Desert Leopards

By Nikki Grace

As the Age unfolds in a dark and treacherous enactment of religious inspired violence throughout the world, an avatar rises in the mountains and meets his destiny in the desert sands. Michael of the Morning, Chosen of God, is born the child of simple ranchers in the primitive Rocky Mountains of northwest America. His heart is pure; his eyes crystal; he sees no evil. At thirteen, he experiences a mystical awakening.

He is the Chosen One, blessed with the Prophet mind, and sent into the world on a mission to create a path for the lost; to bring reform to the great religion of Islam, now held in the bondage of apocryphal suras and hadiths of the Holy Scripture and used by men of violence to spread terror across the world. The Chosen One is sent to bring clarity to those who hunger for light and righteousness. He stands alone in the clear knowledge of his destiny. How, where and when his great mission will be accomplished lies hidden in the folds of Time. Dark forces stand in his way and great suffering, peril and evil will come...

The years pass, as pass they will, and Michael the Chosen dons the uniform of the US Armed Forces as a naval jet pilot – a meditative Islamic warrior in a dangerous age of strife. Shot down in battle during Desert Storm, he is taken prisoner by the Saddam Hussein regime. How he escapes and lives in hiding with his collected disciples, the Desert Leopards (each a descendant of the bloodline of Muhammad), is a powerful narrative of high adventure, poignant human experience, lush and meaningful relationships, and meeting of the disparate cultures of East and West. Supported by ancient scriptures, including the Bhagavad Gita, the New Testament and the Qur’an, and the writings of Eastern mystics like Omar Khayyam and Rumi, it contains numerous descriptions of mystical and cosmic-consciousness experience.

It is written in the Bhagavad Gita: Whenever virtue declines and vice predominates, I incarnate as an Avatar, in visible form I appear from age to age to protect the virtuous and to destroy evildoing in order to re-establish righteousness.

And so Michael, Chosen of God, who once rode a fine horse in the hallowed high mountains, goes to meet his fate and fulfill his destiny in the burning desert sands of Mecca, a land fragrant with the prayers of millions...

An unforgettable book.

• Language: English
• Publisher: One Point Six Technologies Pvt Ltd
• Release date: Nov 30, 2017
• ISBN: 9789352015917

Book preview

1

HUNTER OF THE EAST

Awake! For Morning in the Bowl of Night

Has flung the Stone that puts the Stars to Flight

And Lo! The Hunter of the East has caught

The Sultan’s Turret in a Noose of Light.

Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam

Ecstatic Sufi Poet

PERSIAN GULF 1991

His squadron mates were unaware the young pilot had a secret mission beyond the Iraq war effort. They didn’t know he had surrendered his life to the will of God and in this he was a Muslim. Even less did they know he was an inheritor of the Prophet Mind. To them, he was simply Lieutenant Commander Michael McClain, stationed on the USS Saratoga aircraft carrier in the Persian Gulf, in an expectant pause, waiting for the United Nations to sanction war.

He was nicknamed Mac the Monk as his mates awoke in the night to see him in meditation and he often practiced yoga and martial arts on the fantail of the carrier. This intrigued them. Soon many joined him to learn his arts. They agreed these ancient practices honed their skills as warriors.

He was a solemn young man, tall and stately, with honey blonde hair and the intense blue eyes often seen in the Rocky Mountain West. An Annapolis graduate, he was admired and others looked to him as a leader, asking for his counsel on many subjects.

He was at peace with the path before him. He wrote letters to his family and to Ellie, his childhood sweetheart. In her letters, she hinted at a reunion, which he never acknowledged. He wasn’t sure if he would return from the sands of Iraq and thought it best for her not to hold hopes for a future with him.

He received pictures of a baby boy, his nephew born at the Big Lost Ranch, his far off home in the vast Rocky Mountain wilderness. The baby’s endearing round face was a composite of Sandra and Jim, his older sister and brother-in-law, who operated the family ranch in his absence. His younger sister, Grace, kept up a constant correspondence, delivering news of the ranch horses and the new baby boy. She wrote that Sandra was unwell and Uncle Jim was tired, but worked all the time.

He knew things were not as they should be on his beloved ranch. In fact, he knew things were very wrong. But he couldn’t do anything about that now; he had to focus on his coming mission.

