The two men leapt swiftly in between the trees silently, their worn, brown clothing flying about their bodies. They both carried heavy, weaved sacks on their backs, clanking around on their mud-caked clothing as they bounced about in the ferns. They moved quickly, racing through the jungle, their feet making no sound on the floor. Their lank, long hair hung around their shoulders, bouncing up and down with each stride. Their facial hair had been allowed to grow for several days, and their faces were adorned with patches of dried mud. Their feet were bare, yet they paid it no attention, melting into the underbrush of the jungle as they dashed through the gaps in the trunks.
Suddenly, the trees cleared on either side, and they burst into a clearing, looking up at the bright sunlight for a moment. They stopped, and glanced at each other, their mouths unmoving. In the jungle to the west, a tree was felled, followed swiftly by a deafening clanking sound, and an almighty wail rang through the forest.
The men ignored the chittering and clanking emanating from the trees, and dashed out into the clearing. The entire space was full of activity, men and women working silently around an immense hole which had been dug into the wet soil. In the ground they could see large volumes of broken roots, hanging out into the space of the hole, where they had once run through the soil, underground. It continued down out of sight, further down than they could see from their position as the periphery of the jungle. At the edge of the hole, positioned at the lip, a series of bamboo ladders had been erected, leaning against the outer walls, allowing access down to the bottom. Below, out of sight, the sounds of metal tools on rock rang out loudly into the sky.
Off to the side, there was a large fire next to a grouping of large tents, where a single man sat, his black lidded eyes watching the proceedings carefully.
Suspended above the hole, a large piece of metallic scaffolding had been erected, rising forty feet into the air. The metal surface had become rusted from the humid, tropical air around them. Hanging down from the scaffolding, pulling against a pile of chains, groaning slightly in the breeze, was a thirty foot oblong shaped objects, slightly egg shaped at the bottom.
The men raced over towards the tents, their packages bouncing about their backs, and stopped just short of the man, sitting on a felled log. He looked up at them slowly, his black hair shining in the sun. His blue eyes watched them approach through his dark eyelashes, his clean blue shirt distinctly out of place.
"We've got it," they said in unison.
The man nodded. "Good. Charles, get it ready. Take him with you."
The men looked at each other, and made to move when a suddendeafening boom rang out in the sky. All activity ceased immediately, and everybody dropped their tools, looking up into the sky, through the gap in the canopy of the jungle high above them, ignoring the glare of the sun. A bright light flashed high above them, opposite the peak of a distant mountain.
And then, as if from nothing, the sound of an aircraft propeller rang out in the sky, rising in volume sickeningly, before sinking into nothingness, before repeating. Barely visible, a small dot in the sky was raining down onto them, plummeting towards the ground, trailing smoke and fire.
The men looked at each other, their eyes narrowed. The sound of the aircraft engines faded, followed immediately by a loud explosion in the sky as the body of the plane flew overhead, thousands of feet upwards, heading towards the mountain range.
"Looks like we've got some new visitors," Charles said slowly.