed Hooch into a wall and waggled a finger in his face.  Melissa watched as Hooch finally sat down against a tree.  Wallace walked over to Melissa.

“You’ll have to excuse him.”  Wallace picked up little rocks and arranged them into patterns on the ground in front of Melissa.  “He’s been out in this jungle for four years.  When you spend that long without a rigid command structure, you forget your place.”

“Bell seems to rule with an iron fist.”

“Yes, he does.  But it’s not like you’re used to.  The jungle, she writes her own rules.  Bell has been out here for seven years, and he understands the jungle and understands the people who have made the jungle their home.”

Wallace finished placing stones.  He pointed to the one closest to Melissa.

“This is the building where Bell is meeting with his informant.  The rest of these buildings are storage or market huts.  Ace and Beverly are for public display that he is not alone.  He’ll call them seven and eight to make anyone listening with interest think that there are six more soldiers around somewhere.  If something goes wrong, we cover escape from this point and nowhere else.  Look at the layout of the town.  We have a clear shot right into the center of the village.  The three of us can cover every building by spreading out only twenty feet apart.”

“Why was I not informed of this plan before Bell went into the village?”

“He came up with this plan seven years ago when he first entered the town.  He has never had a chance to need it.  But old habits die hard, and here we sit.  If something happened, all I had to do was tell you to cover the town and stay put.  Hooch and I already know what to do.”  Wallace looked down at the rocks.  “And now so do you.”

Wallace walked back and sat against the same tree as Hooch.  Melissa looked down at the rocks.  Maybe she hasn’t seen much action because Sergeant Bell and his unit have already taken most of the drug lords out in this region.  Those left would be armed to the teeth to defend themselves against the mythical Delta Force unit.

Melissa ran through multiple scenarios as she crouched before the map made from rocks.  She heard Wallace and Hooch get to their feet.  Melissa looked up and saw Sergeant Bell returning.  She stood up and swept away the map with her boot.

Bell walked up and looked at his unit.

“We have new intel that someone started a small heroin manufacturing shack about two days east of here.  We leave now.  Any questions?”  Bell looked right at Melissa.

“No, sir!”

That two-day walk could just have easily been a two-minute walk.  Every tree that Melissa passed look like the last tree they passed.  They took more breaks than normal and marched through the night and arrived in a day and a half.  Melissa never checked her compass, but felt as if they had traveled in circles for thirty hours.

Just before nightfall Sergeant Bell raised his hand in a fist and the unit froze.  He signaled the retreat command and Melissa lead the unit back fifty feet.  The Sergeant gathered the unit into a huddle in the middle of the dense jungle.

“Gentlemen,” Bell looked right at Melissa.  “We have reached the target area.  Just over that hill is the heroin lab.  Ace will recon and report back the situation.  We’ll set up camp in the jungle a hundred feet from this position due north.  We move first thing in the morning.”

Melissa dropped her rucksack and leaned her M4A1 Carbine against it.

She glanced over at Hooch.  Predictably he was eyeballing her and shot his eyebrows up in an invite to join him in his sleeping bag.  He had done this every night since she arrived.

Melissa had complained once to the Sergeant.

He responded with male chauvinist quips about women in the military.  She hadn’t complained again.  It was just another reason why she would request the transfer as soon as they hit the NATO supply station.

Before her internal clock could wake her at five o’clock in the morning, someone kicked her foot.  Melissa opened her eyes and noticed in the fading darkness, she hadn’t been kicked but tripped over.

The quiet shadow hadn’t noticed her laying in the overgrowth farther away from the rest of the unit.

He must not have realized he had bumped into a soldier as he slowly made his way towards the rest of her unit.  Melissa slid silently out of her sleeping bag.

She fingered the safety on her SIG-Sauer P226 X-Five and stood to a shooter’s stance.

“Helada.”  The shadow froze as she had commanded and the rest of the unit was instantly awake.

“Manos para arriba.”  The shadow’s hands shot into the air.

“No tire!  Don’t shoot!”

Flashlights illuminated the face of a kid no more than twelve years old.

“What are you doing here, Alonso?”  Bell walked into the dancing beams of light.

“Mi hermano…my brother is at the lab.  Please don’t kill him.”  Alonso still had his hands raised.

“Don’t worry, son, you can put your hands down.”  Bell put his arm around the boy’s shoulders.  “Where did you hear that we were going to the lab?”

Alonso looked around.  Melissa could see the fear in his eyes.  He hesitated, and Sergeant Bell smiled as he turned Alonso to face him.

“Tell me who told you…”

The harsh staccato of an AK-47 pierced the darkness as everyone hit the ground.