The day came when the war began for the Americans. The alarm sounded before sunrise and the pilots scrambled the F-18 hornets. Michael signed thumbs-up to the deck crew when in his turn he thundered off the carrier, wheeled, headed across the water and straight over the desert. The squadron maneuvered into formation and flew five miles apart, coming in fast and low over a wasteland known as Tululad Dulaym. It was the start of the war the world would call Desert Storm.

Michael looked down on the endless sea of sand. For a moment he saw a glint. Suddenly, in a supernatural yogic act called siddhi, he separated his awareness from his body and slipped to the desert below and found himself looking through the eyes of a man at the jet above. He had entered the mind and body of the enemy. He smelled the rancid kuffiyeh scarf placed over his nostrils and rebelled at the repugnant stench. He knew the man’s name to be Medhi Khalaji. The slight movement of revulsion to the stench of the scarf shook the weapon on his shoulder just as it fired. Michael immediately realized the paradox; that the jet above, at which he had fired, was his own. That slight jiggle saved his life.

Instantly he was back in his own body in the cockpit, heard the alarms and took evasive action. It was too late; the weapon had locked on and was upon him. He ejected, tossed high into the air as the plane blew up below him.

***

A squadron mate saw the explosion and turned to circle, keeping out of range of the enemy that he now knew was hidden on the desert floor. He didn’t see a parachute. The fighter jets re-formed and headed to their assigned target. They flew in silence, anguished at the loss of Michael, mystified that his superior skills had not saved him. They knew it could have been any of them. They were acutely aware of the sad irony of being shot down on the first day of combat.

***

Medhi and his companions screamed in exultation as they watched the jet explode in the air. They rushed to a jeep hidden under a tarp and raced across the desert toward the burning aircraft, some twenty miles in the distance.

The cockpit seat with its parachute slowly spiraled down the sky. As it thudded on the desert floor six miles from the wreckage, Michael reached to unlock the seat belts, but something was wrong with his hand. He pulled off his glove and saw the hand had been mangled in the ejection. He stared at it for amoment, then closed his eyes and took his awareness down his arm, into the hand. He went into the pain and drew warmth and energy; he went deeper into the cells and beyond into the life force, then into the causal thought. He reordered the thoughts and the life force corrected the material particles of the mangled hand into perfection. He opened his eyes, unbuckled all the belts that held him in the seat and began his ‘escape and evade procedures’.

Mehdi and his companions raced to the destroyed jet, raising plumes of sand behind their vehicle. The F-18 was upside down, broken and smoldering. Mehdi scrambled on his hands and knees and peered into the cockpit. He didn’t see a body or smell burning flesh. He jumped to his feet and motioned to the others to start the search. All day and into the dusk they raced around the desert searching for the American pilot. Finally they stopped and made a small oil fire. They performed their evening prayer and then talked excitedly into the night.

Michael watched from a raised dune. When they began their night prayer, he joined them. He knew they couldn’t find him unless he wished it. He had the ability to escape from the midst of his enemies as he cloaked their consciousness of him by bending the refraction of light. The next day he watched as they rose and scavenged all that they could from his jet, including some unexploded ordinance.

They jumped into their jeep and headed back to their camp, fifty miles away from the downed plane site, to bask in the praise of their brothers for their extraordinary feat and a hoped for reward. They were not regular military and Michael would not surrender to them.

Two days passed as he sat in the desert near his plane. His solitary evenings were transcendently beautiful. Under the slanting sun, rust and copper, then charcoal, burgundy and deep black, undulated ghostlike as the whispering breeze scratched rivulets in the sand.

On the third morning he saw a convoy of jeeps with the insignia of the Republican Guard coming to inspect the crash site. An Iraqi colonel and two men jumped from their vehicle and walked to the downed plane. Michael came down the dune and stepped face to face with the colonel, hands raised in surrender.

2

THE GENESIS

Here with a Loaf of Bread beneath the Bough

A Flask of Wine, a Book of Verse…and Thou

Beside me singing in the Wilderness…

And wilderness is Paradise enow.

Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam

[Ecstatic Sufi Poet]

BIG LOST RANCH, IDAHO 1978

On a late August afternoon, the air was still in the Big Lost Valley, the land running with beautiful singing rivers beneath the cool mountains and gorges. At the edge of a gravel road, the only movement was the dried flora rattling and crackling, blending with the hiss and cackle of unseen insects. Michael’s grandmother, Nana Caroline, couldn’t hear them. Her hearing in this world was no longer that distinct. Her life essence, with other ears, had begun to hear the drum of another dimension. Still, she did hear the muffled thunder that day from the far gorge known as the Little Lost that ran parallel to the Big Lost.

She marched down the camber of the ranch road on her way to see her beloved daughter Rose. Nana lived separated by two miles and several streams from her daughter’s family. Her own little house, the original homestead for the ranch, sat near the connection to the county road that ran to Magic Valley, the nearest population. Magic Valley with its little towns was a sparsely peopled, quiet place.

Her daughter Rose, and son-in-law Dean, built their large and modern home in a beautiful setting far from any noise or lights on the county road. The main homestead was tucked into a hip of the foothills facing the silvery northern sky. A lush and beautiful meadow of wildflowers spread out in front of the home with outbuildings to the sides.

Nana reached the curve that led back into the foothills and the lodge-style homestead, built of logs and river rock, came into view across the meadow and the horse pastures. The lane she walked along was in excellent condition, hard packed with evenly spread gravel, keeping down the dust. Her son-in-law made sure it stayed in good condition, as was all the buildings, fences and animals.

‘Grass doesn’t grow under his feet,’ Nana thought to herself of her son-in-law. Dean McClain was an excellent husband and father she acknowledged, despite her early worries when he came to marry her daughter Rose, her only living child. The beautiful well-behaved children he fathered and the well-kept property were the reassurance Nana needed. Someday soon she would deed the Big Lost Ranch to Dean and Rose. For precaution, in case of her early demise, her will settled those property issues. Some little twitch in her kept her from giving the ranch to them just yet. They knew it was her intent and they knew about the will and held a copy.

Dean wasn’t resentful that his mother-in-law still owned the land to which he had dedicated his life. He liked to say that before he met Rose, he had a ragged ass and a world to shake it in. His wife, his children, the ranch, all seemed a happy lucky circumstance to him. He often joked that he had married a rich heiress – a small exaggeration because Nana Caroline and Rose were rich in land, which doesn’t equate to great wealth and high living.

Nana admired her daughter’s home, sitting on the high meadow in the curve of the plump and smooth foothills. A larger transition mound rucked and then humped up to a wooded crown behind the homestead. You felt the energy in the rising land like a fat and rippling cat crouching to spring high. Nestled in small catch basins near the top of the ridge were tiny meadows and paternoster lakes. Looming behind was the sharp and gouging beginning of the wild.

Dean and Michael often rode as high as you could safely take a horse, tied them and continued to climb on foot into the high granite rock. From the high arching ridge they looked out over the vista. Dean liked to lie down near the edge of one of the small lakes, under the closing cloud sky, have a little lunch packed by Rose and take a nap. He could instantly sleep anywhere in the mountains. He took three deep breaths and was asleep. He slept the sleep of a clear conscience. Michael leaned up gainst a rock near his father and watched the clouds scuttle by, so near you seemed to be in them and sometimes you were. In exactly half an hour by his inner clock, Dean was awake and ready to move on.

At the place they tied the horses, the ridge dropped away to the dizzying Little Lost gorge, the white noise whistling up from below. A huge and flat boulder sat precariously above the drop. They often lay on its smooth surface and gazed at the far vistas. The trail cut so steeply over the edge that from the back of a horse you couldn’t see where you were going. It was like stepping into thin air. There were few horses surefooted and trusting enough to drop down that narrow trail with the immediate switch back passing under the hanging boulder. Out beyond the walls of the Little Lost, pyramid upon pyramid of blue gasless primordial rock marched to the edge of vision until they were only phantoms in the mind – so far, so hazy they were in this world and not.

Nana toiled along the final stretch to the ranch house in the hot August afternoon. In years past she had made this walk briskly, skipping lightly over rocks set in the streams for crossing. Dean had built bridges over most of the crossings on the ranch. But lately, Nana was slower and more cautious.

In the large McClain kitchen, Rose was making biscuits. A roast of elk in mountain mushroom gravy was in the oven. She was barefoot and wore a thin cotton dress of white field with a scatter of tiny pink flower bouquets. The front of the dress was loose, with two small buttons undone. Her shapely arms were bare.

Dean sat at the large oak kitchen table studying the ranch books. He glanced up at his wife’s back, narrow waist and ample behind. His eyes narrowed and a smile flickered on his ironic mouth. He stood up and walked to a tall highboy in the kitchen corner, dropped the door on its hinge and pulled out a bottle of Hennessey cognac. Tall, graceful and loose, he glided across the room and silently stepped up behind Rose, reaching over her head into a cabinet for two short glasses.

What’re you doing? Rose asked as she glanced over her shoulder at him.

She knew what he was doing. He was cutting her off and cornering her like the good cowman that he was.

Just thought we could have a little swig. Might make you feel better. You need to keep your blood up, nursing and all. Besides, it might be good for the baby’s colic.

More likely to curdle my milk.

Aw, come on Hon’. We haven’t had a drink together in a long…long…time.

I know what you’ve got on your mind.

Rose took the small tumbler with its inch of amber liquid and smiled with her eyes over the lip of the glass as she took a sip.

That baby’s awful quiet, Dean said as he glanced down the hallway that ran from the kitchen to the back stairs. Upstairs, all the bedrooms were lined up on either side of a long hall and little Grace, the newest McClain, slumbered in one of them. The windows in the baby’s room looked onto the quaking aspen forest in the back. The bedrooms at the front looked out across the meadow and horse pastures. During round-up, the extra rooms were used by the cowpokes.

Michael put Grace to sleep before he went out for his ride, Rose commented as she gazed at her husband.

She sure takes to him. He just held her up in his hands and rocked her back and forth until she quieted down and went to sleep. Every time he started to drop his arms, she would fuss again and he would just start rocking her in mid-air. She finally dropped off. I don’t know where he gets the patience.

Rose was frazzled by little Grace and her crying and carrying on, even sobbing in her sleep. The two older ones were quiet and serene little dumplings, wide-eyed and unperturbed, nursing and cuddling, cooing and smiling. Rose was not designed for a difficult baby. In Grace’s first month, Michael began to lift his baby sister from his mother’s arms and life became calm and peaceful again. According to Dr. Sloan, there was nothing wrong with the baby. Still, sometimes she couldn’t be comforted and would cry herself to exhaustion. Then Rose would look for Michael to soothe his baby sister.

As much as she cries you’d think she had the sorrows of the world in her little chest; reminds me of your Mom. I guess Grace just doesn’t know about all the betterments, gooderments and wonderments yet, Dean chuckled.

He expected his babies to be pleased and as happy with life as he was and this wasn’t so with the youngest McClain. He had taken to riding out in his truck or on his horse when the baby started up her racket. If she hadn’t been such a beautiful and sweet baby when she was serene, he might have had a hard time listing what positive feelings he had for her. Still, things were much better since Michael took charge of Grace. Dean was delighted with his first two babies and liked to nuzzle their necks and squeeze their little limbs, smell their sweetness and tease them to elicit that lopsided baby grin. But he wasn’t a diaper changer or any of those up close and too personal things with babies.

She’s a squawker. Maybe that’s what you get when you have these late-in-life babies. What were you thinking of, Rose?

She looked at her husband intently, arching her eyebrow, lifting her glass to her lips with a little finger pointed in his direction. If I recall correctly, I was letting you do the thinking for both of us at the time.

He walked up to her and caught her close, feeling her bosom and thighs through the thin dress as he walked her backwards toward the sink cabinet.

Yeah, and I’ve been thinking again, all afternoon. His voice became husky as he dropped a big hand to her soft fanny.

You’re just a damn good looking woman, Rose. His voice was lower still and teasing.

You better watch out or one of the kids is going to come in here. She smiled up at him, her face flushed from the cognac and warm kitchen.

I already checked. We got time. He backed her up against the sink counter.

She squirmed around to face the sink, rubbing her bottom against him in the age-old game, being just elusive enough to excite but never saying no. She glanced out the window over the sink and caught sight of the black-clad lonely figure of her mother marching up the lane through the shimmering August sunlight.

It’s mother. She’s going to smell liquor on my breath.

Rose shoved her husband out of the way and rushed down the hall to the bathroom where she splashed water on her face and quickly brushed her teeth.

A frown furrowed Dean’s brow as he looked out the kitchen window at his mother-in-law’s progress in her pilgrimage to see his wife. Then his face softened. He’d catch Rose later. He walked to the door and opened the screen for Nana.

Pretty warm weather for a stroll, Nana, he said to the top of her hat as she passed under his arm, coming over the threshold. You should have rung up; I would have come and got you.

Nana hadn’t quite mastered the telephone. Her fingers were not nimble as they followed the holes around the dial. All these newfangled inventions flustered many of her generation and when she finally was able to reach her party on the phone she held the receiver away from her head and shouted. Mostly she avoided using it at all.

She pulled off her straw bowler and smoothed back her hair which was streaked charcoal and old silver. She had carefully arranged her hair in a bun that morning, as she did nearly every morning. Her hair reached to her knees when it was down and she brushed it out. She would bend over and catch the hair in one hand and with a silver brush in the other, she would make long strokes and then pull it to the center at the back of her head and wind it and place various onyx or tortoiseshell pins in the fat and flattened mound. At other times she braided it and made coils around the crown of her head.

When her hair was down you could see what a lovely young woman she had been. Now she was greatly, richly aged, nearly eighty years. Still, she prided herself on her straight back and the purposeful gait to her walk. She was tall and spare and though she was much wrinkled, her skin was not loose. The air and light in the high mountain valley had shrunk the skin against her bones. Around her eyes was a multitude of cross-hatch marks. Her brows rose in imperiously questioning arches over deeply set silver blue eyes. She had a straight and aristocratic nose. Her mouth was shrunken to a fine line and when she opened it you glimpsed the faded rose of tongue and fragile ivory of teeth. But usually her mouth was set, not often flapping, like most people. Her jaw was neither narrow nor broad but it was her manner to jut it out, which probably accounted for her having no wattle at her throat.

Her sharp eyes looked around the kitchen and spied the cognac glasses sitting on the counter and she sniffed loudly.

Care for something to drink, Nana? Dean asked.

Might have a sip of lemonade, if you have it, she said softly, pulling out a chair at the table and carefully arranging her fragile bones, putting her hands lightly in her lap.

Dean went to the Kelvinator for the pitcher of lemonade that was always there in the summer months.

How’s the baby? she asked in the tone of gravity and reverence she reserved for questions about the health and well-being of her grandchildren.

She’s sleeping away right now. She tuckers herself out with her bellowing. Michael rocked her to sleep.

Nana wrapped her long fingers around the cold glass of pale lemonade as Dean handed it to her. Every vein was visible through the parchment skin of her freckled hand. The nails on her fingers were slender and shapely; each one ribbed and streaked with age but the fingers were not bent. She wore many rings on those fingers and long dangling earrings were in her stretched ear lobes. There was an ornate broach at her throat. She had possessed a reserved vanity in her youthful beauty and she had it now in her aged handsomeness. There was something timelessly chic about her. At the mention of her grandson Michael, she smiled softly.

She was dignified and always respectful to her son-in-law. Seriousness was the hallmark of her generation and place. Jokiness was a sign of unattractive lightness in an individual. Although she knew Dean was a hardworking, good man, his teasing always troubled her, as though it might indicate a deeper character flaw.

That boy Michael is an angel! He’s just an angel, she said in the over-dramatic way of her era.

Well, Nana, he’s a good boy alright. But as a son of mine he may end up being a fallen angel, Dean responded with a pleased smile. Yet he didn’t want to upset the lady. He admired her, saw her fragility and felt affection for her.

He walked to the window and looked across the valley, checking for Michael on Walker, coming back from the trailhead. There was no sign of the boy and the horse, so he sauntered back to the big kitchen table and sat down across from Nana, cognac glass in hand.

He leaned back in the chair, a leg sprawled under the table and smiled slightly as he watched Nana’s nose wiggle and wrinkle and her mouth purse in disgust at the cognac glass. He knew she wouldn’t say anything. He hooked a thumb into his belt and breathed deep, pleased in his masculinity and took a short sip from his glass and sucked it through his teeth. He was proud of his discipline regarding his drinking. He thought of himself as a man of good character and immense self-control, not like the bad actors in his birth family. He drank his one tumbler of cognac on a Saturday evening.

Nana was a Mormon, the daughter of Mormons and descended from polygamists. The Mormon creed and their Word of Wisdom forbade smoking and drinking of alcohol, coffee and tea; but Nana drank teas of her own concoction, the medicinal and tonic types. And though she never mentioned it, the Big Lost had been purchased with the money her late husband made from owning a couple of taverns in Magic Valley and one down in Sun Valley. It was a cross she was required to bear.

Her beloved daughter Rose converted to Dean’s Catholicism when she married him in the Catholic Parish, Our Lady of the Mountains; officiated by Monsignor Dowling. When Rose converted and left the Mormon Church, it had been something of a rite of passage to show her mother that she was now cleaving to her husband Dean. Actually Rose didn’t give a tiddle about religion and never cared for the stuffy boring Mormons. But Rose and Dean rarely entered the Catholic parish church, except for christenings and occasional events, which included Midnight Mass on Christmas Eve, if the roads were passable. These visits to the parish became fewer and fewer as the years rolled on.

Nana couldn’t tolerate being separated from her only living child, even in faith, and she had a vision (visions not being uncommon to Mormons of the day) and she joined the Papists. Rose was outmaneuvered in her little religious rebellion against her mother and gave it up. She enjoyed her mother’s doting anyway and Dean accommodated their relationship.

Nana began requesting that Dean ‘carry’ her to the Mormon Ward on Sacrament Sundays. The whole Papist adventure came to an end. The Mormons took her back without discussion since they knew she was a child of a well-known church dissident. That was embarrassing enough, so they never brought up her temporary switch to the Church of the Abomination.

The Mormons at the Magic Valley ward didn’t mention Rose at all. Leaving the Church to marry a high, wide and handsome Scotch-Irish Catholic was just too tragic to speak about, especially when there was such good Scandinavian Mormon stock available. Tsk tsk!

Mormons have long memories and careful genealogy kept the old stories alive. The Mormons believed that the spiritual powers or weaknesses of ancestors can be visited to the fifth generation and beyond. They keep careful track of both. The Mormon consensus was that Nana and her family was given to instability.

Nana mixed the two dogmas of Mormonism and Catholicism together in her own peculiar way, for the strictest interpretation of the Lord. She was faithful and unfailing in the broadest sense. She considered her short deviation into Catholicism made her all the more staunch in comparison to the everyday Latter Day Saint. So she marched into Mormon Sacrament Meeting with her regal held held high. But like Dean and Rose, her visits to church became fewer and fewer over time.

Dean contemplated Nana in the quiet kitchen until she moved slightly in discomfort under his gaze. He mused on her good intentions and her deep self-negating devotion to Rose. Nana had borne three sons, who died at various stages of childhood, before God placed beautiful Rose into her aching arms, against her broken heart. Some of the unkind and gossiping Mormon Relief Society matrons whispered that the dead boys were a curse for the family’s dissidence and rebellion against polygamy, or even Nana’s haughty ways, but most likely because her husband owned those taverns – dens of iniquity.

For many women of the old times, the children they buried were carried as stones of grief in their bosom. Grieved mothers wrapped themselves in shrouds of sorrows, always wearing dark and somber clothing. No grief counselling existed then, not that it would have helped Nana. The mother of a lost child can’t actually be consoled; patched up perhaps.

The great Hindu rishis (wise men) say that in Satya Yuga (Age of Truth), no child died before its parents. Nana’s days were not golden times on the wheel of life. The tears for lost children seeped into pillows and carved faces. Knives of agony whittled on souls and some went mad. Many people avoided the bereaved for fear that losing a child was contagious. Grieving mothers hid their wounds as if they were a distasteful deformity, and they became reclusive. Others of the times understood and accepted this withdrawing from society as a reasonable response. As they became old women, broken mothers couldn’t always hide the wounds and carried fine handkerchiefs edged with lace by brittle fingers, tucked into their sleeves, never knowing when the soul gash would tear and run fresh again. In the days that Nana lived and lost